Be Copy Now: Dialectics and Feedback of Life and Theater in Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.1

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of one of King Henry's speeches to his troops in Shakespeare's Henry V. The analysis focuses on the sexual imagery and symbolic association of war and aggresion, and on the reflexive, metadramatic dimension of this passage and of Shakespeare's theory of self and drama — thus drawing some further implications of the world as a stage metaphor, in the light of a theory of performativity, as developed by J. L. Austin and J. Hillis Miller.

Keywords: Shakespeare, Henry V, Theatricality, Performativity, Self; Semiotics, Metadrama