Shakespeare\u2019s Henry V Commentary by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.<\/title><meta name= \"description\" content= \"Henry V commentary addresses major themes, major characters such as Sir John Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, Fluellen, sources, literary analysis, drama theory.\"><\/head><\/p>\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">Commentaries on Shakespeare’s History Plays<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-btn__default-btn uagb-btn-tablet__default-btn uagb-btn-mobile__default-btn uagb-block-4f6cdd05 uag-hide-mob\"><div class=\"uagb-buttons__wrap uagb-buttons-layout-wrap \">\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-dcba7b2a wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">HOME<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-9ae5aeea wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/my-olli-courses-at-unlv\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">OLLI<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-2368e1c6 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/shakespeare-questions\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">QUESTIONS<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-040dd0bb wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/shakespeare-commentaries\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">COMMENTARIES<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-57f86fdb wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/shakespeare-audio\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">AUDIO<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-1b812369 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/shakespeare-guides\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">GUIDES<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-d5da63d7 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/shakespeare-links\/\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">LINKS<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-btn__default-btn uagb-btn-tablet__default-btn uagb-btn-mobile__default-btn uagb-block-19d28286\"><div class=\"uagb-buttons__wrap uagb-buttons-layout-wrap \">\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-69502be5 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act1\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 1<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-0ec42142 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act2\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 2<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-6ac70dcb wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act3\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 3<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-bfd6ecc9 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act4\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 4<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-55716ff6 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#act5\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ACT 5<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-uagb-buttons-child uagb-buttons__outer-wrap uagb-block-0246bad9 wp-block-button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__wrapper\"><a class=\"uagb-buttons-repeater wp-block-button__link\" aria-label=\"\" href=\"#endnotes\" rel=\"follow noopener\" target=\"_self\" role=\"button\"><div class=\"uagb-button__link\">ENDNOTES<\/div><\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nShakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth.<\/em> Folio. (The Norton Shakespeare: Histories,<\/em> 3rd ed. 790-857.)<\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare Sources & Resources:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsc.org.uk\/henry-v\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">RSC Resources<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/internetshakespeare.uvic.ca\/Library\/Texts\/H5\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ISE Resources<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.shakespeare-online.com\/sources\/henryvsources.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">S-O Sources<\/a>\u00a0| <a href=\"https:\/\/www.folger.edu\/explore\/shakespeare-in-print\/first-folio\/bookreader-68\/\">1623 Folio 425-51 (Folger)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/babel.hathitrust.org\/cgi\/pt?id=hvd.32044004536116&seq=193\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Holinshed\u2019sChronicles & Plays Compared: Henry V<\/em><\/a>\u00a0| <a href=\"https:\/\/english.nsms.ox.ac.uk\/holinshed\/texts.php?text1=1587_5095#p11004\">Holinshed\u2019s Chronicles \u2026<\/em> Henry V<\/em><\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebo\/A13333.0001.001\/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext\">Tacitus\u2019s Annals,<\/em> \u201cGermanie\u201d Bk. I.13-14, II.3-5 (tr. R. Grenewey, 1598)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/internetshakespeare.uvic.ca\/doc\/FV_Q1\/complete\/index.html\">Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth<\/em> (1598)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldhistory.org\/Battle_of_Agincourt\/\">Battle of Agincourt<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\nEncyclopedias\/Lexica:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/event\/Peasants-Revolt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Britannica.com<\/a> <\/strong>| <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldhistory.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">World History Encyclopedia<\/a> <\/strong>| <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wiktionary.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wiktionary<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perseus.tufts.edu\/hopper\/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0068\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">C. T. Onions\u2019 Shakespeare Dictionary<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perseus.tufts.edu\/hopper\/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0079:entry=Account2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">A. Schmidt\u2019s Shakespeare Dictionary<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/shakespearenetwork.net\/works\/concordance\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Concordance (Shakespeare Network)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nComprehensive Shakespeare:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.folger.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Folger Shakespeare Library<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsc.org.uk\/shakespeares-plays\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">RSC Shakespeare\u2019s Plays<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shakespeare-online.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Shakespeare-Online (Mabillard)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/internetshakespeare.uvic.ca\/m\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Internet Shakespeare Editions (U-Vic)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nText\/Media Repositories:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">U-Penn Books Page<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/english.nsms.ox.ac.uk\/Holinshed\/reign.php?edition=1587\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Holinshed Project<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebogroup\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Early English Books (EEBO)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.luminarium.org\/renascence-editions\/ren.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Renascence\/Luminarium<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gutenberg<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hathitrust.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">HathiTrust<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Internet Archive<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.digitale-sammlungen.de\/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">M\u00fcnchen Digital Lib. (MDZ)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikisource<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nEnglish & European Royals:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/english-monarchy-timeline\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">English Monarchy Timeline (Drake)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.englishmonarchs.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">English Monarchs<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historic-uk.com\/HistoryUK\/KingsQueensofBritain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Kings & Queens of Britain (Historic-UK)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historic-uk.com\/HistoryUK\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Historic-UK.com<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shakespeareandhistory.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Shakespeare <\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.shakespeareandhistory.com\/\">& History<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/thehistoryofengland.co.uk\/resource\/wars-of-the-roses-family-trees\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Family Trees: Edward III \/ Neville \/ Percy (Hist. of Eng.)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900\/Lovell,_Thomas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford)<\/a> |<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/A_General_and_Heraldic_Dictionary_of_the\/qRUYAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Burke\u2019s Peerage<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/europeanroyalhistory.wordpress.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">European Royal History<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historic-uk.com\/HistoryUK\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">French Rulers 840 CE to Present (Thoughtco)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nHundred Years\u2019 War: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.medievalists.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Medievalists.net<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/event\/Hundred-Years-War\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">100 Years\u2019 War (Britannica)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldhistory.org\/Hundred_Years'_War\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">100 Years\u2019 War (WHE)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/thehundredyearswar.co.uk\/timeline-hundred-years-war\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">100 Years\u2019 War Timeline<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nWars of the Roses:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.warsoftheroses.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wars of the Roses.com<\/a> | <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.warsoftheroses.com\/people\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Key People<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.warsoftheroses.com\/origins-of-the-wars-of-the-roses\/battle-timeline-of-the-wars-of-the-roses\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Battles Timeline<\/a> <\/strong>| <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.britishbattles.com\/wars-of-the-roses\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Battles (Brit. Battles)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.battlefieldstrust.com\/wotrmemorial\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Battles (Battlefields Trust)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/richardiii.net\/richard-iii-his-world\/the-war-of-the-roses\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">R3 Society: Wars of the Roses<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/r3.org\/timeline\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">R3 House of York Timeline<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/period\/medieval\/wars-of-the-roses-york-lancaster-henry-tudor-vi-who-what-when-facts-how-long\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">History Extra<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Tudors: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tudorsociety.