The Miraculous Victory War and Ideology in The Life of Henry The Fifth

Jingyin Xu

doi:10.30564/jler.v3i3.3105

The Miraculous Victory War and Ideology in The Life of Henry The Fifth

Journal of Linguistics and Education Research ◽

10.30564/jler.v3i3.3105 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Jingyin Xu

Keyword(s):

Elizabeth I ◽

Henry V

In William Shakespeare’s play The Life of Henry The Fifth, King Henry V is described as an excellent speaker whose speech becomes the key element of the Britain’s miraculous victory in the Battle of Agincourt, and he attributes the victory to God. It is then worth to explore the reasons why Shakespeare highlights the power of the king’s speech and why the king hands the victory to God. This essay argues that Shakespeare’s emphasis on the power of Henry V’s speech in the Battle of Agincourt exaggerates Britain’s power and stirs the British’s sense of glory, and Henry V’s handing over the victory to God makes his colonial war seemingly rationalized, which strengthens the colonial dream and unites the Britons in the age of Elizabeth I.

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Shakespeare’s Adumbrations of State-Based Diplomacy

After Lavinia ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501707575.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

John Watkins

Keyword(s):

Just War ◽

Just War Theory ◽

European Politics ◽

Elizabeth I ◽

Henry V ◽

Negative View ◽

Eleanor Of Aquitaine ◽

King John

This chapter focuses on William Shakespeare's plays, which expressed a negative view of interdynastic marriage as subservience to a foreign power that later dominated European politics. Shakespeare came of age after the failure of Elizabeth I of England in her bid to marry the French Duke of Alençon. The chapter analyzes two of Shakespeare's works, King John and Henry V. King John casts Eleanor of Aquitaine as a manipulator who orchestrates treaties that deprive a rightful heir of his claim to the English throne and put dynastic interest above the welfare of the English people. Henry V is an interrogation of just war theory in its conventional tripartite division: justice in waging, conducting, and ending war.

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Spectres of Female Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s Plays

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199663408.013.6 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 111-130

Author(s):

Susan Frye

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Political Thought ◽

Female Body ◽

The Political ◽

Elizabeth I ◽

Henry Viii ◽

The Winter's Tale ◽

Henry V ◽

Winter's Tale

Spectres of historical queens in several of Shakespeare’s plays recall the political importance not only of queens themselves, but of the vexed issue of sovereignty as it was gendered in early modern political thought. Representations of and allusions to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots in Henry V, Henry VIII, and The Winter’s Tale expose the strategies through which actual queens as well as their supporters authorized and defended early modern female sovereignty. At the same time, because female sovereignty rests on the connection between the female body and the political body, definitions of female sovereignty remain unstable, capable of both reinforcing and disrupting the connection. When Shakespeare creates his historical and fictional queens, he raises their spectres as untimely versions of female sovereignty as well as the uncanny role of the female body in representing time itself.

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