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Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Please.

Judith Shulevitz
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 22, 1999, at 5:42 PM ET

It was inevitable that--as the New York Times reports--Shakespeare would come to rival Machiavelli as the most popular adviser in world literature for businessmen who want to lie, cheat, and scheme their way to the top. (The Brothers Grimm and A. A. Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh, dabble in that line of work too, but their output is noncompetitive--only one book to Machiavelli's and Shakespeare's several each.) It is also fitting that the character chosen by the authors of Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage as a role model for CEOs is Henry V. Hal, as he is called, is widely acknowledged to be the playwright's most Machiavellian hero.

Most people like to think of Henry V as a jolly patriot who conquered France for England--hurrah!--which is how Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh play him in the two movie versions of Henry V. But read the play more closely and you realize that the cheerfully successful king bears little resemblance to the man Shakespeare created. At best, Shakespeare's Henry V was, as critic William Hazlitt wrote, "an amiable monster"--"that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives." At worst, he was a cold and cunning strategist without a glimmer of moral doubt, a man as happy to humiliate his friends, even execute them, as he is to commit mass murder--all in the name of consolidating power.

Just the sort of man a CEO should emulate! you may be thinking. Culturebox agrees. The Shakespearean (as opposed to the Oliverian or Branaghian) Henry V embodies several telling bits of wisdom for he who would develop the character of a true-blue businessman:

1. Learn everything you can from your friends, but drop them the minute they get in your way. In Henry IV, young Hal is a roustabout who keeps the company of a band of merry thieves led by the obese drunkard Falstaff, who has been described by critic Harold Bloom as the life force incarnate. Falstaff teaches Hal how to be a quick-witter punster and a master of play; he also teaches him a commoner's skepticism of power and its pretensions. In short, Hal learns from Falstaff a street savvy that will make him enormously popular later in life. As soon as Hal ascends to the throne, however, he pretends not to know his old and embarrassing mentor:

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

2. Don't worry about whether you have a good reason to initiate a hostile takeover; simply having the means to do so will suffice. Why does Henry V gather up an army and sail to France? For no better reason than that he suddenly came upon a way to pay for it. At the beginning of the play, England's church officials offer to underwrite an invasion as a bribe to keep Henry from appropriating church lands. Upon receiving the proposal, he asks England's bishops several times to give him a clear justification for the invasion, which will necessarily entail the deaths of thousands of men. The bishops give him long-winded answers that make no sense at all, at the end of which he asks again, confused: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" More incomprehensible replies ensue. The scene ends without good reasons having ever been offered, after which he goes ahead and invades anyway.

3. Threaten to loot, pillage, and rape the daughters of your competitors if they don't give up the fight as soon as you enter the field--and explain that they have forced you to do so. Consider Henry's speech before the town of Harfleur, whose crime has been to hold out against a siege:

What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?

4. If a former friend has committed a crime, however minor, make sure he receives the maximum punishment in order to make an example of him. Just before the great battle with the French at Agincourt, Henry V is told that Bardolph, a member of his old gang, has been caught stealing a small statue of Christ from a local church. For this act, Bardolph is to be hanged. Rather than pardon the poor fool, Henry has him killed in order to show the French that his is an orderly army that means them no real harm.

5. Take no prisoners. But if you do, kill them. When Henry hears at Agincourt that the French have sent in reinforcements, he orders his men to kill their French prisoners--a terrifying act for men facing the prospect of imprisonment themselves. As one soldier remarks: "'Tis expressly against the law of arms: 'tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offer't." Neither Shakespeare (who alludes to the incident only in passing) nor history offers any justification for this gross violation of the laws of war: "Was there, as it was later claimed, some sudden movement on the part of French cavalry which lead Henry to fear an attack from the rear? It is possible, though no such attack took place," writes historian John Julius Norwich in his forthcoming book Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1137-1485. Norwich, who calls the command "the darkest stain on [the historical Henry's] reputation," says that so many of Henry's men refused to obey his order that "he was at last obligated to designate 200 of his own archers specifically for the task."

6. Marry a woman appropriate to your station, and say anything you have to to win her. In wooing Katherine, the French princess whose country and relatives he has just laid waste to, Henry, having never met the girl, calls her an angel and claims to be in love with her. When, reasonably enough, she objects, he subtly menaces her:

No; it is not possible you should love the enemy of
France, Kate: but, in loving me, you should love
the friend of France; for I love France so well that
I will not part with a village of it; I will have it
all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine and I am
yours, then yours is France and you are mine.

To sum up, then: What does Shakespeare really have to say to businessmen who think that his kings make good role models--rather than, say, troubling, interesting, morally questionable dramatizations of the effects of power? "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

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Judith Shulevitz is a former culture editor of Slate. She is writing a book about the Sabbath.
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Highlights from the Fray:


Judith Shulevitz needs to brush up on her Shakespeare as well, I'm afraid. Fluellen's statement in Henry V, Act IV, Scene VII is, in full:

Kill the poys and the luggage! 'tis expressly
against the law of arms: 'tis an arrant a piece of
knavery, mark you now, as can be offert; in your
conscience, now, is it not?

