Henry V – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Shakespeare’s ideal sovereign seems to have been Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603). [1] Elizabeth knew how to engage in politics like a Machiavellian operator, but this strong sovereign was also genuinely revered by many of her people. [2] Shakespeare himself (1564-1616) lived most of his life in the time of her iconic reign.

The Tudor Elizabeth I’s long tenure was marked by what today we would call a shrewd concern for public relations—that is, for managing the Queen’s image and keeping the various segments of the populace favorable towards her policies. The “Cult of the Virgin Queen” encouraged by Elizabeth’s officials and courtiers proved a successful means of maintaining order in her court. The Queen was often advised and implored to marry, but doing so would have meant diminished power for herself and an increase in dominion for the lucky Continental suitor, a man such as Spain’s Catholic King Philip II (r. 1556-98).

Henry V, the subject of the present drama, must have been high on the playwright’s list of proper sovereigns as well, to judge from the accolades Henry receives in the history play that bears his name. His father, Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV after taking the crown from the last directly Plantagenet ruler, Richard II, in 1399, was the son of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster and third surviving son of King Edward III, and John’s first wife Blanche of Lancaster. So Bolingbroke’s son, upon ascending the throne in 1413 at the age of 26 as Henry V, continued the Lancastrian line.

That Henry V was a Lancastrian matters because the first Tudor King, Henry VII (who vanquished the Yorkist Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485), was himself head of that great house by virtue of his mother Margaret Beaufort (great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt by his third wife, Katherine Swynford). So while Henry VII basically united the houses of York and Lancaster by marrying Elizabeth of York (King Edward IV’s daughter by his queen, Elizabeth Woodville), the Tudors and their historians, men such as Raphael Holinshed and John Stow, strongly favored the Lancastrian version of the English past. [3]

It would be natural, then, for Shakespeare, who partly follows Raphael Holinshed’s Tudor-friendly Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1586), [4] to offer a positive, though not merely flattering, reconstruction of the reign of the Lancastrian Henry V, and that is mostly what we get in his play by that name.

Modern historicist critics have offered a counter-reading that sees deep irony at work in Henry V. It’s possible, if we want to provide an early example, to sympathize with the Regency republican author William Hazlitt when he criticizes the play Henry V for its willingness to applaud a king whom Hazlitt considers a brute bent on imperial conquest. [5]

Still, it’s difficult to see how the most valued member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men during Elizabeth I’s reign and then of the King’s Men theater company for James I could be expected to be anything but pro-royalist. Shakespeare was very likely a believer (at least to some extent) in the Renaissance’s prime image of earthly order: the Great Chain of Being, wherein everything has its place and God sanctions the order of things. [6] He is unlikely to have been sympathetic to republicanism or some other alternative to monarchy.

This is not to say that Shakespeare is a shameless mouthpiece for the powers that be. We can see from Henry V and other plays that he doesn’t support monarchy blindly. The strengths and weaknesses of his characters amount to something like the representations we see of famous people in Mirror for Magistrates (the title of a moralist work that went through a number of editions around Shakespeare’s time). [7]

Shakespeare never tears the institution of kingship down, but in the end the advice Henry V himself gives in our play holds good: “the King is but a man.” [8] And a “man,” in the view of Renaissance authors, is for the most part a collection of virtues and vices just like every other individual, high-born or not. There are plenty of sin-riddled or otherwise wrongheaded rulers in Shakespeare’s canon, and they never fare well. But this leads us to a consideration of Henry V as a character.

Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Lectures on Shakespeare, have written about the way many of this playwright’s characters manage to be both strong individuals and yet representatives of a class of people. Coleridge writes in an essay on Romeo and Juliet,

The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakespeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class,—just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,—so it is nearly as much so in old age. [9]

Coleridge implies that there is something universal about the Nurse’s eccentric individual behavior. She is an uneducated but good-hearted old woman, and all such people show similar tendencies in their speech and conduct. In that sense, suggests Coleridge, the Nurse is a universally human character even as she shows us her exuberant, very particular personality.

In a similar way, Henry V is the type of a good king. He achieves this paradigmatic status because over the course of three plays (I & II Henry IV plus Henry V), Shakespeare allows “Prince Hal” to transform himself from a playful rascal into a sovereign of iron will and implacable virtue, the burden of which role is at times lightened by the sense of humor that comes from being kicked around by life enough to acknowledge his own limitations, amongst them spiritual error and common mortality. In sum, Shakespeare’s Henry V is neither a saintly or perfect ruler, nor is he a full-on sociopath, but something in between.

PROLOGUE TO ACT 1

Act 1.0, Prologue (791, the Chorus offers us the vision of a stage adequate to so great a monarch and so great a field of action: this would require nothing less than “a muse of fire,” but since that cannot be, the Chorus asks the audience members to use their own imaginations, thereby filling out the scene.)

Shakespeare’s most iconic Prologue begins with the Chorus wishing for the impossible: “Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention, / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene” (Prologue 1.0.1-4). What might Shakespeare mean by “muse of fire”? Some reference to ancient and Renaissance cosmography may help establish parameters for understanding. In such cosmography, for example in Aristotle’s conception of the universe, a “sphere of fire” (fire is the purest element, above air, earth, and water) surrounded the earth and sat just below the heavens. [10]

This suggests that anyone who can access a “muse of fire” would be able to go beyond the changeable, corruptible “sublunary” realm of earth (i.e., the realm “beneath the moon”) and access the “brightest heaven of invention,” [11] where, it seems, the artist would be doing more than offering us clever representations. He or she would be offering us a level of creativity so powerful that it could touch and convey reality itself. In the present case, the playwright would bring to the audience actual kingdoms and the very kings and princes who rule them.

Something like this is, perhaps, what a few hundred years later, the Romantic-era poet and theorist Samuel Taylor Coleridge would envision in his brilliant, fragmentary poem “Kubla Khan.” The emperor in that poem is a figure for the creative imagination, and what he speaks becomes real, as if he were an omnipotent god: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree,” as the poem’s famous opening declares. [12] In Henry V, the Chorus-speaker would like the playwright to create actual kingdoms and monarchs out of the stuff of his own imagination.

But the Chorus that this cannot be accomplished. The playwright must go to Agincourt with the Muse he has, not with the ideal muse he wants. A “muse of fire” would allow him to ascend the heights of invention (poetic creation, finding of subjects), and bring what he has created to us as something living, not limited to the physical properties of the stage and its environs.

What, then, are the resources available to us in this joint enterprise—resources that can maximize the experience for us assembled non-monarchs? [13] Well, “may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?” (791, 1.0.12-14) No, but therein lies a hint. Just as a zero (“a crooked figure”) [14] can be added to another number and multiply it tenfold until in a compact space they may represent “a million” (791, 1.0.16), so the actors, in themselves no more substantial than “ciphers” or zeros, may exercise a profound effect on our “imaginary forces” (791, 1.0.18).

They may, that is, create something very like reality—something that may produce an astonishingly robust “reality effect” for us, at least in terms of the emotional purity of our response to the play that unfolds before us. This resembles what the Romantic theorist S. T. Coleridge would call a “willing suspension of disbelief”— [15] a moment during which the mechanical properties of the stage, the extra-aesthetic existence of the actors, the presence of our fellow theater-goes, and so forth—melts away, leaving us in the spellbinding and yet liberating presence of something we respond to as if, or almost as if, it were reality itself. It’s likely that many audience members have experienced this at a well-performed play. [16]

Of course, the experience of theater also leads us to cultivate and turn back to metadramatic awareness, reflecting on the representational limits of what is before our eyes, and this brings us to a brief discussion of the end of Act 1’s Prologue, with its Chorus-speaker’s call “Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play” (Prol. 1.0.34). That call asks us for two things: it asks for strong exercise of imagination, but also for civility. It promotes a genteel ethos by which we may judge a play “kindly,” meaning (in part) in a spirit of kinship with the actors and the playwright who have poured so much effort into their presentation. [17]

After the Prologue of Henry V itself, Theseus, Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, makes a strong, if indirect, case for this combined responsibility on the audience’s part. At the end of the play, Theseus focuses on the playwright or poet’s own role as setting the audience up to succeed: he says that as for tales told by a fanciful poet, “imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” and then the artist’s “pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” [18]

The rest, however, is almost entirely up to the audience, or reader. But Theseus’s own kindly, if critical, reactions to the silly play that the a small troupe of workingmen serve up for his and the rest of the audience’s delectation also provide us with an ideal model for spectatorship. By his own conduct and remarks, Theseus shows us that a lot of the value we derive from beholding a play is up to us, not the “ciphers” on the stage, or even the work’s creator.

What, finally, is the use of the Chorus-speaker’s own words, since he is present just before the beginning of each act? He speaks, as the Norton gloss tells us, of serving as a “supply” (791, 1.0.30) to our efforts, as a supplement of sorts—presumably meaning both as an addition to those complete efforts and a supply of something they lack. [19]

Much of the Prologue we have been discussing concerns the presentation of images and gestures that may or may not accurately correspond with what we believe to have been historical reality. But the Chorus-speaker’s injunction “Gently to hear … our play” reminds us that we are, indeed, dealing with an experience grounded in words. We are not watching a dumb-show or a series of painting-like tableaux; we are hearing a play, just as the Chorus-speaker reminds us.

What, then, is the role of language in generating the playgoer’s total experience? What is the role of words in relation to imagination? This is something to ponder since it’s well known how dearly Elizabethan-Jacobean audiences prized language in its own right, not simply as an add-on to their experience. So much so that Shakespeare regularly comes back to the limitations and pitfalls inherent in linguistic communication—words fail his characters as often as they save or assist.

As for the Chorus-speaker’s words and presence, perhaps a key goal on Shakespeare’s part is to use this dual supplementarity as means of intensifying the reality-effect that flows from the combination of strong imagination and aptly spoken and heard language. The Chorus stands outside the immediate action of the play, making sure that our need for basic coherence is taken care of—an excellent early neoclassical precept—so that we can experience most compellingly and freely, or with the greatest achievable degree of immediacy and purity, the things we see and hear onstage.

