SOURCE: Slights, Camille Wells. “The Conscience of the King: Henry V and the Reformed Conscience.” Philological Quarterly 80, no. 1 (winter 2001): 37-55.

In the following essay, Slights probes the historical context of Henry's conscience in Henry V, including his mediation between personal judgment and social obligation as King of England.

Since the celebrations of Shakespearean characters as portrayals of universal human nature have been largely silenced by scholarly attacks on the universalizing of the bourgeois subject, analyses of early modern representations of human life have risked an equally ahistorical projection of a postmodern fragmented subject onto early modern texts and have sometimes avoided attributing all meaning to originary subjects only by effacing human agency altogether. If we assume that reality is grasped through language, that there is no pre-linguistic knowledge, then we need to be wary of how we use our own vocabulary in analyzing early modern subjectivities and to...