Forensic History

Written at the time of the accession of a Scots king to the English throne, Henry V has been called a ‘succession play’. Yet although critics have discussed the play’s representation of Ireland and Wales, its representation of Scotland goes unmentioned. This chapter argues that Henry V’s chronicle sources and dramatic precursors are profoundly engaged with England’s disputed claim to legal overlordship of Scotland, revived by England’s invasion of Scotland in the 1540s and thereafter by various legal treatises on the Stewart succession. Shakespeare’s success in effacing the Scottish dimensions of his historical sources is a triumph of the dramatic use of forensic rhetoric to shift legal questions of national sovereignty into apparently universal questions of inwardness, conscience, and ‘character’.