If all is done well, we will share with the playwright an almost miraculous power to multiply and transform the little scenes we see on stage to suggest the sublime events and figures, the grand temporal sweep, of English history.

ACT 1

Act 1, Scene 1 (791-94, the Archbishop of Canterbury tells the Bishop of Ely that a bill in Parliament is threatening to reduce Church revenues; the Archbishop means therefore to encourage the young King to set himself against the French and pursue his claim to the throne of that great and populous nation; to that end, says, Canterbury, the Church has offered Henry a large sum of money.)

In Act 1, Scene 1, the prelates spend a bit of time discussing their wonderment at the transformation of the new King, Henry V, in the brief time since his father died. The Archbishop of Canterbury marvels that as soon as Henry IV died, something happened to Prince Hal: “Consideration like an angel came / And whipped th’offending Adam out of him, / Leaving his body as a paradise / T’envelop and contain celestial spirits …” (792, 1.1.28-31).

Their main object, however, is to remove current pressure from their own estate and redirect it somewhere else. Parliament has called for seizing some of their lands, so they need to create a diversion of the sort that occurred during the reign of Henry IV, who faced serious internal troubles. The Archbishop of Canterbury points out that if this reiterated bill is successful, “We lose the better half of our possession” (792, 1.1.8), consisting of the Church’s secular holdings in England.

Giving the new king money to wage war in France would be a good investment: Canterbury proposes that with regard to France, the Church should “give a greater sum / Than ever at one time the clergy yet / Did to his predecessors part withal” (793, 1.1.79-81). Since the French ambassador is about to be granted an audience with King Henry, the churchmen had better get to work. The prelates surrounding the young ruler are about as Machiavellian a bunch as may be imagined, and Canterbury is about to give him a lecture on succession law that will cost England and especially France many lives.

Act 1, Scene 2 (794-800, King Henry V asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to explain and justify his claim that he has the right to rule France; Canterbury details the claim in all its confusing glory; Henry decides in favor of staking his claim to the French throne; the French ambassador presents to Henry the Dauphin’s insulting gift of tennis balls; Henry gives a chilling response, and tells his lords to prepare for war.)

In Act 1, Scene 2, the priests cite a confusing historical record to refute the Salic law barring claims based on a female’s rights [20] —Edward III had claimed France based upon the fact that his mother Isabella was the daughter of Philip IV of France and Joan I of Navarre. Edward’s claim started the Hundred Years’ War on the Continent, which lasted on and off from 1337-1453. Now, the French say Henry V’s claim is similarly disabled since it was based on Edward III’s, which they refused to recognize as valid. [21]

Undaunted, Canterbury brings to bear eminently forgettable tidbits such as “King Pépin, which deposèd Childeric, / Did as heir general—being descended / Of Blithild, which was daughter to King Clothair— / Make claim and title to the crown of France” (795, 1.2.65-68). With this fustian factuality, Shakespeare and the Archbishop are having some fun at the expense of the dry historical record.

What matters is now, so Canterbury is comfortable making light of the musty old foundation for current claims. As he says, “So that, as clear as is the summer’s sun, / King Pépin’s title and Hugh Capet’s claim, / King Louis his satisfaction, all appear / To hold in right and title of the female” (795-96, 1.2.86-89). “What’s sauce for the goose,” as the saying goes, “is sauce for the gander.” Canterbury insists that Henry V must take his place amongst the English kings who have asserted their claim to France. Henry’s fellow monarchs, says his uncle Exeter, “expect that you should rouse yourself / As did the former lions of your blood” (796, 1.2.123-24).

King Henry is quickly resolved to do precisely this, and Canterbury tells him to take one fourth of England’s available troops to France to prosecute his claim. The rest will stay at home and take care of important menaces, such as—in Westmorland’s phrasing—“the weasel Scot …” (797, 1.2.70), who is sure to come marauding once the King sails for France. Henry agrees, and declares, “France being ours, we’ll bend it to our awe, / Or break it all to pieces” (798, 1.2.225-26).

The King calls in the waiting French ambassadors, who will deliver to him a little gift from the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin. [22] Evidently, the French crown prince still thinks of Henry V not as a mature ruler but as a prodigal youth, the very one that many of Shakespeare’s audience members will know from the delightful Henry IV plays in which “Prince Hal,” close companion of Sir John Falstaff, causes his father great anxiety before finally taking on the responsibility that properly belongs to him.

The Dauphin’s mocking claim is that the wastrel “Hal” is still playing games—thus the trunk full of tennis balls. At least tennis is an eminently French game, as it developed from a medieval sport called jeu de paume, which is somewhat like handball. Anyway, the Dauphin offers this gift along with the contemptuous admonition, “let the dukedoms that you claim / Hear no more of you.” (799, 1.2.257-58). [23]

King Henry’s bold response stuns the court: he concludes it with, “tell the Dauphin / His jest will savor but of shallow wit / When thousands weep more than did laugh at it” (800, 1.2.295-97). Henry has full command of state policy and martial rhetoric, and shows that he understands the deadly nature of the so-called game he is about to initiate. He is clearly not who the Dauphin thinks he is—not anymore.

Whether we, the modern audience, like what the once amiable and humorous Prince Hal has become now that he is King Henry V is another matter. It is the ordinary people of England and France who will suffer the consequences of the war this young man seems so determined to prosecute in the name of hisalleged claim to the French throne. [24]

ACT 2

Act 2.0, Chorus (800-01, the Chorus says King Henry V’s prospective war is popular with young men; preparations are under way, but peril surrounds the King: the French have bribed three English aristocrats close to Henry, and they are preparing to assassinate him.)

The Chorus for Act 2 sets forth a tableau in which “all the youth of England are on fire” (800, Chorus 2.0.1) and there is vast care and expenditure in preparation for the coming expedition. War is the style, the fashion, the rage. The Chorus-speaker well describes the unrealistic optimism that usually reigns in a nation on the eve of a war, before the killing and dying start.

Just as men marched cheerfully into the first engagements of WWI, having no inkling of the horrors of trench warfare, and many Americans during the presidency of George W. Bush believed the overly optimistic line that our armed forces would be “greeted as liberators” once Iraq was defeated, so did thousands of medieval Englishmen ready themselves gallantly for what they probably thought would be a short, profitable conflict across the channel.

King Henry’s readying of his forces while still in England frightens the French, says the Chorus, and so they resort to a plot to assassinate the English King. [25] They’ve bribed three English noblemen to do the deed: Richard, Earl of Cambridge; Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham; and Sir Thomas Gray, Knight, of Northumberland. Like some of Henry IV’s foes, these men meant to install Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March (1391-1425) as king, but apparently Edmund himself, who would at the time, in 1415, have been around 24 years old, tipped Henry off as to what was coming.

The King has traveled to the port town of Southampton, where we playgoers will be expected to imagine ourselves—after an initial trip to London’s Eastcheap where Falstaff’s favorite tavern lies, and he lies sick within it—while we wait for the potentially dire murder plot to be resolved. Then it will be off with us to France, with a “gentle pass” (801, 2.0.39) promised by our guide the Chorus, who is enjoying a bit of pleasantry at the expense of the neoclassical unities of time and place.[26] He will bypass all strictures on time and place while causing no stomach upsets on the way.

All in all, we moderns may feel a bit like the first visitors to Agincourt Park: able to observe and enjoy what present themselves as scenes of heroism and carnage at no risk to ourselves. The fearsome “Battle of Agincourt” is, after all, one of the most riveting moments in English history, and remains so even though the English hold on France was tenuous and lasted little longer than the short life of Henry V himself.

Act 2, Scene 1 (801-04, in Eastcheap, Henry’s old companions Pistol and Nym nearly come to blows over debts and Pistol’s wife, Hostess Quickly; Bardolph stops their quarreling; the Hostess reports that Falstaff is mortally ill.)

In Act 2, Scene 1, Pistol and Nym [27] quarrel at the tavern in Eastcheap over Nell Quickly (801, 2.1.15-17), whom Pistol has married, and about a debt Nym wants to collect from Pistol, who at first says only, “Base is the slave that pays” (803, 2.1.89). Pistol is full of bombastic talk (802, 2.1.42-45), and he plans to become the camp sutler (seller of camp provisions) which will be his way of operating as a war profiteer (803, 2.1.99-104).

Hostess Quickly informs everyone that Falstaff is dying, telling them, “As ever you come of women, come in quickly to Sir John. Ah, poor heart, he is so shaked of a burning quotidian / tertian that it is most lamentable to behold” (804, 2.1.109-11). Nym reminds us that the gregarious, carefree Prince Hal who consorted with him has undergone a transformation as deep as death, too, and it has proven to be devastating to Sir John Falstaff: as he says, “The King hath run bad humours on the knight” (804, 2.1.113). [28]

Act 2, Scene 2 (804-08, Henry finds out about the treasonous plot involving his companions Scrope, Grey, and Cambridge, and confronts them in Southampton; he refuses to commute their death sentences since they have just counseled him not to pardon a drunkard for verbally abusing the King; the three condemned men admit that the King’s sentence is just; Henry turns his attention to preparations for war in France.)

In Act 2, Scene 2, Scrope, Grey and Cambridge’s treason is revealed before Henry’s assemblage in Southampton, and they are denounced and sent to their deaths (805-06, 2.2.39-81). It must be painful, if instructive, for Henry to listen to these men urge extreme harshness against an offender who verbally abused the King a short while ago, when they themselves would do much worse. So when Scrope, Grey, and Cambridge are exposed and liable to sentencing, Henry tells them, “The mercy that was quick in us but late / By your own counsel is suppressed and killed” (805-06, 2.2.77-78).

