here Coleridge saw veneration for the monarchy, Chartist publications worked to uncover subversive undercurrents of disapproval. In ‘CHARTISM FROM THE POETS’, selective quotation from H5 suggest an alternative re-reading of the play which privileges and extends potentially subversive moments (Northern Star, 06/07/1840: 7). Andrew Murphy has commented that this method had the effect of ‘flattening’ the text, losing ‘the highly textured ambiguity of the original’ (2008: 140). Although they certainly remove ambiguity, I would suggest that, to borrow Michel de Certeau’s expression, it is an act of ‘poaching’, the reader travelling ‘across fields they did not write’ (2011: 174). The radical reader takes the plays, ‘combines their fragments, and creates something un-known in the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings’ (de Certeau, 2011: 169). More than a flattening, it is a self-conscious act of dissection, quite literally combining fragments to support a preconceived idea of Shakespeare as a poet of the people. Act 4, Scene 1 of H5 is quoted alongside notoriously political writers: John Milton, James Thomson, and Charles Churchill. The Chartists only quote King Henry when he disguises himself as one of his soldiers to hear more candidly what his soldiers think of his decision to take the country to war against France. Henry emphasises the lack of genuine difference between himself and his soldiers to defend himself against Williams’s criticisms: ‘The King is but a man, as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me”’(4.1.97). In its context, the line is defending the King by highlighting his vulnerability; out of context, it echoes the reformers questioning why ‘A man, fallible and erring as ourselves, is invested with hereditary powers… apt to forget that he is but a poor perishing wreck of humanity’ (‘The Politics of Poets. No. II’, Chartist Circular, 25/07/1840: 178). Though Henry is emphasising a fraternal relationship between the King and his soldiers, the statement in a Chartist context instead critiques the uneven dynamic that kingship necessitates.

The scene itself, in which Henry’s soldiers criticise his authority and motives, is structured to prompt Henry’s subsequent soliloquy on the emotional burden placed upon him, being ‘but a man’, by the crown. As Thomas Cartelli has observed, rather than working to ‘cancel or, at least, qualify’ the artificial divisions that ceremony enforces between men, this speech ‘eventuates in the king’s reconsecration of the same hierarchical ideology to which, he would lead us to believe, he is himself royally subjected’ (1986: 7). The lines therefore prompt Henry’s deconstruction, reaffirmation, and privileging of his royal burden, with the institution of monarchy interrogated but accepted. Instead of including Henry’s reflections on ceremony at