But in 1817 William Hazlitt made remarks critical of the King and several subsequent commentators interested in character analysis followed suit. For the first two hundred years after being published, it was seen as a patriotic celebration of the heroic warrior King Henry V and his victory at Agincourt. Henry V has one of the most divisive critical histories in the Shakespeare canon.

In toto, given the uncovered subversion, I endorse a correct manner of interrogating the text as if in a battle of wits with Shakespeare, where we will find a largely under appreciated masterpiece-and that beyond a reasonable doubt, the play is ironic.

After piecing out the subversive understanding of these speeches, I present plausible triggers-the Oldcastle controversy and possible Catholic sympathies-that might have motivated Shakespeare to elevate his poetic powers and wit to craft such subtle, yet dangerous, subversion into the play. This paper endorses the thesis there is a covert ironic play by showing two speeches where Shakespeare has poetically and obliquely used bawdy imagery and wordplay to completely undermine and subvert the surface meaning of the speeches-and that he even leverages off this covert imagery elsewhere in the play-supporting the ironic interpretation and inviting much more scholarly attention to a close reading of the play. John Arden even called the ironic play a “secret play” within the text.

Andrew Gurr, among others, has noted the crux of the divergent views relates to whether the play is seen staged (celebratory) versus read (cautionary and ironic). For the first two hundred years after being published it was seen as a patriotic celebration of King Henry V and his victory at Agincourt, but starting with William Hazlitt in 1817 numerous commentators have seen Henry as less than heroic, and in 1919 Gerald Gould made an astonishing claim that Shakespeare was actually being ironic in the play, that it is “a satire on monarchical government, on imperialism, on the baser kinds of ‘patriotism’, and on war.” This observation has influenced much of the subsequent commentary on the play.

Download free henry vi the hollow crown