Scrope’s participation in the dastardly plot is most painful of all to Henry, since the two men were apparently close friends. Henry laments, “May it be possible that foreign hire / Could out of thee extract one spark of evil / That might annoy my finger?” (806, 2.2.98-100).

The best Henry can do here is to understand that the doctrine we know as “the King’s two bodies” must be applied: that is, the ordinary mortal “Henry” doesn’t take the threat personally, but in his person he also embodies the realm of England, and these guilty men threatened the realm when they threatened him, so they must pay the ultimate price. [29]

King Henry explains to the condemned men, “Touching our person seek we no revenge, / But we our kingdom’s safety must so tender, / Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws / We do deliver you” (807, 2.2.173-76). With this declaration, Henry’s transformation from a private, prodigal son to a public man, a genuine king, is complete. With that, he turns to preparations for war in France.

Act 2, Scene 3 (808-09, King Henry’s old tavern friends all mourn the passing of Sir John Falstaff; Hostess Quickly aptly eulogizes him; Pistol again reveals that he is a war profiteer, not a real soldier, but he, Bardolph, Nym, and a boy depart for France.)

In Act 2, Scene 3, Pistol tells the tavern audience that Falstaff is dead. In practical terms, he says, that means “we must earn therefore” (808, 2.3.6). They must fend for themselves, not depend on the knight to do their planning for them.

Hostess Quickly speaks with great affection about Falstaff, and recounts his dying moments, ending with “all was as cold as any stone” (808, 2.2.23; see 9-23). He makes his last vow of repentance—we may remember his fitful excursions towards remorse in the other Henry plays and Merry Wives—and seems to be as serious as his tenuous hold on reality will allow. As the Norton editor’s footnote 4 to pg. 808 points out, Sir John, though the Hostess doesn’t recognize the text, recites part of Psalm 23, Verse 2 of which in the Geneva Bible runs “He maketh me to rest in green pasture, and leadeth me by the still waters.” [30]

Touching as this recounting is, old Sir John is a remnant of King Henry’s past. In a sense, “Hal,” too, is dead, succeeded by an austere young man wielding a king’s awesome power. The text affords Falstaff’s companions—and us, the audience—our moment of grief, and then we must let him go. It has been a long odyssey for Jack Falstaff, from I & II Henry IV—his happier times—to The Merry Wives of Windsor, wherein the impecuniousness that began in II Henry IV makes him meaner than we want him to be, and finally to heartbreak, silence, and death in Henry V.

Pistol’s intentions about the wars to come are none too honorable: he says, “Let us to France, like horseleeches, my boys, / To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!” (809, 2.3.46-47) Pistol and his ilk are parasites who will make their way by afflicting their military host. This third scene marks our farewell not only to Falstaff, but in effect to his whole crew. There is some humor ahead, but in the main, it will not be their task to deliver it.

Act 2, Scene 4 (809-12, the French King Charles VI and his advisers plan France’s defense against Henry V’s English forces; Henry’s uncle Exeter presents Charles VI with his nephew’s claim to the French throne; as England’s ambassador, Exeter threatens Charles VI and his court, and hurls defiance at the Dauphin’s earlier gift of tennis balls; in council, Charles takes Exeter’s demands seriously but does not answer immediately.)

In Act 2, Scene 4, Charles VI, [31] who would be late-middle-aged at 47 during the action at Agincourt in 1415, returns his counselors’ memories to the first major strife between France and England: the victories of Edward the Black Prince [32] at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. He sees the continuity of English stock and valor: “Think we King Harry strong. / And, princes, look you strongly arm to meet him. / The kindred of him hath been fleshed upon us, / And he is bred out of that bloody strain / That haunted us in our familiar paths” (810, 2.4.48-52). That is quite a description, one no doubt mingled with fear.

Charles VI admonishes the Dauphin and the Constable alike to be wary of this youthful English King, so late considered a roustabout: he all but pleads with them, “fear / The native mightiness and fate of him” (803, 2.4.63-64). Most of the French nobility we hear from, however, do not follow the old King’s advice—least of all his hotheaded son and heir, the Dauphin.

Exeter [33] soon arrives and levies a stern demand on Henry V’s behalf: to the French king, he declares, Henry “bids you then resign / Your crown and kingdom, indirectly held / From him, the native and true challenger” (811, 2.4.93-95). The Dauphin scorns this demand and tries to justify his earlier gift, saying, “matching to his youth and vanity, / I did present him with the Paris-balls” (812, 2.4.130-31).

The French king doesn’t share the young man’s attitude, and Exeter’s comeback in Henry’s defense is effective: once a prodigal, admits Exeter on Henry’s behalf, “Now he weighs time / Even to the utmost grain” (813, 2.4.137-38). No one is playing anymore, at tennis or otherwise.

Exeter’s speech is by no means devoid of the usual tricks of martial rhetoric, most opprobrious of which is his brazen attempt to displace all responsibility for the coming waves of death, rapine, and destruction onto King Charles VI of France and his counselors. Exeter bids Charles “to take mercy / On the poor souls for whom this hungry war / Opens his vasty jaws …” (811, 2.4.103-05). The personification is evasive since it is, after all, King Henry V who has made a dubious, adventurist claim to the French throne and then set sail to bring fire and sword to that wealthy and populous nation.

ACT 3

Act 3.0, Chorus (812-13, the Chorus pictures the setting-out of Henry V’s fleet across the Channel to France; Henry readies his siege of Harfleur; negotiations between the French and the English fail; the siege of Harfleur begins.)

The Chorus to Act 3 informs us that Henry has set out from England for France, and made his way to the French port town of Harfleur. England, says the Chorus, has been left largely unguarded (813, Chorus 3.0.20-21) since all the young men made their decision to follow Henry to France. A siege is building against Harfleur, and King Charles VI has offered through his ambassador “Katherine his daughter, and with her, to dowry, / Some petty and unprofitable dukedoms” (813, Chorus 3.0.30-31). Henry rejects this offer as insufficient to justify his efforts.

It’s a great pleasure to hear the music of the third Chorus, such is the precision and fineness of Shakespeare’s language encouraging us to let our imaginations swell with the fleet’s sails. His Chorus tells us to see “the threaden sails, / Borne with th’invisible and creeping wind, / Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, / Breasting the lofty surge” (812-13, 3.0.10-13). This tableau is worthy of Homer’s in The Iliad and The Odyssey, master of nautical description surpassed by none. [34] So, too, the Chorus’s picture of “A city on th’inconstant billows dancing …” (813, 3.0.15).

Act 3, Scene 1 (813-14, King Henry gives a stirring speech to his troops as they stand ready to storm the town of Harfleur that they have been besieging.)

Shakespeare’s method for capturing the variety of experience is often to give us competing portraits or vignettes: in Act 3, Scene 1, we hear Henry stirring his troops towards the coming battles with martial rhetoric: “For there is none of you so mean and base / That hath not noble luster in your eyes. / I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, / Straining upon the start” (814, 3.1.29-32). [35] Henry apparently sees the unifying force of military endeavor: it can make the mass of low-born men he beholds into something extraordinary, connecting them in ways they hadn’t imagined and giving their lives a higher purpose.

While Henry’s rhetoric may be sincere—he may well see his men as pure fighters, in the same way that he might see greyhound racing dogs as evincing pure desire to run—it’s a good question as to whether any of his men ever saw the fruition of the promise that the King later makes in Act 4, Scene 3 before the climactic battle at Agincourt; namely, that “he that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother. Be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition” (837, 4.3.61-63).

We must place such stirring rhetoric entailing social betterment next to the “vile” Pistol’s ignoble realism in the current play, or Falstaff’s crass admission in I Henry IV that few of his hand-picked “ragamuffins” will escape beggary when the fighting ends. [36] It isn’t as if late-medieval England (or any other country in that age) had a Department of Veterans Affairs, or offered returning vets the well-deserved benefits of a GI Bill like the one enjoyed by America’s WWII veterans when the war ended.

Act 3, Scene 2 (814-15, Bardolph, Pistol, Nym, and a boy quit the storming action against Harfleur, but Captain Fluellen espies them and forces them back into action; in soliloquy, the boy confesses that he considers his three adult masters cowards.)

In Act 3, Scene 2, we hear Bardolph excitedly (if probably not honestly) screaming, “On, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!” (814, 3.2.1) but neither Nym nor Pistol is keen to take him up on the suggestion and enter the battle. Nym complains, “for mine own part I have not a case of lives,” and Pistol sings a tune beginning with, “And sword and shield / In bloody field / Doth win immortal fame” (814, 3.2.3, 7-9). [37]

This brief scene gives us the perspective of an ordinary servant, who pins Nym and Pistol as cowards and thieves, saying, “three / such antics do not amount to a man” (814, 3.2.28-29). All of these base actors, the boy knows well, offer only words, not fighting skill or spirit. What he says of Pistol will stand in for all: “he hath a killing tongue and a / quiet sword, by the means whereof ’a breaks words and keeps / whole weapons” (815, 3.2.30-32). As for theft, well, the boy says, “Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in / filching …” (815, 3.2.39-40).

The boy’s final judgment of them is succinct: “I must leave them, and seek / some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stom- / ach, and therefore I must cast it up” (815, 3.3.45-46). Young as he is, he doesn’t want to hitch his wagon to their sin-tarnished, dishonorable star.

Shakespeare, with his concentration on men such as Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, and on a servant boy, gives us a sense of the muddiness or complexity that accompanies the heroism of even the grandest military campaigns. The underbelly of war consists of fierce doubts, anxious hopes, and desperate bids to stay alive. Heroes larger than life and self-conscious parasites share the field with those who are just trying to survive. As with any complicated endeavor, motives abound, and they inevitably conflict when those who act upon them cross paths.