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tudor Society<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/tudorhistory.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TudorHistory.org<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.english-heritage.org.uk\/learn\/story-of-england\/tudors\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Tudors (Eng-Heritage UK)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elizabethan.org\/compendium\/home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Life in Elizabethan England (M. Secara)<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elizabethan-era.org.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Elizabethan Era.org<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">INTRODUCTION: HENRY V AND TUDOR PRIDE<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nShakespeare\u2019s ideal sovereign seems to have been Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603). <a href=\"#_edn1\" id=\"_ednref1\">[1]<\/a> Elizabeth knew how to engage in politics like a Machiavellian operator, but this strong sovereign was also genuinely revered by many of her people. <a href=\"#_edn2\" id=\"_ednref2\">[2]<\/a> Shakespeare himself (1564-1616) lived most of his life in the time of her iconic reign.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Tudor Elizabeth I\u2019s long tenure was marked by what today we would call a shrewd concern for public relations\u2014that is, for managing the Queen\u2019s image and keeping the various segments of the populace favorable towards her policies. The \u201cCult of the Virgin Queen\u201d encouraged by Elizabeth\u2019s 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\u2019s Catholic King Philip II (r. 1556-98).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry V, the subject of the present drama, must have been high on the playwright\u2019s 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\u2019s first wife Blanche of Lancaster. So Bolingbroke\u2019s son, upon ascending the throne in 1413 at the age of 26 as Henry V, continued the Lancastrian line.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThat 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\u2019s 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. <a href=\"#_edn3\" id=\"_ednref3\">[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt would be natural, then, for Shakespeare, who partly follows Raphael Holinshed\u2019s Tudor-friendly Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland <\/em>(1586), <a href=\"#_edn4\" id=\"_ednref4\">[4]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nModern historicist critics have offered a counter-reading that sees deep irony at work in Henry V. <\/em>It\u2019s 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<\/em> for its willingness to applaud a king whom Hazlitt considers a brute bent on imperial conquest. <a href=\"#_edn5\" id=\"_ednref5\">[5]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nStill, it\u2019s difficult to see how the most valued member of the Lord Chamberlain\u2019s Men during Elizabeth I\u2019s reign and then of the King\u2019s 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\u2019s prime image of earthly order: the Great Chain of Being, wherein everything has its place and God sanctions the order of things. <a href=\"#_edn6\" id=\"_ednref6\">[6]<\/a> He is unlikely to have been sympathetic to republicanism or some other alternative to monarchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is not to say that Shakespeare is a shameless mouthpiece for the powers that be. We can see from Henry V<\/em> and other plays that he doesn\u2019t 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<\/em> (the title of a moralist work that went through a number of editions around Shakespeare\u2019s time). <a href=\"#_edn7\" id=\"_ednref7\">[7]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare never tears the institution of kingship down, but in the end the advice Henry V himself gives in our play holds good: \u201cthe King is but a man.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn8\" id=\"_ednref8\">[8]<\/a> And a \u201cman,\u201d 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\u2019s canon, and they never fare well. But this leads us to a consideration of Henry V as a character.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRomantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Lectures on Shakespeare,<\/em> have written about the way many of this playwright\u2019s characters manage to be both strong individuals and yet representatives of a class of people. Coleridge writes in an essay on Romeo and Juliet,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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,\u2014just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,\u2014so it is nearly as much so in old age. <a href=\"#_edn9\" id=\"_ednref9\">[9]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nColeridge implies that there is something universal about the Nurse\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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 <\/em>& II Henry IV<\/em> plus Henry V<\/em>), Shakespeare allows \u201cPrince Hal\u201d 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\u2019s Henry V is neither a saintly or perfect ruler, nor is he a full-on sociopath, but something in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">PROLOGUE TO ACT 1<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 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 \u201ca muse of fire,\u201d but since that cannot be, the Chorus asks the audience members to use their own imaginations, thereby filling out the scene.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare\u2019s most iconic Prologue begins with the Chorus wishing for the impossible: \u201cOh, 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\u201d (Prologue 1.0.1-4). What might Shakespeare mean by \u201cmuse of fire\u201d? Some reference to ancient and Renaissance cosmography may help establish parameters for understanding. In such cosmography, for example in Aristotle\u2019s conception of the universe, a \u201csphere of fire\u201d (fire is the purest element, above air, earth, and water) surrounded the earth and sat just below the heavens. <a href=\"#_edn10\" id=\"_ednref10\">[10]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis suggests that anyone who can access a \u201cmuse of fire\u201d would be able to go beyond the changeable, corruptible \u201csublunary\u201d realm of earth (i.e., the realm \u201cbeneath the moon\u201d) and access the \u201cbrightest heaven of invention,\u201d <a href=\"#_edn11\" id=\"_ednref11\">[11]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSomething 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 \u201cKubla Khan.\u201d 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: \u201cIn Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree,\u201d as the poem\u2019s famous opening declares. <a href=\"#_edn12\" id=\"_ednref12\">[12]<\/a> In Henry V, <\/em>the Chorus-speaker would like the playwright to create actual kingdoms and monarchs out of the stuff of his own imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut 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 \u201cmuse of fire\u201d 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,<\/em> not limited to the physical properties of the stage and its environs.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat, then, are the resources available to us in this joint enterprise\u2014resources that can maximize the experience for us assembled non-monarchs? <a href=\"#_edn13\" id=\"_ednref13\">[13]<\/a> Well, \u201cmay we cram \/ Within this wooden O the very casques \/ That did affright the air at Agincourt?\u201d (791, 1.0.12-14) No, but therein lies a hint. Just as a zero (\u201ca crooked figure\u201d) <a href=\"#_edn14\" id=\"_ednref14\">[14]<\/a> can be added to another number and multiply it tenfold until in a compact space they may represent \u201ca million\u201d (791, 1.0.16), so the actors, in themselves no more substantial than \u201cciphers\u201d or zeros, may exercise a profound effect on our \u201cimaginary forces\u201d (791, 1.0.18).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThey may, that is, create something very like reality\u2014something that may produce an astonishingly robust \u201creality effect\u201d 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 \u201cwilling suspension of disbelief\u201d\u2014 <a href=\"#_edn15\" id=\"_ednref15\">[15]<\/a> 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\u2014melts away, leaving us in the spellbinding and yet liberating presence of something we respond to as if, or almost as if, it were reality <\/em>itself. It\u2019s likely that many audience members have experienced this at a well-performed play. <a href=\"#_edn16\" id=\"_ednref16\">[16]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nOf 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\u2019s Prologue, <\/em>with its Chorus-speaker\u2019s call \u201cGently to hear, kindly to judge our play\u201d (Prol. 1.0.34). That call asks us for two things: it asks for strong exercise of imagination, but also for civility. <\/em>It promotes a genteel ethos by which we may judge a play \u201ckindly,\u201d meaning (in part) in a spirit of kinship<\/em> with the actors and the playwright who have poured so much effort into their presentation. <a href=\"#_edn17\" id=\"_ednref17\">[17]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAfter the Prologue of Henry V <\/em>itself, Theseus, Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, <\/em>makes a strong, if indirect, case for this combined responsibility on the audience\u2019s part. At the end of the play, Theseus focuses on the playwright or poet\u2019s own role as setting the audience up to succeed: he says that as for tales told by a fanciful poet, \u201cimagination bodies forth \/ The forms of things unknown\u201d and then the artist\u2019s \u201cpen \/ Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing \/ A local habitation and a name.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn18\" id=\"_ednref18\">[18]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe rest, however, is almost entirely up to the audience, or reader. But Theseus\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cciphers\u201d on the stage, or even the work\u2019s creator.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat, finally, is the use of the Chorus-speaker\u2019s 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 \u201csupply\u201d (791, 1.0.30) to our efforts, as a supplement of sorts\u2014presumably meaning both as an addition to those complete efforts and a supply of something they lack. <a href=\"#_edn19\" id=\"_ednref19\">[19]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nMuch 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\u2019s injunction \u201cGently to hear \u2026 our play\u201d reminds us that we are, indeed, dealing with an experience grounded in words. <\/em>We are not watching a dumb-show or a series of painting-like tableaux; we are hearing<\/em> a play, just as the Chorus-speaker reminds us.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat, then, is the role of language in generating the playgoer\u2019s total experience? What is the role of words in relation to imagination? This is something to ponder since it\u2019s 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\u2014words fail his characters as often as they save or assist.