Description
This study begins with a careful reading of Henry V , and argues that the plays representation of Henry as a consciously Machiavellian prince, who wages an unjust foreign war to bring about domestic peace, elicits complex responses to the king that are comprehensible within a single interpretative framework. The history dramatized in Henry V and in all of Shakespeares plays that deal with the causes or consequences of political revolutions is made intelligible by Shakespeares philosophy of history, a view mainly Machiavellian, that dramatizes all post-revolutionary modes of government and warfare as inescapable necessities that have fallen from superior past worlds, irrecoverable but eliciting nostalgia for a mythological, medieval world, a nostalgia embraced by the Elizabethan and Jacobean establishment to maintain its power through a putative continuity with an imaginary medievalism. The plays elicit that nostalgia in order to criticize it in acts of subversion that are not, as the New Historicists claim, contained.
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