Challenging monarchical legacies in <i>Edward III</i> and <i>Henry V</i>

Tudor chronicles regularly presented Edward III and Henry V as exemplary English monarchs, celebrated for their famous military victories against the French. During the last two decades of the Elizabethan period, these monarchs featured in a variety of new texts: as part of a flurry of war manuals that explore the conduct and experience of war and in plays for the professional stages. Together, the war manuals and stage plays make up an important body of texts that reveal the intertwined popular appeal of Edward III and Henry V and their application to contemporary politics, including the state of ongoing military preparation and engagement that marked the end of the Elizabethan period. This article offers a contrastive analysis of the monarchs’ representations in selected war manuals and in Shakespeare’s Henry V and the apocryphal Edward III. It argues that, while the war manuals examine the legacy of Edward and Henry, they are less detailed and critical than the plays, which offer potential for radical deconstruction of monarchical authority. Mediating between celebration and criticism, the plays question two aspects that had been closely associated with the popular reputations of these monarchs: a model of kingship that relies significantly on the person of the monarch and the legitimacy and expediency of foreign conquests. As the most sustained, individual accounts of Edward III and Henry V from the last decade of the Elizabethan period, the stage plays form an important part of the historiographical tradition and evaluation of these monarchs.