Shakespeare wants us to reckon not only with the “big picture” that writers of historical narrative generate from their study of events and claims, but also the seldom-told individual perspectives (fragmented, biased, and partial though they are) that can only be conjured with one’s understanding of human nature as the starting point, at least when the events in question happened lifetimes ago. [38] But this isn’t to say that Shakespeare subscribes to a facile relativism: the servant boy’s outing of Pistol and Nym as frauds demonstrates that at least sometimes, it is possible to cut through the pretension and the rhetoric and just tell the truth.

Act 3, Scene 3 (815-17, Captain Fluellen, an ideologue and military historian, speaks at some length about battle tactics with Captains Gower, Jamy, and MacMorris; Fluellen gets into an intense argument with MacMorris.)

In Act 3, Scene 3, the Welsh Captain Fluellen prattles on about military method: “For, look you, the mines is not according / to the disciplines of the war” (815, 3.3.4-5), he says to Gower. Fluellen is a military historian of sorts (816, 3.3.31-35), but quarrels with the Scottish Captain MacMorris when the latter tells him that “It is no time to discourse” (816, 3.3.46). MacMorris leans into a quarrel with Fluellen, saying, “I do not know you so good a man as myself. So / Chrish save me, I will cut off your head” (816, 3.3.70-71). Fluellen, for his part, seems flummoxed by this kind of talk.

Fluellen is courageous, but he’s also a pure ideologue in his love of war’s professional side. He is loquacious, has a comic Welsh accent, and ends up talking sometimes while others are fighting. Even so, his vehemence (signaled by such expressions as “look you, now” and “in your conscience!”) is honorable. Fluellen speaks from an excess of uprightness and national pride, not from unworthy motives, and his over-fondness for talk about “the disciplines of … the Roman / wars” (816, 3.3.38-39) stems from erudition in military history. Still, the danger in this theorizing and erudition is that it could lead us merely to rationalize the bloody chaos human beings visit on one another.

Act 3, Scene 4 (817-18, King Henry threatens Harfleur with merciless outrage and complete destruction if they won’t yield to his forces; Harfleur’s governor admits that the town is “no longer defensible” and surrenders; Henry accepts the surrender and orders that no harm should come to the citizens of Harfleur.)

In Act 3, Scene 4, King Henry harangues Harfleur’s defenders, acknowledging war’s stark violence with the shocking advice, “Take pity of your town and of your people / Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command” (817, 3.4.28-29). The speech as a whole bristles with references to primal violence: “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 …” (817, 3.4.11-14). Mass rape is threatened again in the same speech.

We are told that if certain conditions are not met, “The gates of mercy shall be all shut up …” (817, 3.4.10). What is more, as for the outrages to follow, Henry twice poses a question that smacks of moral insanity and psychopathy: “What is it then to me …?” (817, 3.4.15; see also 19) Why should he care if unspeakable outrages should occur? The logic of such talk is, “Don’t make me do x! I can’t be held responsible if …!” Nobody forced King Henry V to invade France, and it will not do to tell the French defenders of Harfleur, “you yourselves are cause …” of the atrocities that stand to be committed against them (817, 3.4.19).

Still, Henry says all this, and more, in his attempt to justify potentially giving free reign to the worst impulses in human nature—an attitude we find Shakespeare condemning in his bleakest tragedies. [39] The King positions himself aside as conditionally indifferent and hedges his own responsibility by saying the men of Harfleur should capitulate “Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command” (817, 3.4.29).

It is no doubt true that even the strongest commander lost much of his leverage over his troops once he unleashed them in battle—we are not dealing with a modern army with continuous lines of communication. That fact notwithstanding, King Henry’s speech must remain disturbing to anyone who refuses simply to sign off on the kind of brutality that today we would call war crimes or, in some cases, crimes against humanity.

What King Henry has said delivers to us some pale sense of the dreadful reality that we must contrast with Fluellen’s war-college ideal. Henry himself claims that he has only the thinnest control over the violence he proposes to unleash, and we know that the fearsome call of “Havoc!” is never far from an ancient battlefield. [40] But the speech’s strategy works. The couplet-question, “Will you yield and this avoid? / Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroyed?” (817, 3.3.42-43) is answered by the men of Harfleur with surrender and the opening of the town gates.

Henry is a talker, to be sure, but he’s much more than that: he is a doer whose words suit his purposes and his actions, be they good or ill. Here at Harfleur, the King orders that his men “Use mercy to them all” (818, 3.4.54), while the coming on of winter and illness drives him to declare a temporary retirement to Calais.

Act 3, Scene 5 (818-19, Princess Katherine of Valois learns some comically indecorous English from her maid Alice.)

In Act 3, Scene 5, Katherine and her maid Alice practice their English. This is Agincourt’s lighter side, with deep differences reduced to linguistic felicities and embarrassments, culminating in Katherine’s declaration that certain English words are not only ugly but also “corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non / pour les dames d’honneur d’user” (819, 3.5.48-49). She means specifically the English words for le pied (“foot”) and la robe (“gown”), which the French ladies mispronounce as foutre (“f*ck”) and le con (“c*nt”). Their innocence contrasts with the English King’s brazen references to sexuality in his Harfleur speech of Act 3, Scene 4.

We also get a sense of what the wars between the English and French mean from a royal woman’s perspective, though here that perspective consists in remaining oblivious. Aside from France itself, Katherine is the prize for King Henry. [41]

Act 3, Scene 6 (819-21, the French commanders admit that they are ashamed of their performance thus far against the English; the French King Charles VI encourages his generals to confront Henry boldly and stop him before he reaches Calais; Charles commands his herald Montjoy to visit Henry and ask how much ransom he would be willing to pay to avoid capture by the French forces.)

In Act 3, Scene 6, the French commanders exhibit both shame for their poor performance in war thus far and continued contempt for their English opponents. The Dauphin scornfully reduces the English to the efflux of certain Frenchmen’s acts of generation, calling them “a few sprays of us, / The emptying of our fathers’ luxury, Our scions, / put in wild and savage stock …” (820, 3.6.5-7). All said, Shakespeare’s high-born Frenchmen put too much stock in their own “stock,” and too much emphasis on words, honor-based catalogs, titles and so forth, and too little on deeds, accomplishments.

King Charles VI is warier and smarter than that. He bids his ample army to stop prating and get down to bringing King Henry to him as a prisoner: “Go down upon him—you have power enough— / And in a captive chariot into Rouen / Bring him our prisoner” (821, 3.6.52-54). Around 1415, France, even after the plague had killed perhaps one-fourth of its people, had around 14 million inhabitants. Compare that with England’s 3 million or so. [42]

Some of the Elizabethans’ slights against the French are English propaganda, but it seems true that the advantage lay with the French. Late-medieval France was a wealthier and more populous place than England, even if both countries were often beset with internal power struggles and other problems.

Act 3, Scene 7 (821-24, Fluellen and Gower run into Pistol, who puts on soldierly airs and tries to enlist Fluellen on Bardolph’s side since that man has been sentenced to death for robbing a church; Fluellen says the sentence against Bardolph is proper, and Pistol disparages him for saying so; Henry arrives and upholds the sentence; Montjoy encourages Henry to offer a ransom, but the English king defies him, and commits his cause to God.)

In Act 3, Scene 7, Fluellen is fooled into taking Pistol for an honorable soldier until the latter begs him to intervene for Bardolph, who is to be hanged for robbing a church: “let not Bardolph’s vital thread be cut / With edge of penny cord and vile reproach” (822, 3.7.43-44). Fluellen flatly refuses to honor this request: “if, look you, he were my brother, I would desire the Duke [Exeter] to / use his good pleasure and put him to execution” (822, 3.7.49-50). Fluellen is now determined to expose Pistol for what he is. He cannot stand such a gap between appearances and reality: “If I find a hole in his coat, I will tell him my mind” (822, 3.7.76).

Even though King Henry did not originally hand down Bardolph’s sentence, he shows no mercy for Bardolph, saying, “We would have all such offenders so cut off” (823, 3.7.96). Riot and advantage-taking against the common people cannot be allowed when one is “gamester” for a territory like France (823, 3.7.101).

The Herald Montjoy soon arrives and makes his master’s demands, offering to show mercy on King Henry if he agrees to pay a very large ransom. What the Herald says by way of inflating the ransom’s price comes very nearly to “How dare you be winning!” He says to Henry, “for our disgrace, his own person / kneeling at our feet [would be] but a weak and worthless satisfaction” (823, 3.7.118-19).

Henry refuses ransom to the French king, pledging through the French herald [43] only “this frail and worthless trunk” (824, 3.7.140; see 139-42). He tells the herald honestly, “We would not seek a battle as we are, / Nor as we are we say we will not shun it” (824, 3.7.150-51). All said, King Henry V places himself in God’s hands, as he says to Gloucester, and gives orders to establish a camp past the river, with a march elsewhere to proceed the next day.

Act 3, Scene 8 (824-27, the French commanders flaunt their prospects as the morning and the battle approach, praising their own war-horses in the most fulsome and frivolous terms.)

In Act 3, Scene 8, the French rehearse their arrogance regarding the English prospects. The Dauphin follows Orléans and the Constable on the subject of their war-horses. The heir to the French throne waxes poetical about his own cheval de guerre, saying, “I will not change my horse / with any that treads but on four pasterns [hooves]” (824, 3.8.11-12). When the Dauphin leaves them to themselves, Orléans, Rambures, and the Constable jest about the Dauphin’s supposedly deficient valor, and the Constable concludes with comic irony, “I think he will eat all he kills” (826, 3.8.84). [44]

ACT 4

Act 4.0, Chorus (827-28, the Chorus describes the demeanor of the French and English armies just hours before battle—the French are eager to gain the victory they expect, while the English are riven by anxiety; during the night, Henry walks among his men and bucks up their spirits; the Chorus again, as at the play’s outset, wishes the stage could better do justice to the representation of so great an event as the Battle of Agincourt.)

