IT'S A PLAY:

"Step aside, I'll show thee a president": George W as Henry V?: Political commentators have been claiming Dubya as a modern-day Prince Hal since the 1990s, eager to ascribe a kingly divine right to a ruler who, from his assumption of the throne to his current crusade, lacks justification (Scott Newstrom, PopPolitics)

Some readers of the play ("we happy few," as Henry would say) have pointed out the numerous weaknesses, and disturbing echoes, in the Right-wing version of this analogy, even going so far as to call it claptrap. Major elements of the story glossed over include: the fact that the newly crowned Henry overtly rejects his cronies from his ne'er-do-well youth; the fact that Henry rather awkwardly effaces his responsibility for civilian deaths; the fact that the momentary triumph over France soon resulted in a generation's worth of making "England bleed," with carnage abroad as well as at home in civil wars; the fact that Hal informs us early in Henry IV, part I that he is deliberately misbehaving (few would claim Dubya's youthful hijinks to be part of a visionary plan of redemption -- although, as Mark Crispin Miller has argued, "it suits a politician to have everybody thinking he's a dunce") . . .

But no bother. The audience for this supposedly self-evident connection, I would argue, is not someone who has read the play; rather, it is someone who hasn't, but trusts the cultural authority of Shakespeare. We are thus lulled into recognizing Bush's supposed nobility. Moreover, the precise moment of George/Hal's maturation is usefully malleable, as it has been played and replayed incessantly for half a decade; its most recent occasions include the war in Afghanistan, the announcement of a new preemptive military doctrine, and Bush's address to the United Nations. Even stage directors seem eager to reinforce the reciprocal dynamic between Bush and Henry, with more than one theater company producing Henry V in response to current events. Analogies between Iraq and 'Agincourt' have, inevitably, resulted from Bush's current foreign quarrels. (They might not be so far off the mark, with Republican bumper stickers and buttons proclaiming the slogan "First Iraq, Then France.")

What remains most galling about the loaded way in which the right insists upon the W/V connection is how deeply reactionary it is. The reductive reading of Shakespeare and the reductive reading of history are both lamentable, but perhaps inevitable in a sound-bite world. What isn't inevitable is the conclusion of these readings: that we should celebrate the Bush presidency on account of some rather tenuous (and by no means unproblematic) similarities to a fictionalized king. This is using a cultural authority (Shakespeare) to bolster a political authority (the Bush regime) which, from its inception, has been short on, and even defiant of, the authority necessary to lead a democracy: the consent of the majority of the people.

There's another, simpler, possibility to consider here--the Right encourages the comparison in order to justify war with France.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2003 10:24 AM