‘Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow?’: Jon Snow and Henry V at the Donmar Warehouse
Maria Devlin McNair
Kit Harington as Henry V at the Donmar Warehouse
This March, I had the chance to see Henry V (twice) at the Donmar Warehouse, starring Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington as Henry V. During the show, I found myself, predictably, remembering moment after moment of Harington as Jon Snow in Thrones. When Henry and his men march to war in France, I thought about Jon Snow explaining to Ygritte why drumming helps the men march in battle and her mocking him, “Left right, left right - you need help remembering that?”
Then I wondered if Harington thought about any of the same things — if he, playing Henry V, found himself remembering moments in the career of Jon Snow. There are clear parallels between them. Both are elevated to a positions of leadership — King of England, King of the North — in ways that come as something of a surprise. The young Jon Snow, the bastard of Winterfell, never expected to find himself in power; Henry, as a young man, behaved as though he never expected to hold power. But both prove themselves capable leaders and win major military victories: the Battle for Winterfell, Agincourt.
Then, as I processed Harington’s performance, I found myself wondering one step further — what if, in some only-possible-in-fictional-worlds kind of way, Henry himself was remembering an earlier existence as Jon Snow? What if some of the subtleties and novelties of Harington’s interpretation of the character could be understood by seeing his Henry as someone who remembers some alternative way of wielding power, and is consistently chaffing against the impossibility of returning to that way? What if some of Henry’s frustrations stem from wishing he could lead in the mode of Jon Snow and knowing he cannot? That thought experiment, I think, helped me gain some insight into Harington’s understanding of Henry V, and what Henry and Jon Snow illuminate about leadership.
In Season Four of Thrones, as the Night’s Watch prepare for a Wildling attack, Jon Snow stands on the wall with his longstanding adversary Ser Alliser Thorne. Thorne tells Jon that they should have followed Jon’s advice and sealed the tunnel through the Wall. “It was a difficult decision either way, sir,” says Jon. Thorne replies, “Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second-guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second-guessing himself, that's the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone.”
What Thorne articulates is the difference between being a soldier of any other rank and being the person at the very top. All other ranks are permitted a luxury and a freedom that the person at the top cannot permit himself. This is the freedom to acknowledge ambiguity — to emphasize complexity, to point out the difficulties that would remain after committing to any given course of action, even the best one, to “second-guess” one’s peers and oneself. These people can acknowledge what Bernard Williams calls “moral remainder.”
“Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second-guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second-guessing himself, that’s the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone.”
In his essay “Politics and moral character,” Williams notes that political leaders are particularly likely to face situations in which the recognizably correct course of action involves acts that “honourable and scrupulous people might, prima facie, at least, be disinclined to do.” Politicians cannot expect to avoid such situations, nor can they simply refuse to take the correct but disagreeable course when such situations do arise, Williams notes — “Yet, at the same time, the moral disagreeableness of these acts is not merely cancelled.” This “uncancelled moral disagreeableness” is what Williams calls “the moral remainder.”
The topmost person may still perceive and regret the moral remainder. But what he cannot do, in Thorne’s view, is permit himself to acknowledge it too openly. He cannot address it too directly with his subordinates; he cannot even address it too directly with himself, lest it weaken his resolve to pursue the course that he and everyone else knows must be taken, but which only he is responsible for choosing. This course may come with high moral costs. But if it’s the only one that will provide the necessary benefits and protection to the community that he leads, then he is duty-bound to pursue it. And if he wavers on or second-guesses this decision, it very well may not be carried out with the thoroughness and determination required to achieve success — but its failure might still generate just as many costs.
What sets apart the person at the top is that he is ultimately responsible: responsible for making decisions for his community, and responsible for that community. But the difficulty is that this position obliges him to treat as an ultimate responsibility — as his highest priority and most sacred duty — something which that isn’t actually ultimate. His priority is this community, meaning, not other communities outside it. A fully sensitive moral agent, especially as the 21st century would imagine her, would recognize that there’s no fundamental difference between one community and another. At the most basic level, all human beings share some equal moral standing. But Jon Snow and Henry V are in different positions with regard to how free they are to acknowledge this.
In Season Five, Jon Snow is elected Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, the topmost position within this community. When Stannis Baratheon invites Jon to help him expel the Boltons from Winterfell and become Lord of Winterfell himself, Jon tells him, “You do me great honor … But I have to refuse you … I’m Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. My place is here … I swore a sacred vow at the godswood. I pledged my life to the Night's Watch.”
