It is no novelty to discern a pattern in Shakespeare's chronicle plays of a “mirror for kings, reflecting the universal consequences of bad or weak rule,” as Harold Jenkins reminded us well over half a century ago (Jenkins 1953: 1), tracing the observation back to the German Romantic critic and translator of Shakespeare, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, in Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1808; English translation 1833: 342–3, 350–1). Since that time it has been platitudinous for one group of Shakespeare editors and critics to write of the character of Henry V as “the mirror of all Christian kings” (Shakespeare, ed. Walter 1979: xxvi) or “the ideal monarch”; while a countertendency, apparently since Hazlitt's times, has seen Henry as “a cynical hypocrite, a cold-blooded Machiavellian, a brutal butcher” (cf. Richard Levin 1984: 134–41); whereas Conal Condren (2009: 197–206) applied a knowledge of Early Modern political ideas to dismiss the “Machiavellian militarist” interpretation as unhistorical.

“The mirror of all Christian kings” has all too often been treated as a convenient label and it might be worthwhile to look back into the provenance of the term and its place in Elizabethan public life.

The notion of the mirror (Latin speculum, Italian lo specchio, French le miroir) had a widespread metaphorical application in an ancient convention of political discourse otherwise known as de regimine principum or alternatively de institutione principum, and occasionally as the speculum principis – the mirror of the perfect prince.