Polysemic Brotherhoods in Henry V (Critical Essay‪)‬

In Henry V, Shakespeare explores the relationship between personal identity and national consciousness, highlighting those moments in which the two violently come to cross-purposes. (l) Audiences of the play are presented with complicated representations of England, the English monarchy, and English national identity. In the same moment, the play pulls together a communal feeling of English triumphalism while also criticizing the foundations of English identity. Throughout the play, Shakespeare seems to be searching for words and metaphors that can aptly describe and mediate between these apparently conflicting positions. How can a citizen both love and hate his country? What vocabulary can describe this contrary pull within a subject's mind? The conflation of personal and national relationships is an integral feature of the lexical web that Shakespeare weaves in order to explore these questions. He seems particularly fascinated with the various connotations of the word "brother" and with the varying sense of closeness and distance implied in fraternal relationships. Focusing on how Shakespeare mapped concepts of brotherhood upon national discourse allows us to gain an understanding of how the playwright might have been working out the conflicts of personal and national identities upon the English stage. I hope to show in this essay how the polysemic word "brother" in Henry V provided Shakespeare with away of exploring and describing his conflicted relationship with an emerging English nationalism that generated fears of racial, national, and spiritual others.