Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/166

Shakespeare of Stratford foreign quarrels’; and because the Archbishop of Canterbury has unblushingly ventured an affirmative answer to his question, ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ Shakespeare shirks the real business of the conquest of France, and concentrates attention upon the upset of all sporting predictions in the outcome of the battle of Agincourt. And Agincourt is particularly glorified as a defensive action. Says Henry to the French herald, Montjoy,

If only the French would not insist upon it, there should be no conquest of France. The Jingoes, pray observe, are all in the French camp—all but Captain Macmorris, the Irishman, who by Gower’s account (and his own) is ‘a very valiant gentleman’ and a fire-eater, and for whom we have Fluellen’s unimpeachable authority that ‘he is an ass, as in the world: I will verify as much in his peard: he has no more directions in the two disciplines of the wars, look you than is a puppy-dog.’

Shakespeare learned his patriotism and foreign policy from Holinshed and the other old chroniclers who followed in the train of that prince of sporting-writers, Froissart. They treated warfare as we treat football—as a spectacular, exciting, and fundamentally good-natured pastime, arising from no particular causes except the love of competition and productive of no consequences except the glory of the successful