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAs for the Chorus-speaker\u2019s words and presence, perhaps a key goal on Shakespeare\u2019s 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\u2014an excellent early neoclassical precept\u2014so 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act1\">ACT 1<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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: \u201cConsideration like an angel came \/ And whipped th\u2019offending Adam out of him, \/ Leaving his body as a paradise \/ T\u2019envelop and contain celestial spirits \u2026\u201d (792, 1.1.28-31).<\/p>\n\n\n\nTheir 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, \u201cWe lose the better half of our possession\u201d (792, 1.1.8), consisting of the Church\u2019s secular holdings in England.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGiving the new king money to wage war in France would be a good investment: Canterbury proposes that with regard to France, the Church should \u201cgive a greater sum \/ Than ever at one time the clergy yet \/ Did to his predecessors part withal\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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\u2019s insulting gift of tennis balls; Henry gives a chilling response, and tells his lords to prepare for war.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 1, Scene 2, the priests cite a confusing historical record to refute the Salic law barring claims based on a female\u2019s rights <a href=\"#_edn20\" id=\"_ednref20\">[20]<\/a> \u2014Edward 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\u2019s claim started the Hundred Years\u2019 War on the Continent, which lasted on and off from 1337-1453. Now, the French say Henry V\u2019s claim is similarly disabled since it was based on Edward III\u2019s, which they refused to recognize as valid. <a href=\"#_edn21\" id=\"_ednref21\">[21]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nUndaunted, Canterbury brings to bear eminently forgettable tidbits such as \u201cKing P\u00e9pin, which depos\u00e8d Childeric, \/ Did as heir general\u2014being descended \/ Of Blithild, which was daughter to King Clothair\u2014 \/ Make claim and title to the crown of France\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat matters is now<\/em>, so Canterbury is comfortable making light of the musty old foundation for current claims. As he says, \u201cSo that, as clear as is the summer\u2019s sun, \/ King P\u00e9pin\u2019s title and Hugh Capet\u2019s claim, \/ King Louis his satisfaction, all appear \/ To hold in right and title of the female\u201d (795-96, 1.2.86-89). \u201cWhat\u2019s sauce for the goose,\u201d as the saying goes, \u201cis sauce for the gander.\u201d Canterbury insists that Henry V must take his place amongst the English kings who have asserted their claim to France. Henry\u2019s fellow monarchs, says his uncle Exeter, \u201cexpect that you should rouse yourself \/ As did the former lions of your blood\u201d (796, 1.2.123-24).<\/p>\n\n\n\nKing Henry is quickly resolved to do precisely this, and Canterbury tells him to take one fourth of England\u2019s available troops to France to prosecute his claim. The rest will stay at home and take care of important menaces, such as\u2014in Westmorland\u2019s phrasing\u2014\u201cthe weasel Scot \u2026\u201d (797, 1.2.70), who is sure to come marauding once the King sails for France. Henry agrees, and declares, \u201cFrance being ours, we\u2019ll bend it to our awe, \/ Or break it all to pieces\u201d (798, 1.2.225-26).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe King calls in the waiting French ambassadors, who will deliver to him a little gift from the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin. <a href=\"#_edn22\" id=\"_ednref22\">[22]<\/a> 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\u2019s audience members will know from the delightful Henry IV <\/em>plays in which \u201cPrince Hal,\u201d close companion of Sir John Falstaff, causes his father great anxiety before finally taking on the responsibility that properly belongs to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Dauphin\u2019s mocking claim is that the wastrel \u201cHal\u201d is still<\/em> playing games\u2014thus the trunk full of tennis balls. At least tennis is an eminently French <\/em>game, as it developed from a medieval sport called jeu de paume, <\/em>which is somewhat like handball. Anyway, the Dauphin offers this gift along with the contemptuous admonition, \u201clet the dukedoms that you claim \/ Hear no more of you.\u201d (799, 1.2.257-58). <a href=\"#_edn23\" id=\"_ednref23\">[23]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nKing Henry\u2019s bold response stuns the court: he concludes it with, \u201ctell the Dauphin \/ His jest will savor but of shallow wit \/ When thousands weep more than did laugh at it\u201d (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 <\/em>who the Dauphin thinks he is\u2014not anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhether 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. <a href=\"#_edn24\" id=\"_ednref24\">[24]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act2\">ACT 2<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 2.0, Chorus (800-01, the Chorus says King Henry V\u2019s 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Chorus for Act 2 sets forth a tableau in which \u201call the youth of England are on fire\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJust 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 \u201cgreeted as liberators\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKing Henry\u2019s 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. <a href=\"#_edn25\" id=\"_ednref25\">[25]<\/a> They\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe King has traveled to the port town of Southampton, where we playgoers will be expected to imagine ourselves\u2014after an initial trip to London\u2019s Eastcheap where Falstaff\u2019s favorite tavern lies, and he lies sick within it\u2014while we wait for the potentially dire murder plot to be resolved. Then it will be off with us to France, with a \u201cgentle pass\u201d (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.<a href=\"#_edn26\" id=\"_ednref26\">[26]<\/a> He will bypass all strictures on time and place while causing no stomach upsets on the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll in all, we moderns may feel a bit like the first visitors to Agincourt Park: <\/em>able to observe and enjoy what present themselves as scenes of heroism and carnage at no risk to ourselves. The fearsome \u201cBattle of Agincourt\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 2, Scene 1 (801-04, in Eastcheap, Henry\u2019s old companions Pistol and Nym nearly come to blows over debts and Pistol\u2019s wife, Hostess Quickly; Bardolph stops their quarreling; the Hostess reports that Falstaff is mortally ill.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 2, Scene 1, Pistol and Nym <a href=\"#_edn27\" id=\"_ednref27\">[27]<\/a> 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, \u201cBase is the slave that pays\u201d (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).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHostess Quickly informs everyone that Falstaff is dying, telling them, \u201cAs 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\u201d (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, \u201cThe King hath run bad humours on the knight\u201d (804, 2.1.113). <a href=\"#_edn28\" id=\"_ednref28\">[28]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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\u2019s sentence is just; Henry turns his attention to preparations for war in France.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 2, Scene 2, Scrope, Grey and Cambridge\u2019s treason is revealed before Henry\u2019s 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, \u201cThe mercy that was quick in us but late \/ By your own counsel is suppressed and killed\u201d (805-06, 2.2.77-78).<\/p>\n\n\n\nScrope\u2019s participation in the dastardly plot is most painful of all to Henry, since the two men were apparently close friends. Henry laments, \u201cMay it be possible that foreign hire \/ Could out of thee extract one spark of evil \/ That might annoy my finger?\u201d (806, 2.2.98-100).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe best Henry can do here is to understand that the doctrine we know as \u201cthe King\u2019s two bodies\u201d must be applied: that is, the ordinary mortal \u201cHenry\u201d doesn\u2019t 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. <a href=\"#_edn29\" id=\"_ednref29\">[29]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nKing Henry explains to the condemned men, \u201cTouching our person seek we no revenge, \/ But we our kingdom\u2019s safety must so tender, \/ Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws \/ We do deliver you\u201d (807, 2.2.173-76). With this declaration, Henry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 2, Scene 3 (808-09, King Henry\u2019s 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 2, Scene 3, Pistol tells the tavern audience that Falstaff is dead. In practical terms, he says, that means \u201cwe must earn therefore\u201d (808, 2.3.6). They must fend for themselves, not depend on the knight to do their planning for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHostess Quickly speaks with great affection about Falstaff, and recounts his dying moments, ending with \u201call was as cold as any stone\u201d (808, 2.2.23; see 9-23). He makes his last vow of repentance\u2014we may remember his fitful excursions towards remorse in the other Henry <\/em>plays and Merry Wives<\/em>\u2014and seems to be as serious as his tenuous hold on reality will allow. As the Norton editor\u2019s footnote 4 to pg. 808 points out, Sir John, though the Hostess doesn\u2019t recognize the text, recites part of Psalm<\/em> 23, Verse 2 of which in the Geneva Bible<\/em> runs \u201cHe maketh me to rest in green pasture, and leadeth me by the still waters.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn30\" id=\"_ednref30\">[30]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nTouching as this recounting is, old Sir John is a remnant of King Henry\u2019s past. In a sense, \u201cHal,\u201d too, is dead, succeeded by an austere young man wielding a king\u2019s awesome power. The text affords Falstaff\u2019s companions\u2014and us, the audience\u2014our moment of grief, and then we must let him go. It has been a long odyssey for Jack Falstaff, from I & II Henry IV<\/em>\u2014his happier times\u2014to The Merry Wives of Windsor, <\/em>wherein the impecuniousness that began in II Henry IV<\/em> makes him meaner than we want him to be, and finally to heartbreak, silence, and death in Henry V.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nPistol\u2019s intentions about the wars to come are none too honorable: he says, \u201cLet us to France, like horseleeches, my boys, \/ To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 2, Scene 4 (809-12, the French King Charles VI and his advisers plan France\u2019s defense against Henry V\u2019s English forces; Henry\u2019s uncle Exeter presents Charles VI with his nephew\u2019s claim to the French throne; as England\u2019s ambassador, Exeter threatens Charles VI and his court, and hurls defiance at the Dauphin\u2019s earlier gift of tennis balls; in council, Charles takes Exeter\u2019s demands seriously but does not answer immediately.