SOURCE: Eggert, Katherine. “Nostalgia and the Not Yet Late Queen: Refusing Female Rule in Henry V.” ELH 61, no. 3 (autumn 1994): 523-50.

In the following essay, Eggert asserts that Henry V is an example of the way the Elizabethan stage was used to support patriarchal power.

Within the last decade, Henry V has assumed a surprisingly prominent place not only in Shakespeare criticism, but in wider critical debates over the relations between literature and hegemonic political power. Prompted by Stephen Greenblatt's widely influential consideration of the Henriad in his essay “Invisible Bullets,” various critics have staked out Shakespeare's only real “war play” as their own battlefield for contesting, as Jean Howard puts it, “how and why a culture produces and deals with challenges to its dominant ideologies.”¹ Whatever their ideological stance, however, these critics have largely left untested Greenblatt's crucial assumption that, in the Henriad's counterpoint between hegemony and...