The Chorus-speaker for Act 4 describes the evening’s calm before the storm, with the French awaiting their victory and the diminished, anxious English forces hanging on until morning comes. He previews the English King Henry’s night-time walk through his encampment to give heart to his soldiers as “A little touch of Harry in the night” (828, 4.0.47). [45] As for the audience, our task consists as usual in, “Minding true things by what their mock’ries be” (828, 4.0.53).

Act 4, Scene 1 (828-34, disguised, Henry walks through his camp before battle and meets Pistol, hears Fluellen and Gower’s back-and-forth, and argues with the common soldier Michael Williams about the responsibility the King bears for his soldiers’ souls; Henry and Williams postpone their quarrel until battle’s end, each offering a glove as pledge; alone, Henry reflects on the burdens of his kingship, and begs God not to punish him now for his father Henry IV’s treason against Richard II.

In Act 4, Scene 1, the King speaks to Erpingham about setting an example: “‘Tis good for men to love their present pains / Upon example” (829, 4.1.18-19). He understands the mass psychology of battle, the importance of exemplary conduct. Montaigne suggests in his essay (as translated by John Florio) “Of the Inconstancie of Our Actions” that our virtues fluctuate with circumstance and desire: yesterday’s virtuous woman is shameless today, and the courageous man of a recent battle is just as likely to turn and run next time.

When it comes to our thoughts, Montaigne suggests, “Our ordinary manner is to follow the inclination of our appetite this way and that way …” and “all is but changing, motion and inconstancy.” [46] It isn’t known precisely when Shakespeare read Montaigne’s Essais, but King Henry’s insistence on the importance of his personal presence among the troops seems to flow from a similar kind of awareness.

As “Harry le Roy” (a nom de guerre), Henry goes on a walking tour, and meets first with Pistol, who comically mistakes “Le Roy” for a Cornish surname and praises the King but threatens Fluellen, saying “Tell him I’ll knock his leek about his pate / Upon Saint Davy’s day” (829, 4.1.54-55). There is irony in the flourishing of such clan-based hatreds even as the English army confronts superior French forces.

Meanwhile, Fluellen is busy lecturing Gower on not being foolish enough to let the opponent hear his conversation: “If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating cox- / comb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be / an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb …?” (830, 4.1.75-77) [47] Gower agrees to pipe down. Some actors choose to play this episode with Fluellen practically shouting his warnings to Gower, which greatly enhances its comic potential.

Fluellen also airs his opinion—again—that there must be firm order, a respect for “the rules”—in war, and he calls to witness no lesser light than the Roman general and triumvir Pompey the Great. It’s fine to voice this insistence, but in practice, such idealism quickly breaks down and gives way to horrifying scenes of death and destruction. Unfortunately, Voltaire’s Candide sometimes reads more like non-fiction than the novella that it is. [48]

In disguise as Harry Le Roy, King Henry meets the common soldier Michael Williams, [49] who speaks with a mix of fear, distrust, and anger. But first, to the more amenable Bates, Henry argues that nobody in the host should rehearse their fears and doubts in front of the King, saying, “I think the King is but a man, as I am” (830, 4.1.98). The point is that a ruler is as susceptible to despair and paralysis as the ordinary soldier or mid-level commander: all are linked in a chain of responsibility for the welfare of one another’s mental and physical well-being.

The King’s groundedness and view of the big picture in morals and politics show in his exchange with Williams, a humble but astonishingly frank subject, who tells him, “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 …” (831, 4.1.125-28). There is something redolent of menace in Williams’s honest summation: “Now, if these men do not die / well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it …” (831, 4.1.133-34).

Against this charge Henry sums up his argument with the thought, “Every subject’s duty / is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own” (832, 4.1.161-62). [50] Both parties speak of end things, of Christian eschatology. They talk of mortality and eternal judgment following the resurrection of the dead. In that context, the soul is more than the body, so King Henry can send his subjects to fight in a foreign war without being responsible for their fate, whether physical or spiritual. Henry does not believe he needs to answer for the state of his men’s souls at death—that is something only they can answer for.

A philosophical materialist will surely have issues with the King’s argument, and will most likely call it out as evasive. Williams’s “Last Judgment” theological framework, however, leaves him with little to say by way of a comeback. It seems that King Henry V can relate to his subjects at something like their own level, yet he maintains the perspective of a man operating on a higher plane of experience and understanding.

When “Harry le Roy” and Bates address the subject of whether the King would agree to be ransomed, Williams steps in heavily with a keen sense of the multi-tiered notion of justice and human value that seems to him to be at work. He insists that any talk of refusing ransom is only “to make us fight cheerfully. But when / our throats are cut he may be ransomed and we never the / wiser” (832, 4.1.175-77). Williams and Henry take each other’s remaining words ill, and a quarrel is struck up between them to be finished later. The two men exchange gloves as a pledge (832, 4.1.189-96).

Alone at last, King Henry meditates on his burdens as monarch. He asks of the “ceremony” (833, 4.1.229) that makes a king, “Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men …?” (833, 4.1.223-24; see 207-61 inclusive). He is considered responsible for everyone, so only peasants sleep well. The gap between the person and the symbol is huge, potentially infinite. Perhaps, then, monarchy is a projection of the subjects’ own desires, an investment in something symbolic, something larger than themselves on which the king in his material person is then expected to make good.

There is a penitential structure to Henry’s kingship. Much of what he does here in France seems meant to wash the blood from his father’s hands, some of which attaints him as well. He prays to the “God of battles” earnestly, “Oh, not today, think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown” (834, 4.1.270-71). The irony of starting an expiatory war—if that is what it is, in part—in which thousands of innocents and combatants are bound to be killed may or may not fully occur to Henry, though his concluding statement, “all that I can do is nothing worth, / Since that my penitence comes after all, / Imploring pardon” is suggestive (834, 4.1.280-82).

All in all, Henry’s soliloquy indicates intense awareness that the life of kings is not their own. They are actors on a grand stage, and all eyes behold them. Few are the moments when they can, as King Henry V does now, turn inward and converse with what they find there. [51]

To appreciate fully the maturity of this young king as Shakespeare casts him on the eve of Agincourt, 1415, we must remind ourselves of the road Henry has traveled to get to this point. In I Henry IV, back when he was still the prodigal son Prince Hal and, as such, a thorn in his father’s side, Henry had spent much of his time with hard-drinking rascals like the jolly knight and sometime highway robber Sir John Falstaff and his friends, some of whom we meet in Henry V.

Henry’s father the King found that such brazen behavior violated his own “public relations” principle that a great prince is more prized by making himself scarce than by mingling with low company. [52] That failure to appreciate the dignity of his office is among the chiefest of the faults in Richard II that Henry Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV, used with ruthless effectiveness against his predecessor, who “Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools.” [53]

Even so, a species of “mingling” was Prince Hal’s way of getting to know his subjects, the better to govern them. So in I Henry IV, the Prince is busy trying out various roles, learning how the various subjects in his future kingdom think and live.

In Act 1.2 of that play, Hal himself describes his antics in providential terms: “My reformation, glittering o’er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off” and pledges to himself that his reformation will amount to “Redeeming time when men think least I will.” [54]

Kingly virtue has always been Henry’s redemptive goal, whatever capers he may have committed on his way to the throne. That may or may not have been true of the real Henry, but it seems true of Shakespeare’s character, who goes from “Hal” to the ultimate warrior-king Henry V, October 1415’s victor at Agincourt against an imposing French army.

All of the above makes Henry V, Act 4, Scene 1 the successful culmination of a long process. King Henry’s method has always been that of an actor, a grand one who has workshopped his way to present glory, interacting with all manner of citizens from the common tavern to battlefields full of fiery nobility.

Henry V’s “self” is not a romantic, unique, nameless, intimate self. It is rather the product of trying out many different stations and styles on his way to appreciating his one true office [55]—a medieval relational term for defining a person by his or her role in life, entailing as it does certain responsibilities within the political and social order. A king must understand, in Shakespeare’s terms, that he plays a role on the stage of life. That means taking on grave burdens and enduring potentially harsh consequences, but it’s no less a role than if the person were simply strutting across the theatrical boards.

Henry’s playful past has also imbued him with the medieval and Renaissance truth that the king has not one body, but two—a natural body that desires, breathes, and dies, and a body political or civil whose boundaries go beyond the personal and the physical. The king is in part a walking set of duties, and this transpersonal aspect of him is what promises political continuity as well as (to borrow Thomas More’s term in Utopia) the “majesty” that comes with respect for whatever is larger than material affairs and ordinary humanity. [56]

Act 4, Scene 2 (834-36, the French commanders continue to think the battle will be embarrassingly easy to win since the English forces are in terrible shape.)

In Act 4, Scene 2, the French cockiness and high-spirited words continue. Says the Constable, “A very little let us do / And all is done” (835, 4.2.32-33). Hyperbole flows as freely as the blood that will soon be spilt on the battlefield.

Act 4, Scene 3 (836-38, Henry inspires his troops just before battle begins, calling them a “band of brothers” whose courageous deeds will be spoken of in times to come; Montjoy again visits Henry about a potential ransom, and an exasperated Henry rejects the offer.)

In Act 4, Scene 3, Henry makes his most rousing battle speech, countering Westmorland’s wish that the English had more men to send into battle with his great exhortation beginning, “Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be rememberèd …” (837, 4.3.57-59). His comparatively tiny “band of brothers” (837, 4.3.60) will take the palm for honorable exploits, come what may.

King Henry also makes a promise to the future survivors that “he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother. Be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition” (837, 4.3.61-63). From the way Henry concludes this thought, it seems that his promise has more to do with an enhanced sense of masculinity than with any actual improvement in socio-economic status. Veterans have always struggled to get the respect due to them when they return home, and that was most likely even more intensely the case in the Middle Ages.

