« With four or five most vile and ragged foils » : métonymie shakespearienne ou topos politique ?

In Henry V, Shakespeare laments having only “four or five foils” to represent the battle of Agincourt. Is the playwright mocking the limitations of his theatre? Or was the expression a commonplace shared by his contemporaries? To engrave a triumph (1586), Goltzius already made use of this metonymy to stage a battle, suggesting that it was possibly a collective representation of war. The engraving, which showed a battle yet to be fought when engraved, envisioned the possible triumph of Robert Dudley in the Netherlands. Elizabeth I had commissioned her general to thwart Philip II’s plan, as the Catholic king of Spain sought to facilitate the passage of his Invincible Armada by annexing The Hague. Could a few mere paltry swords have served fictions of glory with a political purpose? In the event, Dudley lost this battle, allowing the Armada to break out. The engraving was immediately censored, as were Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, which featured the same wishful thinking. A similar censorship was to affect the play Henry V, this time for using the real glory of Agincourt and the four or five foils that illustrate it for subversive purposes. In Chorus V, Shakespeare celebrated the victorious Essex in Ireland like a new Caesar, implicitly threatening the Queen’s authority, although his defeat actually decided otherwise. Do these acts of graphic, scenic and narrative censorship suggest a political implication of the war metonymy under the guise of aesthetics?