Nation and Responsibility: The King and His Soldiers in Shakespeare’s Henry V

• Author: Arlene W. Saxonhouse
• Date: 01 December 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720982951
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720982951

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(6) 968 –994

© The Author(s) 2020

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720982951

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Article

Nation and

Responsibility: The

King and His Soldiers in

Shakespeare’s Henry V

Arlene W. Saxonhouse1

Abstract

Who bears responsibility for the actions of a city or state? Is it the entity

that we sometimes call a nation? Or the individual members of the nation?

Shakespeare’s Henry V includes a brief interchange the night before the battle

at Agincourt that addresses this question. A disguised king and the common

soldiers of his army debate who is responsible for the deaths that will occur

during the forthcoming battle if the war they are fighting is unjust: the king

or his soldiers? Who will be punished on Judgment Day? The interchange

opens up reflections on the challenge of deciding who acts when a state

acts. Henry V is a play that emphasizes the role of the imagination as central

to both stagecraft and the politics of creating a nation. Engaging with the

medieval theory of the “king’s two bodies,” the Henry of Shakespeare’s play

is caught between the desire to be the embodiment of the imagined nation

and yet be his own “natural person” when questions of responsibility for

the actions of the nation emerge. Dependent on the imagination to build a

unified nation of diverse peoples, Henry desires to escape responsibility for

the potentially unjust actions of the nation by focusing on the private actions

of his individual subjects. The play thereby brings questions of responsibility

for the actions of collective bodies founded by the imagination to the fore

and forces us to explore who is responsible when states or nations act.

1Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 5700 Haven

Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.

Email: awsaxon@umich.edu

982951PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720982951Political TheorySaxonhouse

research-article2020

Saxonhouse 969

Keywords

responsibility, imagination, Shakespeare, Henry V

From the same also it proceedeth that men cannot distinguish without study

and great understanding, between the one action of many men and many

actions of one multitude; as for example, between one action of all the

senators of Rome in killing Catiline and the many actions of senators in

killing Caesar; and therefore are disposed to take for the action of the people

that which is a multitude of actions done by a multitude of men, led perhaps

by the persuasive one.

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 11, paragraph 20

I. The Problem

What does it mean to say, as we regularly do, that a state “acts”? Germany

invades Poland, England resists, the United States reduces its nuclear arsenal,

the Athenians acquire an empire in the Mediterranean, the Melians refuse to

submit, the Spartans begin a war to restrain the imperial ambitions of the

Athenians. And so forth. Linguistically, these phrases casually roll off our

tongues. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BCE and analyzing what it

means to live in a political community, asks in the beginning lines of Book III

of Politics: “What in the world is a city (polis)?” Before turning this into the

question of who is a member of the polis and giving his famous definition of

a citizen as one who shares in decisions and judgments, he ponders the ques-

tion of action: “There are disputes, some arguing that the city performed an

action (tên polin peprachenai), others that it was not the city but the oligarchy

or the tyrant.”1 He thus suggests how any change in the regime of a city might

undermine the simple statement that Germany invaded Poland.2 Aristotle fol-

lows up on this dispute when he does not simply ask his readers to identify

who acts in the unsettling situation when regimes change, but also points to

the problem that “some raise” of “when the city performed an action and

when it did not – for example, at the time when a democracy replaces an

oligarchy or a tyranny . . . some do not want to fulfill [public] agreements on

the ground that it was not the city but the tyrant who entered into them.”3 The

“agreements (ta sumbolaia)”—treaties, debts, and so forth—introduce the

question of justice, of what is owed, into this question of what it means to say

that states or cities act.

Aristotle’s challenge, which he himself never really answers, resounds

through our understanding of the politics and justice of political actions taken

by the collective bodies that we now call states. Not only do we ask who acts,