To this statement Gower, another soldier, replies:

'Tis certain there's not a boy left alive; and
the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done
this slaughter: besides, they have burn'd and
carried away all that was in the king's tent;
wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every
soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a
gallant king!

This then prompts an extended comparison on the part of Fluellen of Henry V and Alexander the Great. Thus, Fluellen's condemnation was for the French slaughter of the boys in the English baggage train, a slaughter conducted apparently by French soldiers who fled the battle. This is what they think provoked King Henry's command to kill the prisoners, and both soldiers fully approve of that command.

John Keegan's excellent book The Face of Battle also looks at the issue and concludes that his command was well within the norms of warfare for the period. Henry V is, in fact, Shakespeare's archetype of the perfect Hero-King precisely because of his Machiavellian qualities (which certainly are present)--Henry understands, as he explains during his tour of the army before Agincourt, that the moral demands upon a King are very different from those upon ordinary men.

--Guatam Makunda

(To reply, click here.)


I disagree somewhat with Culturebox's interpretation of the immensely interesting character, Henry V. Certainly Hal is crafty. Hal is creepy, even. I think the scene with Katherine at the end of Henry V reveals this nicely, as Culturebox says. But Brannagh's Hal, rather than being a whitewashed Henry (as Culturebox asserts), delivers that line with a thinly veiled cunning that is chilling.

Young Hal reveals himself--or, rather, Shakespeare reveals him to us--most fully in his soliloquy in 1 King Henry IV:

So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Is Hal honorable? Certainly not. Noble? No. Effective? Absolutely.

It seems to me that Shakespeare is making the sophisticated point that even a benign and beloved despot must be above the moral considerations that plague lesser beings. In other words, Hal is more pragmatic than idealistic. I would agree that that is a desirable quality in both kings and CEO's, assuming that their goals are in the best interests of the nation or corporation.

Indeed, Prince Henry is almost Machievelli's prince; and it is a simplistic misreading of both writers to believe that this is necessarily a bad thing. Machievelli argues that the most effective use of power is also often the most benevolent--but not always. A great leader embodies within him or herself the sum of the best interests of those he leads, he makes those interests his own, and his own interests, theirs.

--Keith M Ellis

(To reply, click here.)


Gautam Mukunda has a point. I did misread the passage. But he (or she) is wrong to conclude that I thereby vitiate my larger argument.

First things first. I stand corrected: Fluellen is in fact referring to the French slaughter of the English servants. But I submit that there's a good reason for my having misread the text on the fly. Fluellen's remark follows immediately Henry's order to his men to kill their prisoners, which would have scared anybody in Shakespeare' audience who knows anything about war: The side whose captured soldiers have been murdered invariably retaliates by killing the men it has captured, and the men ordered to slit their prisoners' throats understood that. I think Shakespeare means for us to confuse the two for a moment, until Gower replies and we know where we are.

Fluellen does not then go on to compare Henry to Alexander the Great, exactly. Fluellen, in the great tradition of the Shakespearean Fool, uses the comparison to make Henry out to be an ass. Fluellen first compares Henry to Alexander the Pig, is corrected by Gower, defends his malapropism, then goes on to say that the reason Alexander and Henry are alike is they both kill their friends! (Henry, of course, killed Falstaff metaphorically by cutting him to the quick.) Obviously, we are meant to laugh at Fluellen's nonsense, but still. When a Shakespearean fool mocks a king, intentionally or not, we have to sit up and take notice.

As for Keegan and The Face of Battle, Gautam Mukunda inadvertently makes my point for me: Keegan would not have had to weigh in if there wasn't a raging debate about the rightness or wrongness of Henry's actions.

Is Henry the archetype of the Hero, Machiavellian or otherwise? I would argue that Shakespeare did not create archetypes. He created characters. Indeed, he may have created Character itself. What makes a Shakespearean character is his roundedness, his moral complexity, his good sides and his evil sides, all mixed in. As Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare more or less invented our modern notions of psychology. Is Henry all good? Hell no. Is he all bad? No-oh, not really, but he's out there, and Shakespeare knew it. My point was simply that he's not an exemplary role model, and it's ridiculous for business executives to think that Shakespeare had handed them a road map to the unproblematic exercise of power.

--Judith Shulevitz

(To reply, click here.)

(12/28)


I was happy to see someone set straight the matter of arrant knavery-- the French murder of the boys in the luggage. But I think you missed two other important points.

First, Henry does indeed have several moments of malaise about his course of action. (He'd be much less interesting if he didn't.) He's almost Hamlet-like for portions of Act 4, Scene 1 and Shakespeare allows other characters, such as Gower, to pull apart provocative ideas about responsibility and the Good War in Henry's hearing.

Second, you do a disservice by treating Branagh's film as a clone of Olivier's. The differences between the two are significant. For example, Olivier chooses to omit the three traitors entirely (false Englishmen!?!), while Branagh gives us Henry at his most sincere and serpent-like. Do you suppose that Cambridge, Scroop, & Gray could have changed their fates by 'fessing up?

Finally, if you don't like Hal as a model, is there a Shakespeare character you do recommend?

--Lin Seagren

(To reply, click here.)

(12/30)

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