But then Ser Davos reminds him how the Night’s Watch oath goes: “‘The shield that guards the realms of men.’ That's what you swore to be. Now, I’m not a learned man, but the best way to help the most people might not be sitting in a frozen castle at the edge of the world.” What Ser Davos means is that the Night’s Watch oath actually licenses — or requires — Jon to expand the circle of his duty to communities beyond the Night’s Watch. To the largest possible community, in fact: “the realms of men.”
And we see Jon do exactly this. He comes to perceive himself as as able and obliged to make what we might call a “moral pivot”: to extend concern to a community they’ve historically tried to eliminate. He forms a plan to make peace with the Wildlings and bring them south in time to escape death at the hands of the White Walker army.
Some of the Night’s Watch object to expanding their circle of concern. “Men, women, and children will die by the thousands if we do nothing,” Jon tells them. “Let them die. We got our own to worry about. Less enemies for us,” they answer. But for Jon, there is no more “them” or “us,” “enemies” or “our own.” There is just one community. When he goes to free the Wildling leader, Tormund asks why he is doing this. “Because you are not my enemy. And I'm not yours.” “You sure seemed like my enemy when you were killing my friends,” Tormund answers. “For 8,000 years the Night's Watch have sworn an oath to be the shield that guards the realms of men,” says Jon. “And for 8,000 years, we've fallen short of that oath. You belong to the realms of men.” He’s absorbed Ser Davos’s view.
Something similar happens when Jon Snow is declared King in the North. He decides to surrender this title and bend the knee to Daenerys Targaryen in order to make an alliance that will bring Daenerys and her armies north to defeat the White Walkers. Lady Mormont and some of the other Northern leaders are angry with this move: “We named you King in the North.” “You did, my lady. It was the honor of my life. I'll always be grateful for your faith,” says Jon. “But when I left Winterfell, I told you we need allies or we will die. I have brought those allies home to fight alongside us. I had a choice, keep my crown or protect the North. I chose the North.” From his position as topmost leader of the Northern peoples, he perceives a right and a duty to surrender his position. He can make this pivot because he believes that bending the knee to Daenerys Targaryen would help the Northerners themselves — and the larger population of Westeros, who will be in danger if the Northerners fail to stop the White Walkers.
What is it that allows Jon Snow to make these moral pivots and keep extending his circle of concern? Perhaps it is because he never finds himself having — or more accurately, he never identifies himself as having — the actual topmost position of leadership, something beyond which there is no higher duty. Whatever position of leadership he is in, he perceives himself as free to identify some higher duty that extends beyond his immediate community and to change course for the sake of that larger community.
What makes these pivots easier, perhaps, is the nature of the fight that Jon’s engaged in. When Cersie Lannisterr objects to sending troops to fight for “the Dragon Queen,” Jaime tells her, “This isn’t about noble houses. This is about the living and the dead.” This is what Jon has been saying all along. If the enemy community is the dead, then the ally community is larger than any possible subset of human peoples, any one house or kingdom — it’s the whole of the realms of living men. What he treats as his ultimate concern really is the ultimate concern.
But Henry V isn’t in that position, and that’s not the kind of fight he’s engaged in. Henry is placed in a topmost position of leadership. He is King of England. His advisors identify no obligations to communities outside of England, no duty beyond pursuing the greatest good and glory for England, and neither, overtly, does Henry. He takes this community’s good as the ultimate good. For him, leadership means making England a priority he cannot allow himself to question or second-guess. But what Harington’s performance suggests is that he’s also wrestling with this very aspect of leadership — the one Ser Alliser warned him about in another lifetime on the Wall.
In the first part of the play, Harington’s Henry is in a subtly visible state of struggle. This came across to me as a struggle with inauthenticity. He is aware that as King of England, he has commit himself fully to this idea that England’s good is the ultimate good. He can’t make himself totally believe this is true. But he also can’t stop acting as if it is true. This disjunction between his knowledge and his enacted commitments is the inauthenticity he struggles with. This struggle comes across particularly clearly in his speech before Harfleur.
Prompted partly by an insult from the French prince and partly by zealous encouragement from his advisors who urge him to “renew the feats” of his conquering ancestors, Henry decides to go to war with France and reclaim the lands and titles that past English kings had won. It’s a voluntary war of expansion and glorification. The English troops prepare for battle, march into France, and lay siege to the French city of Harfleur. After a period of successful fighting, Henry addresses the city’s governor:
This is the latest parle we will admit.