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 2, Scene 4, Charles VI, <a href=\"#_edn31\" id=\"_ednref31\">[31]<\/a> who would be late-middle-aged at 47 during the action at Agincourt in 1415, returns his counselors\u2019 memories to the first major strife between France and England: the victories of Edward the Black Prince <a href=\"#_edn32\" id=\"_ednref32\">[32]<\/a> at Cr\u00e9cy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. He sees the continuity of English stock and valor: \u201cThink 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\u201d (810, 2.4.48-52). That is quite a description, one no doubt mingled with fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCharles 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, \u201cfear \/ The native mightiness and fate of him\u201d (803, 2.4.63-64). Most of the French nobility we hear from, however, do not follow the old King\u2019s advice\u2014least of all his hotheaded son and heir, the Dauphin.<\/p>\n\n\n\nExeter <a href=\"#_edn33\" id=\"_ednref33\">[33]<\/a> soon arrives and levies a stern demand on Henry V\u2019s behalf: to the French king, he declares, Henry \u201cbids you then resign \/ Your crown and kingdom, indirectly held \/ From him, the native and true challenger\u201d (811, 2.4.93-95). The Dauphin scorns this demand and tries to justify his earlier gift, saying, \u201cmatching to his youth and vanity, \/ I did present him with the Paris-balls\u201d (812, 2.4.130-31).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe French king doesn\u2019t share the young man\u2019s attitude, and Exeter\u2019s comeback in Henry\u2019s defense is effective: once a prodigal, admits Exeter on Henry\u2019s behalf, \u201cNow he weighs time \/ Even to the utmost grain\u201d (813, 2.4.137-38). No one is playing anymore, at tennis or otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\nExeter\u2019s 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 \u201cto take mercy \/ On the poor souls for whom this hungry war \/ Opens his vasty jaws \u2026\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act3\">ACT 3<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 3.0, Chorus (812-13, the Chorus pictures the setting-out of Henry V\u2019s 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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 \u201cKatherine his daughter, and with her, to dowry, \/ Some petty and unprofitable dukedoms\u201d (813, Chorus 3.0.30-31). Henry rejects this offer as insufficient to justify his efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s a great pleasure to hear the music of the third Chorus, such is the precision and fineness of Shakespeare\u2019s language encouraging us to let our imaginations swell with the fleet\u2019s sails. His Chorus tells us to see \u201cthe threaden sails, \/ Borne with th\u2019invisible and creeping wind, \/ Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea, \/ Breasting the lofty surge\u201d (812-13, 3.0.10-13). This tableau is worthy of Homer\u2019s in The Iliad <\/em>and The Odyssey, <\/em>master of nautical description surpassed by none. <a href=\"#_edn34\" id=\"_ednref34\">[34]<\/a> So, too, the Chorus\u2019s picture of \u201cA city on th\u2019inconstant billows dancing \u2026\u201d (813, 3.0.15).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare\u2019s 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: \u201cFor 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\u201d (814, 3.1.29-32). <a href=\"#_edn35\" id=\"_ednref35\">[35]<\/a> 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\u2019t imagined and giving their lives a higher purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhile Henry\u2019s rhetoric may be sincere\u2014he 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\u2014it\u2019s 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 \u201che that sheds his blood with me \/ Shall be my brother. Be he ne\u2019er so vile, \/ This day shall gentle his condition\u201d (837, 4.3.61-63).<\/p>\n\n\n\nWe must place such stirring rhetoric entailing social betterment next to the \u201cvile\u201d Pistol\u2019s ignoble realism in the current play, or Falstaff\u2019s crass admission in I Henry IV <\/em>that few of his hand-picked \u201cragamuffins\u201d will escape beggary when the fighting ends. <a href=\"#_edn36\" id=\"_ednref36\">[36]<\/a> It isn\u2019t 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\u2019s WWII veterans when the war ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 3, Scene 2, we hear Bardolph excitedly (if probably not honestly) screaming, \u201cOn, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!\u201d (814, 3.2.1) but neither Nym nor Pistol is keen to take him up on the suggestion and enter the battle. Nym complains, \u201cfor mine own part I have not a case of lives,\u201d and Pistol sings a tune beginning with, \u201cAnd sword and shield \/ In bloody field \/ Doth win immortal fame\u201d (814, 3.2.3, 7-9). <a href=\"#_edn37\" id=\"_ednref37\">[37]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThis brief scene gives us the perspective of an ordinary servant, who pins Nym and Pistol as cowards and thieves, saying, \u201cthree \/ such antics do not amount to a man\u201d (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: \u201che hath a killing tongue and a \/ quiet sword, by the means whereof \u2019a breaks words and keeps \/ whole weapons\u201d (815, 3.2.30-32). As for theft, well, the boy says, \u201cNym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in \/ filching \u2026\u201d (815, 3.2.39-40).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe boy\u2019s final judgment of them is succinct: \u201cI must leave them, and seek \/ some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stom- \/ ach, and therefore I must cast it up\u201d (815, 3.3.45-46). Young as he is, he doesn\u2019t want to hitch his wagon to their sin-tarnished, dishonorable star.<\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nShakespeare wants us to reckon not only with the \u201cbig picture\u201d 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\u2019s understanding of human nature as the starting point, at least when the events in question happened lifetimes ago. <a href=\"#_edn38\" id=\"_ednref38\">[38]<\/a> But this isn\u2019t to say that Shakespeare subscribes to a facile relativism: the servant boy\u2019s outing of Pistol and Nym as frauds demonstrates that at least sometimes, it is <\/em>possible to cut through the pretension and the rhetoric and just tell the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 3, Scene 3, the Welsh Captain Fluellen prattles on about military method: \u201cFor, look you, the mines is not according \/ to the disciplines of the war\u201d (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 Irish Captain MacMorris when the latter tells him that \u201cIt is no time to discourse\u201d (816, 3.3.46). MacMorris leans into a quarrel with Fluellen, saying, \u201cI do not know you so good a man as myself. So \/ Chrish save me, I will cut off your head\u201d (816, 3.3.70-71). Fluellen, for his part, seems flummoxed by this kind of talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFluellen is courageous, but he\u2019s also a pure ideologue in his love of war\u2019s 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 \u201clook you, now\u201d and \u201cin your conscience!\u201d) is honorable. Fluellen speaks from an excess of uprightness and national pride, not from unworthy motives, and his over-fondness for talk about \u201cthe disciplines of \u2026 the Roman \/ wars\u201d (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<\/em> the bloody chaos human beings visit on one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 3, Scene 4 (817-18, King Henry threatens Harfleur with merciless outrage and complete destruction if they won\u2019t yield to his forces; Harfleur\u2019s governor admits that the town is \u201cno longer defensible\u201d and surrenders; Henry accepts the surrender and orders that no harm should come to the citizens of Harfleur.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 3, Scene 4, King Henry harangues Harfleur\u2019s defenders, acknowledging war\u2019s stark violence with the shocking advice, \u201cTake pity of your town and of your people \/ Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command\u201d (817, 3.4.28-29). The speech as a whole bristles with references to primal violence: \u201cthe 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\u2019ring infants \u2026\u201d (817, 3.4.11-14). Mass rape is threatened again in the same speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWe are told that if certain conditions are not met, \u201cThe gates of mercy shall be all shut up \u2026\u201d (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: \u201cWhat is it then to me \u2026?\u201d (817, 3.4.15; see also 19) Why should he care if unspeakable outrages should occur? The logic of such talk is, \u201cDon\u2019t make <\/em>me do x! I can\u2019t be held responsible if \u2026!\u201d Nobody forced<\/em> King Henry V to invade France, and it will not do to tell the French defenders of Harfleur, \u201cyou yourselves are cause \u2026\u201d of the atrocities that stand to be committed against them (817, 3.4.19).<\/p>\n\n\n\nStill, Henry says all this, and more, in his attempt to justify potentially giving free reign to the worst impulses in human nature\u2014an attitude we find Shakespeare condemning in his bleakest tragedies. <a href=\"#_edn39\" id=\"_ednref39\">[39]<\/a> The King positions himself aside as conditionally indifferent and hedges his own responsibility by saying the men of Harfleur should capitulate \u201cWhiles yet my soldiers are in my command\u201d (817, 3.4.29).<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt is no doubt true that even the strongest commander lost much of his leverage over his troops once he unleashed them in battle\u2014we are not dealing with a modern army with continuous lines of communication. That fact notwithstanding, King Henry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat King Henry has said delivers to us some pale sense of the dreadful reality that we must contrast with Fluellen\u2019s 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 \u201cHavoc!\u201d is never far from an ancient battlefield. <a href=\"#_edn40\" id=\"_ednref40\">[40]<\/a> But the speech\u2019s strategy works. The couplet-question, \u201cWill you yield and this avoid? \/ Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroyed?\u201d (817, 3.3.42-43) is answered by the men of Harfleur with surrender and the opening of the town gates.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry is a talker, to be sure, but he\u2019s 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 \u201cUse mercy to them all\u201d (818, 3.4.54), while the coming on of winter and illness drives him to declare a temporary retirement to Calais.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 3, Scene 5 (818-19, Princess Katherine of Valois learns some comically indecorous English from her maid Alice.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 3, Scene 5, Katherine and her maid Alice practice their English. This is Agincourt\u2019s lighter side, with deep differences reduced to linguistic felicities and embarrassments, culminating in Katherine\u2019s declaration that certain English words are not only ugly but also \u201ccorruptible, gros, et impudique, et non \/ pour les dames d\u2019honneur d\u2019user<\/em>\u201d (819, 3.5.48-49). She means specifically the English words for le pied <\/em>(\u201cfoot\u201d) and la robe<\/em> (\u201cgown\u201d), which the French ladies mispronounce as foutre <\/em>(\u201cf*ck\u201d) and le con<\/em> (\u201cc*nt\u201d). Their innocence contrasts with the English King\u2019s brazen references to sexuality in his Harfleur speech of Act 3, Scene 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWe also get a sense of what the wars between the English and French mean from a royal woman\u2019s perspective, though here that perspective consists in remaining oblivious. Aside from France itself, Katherine is the prize for King Henry. <a href=\"#_edn41\" id=\"_ednref41\">[41]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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\u2019s acts of generation, calling them \u201ca few sprays of us, \/ The emptying of our fathers\u2019 luxury, Our scions, \/ put in wild and savage stock \u2026\u201d (820, 3.6.5-7). All said, Shakespeare\u2019s high-born Frenchmen put too much stock in their own \u201cstock,\u201d and too much emphasis on words, honor-based catalogs, titles and so forth, and too little on deeds, accomplishments.