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Shakespeare's Henry V offers us opportunity for reviewing an action of piety and patriotism which to many readers has seemed ideal. The king and the clergy, in this play, are seen working together in friendly collaboration. United around a common interest, they forge a common purpose. In the name of God and country they undertake a war with France whereby the English people are rallied to high heroism and achieve, almost miraculously, a famous victory and a new international status. To the portrait of Henry in the chronicles, Traversi believes Shakespeare added his own reading of the 'tragedy' implicit in the kingly office. Shakespeare sees also, as Holinshed apparently does not, the ironic connection between Henry's murdering of the prisoners and his pious eagerness, immediately afterwards, to give God's "arm" the whole credit for the victory. The words Katherine asks about have an order suggestive of a progress in love-making, though devoid of any words for heart or soul.

judge a work of art without at some point bringing in his own convictions. Can the critic of Shelley, for example, discuss adequately the greatness of Shelley's poetry without involving himself in an estimate of Shelley's faith? Can the critic of Dante, to use another example, gain a full appreciation of The Divine Comedy if he comes to its reading as one who does not share Dante's faith? Does the having of a faith hamper or help an author? Specifically, will a holding of the Christian faith make one a better or a poorer writer or critic than one might otherwise be? These are important questions; and I shall be able in this paper to do no more than tentatively set forth some preliminary lines of reasoning on a few of the issues involved.

In an age when thinking was emerging from the dominance of Christian dogma to become once again, as in Classical times, man-centered—when Pico was raising new hopes by his Oration on the Dignity of Man, and Calvin new anguish by his outcry over man's lost dignity—Shakespeare brought the mood of the times to a focus in Hamlet. The mood had two sides, as Theodore Spencer has argued: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. “To Pico and the earlier humanists,” he writes, “man belonged with the angels. But to Montaigne, and the satiric, melancholy, realistic writers of the 1590's he belonged with the beasts.” Which is truer of man, then: the dignity of an angel, or that of a beast? The conflict of appraisal is mirrored, Spencer contends, in the hero of Shakespeare's most famous play, providing that play one of the main reasons for its greatness.