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves
Or, like to men proud of destruction,
Defy us to our worst …
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants.
What is it then to me if impious war …
Do with his smirched complexion all fell feats
Enlinked to waste and desolation?
What is ’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career? …
Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command …
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Desire the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters,
Your fathers taken by the silver beards
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls…
What say you? Will you yield and this avoid
Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroyed?
Harington delivers this speech in ringing, authoritative tones. As experts in game theory and military strategy will tell you, if you hope to pressure your enemies by making a threat, you need to make your threat convincing. And Henry wants to make the threat convincing — partly, it seems, because the more persuasive the threat, the less likely it is he will actually have to carry it out. If the French believe that Henry really will unleash an unstoppable flood of violence against them if they resist, they are more likely to surrender, and then Henry can take the town without any violence at all. This seems to be Henry’s preference, not only for the sake of his own English victory, but for the sake of the French community. Even in this authoritative speech, there are moments when Henry pauses briefly to grimace and knead his face with his hand, as though he cannot suppress all the repugnance he feels at these words. It’s clearly to the English advantage to make this threat and make it credible. But having to say “What is ’t to me, when you yourselves are cause, / If your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation?” forces him into that posture of inauthenticity. It commits him to affirming, with the utmost possible sincerity, two things he knows aren’t true.
First, it isn’t true that the French themselves are cause of this potential violence. In this production particularly, the war is very much a war of aggression for English gain and glory.
Second, it isn’t true what Henry’s words imply, that is nothing to him if Harfleur’s women are raped and “impious war” lays “waste and desolation to the city.” When Harfleur does surrender, Henry shows intense relief and tells the English officers emphatically, “Use mercy to them all.” At this point in the play, there’s a part of him that sees the French people as Jon Snow would see them — as a community that he has some obligation towards. And though he cannot make this an explicit moral principle by which to direct his English army, he seems to feel least ill at ease when English advantage can coincide with French safety.
Kit Harington in Henry V © Helen Murray
Later in the play, Henry executes one of his own former companions, Bardolf, after Bardolf violates the order not to steal from the French. It’s a very painful moment. But Henry declares, “We would have all such offenders so cut off; and we give express charge that … there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused … for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” If gentleness will help the English army win more easily, then it serves Henry’s primary duty to his English community. But it also keeps the French safe, which is something that Henry cannot help desiring. As it pains him to threaten the French, it gives him obvious pleasure to sit beside the French herald and joke with him. Something in him wants to deal with this enemy community as fellow humans.
But still, we’re left to wonder what Henry would have done if the French hadn’t surrendered and he’d been pressed to put his threat into action. “Take pity of your town and of your people / Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,” he says. During the destruction of King’s Landing, Jon Snow did lose command of his soldiers. When the city bells rang to signal surrender, his soldiers were meant to hold off any further attack. But when Daenerys’s dragon started burning the city, the soldiers ignored Jon’s commands and resumed their attack on Cersei’s army — and on the people of King’s Landing. We saw one soldier in Jon’s army drag away a screaming woman, apparently intending “hot and forcing violation.” Jon chased him down to stop him. And when the man turned on him, Jon killed him.
At this moment, Jon again recognizes a duty that extends beyond his own immediate community — his army, his side — to the human community at large. It might be painful to kill this soldier, but it’s a different pain than the pain of inauthenticity, of pretending you have no duty where a duty really exists. Henry is able to negotiate this pain by trying to find the paths to English victory that involve least French destruction. But the weight of inauthenticity comes bearing down on him again, I think, during his meeting with some English foot soldiers.
The night before Agincourt, Henry goes through the camp in disguise so the soldiers speak their minds freely before him. Two in particular are fearful about their fate in the next day’s battle. Henry tells them, “Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable.” Their response disturbs him.
WILLIAMS That’s more than we know.
BATES Ay, or more than we should seek after, for we know enough if we know we are the King’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.
WILLIAMS But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all “We died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.
The soldiers emphasize that Henry is carrying enormous moral responsibility for the war and its potential casualties. Now Henry, I think, doesn’t see the war as solely his idea. He didn’t seem thrilled at the prospect when his advisors raised it, but his advisors and his position left him little room to maneuver. So part of him may be angered by the wrongness of the war, but another part is clearly angered at having this wrongness pointed out and blamed on him. What comes through in his reaction to these men and his soliloquy immediately after is resentment: resentment at the inauthenticity of his position, at having to defend the indefensible, at being cut off from human communities, at having to pretend that “ceremony … thou idol ceremony” really makes a king superior to his subjects: “O ceremony!” says Henry bitterly. “Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men, / Wherein thou art less happy, being feared, / Than they in fearing?”