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKing 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: \u201cGo down upon him\u2014you have power enough\u2014 \/ And in a captive chariot into Rouen \/ Bring him our prisoner\u201d (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\u2019s 3 million or so. <a href=\"#_edn42\" id=\"_ednref42\">[42]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nSome of the Elizabethans\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 3, Scene 7 (821-24, Fluellen and Gower run into Pistol, who puts on soldierly airs and tries to enlist Fluellen on Bardolph\u2019s 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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: \u201clet not Bardolph\u2019s vital thread be cut \/ With edge of penny cord and vile reproach\u201d (822, 3.7.43-44). Fluellen flatly refuses to honor this request: \u201cif, look you, he were my brother, I would desire the Duke [Exeter] to \/ use his good pleasure and put him to execution\u201d (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: \u201cIf I find a hole in his coat, I will tell him my mind\u201d (822, 3.7.76).<\/p>\n\n\n\nEven though King Henry did not originally hand down Bardolph\u2019s sentence, he shows no mercy for Bardolph, saying, \u201cWe would have all such offenders so cut off\u201d (823, 3.7.96). Riot and advantage-taking against the common people cannot be allowed when one is \u201cgamester\u201d for a territory like France (823, 3.7.101).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Herald Montjoy soon arrives and makes his master\u2019s 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\u2019s price comes very nearly to \u201cHow dare you be winning!\u201d He says to Henry, \u201cfor our disgrace, his own person \/ kneeling at our feet [would be] but a weak and worthless satisfaction\u201d (823, 3.7.118-19).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry refuses ransom to the French king, pledging through the French herald <a href=\"#_edn43\" id=\"_ednref43\">[43]<\/a> only \u201cthis frail and worthless trunk\u201d (824, 3.7.140; see 139-42). He tells the herald honestly, \u201cWe would not seek a battle as we are, \/ Nor as we are we say we will not shun it\u201d (824, 3.7.150-51). All said, King Henry V places himself in God\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 3, Scene 8, the French rehearse their arrogance regarding the English prospects. The Dauphin follows Orl\u00e9ans and the Constable on the subject of their war-horses. The heir to the French throne waxes poetical about his own cheval de guerre, <\/em>saying, \u201cI will not change my horse \/ with any that treads but on four pasterns [hooves]\u201d (824, 3.8.11-12). When the Dauphin leaves them to themselves, Orl\u00e9ans, Rambures, and the Constable jest about the Dauphin\u2019s supposedly deficient valor, and the Constable concludes with comic irony, \u201cI think he will eat all he kills\u201d (826, 3.8.84). <a href=\"#_edn44\" id=\"_ednref44\">[44]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act4\">ACT 4<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 4.0, Chorus (827-28, the Chorus describes the demeanor of the French and English armies just hours before battle\u2014the 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\u2019s outset, wishes the stage could better do justice to the representation of so great an event as the Battle of Agincourt.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Chorus-speaker for Act 4 describes the evening\u2019s 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\u2019s night-time walk through his encampment to give heart to his soldiers as \u201cA little touch of Harry in the night\u201d (828, 4.0.47). <a href=\"#_edn45\" id=\"_ednref45\">[45]<\/a> As for the audience, our task consists as usual in, \u201cMinding true things by what their mock\u2019ries be\u201d (828, 4.0.53).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 1 (828-34, disguised, Henry walks through his camp before battle and meets Pistol, hears Fluellen and Gower\u2019s back-and-forth, and argues with the common soldier Michael Williams about the responsibility the King bears for his soldiers\u2019 souls; Henry and Williams postpone their quarrel until battle\u2019s 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\u2019s treason against Richard II.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 4, Scene 1, the King speaks to Erpingham about setting an example: \u201c\u2018Tis good for men to love their present pains \/ Upon example\u201d (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) \u201cOf the Inconstancie of Our Actions\u201d that our virtues fluctuate with circumstance and desire: yesterday\u2019s virtuous woman is shameless today, and the courageous man of a recent battle is just as likely to turn and run next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen it comes to our thoughts, Montaigne suggests, \u201cOur ordinary manner is to follow the inclination of our appetite this way and that way \u2026\u201d and \u201call is but changing, motion and inconstancy.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn46\" id=\"_ednref46\">[46]<\/a> It isn\u2019t known precisely when Shakespeare read Montaigne\u2019s Essais, <\/em>but King Henry\u2019s insistence on the importance of his personal presence among the troops seems to flow from a similar kind of awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAs \u201cHarry le Roy\u201d (a nom de guerre<\/em>), Henry goes on a walking tour, and meets first with Pistol, who comically mistakes \u201cLe Roy\u201d for a Cornish surname and praises the King but threatens Fluellen, saying \u201cTell him I\u2019ll knock his leek about his pate \/ Upon Saint Davy\u2019s day\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Fluellen is busy lecturing Gower on not being foolish enough to let the opponent hear his conversation: \u201cIf 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 \u2026?\u201d (830, 4.1.75-77) <a href=\"#_edn47\" id=\"_ednref47\">[47]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFluellen also airs his opinion\u2014again\u2014that there must be firm order, a respect for \u201cthe rules\u201d\u2014in war, and he calls to witness no lesser light than the Roman general and triumvir Pompey the Great. It\u2019s 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\u2019s Candide <\/em>sometimes reads more like non-fiction than the novella that it is. <a href=\"#_edn48\" id=\"_ednref48\">[48]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn disguise as Harry Le Roy, King Henry meets the common soldier Michael Williams, <a href=\"#_edn49\" id=\"_ednref49\">[49]<\/a> 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, \u201cI think the King is but a man, as I am\u201d (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\u2019s mental and physical well-being.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe King\u2019s 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, \u201cif 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 \u2026\u201d (831, 4.1.125-28). There is something redolent of menace in Williams\u2019s honest summation: \u201cNow, if these men do not die \/ well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it \u2026\u201d (831, 4.1.133-34).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAgainst this charge Henry sums up his argument with the thought, \u201cEvery subject\u2019s duty \/ is the King\u2019s, but every subject\u2019s soul is his own\u201d (832, 4.1.161-62). <a href=\"#_edn50\" id=\"_ednref50\">[50]<\/a> 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\u2019s souls at death\u2014that is something only they can answer for.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA philosophical materialist will surely have issues with the King\u2019s argument, and will most likely call it out as evasive. Williams\u2019s \u201cLast Judgment\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen \u201cHarry le Roy\u201d 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 \u201cto make us fight cheerfully. But when \/ our throats are cut he may be ransomed and we never the \/ wiser\u201d (832, 4.1.175-77). Williams and Henry take each other\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAlone at last, King Henry meditates on his burdens as monarch. He asks of the \u201cceremony\u201d (833, 4.1.229) that makes a king, \u201cArt thou aught else but place, degree, and form, \/ Creating awe and fear in other men \u2026?\u201d (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\u2019 own desires, an investment <\/em>in something symbolic, something larger than themselves on which the king in his material person is then expected to make good.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere is a penitential structure to Henry\u2019s kingship. Much of what he does here in France seems meant to wash the blood from his father\u2019s hands, some of which attaints him as well. He prays to the \u201cGod of battles\u201d earnestly, \u201cOh, not today, think not upon the fault \/ My father made in compassing the crown\u201d (834, 4.1.270-71). The irony of starting an expiatory war\u2014if that is what it is, in part\u2014in which thousands of innocents and combatants are bound to be killed may or may not fully occur to Henry, though his concluding statement, \u201call that I can do is nothing worth, \/ Since that my penitence comes after all, \/ Imploring pardon\u201d is suggestive (834, 4.1.280-82).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll in all, Henry\u2019s 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. <a href=\"#_edn51\" id=\"_ednref51\">[51]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nTo 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,<\/em> back when he was still the prodigal son Prince Hal and, as such, a thorn in his father\u2019s 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<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry\u2019s father the King found that such brazen behavior violated his own \u201cpublic relations\u201d principle that a great prince is more prized by making himself scarce than by mingling with low company. <a href=\"#_edn52\" id=\"_ednref52\">[52]<\/a> 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 \u201cMingled his royalty with cap\u2019ring fools.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn53\" id=\"_ednref53\">[53]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\nEven so, a species of \u201cmingling\u201d was Prince Hal\u2019s way of getting to know his subjects, the better to govern them. So in I Henry IV,<\/em> the Prince is busy trying out various roles, learning how the various subjects in his future kingdom think and live.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 1.2 of that play, Hal himself describes his antics in providential terms: \u201cMy reformation, glittering o\u2019er my fault, \/ Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes \/ Than that which hath no foil to set it off\u201d and pledges to himself that his reformation will amount to \u201cRedeeming time when men think least I will.