"Impious War": Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V

Abstract

"Impious War":Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V John S. Mebane A central issue in recent Shakespearean criticism is the question of the relation between historical and political analysis and studies of aesthetic form. Cultural critics often analyze the text as a reflection of a culture's ideological assumptions and eschew any interest in the playwright's artistic methods. In their influential cultural materialist essay "History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V," Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield emphasize that the conflicts and contradictions in the play's use of religion to rationalize the conquest of France are reflections of early modern English culture. Somewhat more subtle in its analysis of authorial subjectivity is Richard Hillman's recent book, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Politics of France, in which Hillman's concern is "not with the telling of stories but with the overlapping of English and French discursive spaces to produce political meanings-meanings that define collective subjectivity."1 Although Hillman's analysis of the relations among Henry V and other texts sometimes acknowledges differences, his study nonetheless exemplifies the persistence of the widespread tendency to emphasize the text's participation in a field of discourse rather than seeing the play as a unique work of art. While some cultural critics argue that Henry V reflects cultural conflict, others have seen the play as monolithic in its aggressive nationalism.2 Among the most thoroughgoing critiques of the recent [End Page 250] emphasis on history and ideology as opposed to aesthetics is Graham Bradshaw's Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists, in which Bradshaw provides extensive analysis of Shakespeare's dramatization of conflicting political positions in Henry V and concludes that the play as a whole cannot be identified with any one ideological position. In other words, Bradshaw offers us a significantly updated version of the belief that literature transcends politics.3 In this essay I shall argue that formalist analysis is a necessary prerequisite for discussion of a play's ideology, and that it need not be associated with the claim that great literature is politically neutral. I shall place my commentary on Henry V in the context of an interpretation of Shakespeare's treatment of religion and the ideology of warfare throughout the first and second historical tetralogies. I suggest that all eight of these plays dramatize the discrepancy between the pacifism grounded upon key elements of the New Testament, on the one hand, and the devotion of the aristocratic warrior classes to an ideology of warfare, on the other. That ideology is a compound of codes of chivalry, traditional Judeo-Christian "just war" doctrine, and pagan heroic tradition. [End Page 251] While there are many Renaissance texts that are univocal and dogmatic in their jingoism, and others that are pacifist or nearly pacifist, the cultural work of much medieval and Renaissance literature is making warfare acceptable to Christians, and this process is often accompanied by significant cognitive dissonance. In contrast to influential interpretations that view the conflicts of Shakespeare's text primarily as a reflection of Shakespeare's culture and thus minimize the playwright's artistry, I argue that the dramatic form and artistic strategies of Shakespeare's history plays-especially Henry V-undercut the ideology of "just war" by emphasizing the fear that all warfare is damnable. Among the artistic methods that I shall highlight are Shakespeare's ironic deflations of patriotic rhetoric, his use of comic parody of chauvinistic characters (including the Chorus), and his juxtapositions of exhortations to warfare with biblical and theological allusions that undermine the king's rationale for the invasion. Much recent Shakespearean criticism has done an excellent job of explaining how religion was often appropriated to rationalize wars of conquest.4 There has, however, been considerably less attention among Shakespeareans to the history of the pacifist or nearly pacifist elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition. My approach to Shakespeare's history plays draws upon the work of Robin Headlam Wells, Christopher Hill, [End Page 252] and Ben Lowe, all of whom have expanded our knowledge of the ways in which religion was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as metaphysical ground for a very wide range of social and...