Once again, I wondered if he was ‘remembering’ a different life, a different way of relating to his people. When Jon Snow must defend his decisions to a hostile audience, he speaks frankly and honestly in a way that connects him more closely to them. When he goes to make his alliance with the Wildlings, he tells them, “We’re not friends. We’ve never been friends. We won’t become friends today. This isn’t about friendship. This is about survival.”
But Henry doesn’t engage with the men; he shuts them down. He angrily attacks their claims about the king’s guilt while ignoring their query of whether the war’s cause is just, perhaps because attempting to justify the decision to go to war comes too close to second-guessing it. If they are to make the war a success, he needs to remain committed to that decision and his soldiers need to remain committed to him. The St. Crispin’s Day speech suggests how much the English victory depends on this commitment among his men.
Henry may sense, too, that the best chance he has of justifying the war to these men is to by making it a victorious one. That would explain his rather jarring reactions when the war is over. Up until now, Henry has been stuck in a posture of inauthenticity. He’s been forced to commit to threats that disgusted him, to defend the king by deflecting the real, valid charges against him, to brush aside the moral remainder. But at least we sensed that he struggled with this. He felt this inauthenticity as a burden. He wasn’t able to openly acknowledge the moral claims of this other community, but he felt them, and he felt pained by the knowledge that he was culpable in failing to meet them, and he had to struggle to put those claims aside to focus only on the claims of his own local community.
What seems to happen after the battle is that Harington’s Henry gives up the struggle. He decides to permit himself the relief of ceasing to resist this burden of inauthenticity. Up until now, Henry owed a large moral debt to both sides. He had culpability with regard to the French for invading their land. He also had culpability with regard to the English for leading them into battle and risking their lives. But when the battle is over, this situation changes. Henry’s debt to the French is much greater, but his debt to the English is much less. He’s led them to victory, and apparently much less costly victory than anyone anticipated. In the eyes of this community, he has no “heavy reckoning” to make. What seems to happen is that Henry removes his heavy moral burden by restricting his concern only to this community.
When the French herald tells Henry he has won the battle, Henry whoops in a startlingly insensitive way and embraces his English officers as though what they’ve just won is a school rugby match. When he is given the enormous list of the dead French nobility, he says, “Here was a royal fellowship of death,” not reverently or remorsefully, but with a hint of jocularity, the way one delivers a pun. When the list of the English dead is brought to him, he seizes the list with rough impatience to announce that only “five and twenty” are dead. He’s visibly more concerned with the English dead than with the French. He’s had to behave all along as though he believed that only the English community mattered, and he was burdened by the inauthenticity of this behavior because he knew this belief wasn’t true. But at this point, Harington’s Henry seems to embrace this belief, to choose it as true. He chooses the relief of restricting his moral concern to his own community, because now, after this remarkably low-cost victory, this is a community to whom he’s (mainly) morally clean. And from here till the end of the play, his prime concern seems to shift to making sure that everyone sticks with this view — that no one disturbs his newly-found moral repose by introducing new perspectives.
This shift is visible in Harington’s altered manner of delivery. Until now, his voice has been tinged with a husky quality reminiscent of Jon Snow; there’s a lift at the end of many sentences that suggests his voice is about to break. The delivery suggests sincerity, someone who, even if forced into a position of inauthenticity, at least maintains the integrity of minding it. But this changes after the battle is won. Harington’s delivery is quicker, flatter, with a notable sense of self-satisfaction. There’s not a lift at the end of lines but a clamping down, as though to tell everyone that the question is closed. There’s nothing more to say — no remainder.
Once Henry gives in to his own ideology, other things give way very quickly. Not only does he cut off his own awareness of and discomfort with his inauthenticity, he also starts trying to cut off anyone who tries to make him aware of it. “And then to Calais, and to England then, / Where ne’er from France arrived more happy men,” he tells his men after the battle, and the tone of delivery is a warning that they’d better not not be happy — although the final scenes with Fluellen, Pistol, and the Chorus indicate some very different emotions at play. When Henry returns to France to speechify before his defeated opponents, this flat, satisfied tone dominates his words, tinged with an impatience whenever someone disrupts that satisfaction. These come across most clearly and disturbingly in his “courtship” scene with the French princess, Katherine.