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn54\" id=\"_ednref54\">[54]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nKingly virtue has always been Henry\u2019s 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\u2019s character, who goes from \u201cHal\u201d to the ultimate warrior-king Henry V, October 1415\u2019s victor at Agincourt against an imposing French army.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll of the above makes Henry V, <\/em>Act 4, Scene 1 the successful culmination of a long process. King Henry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry V\u2019s \u201cself\u201d 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 <\/em><a href=\"#_edn55\" id=\"_ednref55\">[55]<\/a>\u2014a 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\u2019s terms, that he plays a role on the stage of life. That means taking on grave burdens and enduring potentially harsh consequences, but it\u2019s no less a role than if the person were simply strutting across the theatrical boards.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry\u2019s playful past has also imbued him with the medieval and Renaissance truth that the king has not one body, but two\u2014a 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\u2019s term in Utopia<\/em>) the \u201cmajesty\u201d that comes with respect for whatever is larger than material affairs and ordinary humanity. <a href=\"#_edn56\" id=\"_ednref56\">[56]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 4, Scene 2, the French cockiness and high-spirited words continue. Says the Constable, \u201cA very little let us do \/ And all is done\u201d (835, 4.2.32-33). Hyperbole flows as freely as the blood that will soon be spilt on the battlefield.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 3 (836-38, Henry inspires his troops just before battle begins, calling them a \u201cband of brothers\u201d 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 4, Scene 3, Henry makes his most rousing battle speech, countering Westmorland\u2019s wish that the English had more men to send into battle with his great exhortation beginning, \u201cCrispin Crispian shall ne\u2019er go by \/ From this day to the ending of the world \/ But we in it shall be remember\u00e8d \u2026\u201d (837, 4.3.57-59). His comparatively tiny \u201cband of brothers\u201d (837, 4.3.60) will take the palm for honorable exploits, come what may.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKing Henry also makes a promise to the future survivors that \u201che today that sheds his blood with me \/ Shall be my brother. Be he ne\u2019er so vile, \/ This day shall gentle his condition\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAt 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. <a href=\"#_edn57\" id=\"_ednref57\">[57]<\/a> For the last time\u2014and belting out jauntily in front of his entire army that there will be no ransom for him besides \u201cthese my joints \u2026\u201d (838, 4.3.123), King Henry refuses Montjoy\u2019s entreaty to surrender, and the latter departs suitably impressed, saying, \u201cThou never shalt hear herald any more\u201d (838, 4.3.127).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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\u2019s 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, \u201cI \/ 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\u201d (840, 4.4.66-69).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 5 (840, the French commanders are so humiliated when the English rout them that they decide to go down fighting\u2014strategy be damned.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 4, Scene 5, the French are losing, and they throw order to the winds. Orl\u00e9ans suggests that if only some order could be restored, the French army\u2019s numbers would still give them the victory. The Constable counters with, \u201cLet us on heaps go offer up our lives\u201d (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 Cr\u00e9cy and Poitiers more than half a century before Agincourt. <a href=\"#_edn58\" id=\"_ednref58\">[58]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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\u2019 throats cut\u2014otherwise, they might escape and rejoin their own forces.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 4, Scene 6, King Henry issues the first of two orders that his prisoners\u2019 throats be cut. The first time, the reason seems to be that \u201cThe French have reinforced their scattered men\u201d (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 \u201cwar crime\u201d 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. <a href=\"#_edn59\" id=\"_ednref59\">[59]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 4, Scene 7 (841-45, Fluellen says to Gower that Henry is as magnificent as Alexander the Great, and rages at the French army\u2019s slaughter of boys in the English camp; Welsh pride abounds; Montjoy informs Henry that the English have won; Williams shows up with Henry\u2019s 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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 \u201cexpressly against \/ the law of arms\u201d (841, 4.7.1-2). <a href=\"#_edn60\" id=\"_ednref60\">[60]<\/a> During their counterattack, the French have also apparently stolen everything in King Henry\u2019s personal tent, says Gower, and he supposes that this was the reason for the King\u2019s order in the previous scene to cut all the French prisoners\u2019 throats.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe killing of the boys does, however, seem to be the reason why the King gives another such order in the current scene. Henry says, \u201cI was not angry since I came to France \/ Until this instant\u201d (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\u2014it will be done, that is, only if the French continue the struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut in truth, the day\u2014Friday, 25 October 1415\u2014is 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\u2019s 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 \u201cAgincourt.\u201d That is what Henry declares should be the name of the field and the battle. <a href=\"#_edn61\" id=\"_ednref61\">[61]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nFluellen\u2019s Welsh effusive patriotism is a bonding point with King Henry, as he says, \u201cI do believe your Majesty takes no \/ scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy\u2019s day\u201d (843, 4.7.93-94). The delighted King tells Fluellen that he is of Welsh ancestry, too\u2014or at least, he was born in Monmouth Castle, Wales, and his mother Mary de Bohun\u2019s family held a great deal of land in the Welsh marches bordering Wales proper. <a href=\"#_edn62\" id=\"_ednref62\">[62]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nWilliams 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\u2019s challenge-glove to Fluellen, impishly claiming, \u201cWhen Alen\u00e7on and myself were down together, I \/ plucked this glove from his helm. If any man challenge this, \/ he is a friend to Alen\u00e7on and an enemy to our person\u201d (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).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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 Alen\u00e7on, 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,<\/em> as he enjoys telling Williams that he <\/em>is the person the common soldier had in fact insulted and challenged. But Williams handles himself well, saying, \u201cYour majesty came not like yourself\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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\u2014almost none, in fact (847, 4.8.97-100). It\u2019s 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\u2019t much use. But the battle was more complex than that, and the casualties given in Shakespeare\u2019s play sound somewhat dubious. <a href=\"#_edn63\" id=\"_ednref63\">[63]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry commands the singing of Psalm<\/em> 115 \u201cNon nobis,<\/em>\u201d <a href=\"#_edn64\" id=\"_ednref64\">[64]<\/a> and \u201cTe Deum<\/em> Laudamus<\/em>\u201d (847, 4.8.117). He also orders a move to the port city of Calais, and thence across the Channel to England. Essentially, both Latin texts oppose pretensions to human autonomy and pride. Of course, we could also say that such verses amount to humans\u2019 hiding behind God for the ultraviolence they do from one century to the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"act5\">ACT 5<\/h3>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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 Beaug\u00e9 and a personal trip to Paris to refurbish his image in France. <a href=\"#_edn65\" id=\"_ednref65\">[65]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nHowever, 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\u2019s 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. <a href=\"#_edn66\" id=\"_ednref66\">[66]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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\u2019s on to the reign of the Tudors beginning with Henry VII in 1485 and ending with Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAt 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 \u201cconqu\u2019ring Caesar\u201d (848, 5.0.28). There\u2019s even a reference to the future Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s sometime favorite and soon-to-be treasonous enemy, the Earl of Essex, who around the time of the play\u2019s writing in 1599 was expected back shortly from a campaign fighting against Irish rebels. The return described would be Henry\u2019s initial trip home from the Agincourt campaign in November 1415.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHoly 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. <a href=\"#_edn67\" id=\"_ednref67\">[67]<\/a> In any event, the Chorus-speaker says, more time has passed, and now it\u2019s \u201cstraight back again to France\u201d (848, 5.0.46).<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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\u2019s unheroic dimension.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen and Pistol are at odds over Saint David\u2019s Day, the day of homage to Wales\u2019s sixth-century CE patron saint, David. <a href=\"#_edn68\" id=\"_ednref68\">[68]<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\nPistol 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\u2019s reign can\u2019t 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, \u201cTo England will I steal, and there I\u2019ll steal; \/ And patches will I get unto these cudgeled scars, \/ And swear I got them in the Gallia wars\u201d (850, 5.1.78-80).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe statement has a certain eloquence to it, and the pun on \u201csteal\u201d reinforces the pathos of this unheroic character\u2019s future: Henry said everyone who came back from the war in France would be remembered forever, <a href=\"#_edn69\" id=\"_ednref69\">[69]<\/a> but that hardly rings true for an aging, widowed malcontent like Pistol. With no honorable role to play back home, he\u2019s sure to come to an ignominious end. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden <\/em>that \u201cThe mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn70\" id=\"_ednref70\">[70]<\/a> \u201cQuiet\u201d isn\u2019t a word we would associate with the voluble and irascible Pistol, but \u201cdesperation\u201d will definitely follow him back to England.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 5, Scene 2 (850-57, Charles VI agrees to terms with the English; Henry\u2019s 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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 \u201cmy people will get back to your people,\u201d but the sum of it is that he must agree to the terms (853, 5.2.77-82), at least for the present. <a href=\"#_edn71\" id=\"_ednref71\">[71]<\/a> Burgundy aptly figures the torn environment of France as needing nothing more urgently than the residency of peace\u2014\u201cthat naked, poor, and mangled peace, \/ Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births\u201d\u2014to recover (851, 5.2.34-35).