Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V

Shakespeare's Henry V explores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action. Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.