Kit Harington and cast in Henry V. Photograph: Helen Murray/PA
Henry has already demanded Katherine’s hand in marriage as part of his peace terms. But he goes through this scene of wooing Katherine and asking her to love him to make a show of giving her the chance to say “yes,” though she has no real choice to say “no.” He delivers his lines — “O fair Katherine, if you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue. Do you like me, Kate?” — in a flat, hearty tone, as though he is reciting a script and has no idea that anyone would deviate from it. But Katherine does. She makes her displeasure clear with her situation, and none of Henry’s bluff, hearty self-deprecations and jokes can fully erase that displeasure. She puts Henry off with deferrals that are played as coy and charming in other productions but which here start to irritate Henry visibly. This irritation flames into frankly alarming anger when Henry moves to kiss Katherine and she rebuffs him, telling him that ladies in France don’t kiss before they are married. “O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings … and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults, as I will do yours.” Elsewhere, the promise to stop Katherine’s mouth is the playful prologue to a mutually desired kiss. In Harington’s performance, it rings as nothing but a threat — a promise to subjugate Katherine as thoroughly as he has subjugated her country.
The problem seems to be that Katherine’s unwillingness to consent to the marriage stands in for the unwillingness of the French kingdom to consent to his invasion and subjugation. Henry has tried to suppress his awareness of that French unwillingness. He’s limited his moral focus to a restricted set of concerns, and he’s unwilling himself to be reminded of moral claims beyond those concerns. Henry has accepted his inauthenticity for the sake of easing an intolerable moral burden. But for the ease to take effect, he has to forget the act of acceptance. He can’t allow anything to remind him of the inauthenticity he has embraced, and this is what generates his anger at Katherine and his need to silence her.
In this way, Harington’s Henry becomes a figure not unlike Daenerys Targaryen. When she styled herself the Breaker of Chains, freed slaves, and dealt violence to people who were already dealing unjust violence, it seemed like she had that same unbounded moral concern as Jon Snow, a concern for all the “realms of men.” But when she invades Westeros and starts dealing the same violence to honorable soldiers defending their homeland, we start to realize that her circle of concern is more bounded than we thought. Her advisors start to realize this too, and start to question her. When it looks like Daenerys is preparing to attack King’s Landing, Varys tells her, “This is a mistake … if we attack King's Landing with Drogon and the Unsullied and the Dothraki, tens of thousands of innocents will die … These are the people you came here to protect.” But Daenerys, like this altered Henry, doesn’t want to be questioned. “I'm here to free the world from tyrants. That is my destiny … and I will serve it, no matter the cost,” she replies.
Ultimately, her circle of concern is determined in relation to her own position. She is destined to be topmost leader of Westeros, and her concern stops at the groups that try to stop her. The same thing happens for Harington’s Henry. Ultimately, he determines his circle of concern in relation to his position as English king.
In “Politics and moral character,” Bernard Williams suggests that “decent political existence” lies somewhere between a completely cynical space that “ceases to be disturbed by any moral qualms,” and a naive space of “absurd failure to recognize that if politics is to exist as an activity at all, some moral considerations must be expected to get out of its way.” How do we find that decent middle ground? We must, says Williams, “hold on to the idea, and [] find some politicians who will hold on to the idea, that there are actions which remain morally disagreeable even when politically justified. The point of this is not at all that it is edifying to have politicians who, while as ruthless in action as others, are unhappy about it. Sackcloth is not a suitable dress for politicians, least of all successful ones.” Here Williams seems to be sympathy with Ser Alliser. A politician in sackcloth, who goes about publicly lamenting his own choices, is one who is continually second-guessing himself, and in this posture, he has little hope of being successful in his duties.
But, Williams goes on, “The point … is that only those who are reluctant or disinclined to do the morally disagreeable when it is really necessary have much chance of not doing it when it is not necessary.” When Jon Snow is obliged, as Commander of the Night’s Watch, to execute Ser Janos Slynt and later Ser Alliser and Olly, he recognizes the necessity and he does it. But his reluctance is clearly visible. He feels the moral remainder. And that moral instinct is what allows him his final and most drastic moral pivot at the end of the series, when the Queen he swore to serve starts destroying the community he was serving her for.
Throughout the series, Daenerys did morally disagreeable things when it seemed to be necessary. There seemed to be no way to defeat the slaveholding masters or the Dothraki warlords who captured her except to kill them. But Daenerys did not register the sense, as Jon so clearly did, that these acts were disagreeable to her. And indeed, at the show’s end, she unleashes the same deadly force to take King’s Landing when it really isn’t necessary — when the city has already surrendered. “Everywhere she goes, evil men die and we cheer her for it. And she grows more powerful and more sure that she is good and right,” Tyrion explains to Jon Snow in the final episode. Daenerys has no sense of moral remainder.