At this point, Henry V seems to many readers and audience members to be the perfect Tennysonian king: such men are for glory, not for long life, and they never shrink from giving flesh, blood and bone to the symbolic power that belongs to them. [57] For the last time—and belting out jauntily in front of his entire army that there will be no ransom for him besides “these my joints …” (838, 4.3.123), King Henry refuses Montjoy’s entreaty to surrender, and the latter departs suitably impressed, saying, “Thou never shalt hear herald any more” (838, 4.3.127).

Act 4, Scene 4 (838-40, Pistol captures a French soldier and threatens him for a large sum in ransom; the boy says that Bardolph and Nym have been executed and that the English camp has been left all but unguarded.)

In Act 4, Scene 4, Pistol captures a French gentleman prisoner, whose offer of 200 crowns to spare his life he promptly accepts (839, 4.4.40-44). This is a comic scene, but it kicks off several scenes that highlight the confusion or fog of war: it’s hard to tell one person from another, and morals become muddied. The serving-boy makes an ominous announcement: Bardolph and Nym have both been hanged for thievery, and at present the English camp is nearly defenseless. As the boy admits, “I / must stay with the lackeys with the luggage of our camp. / The French might have a good prey of us if he knew of it, for / there is none to guard it but boys” (840, 4.4.66-69).

Act 4, Scene 5 (840, the French commanders are so humiliated when the English rout them that they decide to go down fighting—strategy be damned.)

In Act 4, Scene 5, the French are losing, and they throw order to the winds. Orléans suggests that if only some order could be restored, the French army’s numbers would still give them the victory. The Constable counters with, “Let us on heaps go offer up our lives” (840, 4.5.19), which sounds like an invitation to engage in a suicidal charge. It sounds as if his spirit has been broken by the shameful defeat thus far inflicted. This is a battle that the French should have won, but instead it must be added to the ledger of defeats such as the ones at Crécy and Poitiers more than half a century before Agincourt. [58]

Act 4, Scene 6 (841, the French grow desperate; Henry is informed that York and Suffolk have been killed in battle; due to a renewed French call to arms and the arrival of reinforcements, Henry orders his French prisoners’ throats cut—otherwise, they might escape and rejoin their own forces.)

In Act 4, Scene 6, King Henry issues the first of two orders that his prisoners’ throats be cut. The first time, the reason seems to be that “The French have reinforced their scattered men” (841, 4.6.36), which presumably means they might regroup and carry on the fight against the English. Many French prisoners could break free and join in the struggle, taking more English lives. While this may not have been termed a “war crime” in our modern, fully codified sense, it would surely have been considered contrary to the well-known laws of chivalry, which themselves were grounded in Christian doctrine. [59]

Act 4, Scene 7 (841-45, Fluellen says to Gower that Henry is as magnificent as Alexander the Great, and rages at the French army’s slaughter of boys in the English camp; Welsh pride abounds; Montjoy informs Henry that the English have won; Williams shows up with Henry’s glove, but Henry, pretending not to recognize the glove, tricks Fluellen and Williams: he sends Fluellen to challenge Williams to a duel, then sends Warwick and Gloucester after Fluellen to prevent violence.)

In Act 4, Scene 7, when Captain Fluellen finds out that the youngsters watching over the English camp have been slain, he explodes that this barbaric act is “expressly against / the law of arms” (841, 4.7.1-2). [60] During their counterattack, the French have also apparently stolen everything in King Henry’s personal tent, says Gower, and he supposes that this was the reason for the King’s order in the previous scene to cut all the French prisoners’ throats.

The killing of the boys does, however, seem to be the reason why the King gives another such order in the current scene. Henry says, “I was not angry since I came to France / Until this instant” (842, 4.7.47-48), and again demands that a second collection of prisoners should be given no quarter even though they are now prisoners to his English forces. This order appears to be conditional—it will be done, that is, only if the French continue the struggle.

But in truth, the day—Friday, 25 October 1415—is over and the English have won. That the French Herald has to tell Henry this suggests how chaotic the field must have been. The Herald comes to ask leave to number and bury his side’s dead, and he seems very concerned that the dead nobility be duly separated from the slain commoners. The battle, he says, has been fought near a castle named “Agincourt.” That is what Henry declares should be the name of the field and the battle. [61]

Fluellen’s Welsh effusive patriotism is a bonding point with King Henry, as he says, “I do believe your Majesty takes no / scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day” (843, 4.7.93-94). The delighted King tells Fluellen that he is of Welsh ancestry, too—or at least, he was born in Monmouth Castle, Wales, and his mother Mary de Bohun’s family held a great deal of land in the Welsh marches bordering Wales proper. [62]

Williams enters again, and Henry (who is too high in rank to accept a challenge from a commoner) plays a Hal-worthy trick: he gives Williams’s challenge-glove to Fluellen, impishly claiming, “When Alençon and myself were down together, I / plucked this glove from his helm. If any man challenge this, / he is a friend to Alençon and an enemy to our person” (844, 4.7.140-42). Fluellen now becomes liable to assault by the incensed soldier Williams. King Henry sends Warwick and Gloucester after the hothead Fluellen to make sure nobody ends up getting killed (845, 4.7.153-66 inclusive).

Act 4, Scene 8 (845-47, Williams strikes Fluellen, but Warwick and Gloucester cut the quarrel short; Henry enters and reveals that Williams offered to strike him, the King, and Williams decorously apologizes for this unintended insubordination; Henry is informed of the terrible French losses and the small English losses; Henry dedicates the English victory to God, and plans to sail home to England.)

In Act 4, Scene 8, Williams strikes Fluellen, who accuses him of treason because he thinks the blow was struck in remembrance of the Duke of Alençon, whose glove Henry falsely told him it was (823, 4.8.13-17). For a moment, Henry is almost like the merry Prince Hal of I & II Henry IV, as he enjoys telling Williams that he is the person the common soldier had in fact insulted and challenged. But Williams handles himself well, saying, “Your majesty came not like yourself” (846, 4.8.46), and both Henry and Fluellen forgive him, though characteristically, Fluellen and Williams nearly get into a new quarrel all their own.

The French and English dead are tallied, with the report being that 126 princes have been slain, and perhaps 10,000 soldiers, with most of them ranking as gentlemen or knights, and only around 1600 mercenaries or common soldiers. The English are said to have lost few—almost none, in fact (847, 4.8.97-100). It’s generally thought that the French greatly outnumbered the English, but apparently, they put their nobility up front, and when the English killed so many of them, the rest of the French soldiers weren’t much use. But the battle was more complex than that, and the casualties given in Shakespeare’s play sound somewhat dubious. [63]

Henry commands the singing of Psalm 115 “Non nobis,” [64] and the canticle “Te Deum” (847, 4.8.117), the burial of the dead. He also orders a move to the port city of Calais, and thence across the Channel to England. As for “Te Deum,”the first lines in the Vulgate Latin run, “Non nobis, non nobis, Domine / Sed nomini tuo da gloriam.” Essentially, both pieces oppose pretensions to human autonomy and pride. Of course, we could also say that such verses amount to humans’ hiding behind God for the ultraviolence they do from one century to the next.

ACT 5

Act 5.0, Chorus (847-48, the Chorus says that the English army returned home to a thunderous welcome, and recounts how the Holy Roman Emperor has visited to try to make permanent peace between the English and the French; then, King Henry V returns to France.)

The Chorus-speaker for Act 5 sets the current year as 1421. After the 1415 invasion of France, Henry had invaded again in 1417 and his English forces captured Rouen by a very destructive siege, and they also captured Caen and Normandy. Later, in 1421, after the Treaty of Troyes that granted him marriage to Katherine of Valois and the status of French Regent and heir to the French throne, King Henry V returned to France and, as part of his agenda for the trip, laid a hard-fought siege to Meaux for its strategic importance in controlling France. This was after a serious defeat at Beaugé and a personal trip to Paris to refurbish his image in France. [65]

However, Henry died of dysentery in France at the end of August 1422, and Charles VI followed him to the grave in October of the same year. The Treaty of Amiens was to follow in 1423, but the troubled reign of Henry V’s son, Henry VI (r. 1422-61, 1470-71), saw the loss of almost all of the territory that his father had spent so much effort to win, and the reign of Charles VII as King of France from 1422-61. [66]

The same reign of Henry VI saw the beginning in England of the Wars of the Roses from 1455-1487 between the great houses of Lancaster and York. From there, it’s on to the reign of the Tudors beginning with Henry VII in 1485 and ending with Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603).

At the outset of the Choral speech, we see the people of London and their dignitaries go out to meet King Henry V as if he were a “conqu’ring Caesar” (848, 5.0.28). There’s even a reference to the future Queen Elizabeth I’s sometime favorite and soon-to-be treasonous enemy, the Earl of Essex, who around the time of the play’s writing in 1599 was expected back shortly from a campaign fighting against Irish rebels. The return described would be Henry’s initial trip home from the Agincourt campaign in November 1415.

Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund (r. as HRE 1433-37) did not succeed in his diplomatic efforts to bring France and England together, and he eventually sided with England, as the 1416 Treaty of Canterbury demonstrates. [67] In any event, the Chorus-speaker says, more time has passed, and now it’s “straight back again to France” (848, 5.0.46).

Act 5, Scene 1 (848-50, the year is 1421; Fluellen humiliates Pistol with Welsh leeks; Pistol will return home to England, steal for a living, and lie about his exploits: he epitomizes war’s unheroic dimension.)

In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen and Pistol are at odds over Saint David’s Day, the day of homage to Wales’s sixth-century CE patron saint, David. [68] Legend has it that seventh-century CE King Cadwalladr ordered his men to wear leeks during a battle with the Saxons, post fifth-century Germanic invaders of England. Anyhow, Pistol has insulted Fluellen about his Welsh heritage, and Fluellen forces him to chomp down some of the Welsh vegetable Pistol mocked (849, 5.1.29-53 inclusive).

