Two leadership lessons from Shakespeare's Henriad

I love the lovely bully.

You can find all the Shakespeare essays here, and the schedule for future meetings here. We meet on Sunday 7th April, 19.00 UK time to discuss **Henry IV part I**.

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Obviously, the first thing to say is that if you only read the summarised leadership lessons from Shakespeare, you won’t really learn very much. Literature offers not simple advice but messy demonstration. You have to read (and watch) the plays several times to get the benefit. If I had my way, these plays would be required reading in corporate and political life. The obvious lessons—giving inspirational speeches before momentous occasions—are not what we’re interested in today. Instead, I want to draw out the two big ideas that underpin the cycle of plays—Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V—and what they teach us about leadership and politics.

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We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

This is the one big lesson. Everything is subject to time. Everything has to be seen in the context of death and unpredictable change. Human agency is more limited by time than any character realises. No-one gets out of these plays wholly successful. Time catches up to them all. The true subject is not power as such, but the role of what Shakespeare elsewhere called “Time’s thievish progress to eternity” in politics.

From Richard II through to Henry V, all four plays are concerned with time—wasting it, redeeming it, accepting its passage. Some characters waste time, some try to defy time, some fill up all their time with accomplishment—and it overtakes all of them. You must expect to be thwarted.

The plays only cover a period of twenty-two years! And yet, one king is deposed, one spends his reign struggling against rebellions, another wins great victories before dying young. His son succeeds as an infant, the victories in France are undone, and the English civil wars resume. Read the final words of Henry V, the closing of the cycle. It’s as if nothing has changed.

Small time, but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England. Fortune made his sword,
By which the world’s best garden he achieved
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King
Of France and England, did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed,
Which oft our stage hath shown. And for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.

The phrase that closes the whole cycle—In your fair minds let this acceptance take—is crucial. Literally, it means “let this play take acceptance in your minds”, i.e. applaud for us. But it also means, “let this history take acceptance in your mind.” He wants you to accept the whole play, the victory and the consequential decline.

At the start of Henry IV, part II, Hastings, one of the rebels says, “We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.” That can stand as the motto for the whole cycle. Let this acceptance take.

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Vile politics and the lovely bully.

No-one is the ideal. Yes, Henry V is closest to being a “hero king”, but the plays are not designed to have you choose between the goodies and the baddies. Many critics take sides between Falstaff and Hal. They see Hal’s rejection of Falstaff as either the betrayal of a friendship or the necessary choice for a proper ruler. For some, Henry V is an ideal king. To others, he allows ambition to warp his heart.

No. As William Empson said, the Henriad is all about dramatic ambiguity. No one is entirely good or bad. In her excellent lecture about Henry V, Professor Emma Smith compares the play to the duck-rabbit illusion used by psychologists: you cannot see it as only one or the other, but simultaneously both. That is true of much of the cycle. And this interacts with what counts as “good politics”. To see this, let’s review how the major events unfold.

Richard II’s excesses as king cause the nobles to disdain him. The famous “scepter’d isle” speech is a grouchy proclamation from a dying man that Richard has “leased out” the kingdom. And so Richard, a weak monarch, is deposed by Henry IV.

Henry turns out to be weak as well. The rebels who helped him to the throne soon turn against him and dog his rule. England lacks a unifying leader.

The rebels have the same problem as Henry, but in reverse. Hotspur, heir to the powerful Northumberland family, calls Henry a “vile politician”—but Hotspur is not politician enough. His father and uncle “lead him on” in his rebellion, and when it comes to the fight one of them abandons him and the other lies about Henry IV’s offer of mercy, in an attempt to save his own neck. And Hotspur pays the price. He dies in battle.

Henry V is often seen as a unifying hero, who learned how to talk to ordinary people as a playboy prince, which he then put to work as an inspiring war leader. The truth is he combines esprit de corps with a disturbing ruthlessness.

After the victory at Harfleur, he threatens to inflict terrible suffering unless the town surrenders. In a long and vicious speech he threatens to “mow… like grass/ Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants”, to reduce the town to ashes. Later on, he twice orders the death of thousands of prisoners, breaking the rules of war. Some critics have, very reasonably, asked “Was Henry V a war criminal?”

These pronouncements make Henry’s reputation as an ideal seem untenable. It’s so difficult to square this with the patriotic interpretation of the play that the lines ordering the prisoners’ deaths are often cut from films.

But look where weakness got Richard II. Henry IV’s offer of mercy only encouraged the rebels. And look where Hotspur ended up, unable to control his rage—”a wasp-stung and impatient fool”. Henry V is morally flawed, but politically effective because he finds the balance between politics and ruthlessness.

The same cold pragmatism that banished Falstaff is at work in the dark cruelty of Henry’s threats. He knows that if he threatens the worst, his enemies will be more likely to give themselves to his best mercy. He knows, too, that being political is hard to get right—either too weak like his father or too headstrong like Hotspur. He must hold a firm, consistent line: enforce the law, unite the kingdom, pursue his claim to the French throne.

Henry V is the ideal king. And he is morally compromised. He knows when vile politics will be effective and when it will not. This allows him to become the most effective ruler of the three kings in this play cycle.

When Henry V goes into the camp, disguised as a commoner the night before Agincourt, he speaks to Pistol, one of his former tavern mates. Pistol does not know it is the king. And Pistol is perhaps the only person alive who has seen Henry V in both the Boar’s Head and on the battle field. He captures perfectly the moral advantage of Henry’s ambiguity. (Bawcock is a compliment, it means “fine bird”, “good fellow”.)

The king’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold, a lad of life, an imp of fame; Of parents good, of fist most valiant. I kiss his dirty shoe, and from heart-string I love the lovely bully.

To be heroic, Shakespeare says, you must engage in vile politics; to admire a leader, you must love the lovely bully.

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You can find all the Shakespeare essays here, and the schedule for future meetings here. We meet on Sunday 7th April, 19.00 UK time to discuss Henry IV part I.

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The duck rabbit