While Henry V is alive with religious echoes, its moral direction seems incoherent or unstable. Accordingly, the focus of this account is the way the play’s use of religion paradoxically intensifies and legitimates the pleasures of war. The chapter aims to explain not only how the sacral monarchy of England’s Plantagenet kings lives on in Shakespeare’s play but more importantly how in instrumentalizing it and its complex political theology, the prince outdoes his royal predecessors and the play aestheticizes war. It does this by enabling Henry to appropriate the dynamism and sheer agency imagined in Scripture’s representation of God’s freedom. The king comes out of a whirlwind and his army appears as Leviathan – all apparently in the service of the new national community. While Henry V is insistently skeptical about the value of war, its delight in the king’s virtù or violent agency complicates the irony and so denies the play any clear-cut moral critique.

As an artist working in multiple fields, I am suggesting in this chapter, which is also a reader’s memoir, that paying homage to Cormac McCarthy’s work in paint and in performance is also a form of reading McCarthy. In proposing this expanded view of what it is to read and thus to grapple with a masterwork, I am positing a wider of view of the pleasure and purpose of reading, and I am allowing that responding to McCarthy’s work in this way – because it entails the responsibility to grasp at least something of what is intrinsic about the work – also constitutes a form of criticism, a notion I have explored in all three of the books I have published on McCarthy. Painting a series called The Lost Blood Meridian Notebook entails challenges and confusions in many ways comparable to trying to write compellingly about that novel, and performing the part of White in The Sunset Limited is equally as demanding as writing about it, for the actor is the word made flesh in the act of becoming one of McCarthy’s characters and thus of becoming both the reader and the read.

Even though Cormac McCarthy’s position in relation to the Western genre is subversive, working against a genre still requires thorough familiarity with the conventions of that genre. Two of McCarthy’s Western novels, namely Cities of the Plain (1998) and No Country for Old Men (2005), were originally written as screenplays, placing his writing within the context of the cinematic Western. Given McCarthy’s interest in both the genre and medium of Western films, an investigation into his cinematic influences is apposite. The publication dates of McCarthy’s Western novels follow the emergence of a revisionist shift in the Western film genre. The first wave of revisionist appeared in the mid 1960s and early 1970s. Largely influenced by social and ideological disillusionment following the Vietnam War, the films were characterized by their cynical, amoral, and above all violent portrayals of the so-called Wild West. There are numerous nuances of similarity between McCarthy’s Western novels and the most influential Western films of the pre-revisionist and revisionist eras, namely, those directed by John Ford, Sergio Leone, and especially Sam Peckinpah.