Pistol is humiliated, and worse yet, he informs us, his wife Nell Quickly (the Hostess) is dead. Still, he is not quite done for: Shakespeare is true to the complexities of characters and events. The retelling of Henry V’s reign can’t be all about heroic battles and diplomatic triumphs because that would do violence to a proper understanding of the human beings who made all those things happen. Pistol laments that he has grown old, and says, “To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal; / And patches will I get unto these cudgeled scars, / And swear I got them in the Gallia wars” (850, 5.1.78-80).

The statement has a certain eloquence to it, and the pun on “steal” reinforces the pathos of this unheroic character’s future: Henry said everyone who came back from the war in France would be remembered forever, [69] but that hardly rings true for an aging, widowed malcontent like Pistol. With no honorable role to play back home, he’s sure to come to an ignominious end. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” [70] “Quiet” isn’t a word we would associate with the voluble and irascible Pistol, but “desperation” will definitely follow him back to England.

Act 5, Scene 2 (850-57, Charles VI agrees to terms with the English; Henry’s men negotiate the peace while he charms the French princess Katherine of Valois into accepting his marriage proposal; Charles VI ratifies all of the English demands, and Henry is promised that he will be heir to the French throne when Charles dies.)

In Act 5, Scene 2, the Duke of Burgundy (Philippe III le Bon, r. 1419-67) has worked hard to bring the French and English kings together, replacing fighting with binding words, and at last it pays off (851, 5.2.23-28). King Charles VI at first responds with the medieval equivalent of “my people will get back to your people,” but the sum of it is that he must agree to the terms (853, 5.2.77-82), at least for the present. [71] Burgundy aptly figures the torn environment of France as needing nothing more urgently than the residency of peace—“that naked, poor, and mangled peace, / Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births”—to recover (851, 5.2.34-35).

Even though King Henry says outright that his marriage to the Princess Katherine of Valois is his “capital demand” (852, 5.2.96) and not simply a request, he must not omit, in all good manners, to play the suitor for the hand of Katherine of Valois, and while his French would scarcely earn the proverbial “gentleman’s C,” his performance is not without charm. He admits to Katherine, “I know no ways to mince it in love…” (853, 5.2.123).

The Princess has some trouble understanding King Henry, but what he says is good enough, burbling out statements such as, “to say to thee that I shall die is / true—but for thy love, by the Lord, no. Yet I love thee, too” (853, 5.2.145-46). How could a lady not fall for that? It’s of a piece with Rosalind’s remark in As You Like It that “men / have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, / but not for love.” [72]

The fifth act is partly interested in the interplay between words and deeds: the former (words) are seldom as efficacious as we wish, while the latter (deeds) are usually more complicated than we like. Words often call for deeds, but deeds usually give way to words, too, if affairs are to come to a satisfactory completion.

Katherine has some ideas about which deeds are or are not permitted to a demoiselle of her station. She seems to recognize that, in practical terms, the King’s offer of marriage is one that she really can’t refuse, but nonetheless, she says, “it is not be de fashion pour les ladies of France—I / cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish” (853, 5.2.241-42).

Henry’s polite but firm comeback to this coyness on Katherine’s part is, “nice customs curtsy to great kings, Dear Kate” (855, 5.2.248). It is the fashion for French ladies to kiss before marriage, if he says so. Henry says there is “witchcraft” (855, 5.2.254) in Katherine’s lips, more than in all the eloquence of her father’s counselors. Nothing’s set in stone: war’s violence changes territorial markers, but simple gestures can change frosty fashions. Tradition? Says Henry, broadening the royal “we” to include her: “We are the makers of manners, Kate, and / the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all / find-faults” (850, 5.2.250-52).

With the promise of Kate’s hand in marriage and Charles VI’s agreement to make him heir to the French throne, Henry V has the essential security he needs, and at least for the time being, peace obtains between England and France. King Henry never actually inherited the French throne since he died in 1422, as did the French King Charles VI, only a few months after Henry.

Act 5, Epilogue (857, the Chorus reminds us that King Henry V died a young man, leaving the English throne to the infant Henry VI, who would go on to lose the considerable possessions in France that his father had won.)

The Epilogue makes brief but significant reference to the brute fact of history that what Henry V won, his incapable son Henry VI lost right back during a tumultuous, interrupted reign that drove England into the dark period known as the Wars of the Roses, ending only with Henry Tudor’s putting-down of the Yorkist King Richard III at Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485. When the dust settled in 1453 from what we call the Hundred Years’ War, France, and not England, emerged the winner.

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Histories + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93859-3.

Document Timestamp: 9/01/2025 4:30 PM

ENDNOTES

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] See “Queen Elizabeth I.” Englishmonarchs.co.uk. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[2] See Elizabeth I’s “Golden Speech.” The National Archives, UK. Accessed 9/1/2025. In this speech, written towards the end of her reign, the Queen professes abiding love for her subjects, saying nothing is “more deere unto us then the loving conservation of our subjects hearts.”

[3] Visit Tudorhistory.org. for detailed materials on all things Tudor. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[4] A convenient Shakespeare-oriented abridgement is available. See Boswell-Stone, Walter G. Shakespeare’s Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared. Wentworth Press, 2019 [repr. of London: Chatto & Windus 1907 ed.]. ISBN-13: 978-0530892863. This text is also available online at Shakespeare’s Holinshed…. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[5] Hazlitt, William. Collected Works of William Hazlitt, eds. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902. pg. 285. In a lecture from The Round Table, Hazlitt writes that “Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbours. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France.” That is a frank response to an attitude Hazlitt finds offensive in his countrymen. The quote appears in The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays: Henry V. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[6] See Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Harvard UP, 1976. First published 1933. See also Scala Naturae: Great Chain of Being and Great Chain of Being, R. Fludd, 1619 (Wikimedia). Accessed 9/1/2025.

[7] See Mirror for Magistrates Volume 1 and Volume 2. HathiTrust. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[8] See present edition of Henry V, 830, 4.1.98.

[9] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare …, Vol. 1. London: William Pickering, 1849; “Notes on Romeo and Juliet,” 155. “Romeo and Juliet.” Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[10] On the four elements as ancient cosmography construes them, see Steven M Carr’s “The Four Elements in Greek Cosmology.” See also “Elements and Atoms.” Lemoyne U, Prof. Emeritus Carmen Giunta. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[11] In Classical, Ciceronian rhetoric, the term “inventio(n)” refers to the means whereby one arrives at “what to say.” It’s how you figure out what you want to say or write. See, for example, Thoughtco.com’s “The Rhetorical Canons” and Gideon O. Burton of BYU’s “Topics of Invention.” Accessed 9/1/2025.

[12] This is not to say that Coleridge’s Romantic epistemology was available in its specifically modern form to the Early Modern author Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s time, the faculty of “imagination” was thought of as being basically combinatory, not as the Godlike creative power that it would be transformed into during the age of the English Romantics. However, we cansuggest that the general notion of “speech acts that create reality” is at least as old as the Hebrew Bible. The Romantics did not invent the concept—it would make more sense to say that they looked backwards at the ancient conception and modernized it.

[13] Excepting those times when Shakespeare’s plays were, in fact, performed in front of actual monarchs since, after all, Queen Elizabeth I and James I did have the pleasure of taking in the occasional play.

[14] The Norton editor’s footnote 3 for pg. 791 points out that “zero” is what’s meant by “a crooked figure.”

[15] See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV. In this fourteenth chapter, Coleridge uses the excellent phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[16] The “reality-effect” (if one agrees to use that term) is easier to generate with film—see, for example, Kenneth Branagh’s film Henry V, with its remarkable battle scenes. Whether or not they are historically accurate, the film’s battle representations are compelling. Still, it’s possible to achieve something like this effect in live theater, and many critics and audiences would probably agree that there are also “intellectual” or reflective benefits to experiencing live theater that are harder to achieve with film.

[17] The term “kindly” could also mean “in accordance with its nature or kind.”

[18] See Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 406-53. Theseus’s comments occur at 444, 5.1.14-17.

[19] On supplementarity as a philosophical topic, see mainly Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, especially the chapters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Orig. pub. 1976. ISBN-13: 978-1421419954.

[20] See the entry “Salic Law of Succession” in Britannica.com. See also Margaret Wood’s Library of Congress blog entry “Happy Birthday William: Shakespeare, Henry V and Salic Law.” Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[21] Henry V’s claim stems from Edward III’s mother, Isabella of France (1295-1358), daughter of the French King Philip IV (r. 1285-1314) and Joan I of Navarre (r. 1274-1305). Henry V was of course the son of Henry IV (r. 1399-1413), son of Edward’s third surviving son, John of Gaunt (1340-1399). On such genealogies, see, for example, Historic-UK.com’s “Historic Kings and Queens of Britain,” Royal.Uk’s “Kings and Queens,” and Englishmonarchs.co.uk’s “English Monarchs – Kings and Queens.” See also this commentator’s “English Monarchy Timeline.” All accessed 9/1/2025.

[22] It’s good to remember that there were three Dauphins (the French term analogous to the English title for heirs to the throne, “Prince/Princess of Wales”) in quick succession during the time covered by Shakespeare’s Henry V. The Dauphin referred to in the first part of the play—the one who gave Henry tennis balls for a guest gift—is Louis, Duke of Guyenne. He died of dysentery in December 1415. Next came John, who died in April 1417. Finally came Charles, Dauphin from 1417-1422, who would become Charles VII, King of France in October 1422 upon the death of Charles VI. See Britannica.com’s entry “Charles VII, King of France.” Accessed 9/1/2025.

[23] On tennis, see “The Royal & Ancient Game of Tennis: A Short History” at uscourttennis.org. As for tennis balls, see this entry, “The History of Tennis Balls,” at tennisplayer.net. Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[24] How can we fail to notice the extreme threats of violence that keep getting voiced in this play? War has alwaysbeen about doing damage to civilians, going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Assyrians, and earlier. What today we call “collateral damage” may or may not be intentional in any particular instance, but in a larger strategic context, it is surely not incidental; it may even be essential. Medieval war was largely about wearing down the capacity of a people to support long-term struggles, and it’s difficult to see how any other description of modern warfare would be appropriate.

