{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017755231452124286, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010145846544071021, 'mean_word_length': 5.312, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Shakespeare’s Itinerant Soldiers and Foreign Wars: The Elizabethan Crisis of Debt in the Economy of Hal’s England

This essay examines how Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V plays react to and comment upon English anxieties about the wars in the Netherlands and Ireland and the economic crisis of the mid-1590s. The article proposes that the plays’ sustained treatment of the moral issue of monetary debts establishes a relationship between foreign wars and economic crisis, revealing an emergent early modern attitude regarding the role of government in addressing social concerns such as poverty and unemployment. Elizabethan foreign policy from the 1580s until the end of the queen’s reign produced a steady stream of maimed, sick, malnourished, and underpaid demobilized soldiers and deserters returning to England. The failure of many ex-soldiers to reintegrate productively into society, combined with the expense of wars and successive poor harvests from 1594–1597, triggered an economic and moral crisis in England just as Shakespeare was penning the Henry IV plays. The economic relationships between Falstaff, Prince Hal, and the rest of the Eastcheap tavern crowd reflect deteriorating social conditions and values fomented by wars and dearth. In particular, the connection between the responsibility for Falstaff’s debts, which Hal both assumes and rejects in the plays, and the dispute in Henry V over the monarch’s responsibility for the deaths of soldiers in battle reveals a rethinking of the monarchy as subject to a national identity and to national concerns.