Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Roy Battenhouse

Critical Essay by Roy Battenhouse

Battenhouse, Roy. “Henry V in the Light of Erasmus.” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 77-85.

In this essay, Battenhouse evaluates Henry V in terms of the principles set forth by the sixteenth-century Catholic humanist Erasmus in his Praise of Folly and The Education of a Christian Prince, contending that Shakespeare presents Henry as a monarch who repeatedly evades personal responsibility and only counterfeits the role of ideal Christian king.

In a Cambridge edition of Henry V in 1947, John Dover Wilson described Henry as a king inspired by religion. He even likened this hero's faith to “that of the martyrs.” He judged Henry's bishops to be upright men, and he viewed the play's chorus as an “entreaty from the playwright's own lips.” J. H. Walter, in his Arden edition seven years later, sought to bolster Wilson's interpretation. He provided, therefore, among other things, a tabulation of “parallels” between passages in the...
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