Themes

Abstract

One theme, quite absent in Brooke, Shakespeare thought important enough to be brought in three times, at the beginning, the middle and the end of the play: the evil effects of civil strife. It was an Elizabethan commonplace that there was a ‘great chain of being’, from God through angels to men and down to the meanest creatures, ‘which order God willeth us firmly to keep’. Their own world was far from orderly: civil war on the continent, rebellions and uprisings at home, war with Spain, rapid inflation, religious strife. But these were regarded as wrong, and (as Burgundy describes war-shattered France in Henry V) ‘everything that seems unnatural’. God had planned an orderly universe with the earth in the centre, and the stars and the planets swinging round it in their appointed spheres. On earth the king, the nobility, the merchants and the various grades of ordinary people should move correspondingly in their appointed spheres, also in harmony.

For government, though high and low and lower, Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, Congreeing in a full and natural close Like music

as Exeter reminds us in Henry V (I.ii.180).