ABSTRACT

This section has sought to highlight rather than resolve the paradox of the camp scenes, for in some respects Henry fits the ideal categories in the manuals - and yet breaks the rules. An account of Henry's actions in the context of manual literature on military procedures lends support to the growing body of critical opinion that construes the Agincourt set-up and its aftermath in this play as an ideological destabilization.91 According to this body of criticism Henry V is a play about the exposure of 'imperialist rhetoric and a critique of the institution of monarchy'.92 In Fitter's interpretation, for example, Henry's quarrel with Williams constitutes a 'site of ideological construction' in which Henry's 'self-pitying soliloquy' about envying those who can sleep soundly through 'horrid night' (HVIV i 259) is delivered 'only minutes after quitting lowly followers insomniac in nocturnal terror'.93 In addition to those lateral readings of the play which question Henry's role as an ideal monarch, the intention of the foregoing discussion has been to interrogate his status as a model general. If the idealized figure of Henry is a displacement for the reallife Essex (as some critics would have it), then these scenes function as a staged critique of Essex and his brand of generalship at a time when the London populace (pace the chorus in Act V) were ecstatic upon his return home from his so-called 'victory' in Ireland. By means of textual and dramatic strategies which disrupt conventional responses to the nocturnal camp scenes featuring Henry's common soldiers, his 'noble' cause is rendered problematic and ambiguous - intensifying, not resolving, fears of impotence brought into play by the boundary uncertainties of the last decade of Elizabeth's reign.