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Article Dans Une Revue Shakespeare en devenir Année : 2022

Ignoring Crecy, Forgoing Poitiers and Adding to Agincourt: (For)getting the Battles Right in the Record

Résumé

Agincourt is remembered as the decisive battle where Henry V’s “happy few” plucked the flower of French chivalry on battle-rich St Crispin’s Day, 25 October 1415. As celebrated as it is, however, this was no valiant chevauchée through Normandy in the style of Edward III. Decimated from their Pyrrhic victory at Harfleur, suffering from dysentery, fatigue and hunger, the English were essentially on retreat to the safety of Calais. But hemmed in near the castle of Azincourt, “with a weak and sickly guard” (III.6.157) Henry surmised that the French army grew stronger with each moment while, as Shakespeare put it, his own “numbers lessened.” Henry’s unorthodox surprise attack – leading with longbows – was therefore an act of desperation more than bravado, and its initial success can be attributed more to bad weather and obstinate French adherence to conventional rules of warfare than to superior military prowess. Indeed, Henry’s summary execution of all but the richest prisoners of war in sight of the enemy, a task his own knights considered so heinous that it fell to the archers, indicates how terrified he was of defeat. So although ultimately triumphant, Agincourt hardly shows the English in the best light. It was a victory born of desperation, achieved through luck, and consolidated in an act of butchery tempered only by the prospect of mammon. And while Agincourt is hailed as the moment when the English extinguished “the Flower of French chivalry,” such could just as well be said of Crecy (1346), where a similarly outnumbered and harassed English army also annihilated superior French forces. The honour could likewise go to Poitiers (1356), where the French king himself was captured and shipped back to London. In fact, Agincourt was not the first, but only the final great English upset. Furthermore, within ten years any gains it had made were definitively lost. In hindsight it therefore seems that Agincourt should be seen as the swan-song of a lost cause more than a watershed victory. So why is Agincourt remembered more nostalgically than any other battle, most notably Crecy and Poitiers?Undoubtedly an important reason is that Agincourt was deliberately aggrandized in order to drum up support for an increasingly unpopular and costly war. Such glorification was hardly necessary for Edward III or the Black Prince, victors of Crecy and Poitiers, but Richard II’s subsequent neglect of the war meant that it had been all but ignored by that great quadrumvirate of medieval English writers – Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the Pearl Poet – while the usurping Henry IV had been more concerned with legitimizing his reign at home than with pursuing claims in France. In the meantime, attitudes towards war and nationhood had been changing; while war was losing its medieval cachet as a noble endeavour, the nascent national consciousness emerging in the early Renaissance was ripe for exploitation by the war’s old-school proponents. Indeed, the relatively immense outpouring of (decidedly mediocre) popular verse in English immediately following Agincourt seems to have found official sanction, ultimately augmenting the development of a sense of Englishness. In fact, despite evidence that the king himself later hoped to downplay overblown and inaccurate accounts of the battle when they became counterproductive, the die had been cast. Early commemorative accounts had already indissolubly imbued the emergent national psyche, rendering the myth a more consumable reality than actual facts. It is this legend of Agincourt more than historical truth which informed Shakespeare’s own highly politicized history, and through him that legend continues to be perpetuated and built upon up to the present day.
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hal-03719690 , version 1 (24-04-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03719690 , version 1

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John Ford. Ignoring Crecy, Forgoing Poitiers and Adding to Agincourt: (For)getting the Battles Right in the Record. Shakespeare en devenir, 2022, Views on and from the Renaissance. I. Historicizing the Past, Emblematizing the Present, 16. ⟨hal-03719690⟩

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