<\/p>\n\n\n\nEven though King Henry says outright that his marriage to the Princess Katherine of Valois is his \u201ccapital demand\u201d (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 \u201cgentleman\u2019s C,\u201d his performance is not without charm. He admits to Katherine, \u201cI know no ways to mince it in love\u2026\u201d (853, 5.2.123).<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Princess has some trouble understanding King Henry, but what he says is good enough, burbling out statements such as, \u201cto say to thee that I shall die is \/ true\u2014but for thy love, by the Lord, no. Yet I love thee, too\u201d (853, 5.2.145-46). How could a lady not fall for that? <\/em>It\u2019s of a piece with Rosalind\u2019s remark in As You Like It <\/em>that \u201cmen \/ have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, \/ but not for love.\u201d <a href=\"#_edn72\" id=\"_ednref72\">[72]<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nKatherine 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\u2019s offer of marriage is one that she really can\u2019t refuse, but nonetheless, she says, \u201cit is not be de fashion pour les <\/em>ladies of France\u2014I \/ cannot tell vat is baiser en <\/em>Anglish\u201d (853, 5.2.241-42).<\/p>\n\n\n\nHenry\u2019s polite but firm comeback to this coyness on Katherine\u2019s part is, \u201cnice customs curtsy to great kings, Dear Kate\u201d (855, 5.2.248). It is<\/em> the fashion for French ladies to kiss before marriage, if he says so. Henry says there is \u201cwitchcraft\u201d (855, 5.2.254) in Katherine\u2019s lips, more than in all the eloquence of her father\u2019s counselors. Nothing\u2019s set in stone: war\u2019s violence changes territorial markers, but simple gestures can change frosty fashions. Tradition? Says Henry, broadening the royal \u201cwe\u201d to include her: \u201cWe are the makers of manners, Kate, and \/ the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all \/ find-faults\u201d (850, 5.2.250-52).<\/p>\n\n\n\nWith the promise of Kate\u2019s hand in marriage and Charles VI\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAct 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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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\u2019s 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\u2019 War, France, and not England, emerged the winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEdition.<\/strong>\u00a0Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors.\u00a0The Norton Shakespeare: Histories + Digital Edition.<\/em>\u00a03rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93859-3.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012, revised 2025 Alfred J. Drake<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDocument Timestamp: 2\/18\/2026 5:22 PM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"endnotes\">ENDNOTES<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n*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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref1\" id=\"_edn1\">[1]<\/a> See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.englishmonarchs.co.uk\/tudor_9.htm\">Queen Elizabeth I<\/a>.\u201d Englishmonarchs.co.uk. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref2\" id=\"_edn2\">[2]<\/a> See Elizabeth I\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/education\/resources\/elizabeth-monarchy\/the-golden-speech\/\">Golden Speech<\/a>.\u201d 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 \u201cmore deere unto us then the loving conservation of our subjects hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref3\" id=\"_edn3\">[3]<\/a> Visit <a href=\"https:\/\/tudorhistory.org\/\">Tudorhistory.org.<\/a> for detailed materials on all things Tudor. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref4\" id=\"_edn4\">[4]<\/a> A convenient Shakespeare-oriented abridgement is available. See Boswell-Stone, Walter G. Shakespeare’s Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared<\/em>. Wentworth Press, 2019 [repr. of London: Chatto & Windus 1907 ed.]. ISBN-13: <\/strong>978-0530892863. This text is also available online at <a href=\"https:\/\/catalog.hathitrust.org\/Record\/001365705\">Shakespeare\u2019s Holinshed<\/a>\u2026.<\/em> Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref5\" id=\"_edn5\">[5]<\/a> Hazlitt, William. Collected Works of William Hazlitt, <\/em>eds. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902. pg. 285. In a lecture from The Round Table<\/em>, Hazlitt writes that \u201cHenry, 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.\u201d That is a frank response to an attitude Hazlitt finds offensive in his countrymen. The quote appears in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/55932\/55932-h\/55932-h.htm#Page_285\">The Characters of Shakespeare\u2019s Plays: Henry V<\/a><\/em>. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref6\" id=\"_edn6\">[6]<\/a> See Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. <\/em>Harvard UP, 1976. First published 1933. See also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/guide_ren_great_chain_of_being.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Scala Naturae: Great Chain of Being<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Robert_Fludd,_Integra_naturae_speculum_artisque_imago.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Great Chain of Being, R. Fludd, 1619 (Wikimedia)<\/a>. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref7\" id=\"_edn7\">[7]<\/a> See <a href=\"https:\/\/hdl.handle.net\/2027\/hvd.hxgf7a\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mirror for Magistrates <\/em>Volume 1<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/hdl.handle.net\/2027\/hvd.hxgf7b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Volume 2<\/a>. HathiTrust. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref8\" id=\"_edn8\">[8]<\/a> See present edition of Henry V,<\/em> 830, 4.1.98.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref9\" id=\"_edn9\">[9]<\/a> Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare \u2026,<\/em> Vol. 1. London: William Pickering, 1849; \u201cNotes on Romeo and Juliet,<\/em>\u201d 155. \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/cache\/epub\/25585\/pg25585-images.html#toc53\">Romeo and Juliet<\/a>.\u201d Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref10\" id=\"_edn10\">[10]<\/a> On the four elements as ancient cosmography construes them, see Steven M Carr\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mun.ca\/biology\/scarr\/4270_The_Four_Elements.html\">The Four Elements in Greek Cosmology<\/a>.\u201d See also \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/web.lemoyne.edu\/giunta\/ea\/ARISTOTLEann.html\">Elements and Atoms<\/a>.\u201d Lemoyne U, Prof. Emeritus Carmen Giunta. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref11\" id=\"_edn11\">[11]<\/a> In Classical, Ciceronian rhetoric, the term \u201cinventio(n)\u201d refers to the means whereby one arrives at \u201cwhat to say.\u201d It\u2019s how you figure out what you want to say or write. See, for example, Thoughtco.com\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thoughtco.com\/rhetorical-canons-1692054\">The Rhetorical Canons<\/a>\u201d and Gideon O. Burton of BYU\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/rhetoric.byu.edu\/\">Topics of Invention<\/a>.\u201d Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref12\" id=\"_edn12\">[12]<\/a> This is not to say that Coleridge\u2019s Romantic epistemology was available in its specifically modern form to the Early Modern author Shakespeare. In Shakespeare\u2019s time, the faculty of \u201cimagination\u201d was thought of as being basically combinatory,<\/em> 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 \u201cspeech acts that create reality\u201d is at least as old as the Hebrew Bible. The Romantics did not invent the concept\u2014it would make more sense to say that they looked backwards at the ancient conception and modernized it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref13\" id=\"_edn13\">[13]<\/a> Excepting those times when Shakespeare\u2019s plays were, in fact, performed in front of actual monarchs since, after all, Queen Elizabeth I and James I did <\/em>have the pleasure of taking in the occasional play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref14\" id=\"_edn14\">[14]<\/a> The Norton editor\u2019s footnote 3 for pg. 791 points out that \u201czero\u201d is what\u2019s meant by \u201ca crooked figure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref15\" id=\"_edn15\">[15]<\/a> See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/6081\/6081-h\/6081-h.htm#link2HCH0014\">Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV<\/a><\/em>. In this fourteenth chapter, Coleridge uses the excellent phrase \u201cwilling suspension of disbelief.\u201d Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref16\" id=\"_edn16\">[16]<\/a> The \u201creality-effect\u201d (if one agrees to use that term) is easier to generate with film\u2014see, for example, Kenneth Branagh\u2019s film Henry V<\/em>, with its remarkable battle scenes. Whether or not they are historically accurate, the film\u2019s battle representations are compelling. Still, it\u2019s possible to achieve something like this effect in live theater, and many critics and audiences would probably agree that there are also \u201cintellectual\u201d or reflective benefits to experiencing live theater that are harder to achieve with film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref17\" id=\"_edn17\">[17]<\/a> The term \u201ckindly\u201d could also mean \u201cin accordance with its nature or kind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref18\" id=\"_edn18\">[18]<\/a> See Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream.<\/em> Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. 406-53. Theseus\u2019s comments occur at 444, 5.1.14-17.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref19\" id=\"_edn19\">[19]<\/a> On supplementarity as a philosophical topic, see mainly Jacques Derrida\u2019s Of Grammatology, <\/em>especially the chapters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Orig. pub. 1976. ISBN-13: 978-1421419954.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref20\" id=\"_edn20\">[20]<\/a> See the entry \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Salic-Law-of-Succession\">Salic Law of Succession<\/a>\u201d in Britannica.com. See also Margaret Wood\u2019s Library of Congress blog entry \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.loc.gov\/law\/2012\/04\/happy-birthday-william-shakespeare-henry-v-and-salic-law\/\">Happy Birthday William: Shakespeare, Henry V and Salic Law<\/a>.\u201d Both accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref21\" id=\"_edn21\">[21]<\/a> Henry V\u2019s claim stems from Edward III\u2019s 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\u2019s third surviving son, John of Gaunt (1340-1399). On such genealogies, see, for example, Historic-UK.com\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.historic-uk.com\/HistoryUK\/KingsQueensofBritain\/\">Historic Kings and Queens of Britain<\/a>,\u201d Royal.Uk\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.royal.uk\/kings-and-queens-1066\">Kings and Queens<\/a>,\u201d and Englishmonarchs.co.uk\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.englishmonarchs.co.uk\/\">English Monarchs \u2013 Kings and Queens<\/a>.\u201d See also this commentator\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/english-monarchy-timeline\/\">English Monarchy Timeline<\/a>.