“The point … is that only those who are reluctant or disinclined to do the morally disagreeable when it is really necessary have much chance of not doing it when it is not necessary.”
What Harington’s performance shows, I think, is how a leader could start off in something like Jon Snow’s position and end up in something like Daenerys’s. And the change starts by having to wrestle with the truth in Ser Alliser’s statement about leadership. Leadership requires an absorption rather than an outright acknowledgment of the moral remainder, a determination to follow through on necessary but morally repugnant courses, without losing a sense of their moral repugnancy but also with unflinching commitment — because that commitment is the only thing that can permit success for the community he is duty-bound to serve. Harington’s performance in the first part of the play shows someone enacting, and suffering under, this truth about leadership. What it shows in the latter part of the play are dangers that accompany this aspect of leadership. What happens when absorption of the moral remainder becomes too painful? After he executes Ser Alliser and Olly, Jon Snow hands over his cloak and resigns his position as Commander of the Night’s Watch. Henry’s comparably painful moment comes when he learns that the French have killed the young boys guarding the luggage. But he can’t resign as king. And when you can’t step away from the moral minefield, a tempting course is to deny the moral remainder altogether.
The irony is that that denial can then compromise not only the leader’s moral character, but his ability to carry out his duties as a leader. When the morally repugnant stops feeling repugnant, it becomes that much easier for the leader to pursue it, and at that point, the leader risks becoming a danger to his community rather than its protector. This is what happens with Daenerys. It may be what happens with Henry. At the play’s end, Katherine and her country are now within Henry’s community. But the angry glare he directs at her as he and the French confirm their treaty suggests that his main focus isn’t to support this new community but to keep them from reminding him of his past crimes against them. The slightly altered final lines of the Chorus — “They lost France and made his England bleed … His England … My England … Our England” — delivered in tones of anger, suggest how this king isn’t really morally clean, even from his own community’s perspective.
Jon Snow never stops feeling the moral remainder. Almost the last thing we see him to do is question the ethics of his own decisions. “Was it right?” he asks Tyrion in prison. “What I did?” But he also has more freedom — or gives himself more freedom — to select his own moral parameters, because he never completely identifies as the political leader of one community, one subset of all people. He doesn’t commit himself to choosing the interests of one community over another. We sense that Harington’s Henry initially longs for that same kind of freedom. And as he realizes he will never have it, he reveals the toll this takes: first the personal toll, in his revulsion at his own inauthenticity; and then the political toll, as his commitment to his community morphs into a commitment to his own unimpeachable standing as that community’s leader, prepared to oppress other communities to preserve that standing.
When I saw that Kit Harington would be playing Henry V, I wondered which way he would go. There are two opposing ways to play the character (with many variations in between): there’s the noble, suffering leader beloved by his “band of brothers,” and there’s the brutalistic war-monger who self-servingly sends these brothers to what looks to be their deaths. I wondered if Harington would continue channeling Jon Snow’s nobility into the first of these interpretations or show his range by embracing the second. But the production did something more intelligent than that. It had Harington show both these versions of Henry, and show how a person could shift from one to the other. A Timeout review by Andrzej Lukowski astutely noted that “Harry has gone into kingship not fully formed; these are the events that do shape his psychology.” One thing I loved about Game of Thrones was how it allowed characters to traverse the most tremendous character arcs and made these transformations believable by the time and space devoted to showing that change over eight seasons. There’s nothing melodramatic or romanticized about Theon’s transformation from traitor to martyr or Sansa’s from naif to war-leader because we see so clearly why it happens. And in the far shorter space of 150 minutes, this production allows something similar to happen. I had never seen a production that allowed Henry to change so much over the course of the play.
I valued that choice, to show a Henry in transformation, because of how it allowed the production to address one of the key questions posed by the play. The Donmar’s tagline for the production was, “Do we get the leaders we deserve?” By showing how leadership shapes and even deforms Henry’s personality, this production tackles head-on the question of how we do get our leaders — how people in the topmost positions become who they are, how that position can change who they are. Harington in Game of Thrones shows one way the change can go; Harington in Henry V shows another way. I admire Jon Snow for clarifying the kinds of moral strengths a leader needs. I value this Henry for reminding us how difficult those are to achieve.