Abstract
The critical reception of Henry V indicates that the play may be considered one of the definitely ambiguous or ambivalent works of world literature: perhaps, Shakespeare’s most conspicuous achievement in the reasoning in utramque partem. There have, in fact, been critics who argue resolutely for a celebrative reading and critics who argue as resolutely for its contrary; and there have been — more and more frequently in the last decades — critics who claim, and often brilliantly show, that the play ‘points in two opposite directions.1
Cath. A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious.
Henry VIII, III.i.43
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Notes
H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 256. Richard Levin said that Goddard is ‘probably the most relentless ironizer of our time’ and that ‘when he comes to Henry V... everything in the play he disapproves (that is, everything favourable to Henry) is dismissed as part of the apparent meaning, a sop to the groundlings, whom Shakespeare wanted to deceive’ (’Performance critics’. D. 5471.
‘Either/Or …’, pp. 34–5. The passage quoted by Rabkin is in E. H. Gombrich, ‘Psychology and the Riddle of Style’, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon Press, 1960), pp. 3–25.
Discussing the issue of ‘brotherhood’ and the differences in language which create communicative problems in the play, A. Gurr remarks that ‘the play is full of brothers (and sisters) who cannot communicate with each other’. ‘A Performance Text for Henry V’, in P. Kennan and M. Tempera (eds), Shakespeare from Text to Stage (Bologna: CLUEB, 1992), pp. 71–81, 80. W. F. Bolton finds all the premises of linguistic division in the first part of the play but claims that, by the end, Henry has achieved unity. Shakespeare’s English. Language in the History Plays (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992).
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© 1996 Paola Pugliatti
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Pugliatti, P. (1996). The Strange Tongues of Henry V. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_9
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