MARRIAGE OF HENRY V AND KATHARINE

England had had her days of gloom, and was destined, as the result of these very famous victories, to have days of still deeper misery; but over the marriage of Henry and Katharine, there were no shadows. No birds of evil omen perched above the broad pennon of the warrior king. All voices joined in shouts of Te Deum Laudamus, and the poet sings his song of triumph clear and brilliantly, without a false note or jarring harmony, to the last bar, and, in spite of his own words, with no "rough and all unable pen,"

Our bending author hath pursued the story,

In little room confining mighty men.

-WARNER, English History in Shakespeare's Plays.

FLUELLEN

Among the more serious popular characters—the steady, worthy Gower, the rough Williams, and the dry Batesthe Welshman Fluellen, the king's countryman, is the central point. He is, as the king himself says, a man of "much care and valor," but "out of fashion." Compared with the former companions of the prince, he is like discipline opposed to licence, like pedantry opposed to dissoluteness, conscientiousness to impiety, learning to rudeness, temperance to intoxication, and veiled bravery to concealed cowardice. Contrasted with those boasters, he appears at first a "collier" who pockets every affront. In common with his royal countryman, he is not what he seems. hind little caprices and awkward peculiarities is hidden an honest, brave nature, which should be exhibited by the actor, as it was by Hippisley in Garrick's time, without playfulness or caricature. Open and true, he suffers himself to be deceived for a time by Pistol's bragging, then he seems coldly to submit to insult from him, but he makes

Be

him smart for it thoroughly after the battle, and then gives him "a groat to heal his broken pate." He settles the business on which Henry sets him against Williams, and which brings him a blow, and when the king rewards Williams with a glove full of crowns, he will not be behind in generosity, and gives him a shilling. He speaks good and bad of his superiors, ever according to truth, deeply convinced of the importance of his praise and blame, but he would do his duty under each. He is talkative in the wrong place, takes the word from the lips of others, and is indignant when it is taken from him; but in the night before the battle he knows how to keep himself quiet and calm, for nothing surpasses to him the discipline of the Roman wars, in which this is enjoined. The cold man flashes forth warmly like the king when the French commit the act, so contrary to the law of arms, of killing the soldiers' boys. At the time of his respect for Pistol, the latter begs him to intercede for the church-robber Bardolph, but he made his appeal to the wrong man. It is a matter of discipline, in which Fluellen is inexorable. Indeed he especially esteems his countryman king for having freed himself of these old companions. This is the essential point to him in his learned comparison between Henry V and Alexander the Great, that the latter killed his friends in his intoxication, while the former turned away his when he was "in his right wits." Since then his countryman is inscribed in his honest scrupulous heart, though before he had certainly made little of the dissolute fellow; now he cares not who knows that he is the king's countryman, he needs not to be ashamed of him "so long as his majesty is an honest man." Happy it is that the noble Henry can utter a cordial amen to this remark, "God keep me so;" his captain Fluellen would at once renounce his friendship if he learned from him his first dishonorable trick. The selfcontentedness of an integrity, unshaken indeed, but also never exposed to any temptation, is excellently designed in all the features of this character.-GERVINUS, Shakespeare Commentaries.

THE MOTIVE OF THE PLAY

The principal historical feature, the description of the spirit of the age with its relations to the past, and the character of the two belligerent nations is brought out in a truly dramatic style, by giving the utmost animation to the action. Henry IV, on his death-bed, had counselled his son to engage

"Giddy minds

With foreign quarrels."

And, in fact, "giddiness” and vacillation were the leading features in the character of the age; the reason of this lay not only in the unjust usurpation of Henry IV, which, owing to the close connection existing between the state and its various members, exercised its influence on the barons and people, but also in the progressive development of the state and of the nation itself. The corporative estates of the kingdom, the clergy, knights and burghers, incited by an esprit de corps and by their well-ordered organization, felt their power and endeavored to assert it, both against the royal power and against one another. Their disputes among one another would have been of more frequent occurrence had it not been for the fact that, in direct contrast to the French nobility, the English barons generally sided with the commoners, so as mutually to protect their rights against the pretensions of the crown. Each of these several parties endeavored to promote their own interests and to act with the greatest possible amount of freedom; their active strength naturally strove to find a vigorous sphere of action and would have consumed itself, and thus internally destroyed the organism of the state, had it not succeeded in obtaining vent in an outward direction. In France, on the other hand, the vanity, the excessive arrogance of the court, the nobility and the people desired war in order to realize their proud dream of internal and external superiority; the historical course of the nation's culture required that it should be thoroughly

humbled by misery and wretchedness, otherwise it would have decayed prematurely through extravagance and effeminate luxury. Moreover in France also, the organism of the state was broken up into so many separate and independent corporations that it required a great and general interest, a great national disaster to preserve their consciousness of mutual dependence and unity.-ULRICI, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art.

THE DRAMATIC STRUCTURE

The dramatic structure is not of a normal type; and this may be implied from the mere presence of a chorus in front of each act; briefly, we have a combination of the two methods, the dramatic and the epic; the story is told mostly by action and dialogue, but partly by an extradramatic narrator. To this composite treatment Shakespeare was driven by the scope and grandeur of his subject, and, as is true of nearly all his experiments, the composite method was successful. It is customary, however, to compare the Choruses that link the episodes of Henry V with their predecessors in the classic drama; customary also to assert that they have nothing in common with the latter. But the brief truth is that the nature and the function of the classic chorus was variable; that the Chorus in Henry V assumes much of this nature and many of these functions, while it adds yet others--"prologuelike" says the poet himself. Apart, moreover, from their dramatic functions, these Choruses are epic in some of their aspects: "O for a Muse of fire that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention."

They are finely lyrical, and they are odes to the glory of a king, supplying in this particular what would be impossible in drama. In fact, almost every instrument of poetic music may be heard in this magnificent orchestra of Henry V, which remains not least among the glories of the nation that it glorified.-LUCE, Handbook to Shakespeare's Works.

LYRIC GRANDEUR OF THE SUBJECT

The didactic lessons of moral prudence, the brief sententious precepts, the descriptions of high actions and high passions, are alien from the whole spirit of Shakspere's drama. The Henry V constitutes an exception to the general rules upon which he worked. "High actions" are here described as well as exhibited; and high passions, in the Shaksperian sense of the term, scarcely make their appearance upon the scene. Here are no struggles between will and fate;-no frailties of humanity dragging down its virtues into an abyss of guilt and sorrow,-no crimes, no obduracy, no penitence. We have the lofty and unconquerable spirit of national and individual heroism riding triumphantly over every danger; but the spirit is so lofty that we feel no uncertainty for the issue. We should know, even if we had no foreknowledge of the event, that it must conquer. We can scarcely weep over those who fall in that "glorious and well-foughten field," for "they kept together in their chivalry," and their last words sound as a glorious hymn of exultation. The subject is altogether one of lyric grandeur; but it is not one, we think, which Shakspere would have chosen for a drama.KNIGHT, Pictorial Shakspere.