ABSTRACT
The war on France is the object of the secret conversation between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely opening the play. The problem is how to provide a legitimate reason for Henry's determination to wage war on a legitimate country. Only about 20 years earlier, in 1581, Torquato Tasso had gathered the scattered European Christian army in La Gerusalemme Liberata around one goal, the conquest of Jerusalem, in the name of a Christian counter-reformistic God. The major difference between the mandates of the two Christian 'soldiers', Tasso's Goffredo di Buglione and Shakespeare's Henry V, is worth noting. In Gerusalemme, the Pope, the Vicar of a European Christian God, is the ultimate spiritual authority of the war on Islam. The break of Christian unity and the European discovery of the New World were the two major events leading the great Salamanca theologian Francisco de Vitoria to question for the first time the authority of the Pope.
