ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Henry V gives us perhaps the playwright’s most complete portrait of political leadership.1 In the course of the play, we see King Henry do practically everything a leader must do to be successful in public life: decide, threaten, inspire, negotiate, pass judgment, make war, even woo and seduce (in French, no less). Yet if Henry is Shakespeare’s most comprehensive study in political leadership, he is by no means the most straightforward. Shakespeare’s interpreters have long been divided over the question of how the playwright means us to take the king. As Norman Rabkin noted in an influential essay, one school of thought epitomizes Henry as the ideal ruler, whose bold and inspiring leadership leads England to victory over nearly impossible odds; the other school reads the play as subtly disclosing beneath the king’s outwardly honorable façade a calculating Machiavel.2 Rabkin proposes a third possibility: that Shakespeare means us to view Henry as both at the same time-that he is, in Rabkin’s memorable phrase, a kind of “rabbit/duck,” resembling the optical illusion that shifts back and
forth between two alternative interpretations without ever definitively affirming or denying either perspective. This last reading, though not wholly satisfying, nevertheless puts its finger directly on the central difficulty of evaluating the character of Shakespeare’s most complete political leader, and consequently also of evaluating the task of political leadership itself.
