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Monday
Last week I compared Donald Trump to Shakespeare’s Richard II while examining the play for insights into peaceful vs. violent transfers of power. Today I look at similarities between Kamala Harris and the successor of Richard’s successor—which is to say, Prince Hal, who eventually becomes Henry V. If Harris wins tomorrow’s election, the parallel will be perfect since Hal is the son of Henry IV, who overthrew Richard.
There are significant differences, of course, starting with the fact that Harris has not engaged in the kind of dissolute behavior we see in Hal. There are no Falstaffs in her life, not any hijinks in a forest. But Harris, like Hal, has emerged as a formidable leader after many wrote her off. I believe that, if the Democrats hold on to the Senate and flip the House, she could become the most consequential leader since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Like Prince Hal, Harris has kept her eye on the prize for a long time. Regarding Hal, we learn about his plans early in Henry IV, Part I. Shortly after we see him carousing with Falstaff and planning an elaborate prank, he surprises us with his famous soliloquy. Directed at his drinking companions, his words reveal that we shouldn’t underestimate him:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
And a few lines further on:
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
To be sure, Harris hasn’t been deliberately hiding her bright metal on a sullen ground. But the vice-presidency has a way of functioning like “base contagious clouds,” smothering up quality. Although we may no longer regard the position as “not worth a bucket of warm piss” (as John Nance Garner, an FDR vice president, characterized it), it can still hide excellence. Only when Harris started running for president did many begin to see her potential.
To be fair, Joe Biden saw it, which is why he recommended her as her successor. In that way, he differs from Henry IV, who has all but given up on his son. Seeing “riot and dishonor” staining the brow of Hal, he fantasizes about exchanging him with Harry Percy, the flashy son of his soon-to-be-enemy Northumberland. “O that it could be proved,” he says longingly,
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.
So it’s not so much Biden that we should be thinking of as we read Henry’s disappointment but those Democrats who were rooting for anyone-but-Harris. Looking at Harris’s lackluster performance in the 2020 primaries—she dropped out before a single vote had been cast—they expressed disappointment not unlike that which Henry levels at Hal:
How could such inordinate and low desires,
Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,
Such barren pleasures, rude society,
As thou art match’d withal and grafted to,
Accompany the greatness of thy blood
And hold their level with thy princely heart?
How could a woman with such “greatness of blood,” these Harris doubters wondered, be all but invisible in the first two years of her vice-presidency.
So far, however, Harris appears to have answered every challenge, just as Hal proves himself in battle, saving his father and defeating Hotspur. In the end, he receives his father’s grudging approval:
Stay, and breathe awhile:
Thou hast redeem’d thy lost opinion,
And show’d thou makest some tender of my life,
In this fair rescue thou hast brought to me.
There will be further conflict between Hal and Henry, especially at the end when the dying king thinks that Hal is eager to see him gone. Thinking his father dead and recalling how kingship has weighed him down—earlier in the play Henry has complained, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”–Hal takes the crown from his pillow. By the action, he means to signify that his father can be at rest now. Henry, however, awakes to find it gone and lays into his son. When Hal says, “I never thought to hear you speak again,” Henry replies,
Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought:
I stay too long by thee, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honors
Before thy hour be ripe?
Has Biden ever resented Harris for taking over the position he once thought should have been his? He would not be human if he didn’t feel some anger. But Harris, like Hal, has never shown any indication that she wanted to end Biden’s presidency prematurely, and Hal, like Harris with Biden, ends on good terms with the current occupant of the highest office. After Hal explains why he took the crown, Henry responds with the kind of fatherly sit-down chat that I can imagine Biden having with Harris:
Come hither, Harry, sit thou by my bed;
And hear, I think, the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe.
Granted, Biden will not offer the kind of advice that Henry’s does: Hal, he says, should engage in foreign wars to distract the local feuding forces, a “wag the dog” strategy:
Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
And indeed, we will see Henry V achieving something comparable in the next play, where suddenly we see the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish united under his banner as he prepares to fight the French at Agincourt.
Then again, the coalition that Harris has assembled to defeat Trump is potentially just as fractious, with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the same side as Liz and Dick Cheney. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 national-unity version of the drama played down the fractiousness between Fluellen, Jamy and MacMorris. After all, the United Kingdom was facing a fascist determined to end democracy.
In the play we see Henry V demonstrating the common touch as he relates to his soldiers, a quality that Harris has as well. All over the United States at the moment, Get Out the Vote (GOTV) captains are giving versions of Henry’s famous speech on the eve of his famous battle against the French:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage…
The speech concludes:
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
Henry goes on to register one of England’s greatest victories.
May Harris resemble him in this as well.