[25] On the so-called Cambridge or Southampton plot of 1415, see “The Cambridge Plot” at Britainexpress.com. See also “The Southampton Plot” at Hampshirehistory.com. Both accessed 9/1/2025. Finally, see T. B. Pugh’s Henry V and the Southampton Plot. Sutton Pub. LTD, 1988.

[26] In The Poetics, Aristotle stresses only the “unity of action” (i.e. the unity of the plot events). Insistence on adhering to a very narrow conception of a play’s temporal and spatial setting was a latter-day preoccupation.

[27] On the possible significance of the name “Nym,” Wikipedia’s entry “Corporal Nym” suggests that it derives from the verb “nim” (to take) and is related to “nimble” in the sense of “quick.” Nym is, after all, a thief who ends up being hanged for his misdeeds in Henry V. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[28] The theory of the humors traces back to the Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE): the four humors or bodily fluids are black bile (associated with the element earth), yellow bile (associated with fire), phlegm (associated with water), and blood (associated with air). Balanced amounts of these fluids in the body were thought to maintain health and good temperament. An excess of the first-mentioned (black bile) could make a person depressed or irritable; excess of the second (yellow bile) angry, ill-tempered; excess of the third (phlegm) taciturn, unemotional; excess of the fourth (blood) cheerful, amorous or bold, sometimes to the point of lechery or foolhardiness. See also “Funny Medicine: Hippocrates and the Four Humours” (Vaccines Work), which offers an excellent summary and diagram. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[29] See Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. published in 1957.

[30] See Psalm 23. Geneva Bible, Biblegateway.com. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[31] See “Charles VI, King of France” at Britannica.com. Charles was sickly, and suffered from bouts of madness. There is no trace of that historical background, however, in Shakespeare’s treatment of Charles, though he is portrayed as a rather weak, fearful monarch. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[32] Edward the Black Prince was the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, father of Richard II, and grand-uncle of Henry V.

[33] Exeter refers to King Henry’s uncle, Thomas Beaufort, 1st Duke of Exeter (1377-1426). See “Duke of Exeter” at Shakespeareandhistory.com. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[34] The last dozen or so lines of Book 2 of The Odyssey offer a fine example of Homeric attention to the skill and grace involved in sailing an ancient ship. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Books, 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0140268867.

[35] Henry’s words are surely a “set speech” of the sort that historians themselves used until the advent of modern historiography. In other words, Shakespeare ascribes to Henry a speech that he might plausibly have given, based on a general understanding of war and the circumstances at hand.

[36] Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95. Falstaff says, “I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s / not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for / the town’s end to beg during life” (690, 5.3.35-37).

[37] A “plain-song” is church music, but perhaps the idea is that Pistol adapts a melody to martial words.

[38] Oral history sometimes makes it possible to give us a remarkable sense for the ordinary person’s angle on things. Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (The New Press, repr. 2004) addresses through oral history the experience of the men and women who participated in World War II.

[39] See Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840.

[40] “Havoc!” was a call issued by a military commander for his troops to engage in pillaging. King Henry is all but making this war cry before the battle if his troops hear what he is saying to Harfleur’s exhausted defenders. Nearly everything he mentions as licit in the context of “Havoc!” would be a war crime today: deliberate targeting of violence toward civilians and civilian structures; use of rape as a tool of war; stealing and other crimes, etc. See Etymonline’s gloss on havoc. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[41] As for the role Katherine de Valois in later English history, see “Catherine of Valois, Queen Consort of England.” Englishmonarchs.co.uk. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[42] With regard to populations of France and England in medieval times, figures vary across several demographic websites. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry “Medieval Demography.” Accessed 9/1/2025.

[43] The French Herald, Montjoy, was essentially a courier and spokesman/agent for Charles VI. On the French nobility generally, see “Nobility and Titles in France.” Heraldica.org. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[44] English chroniclers and Shakespeare tend to cast the French in a negative light as in the present scene. But see “Nobility and Titles in France.” Heraldica.org (accessed 9/1/2025) for a more objective view on, for example, the different conceptions of nobility between France and England. A good popular study of medieval France is Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France. Basic Books, 2024. ISBN-13: 978-1541604759.

[45] According to Geoffrey Bullough’s source work, the inspiration for King Henry’s nighttime visit to his troops may have been an episode involving Germanicus in the Annals of Tacitus. See Annals II.12. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed 9/1/2025. Bullough, Geoffrey, editor. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. IV. Later English History Plays: King John, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia UP, 1966, first pub. 1962. See pp. 362-63. Bullough’s edition of the Annals references the location differently.

[46] Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Trans. John Florio, 1603. Book 2, Ch. 1. Montaigne’s Essays, trans. J. Florio 1603 (Internet Archive) or Gutenberg e-text. The quotes occur at the beginning of the essay. Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[47] In Laurence Olivier’s 1946 film production of Henry V, the irascible Captain Fluellen practically shouts this otherwise sage advice, which renders it ridiculous and worse than useless.

[48] Voltaire’s famous satirical fiction Candide (1759) abounds in evidence of people’s casual inhumanity to one another.

[49] With regard to key matters pertaining to the treatment of soldiers, see “Medieval and early modern soldiers.” National Archives, UK. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[50] Henry V’s view may not quite add up to a “divine right theory of kingship,” but something of that sort, at least in partial or inchoate form, has long been common among monarchs. In more recent times, a good example of fully developed “divine right theory” would be King James I’s True Law of Free Monarchyand Basilikon Doron. Both texts available through EEBO/U-Mich. Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[51] The introspectiveness of Richard II and Macbeth leaps immediately to mind.

[52] Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95. See 668-70, 3.2.29-91.

[53] Shakespeare, William. ibid. See 669, 3.2.63.

[54] Shakespeare, William. ibid. See 636, 1.2.188-90, 192.

[55] It is commonly noted that during the Middle Ages, a person’s identity was spoken about mainly in terms of his or her social ties and obligations. Today, we tend to think of personal identity as being formed as much by forces inherent within the individual as by any external influences.

[56] On the development of this theory, see Ernest Kantorowicz’s 1959 book, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology. With regard to Thomas More’s Utopia, his narrator, in the book’s final chapter (titled “Of the Religions of the Utopians”) questions Raphael Hythloday’s enthusiasm for the communistic utopian society he visited on the grounds that such a society must lack “splendor” and “majesty,” which he calls “the true ornaments of a nation.” See More, Thomas. Utopia. Ed. Henry Morley. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[57] See, for example, Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Arthurian long poem Idylls of the King. A king is to seek “glory gained, and evermore to gain.” The Camelot Project. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[58] See “Battle of Crécy” and “Battle of Poitiers.” Britannica.com. Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[59] On the issue of “the law of war” in connection with this incident and more broadly, see Leslie C. Green’s “The Law of War in Historical Perspective.” International Law Studies, Vol. 72. Liber Amicorum Prof. Jack Grunawalt. Ed. Michael N. Schmitt. Green’s excellent, detailed study demonstrates that the Chivalric Codes grounded in the knightly concern for honor that prevailed in Europe were well developed and that in England, there were laws in place beyond that chivalric code—i.e. covering common infantrymen, not only knights—going at least as far back as 1385 during the reign of Richard II, when he set forth his doctrine “Articles of War.” Accessed 9/1/2025.

[60] See Capt. Anthony A. Contrada, “Practice Notes–Law and the Morality of War Today in Henry V.” In The Army Lawyer, Issue 3, 2020. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[61] See Agincourt Castle image in the article “Can we follow Henry’s route today?” Agincourt600.com. See also the YouTube documentary video “Secrets of Agincourt.” Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[62] See “Mary de Bohun” entry at Englishmonarchs.co.uk. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[63] See Britannica’s entry “The Battle of Agincourt.” This source gives the English losses at perhaps 400 men, not 25 as Shakespeare has the total. For the French losses, the source gives the figure of 6,000, “many of whom were noblemen.” See also historian Mike Loades on History Hit: “Historian Mike Loades Debunks ‘The Agincourt Myth’.” Oct. 24, 2021. YouTube.com. Both accessed 9/1/2025. Loades takes apart some of the myths and nationalist propaganda that still haunt “Agincourt.” He sees it as essentially an act of “land piracy” on the part of the English—not a great national crusade; he also says that the forces of the English and French were much less lopsided than claimed and that the English army had benefited from reinforcements, etc.

[64] See Psalm 115. Geneva Bible. Biblegateway.com. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[65] See Rev. J. Franck Bright’s A History of England: Medieval Monarchy, pg. 298.Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[66] The Norton editors point out the relevant date and circumstances in footnote 7 on 848. See also “Henry V: The Scourge of God.”Medievalhistory.info. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[67] On Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and his rebellion against Elizabeth I, see “Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex.” Royal Museums Greenwich. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[68] See “Saint David’s Day.” Museum.Wales. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[69] Henry V present edition, see 837, 4.3.57-59.

[70] Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. See Chapter 2, “Economy.” Project Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9/1/2025.

[71] The peace process involved the Treaty of Troyes (1420; Britannica.com) in which Henry took for his wife Charles VI’s young daughter Katherine of Valois and was recognized as heir to the French throne. Then came the Treaty of Amiens among Burgundy (led by Philip the Good, r. 1419-67), Brittany, and England (1423; Wikipedia.org), though both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422. After that, it’s on to the events that would see the French win the Hundred Years’ War by 1453, and the English, under Henry VI, lose the French territories that they had won during Henry V’s reign. Both accessed 9/1/2025.

[72] Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 673-731. See 715, 4.1.92-94.

Commentaries onShakespeare’s History Plays

INTRODUCTION: HENRY V AND TUDOR PRIDE