SOURCE: Newman, Karen. “Englishing the Other: ‘Le tiers exlu’ and Shakespeare's Henry V.” In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, pp. 95-108. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Newman analyzes the way language is used to represent social and gender differences in Henry V.

At his departure in search of a northwest passage, the English explorer Martin Frobisher was exhorted by Queen Elizabeth to bring back some of the native peoples he encountered on his voyage. Elizabeth betrayed her characteristic ambivalence toward colonial enterprise: she desired to see the “spectacle of strangeness” but at the same time ordered Frobisher not to compel the Indians against their wills. In his account of the voyage (1577), Frobisher reveals that despite Elizabeth's warning he laid hold of his captive forcibly. Worried about the well-being of his “strange and new prey,” he also took a woman captive for his...