SOURCE: Hedrick, Donald. “Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V.” PMLA 118, no. 3 (May 2003): 470-87.

In the following essay, Hedrick studies how Shakespeare masterfully joined history, politics, and love in Henry V, focusing in particular on the courtship between Henry V and Katherine in the play's final act.

Advantage + History

The violence to genre in Henry V's concluding scene, a romantic minicomedy intruding on the main action of military history, has received its share of aesthetic condemnation and interpretive apologetics, from Samuel Johnson's lament that Shakespeare ran out of material to A. C. Bradley's conviction that Shakespeare could not have intended such a disagreeable ending.¹ Despite various explanations, the scene leaves many readers and some spectators markedly uneasy. What typically outweighs any intellectual resolution is the scene's narrative premise, namely that the king's quickie persuasion of Princess Catherine of France to accept, to like, to love, and to marry him...