\u201d All accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref22\" id=\"_edn22\">[22]<\/a> It\u2019s good to remember that there were three<\/em> Dauphins (the French term analogous to the English title for heirs to the throne, \u201cPrince\/Princess of Wales\u201d) in quick succession during the time covered by Shakespeare\u2019s Henry V. <\/em>The Dauphin referred to in the first part of the play\u2014the one who gave Henry tennis balls for a guest gift\u2014is 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\u2019s entry \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Charles-VII-king-of-France\">Charles VII, King of France<\/a>.\u201d Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref23\" id=\"_edn23\">[23]<\/a> On tennis, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/uscourttennis.org\/history\/\">The Royal & Ancient Game of Tennis: A Short History<\/a>\u201d at uscourttennis.org. As for tennis balls, see this entry, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thesmartset.com\/article11300701\/\">Jeu de Paume (Smart Set)<\/a>,\u201d at tennisplayer.net. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref24\" id=\"_edn24\">[24]<\/a> 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 \u201ccollateral damage\u201d may or may not be intentional <\/em>in any particular instance, <\/em>but in a larger strategic context, it is surely not incidental;<\/em> it may even be essential.<\/em> Medieval war was largely about wearing down the capacity of a people to support long-term struggles, and it\u2019s difficult to see how any other description of modern<\/em> warfare would be appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref25\" id=\"_edn25\">[25]<\/a> On the so-called Cambridge or Southampton plot of 1415, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britainexpress.com\/History\/medieval\/cambridge-plot.htm\">The Cambridge Plot<\/a>\u201d at Britainexpress.com. See also \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/thehundredyearswar.co.uk\/the-southampton-plot-execution-of-richard-earl-of-cambridge\/\">The Southampton Plot of 1415<\/a>\u201d at Hampshirehistory.com. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025. Finally, see T. B. Pugh\u2019s Henry V and the Southampton Plot. <\/em>Sutton Pub. LTD, 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref26\" id=\"_edn26\">[26]<\/a> In The Poetics, <\/em>Aristotle stresses only the \u201cunity of action\u201d (i.e. the unity of the plot events). Insistence on adhering to a very narrow conception of a play\u2019s temporal and spatial setting was a latter-day preoccupation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref27\" id=\"_edn27\">[27]<\/a> On the possible significance of the name \u201cNym,\u201d Wikipedia\u2019s entry \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Corporal_Nym\">Corporal Nym<\/a>\u201d suggests that it derives from the verb \u201cnim\u201d (to take) and is related to \u201cnimble\u201d in the sense of \u201cquick.\u201d Nym is, after all, a thief who ends up being hanged for his misdeeds in Henry V. <\/em>Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref28\" id=\"_edn28\">[28]<\/a> 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 \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.gavi.org\/vaccineswork\/funny-science-hippocratic-medicine-and-four-humours#:~:text=imbalance%2C%20not%20invasion.-,The%20body%20was%20a%20system%20of%20four%20fluid%20%E2%80%9Chumours%E2%80%9D%3A,skid%20along%20a%20slippery%20continuum.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Funny Medicine: Hippocrates and the Four Humours<\/a>\u201d (Vaccines Work), which offers an excellent summary and diagram. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref29\" id=\"_edn29\">[29]<\/a> See Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King\u2019s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. <\/em>Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. published in 1957.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref30\" id=\"_edn30\">[30]<\/a> See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Psalm%2023&version=GNV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Psalm <\/em>23<\/a>. Geneva Bible, Biblegateway.com. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref31\" id=\"_edn31\">[31]<\/a> See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Charles-VI-king-of-France\">Charles VI, King of France<\/a>\u201d at Britannica.com. Charles was sickly, and suffered from bouts of madness. There is no trace of that historical background, however, in Shakespeare\u2019s treatment of Charles, though he is portrayed as a rather weak, fearful monarch. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref32\" id=\"_edn32\">[32]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref33\" id=\"_edn33\">[33]<\/a> Exeter refers to King Henry\u2019s uncle, Thomas Beaufort, 1st Duke of Exeter (1377-1426). See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.shakespeareandhistory.com\/thomas-beaufort-duke-of-exeter.php\">Duke of Exeter<\/a>\u201d at Shakespeareandhistory.com. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref34\" id=\"_edn34\">[34]<\/a> The last dozen or so lines of Book 2 of The Odyssey <\/em>offer a fine example of Homeric attention to the skill and grace involved in sailing an ancient ship. Homer. The Odyssey. <\/em>Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Books, 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0140268867.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref35\" id=\"_edn35\">[35]<\/a> Henry\u2019s words are surely a \u201cset speech\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref36\" id=\"_edn36\">[36]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. <\/em>Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories,<\/em> 3rd ed. 629-95. Falstaff says, \u201cI have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there\u2019s \/ not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for \/ the town\u2019s end to beg during life\u201d (690, 5.3.35-37).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref37\" id=\"_edn37\">[37]<\/a> A \u201cplain-song\u201d is church music, but perhaps the idea is that Pistol adapts a melody to martial words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref38\" id=\"_edn38\">[38]<\/a> Oral history sometimes makes it possible to give us a remarkable sense for the ordinary person\u2019s angle on things. Studs Terkel\u2019s The Good War: An Oral History of World War II <\/em>(The New Press, repr. 2004) addresses through oral history the experience of the men and women who participated in World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref39\" id=\"_edn39\">[39]<\/a> See Shakespeare, William. King Lear.<\/em> Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref40\" id=\"_edn40\">[40]<\/a> \u201cHavoc!\u201d 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 <\/em>the battle if his troops hear what he is saying to Harfleur\u2019s exhausted defenders. Nearly everything he mentions as licit in the context of \u201cHavoc!\u201d 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.etymonline.com\/word\/havoc\">Etymonline\u2019s gloss on havoc<\/em><\/a>. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref41\" id=\"_edn41\">[41]<\/a> As for the role Katherine de Valois in later English history, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.englishmonarchs.co.uk\/plantagenet_36.html\">Catherine of Valois, Queen Consort of England<\/a>.\u201d Englishmonarchs.co.uk. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref42\" id=\"_edn42\">[42]<\/a> With regard to populations of France and England in medieval times, figures vary across several demographic websites. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Medieval_demography\">Medieval Demography<\/a>.\u201d Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref43\" id=\"_edn43\">[43]<\/a> The French Herald, Montjoy, was essentially a courier and spokesman\/agent for Charles VI. On the French nobility generally, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.heraldica.org\/topics\/france\/noblesse.htm\">Nobility and Titles in France<\/a>.\u201d Heraldica.org. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref44\" id=\"_edn44\">[44]<\/a> English chroniclers and Shakespeare tend to cast the French in a negative light as in the present scene. But see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.heraldica.org\/topics\/france\/noblesse.htm\">Nobility and Titles in France<\/a>.\u201d 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\u2019s House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France. <\/em>Basic Books, 2024. ISBN-13: 978-1541604759.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref45\" id=\"_edn45\">[45]<\/a> According to Geoffrey Bullough\u2019s source work, the inspiration for King Henry\u2019s nighttime visit to his troops may have been an episode involving Germanicus in the Annals of Tacitus. <\/em>See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perseus.tufts.edu\/hopper\/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D12\">Annals <\/em>II.12<\/a>. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed 9\/1\/2025. Bullough, Geoffrey, editor. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. <\/em>Vol. IV. Later English History Plays: King John, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII.<\/em> London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia UP, 1966, first pub. 1962. See pp. 362-63. Bullough\u2019s edition of the Annals<\/em> references the location differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref46\" id=\"_edn46\">[46]<\/a> Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. <\/em>Trans. John Florio, 1603. Book 2, Ch. 1. <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/MontaigneImages\/page\/n3\/mode\/2up\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Montaigne\u2019s Essays,<\/em> trans. J. Florio 1603 (Internet Archive)<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/cache\/epub\/3589\/pg3589-images.html\">Gutenberg e-text<\/a>. The quotes occur at the beginning of the essay. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref47\" id=\"_edn47\">[47]<\/a> In Laurence Olivier\u2019s 1946 film production of Henry V, <\/em>the irascible Captain Fluellen practically shouts this otherwise sage advice, which renders it ridiculous and worse than useless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref48\" id=\"_edn48\">[48]<\/a> Voltaire\u2019s famous satirical fiction Candide <\/em>(1759) abounds in evidence of people\u2019s casual inhumanity to one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref49\" id=\"_edn49\">[49]<\/a> With regard to key matters pertaining to the treatment of soldiers, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/help-with-your-research\/research-guides\/medieval-early-modern-soldiers\/\">Medieval and early modern soldiers<\/a>.\u201d National Archives, UK. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref50\" id=\"_edn50\">[50]<\/a> Henry V\u2019s view may not quite add up to a \u201cdivine right theory of kingship,\u201d 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 \u201cdivine right theory\u201d would be King James I\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebo2\/A78586.0001.001\">True Law of Free Monarchy<\/em><\/a>and <a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/e\/eebo2\/A04230.0001.001\">Basilikon Doron<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Both texts available through EEBO\/U-Mich. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref51\" id=\"_edn51\">[51]<\/a> The introspectiveness of Richard II and Macbeth leaps immediately to mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref52\" id=\"_edn52\">[52]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. <\/em>Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories,<\/em> 3rd ed. 629-95. See 668-70, 3.2.29-91.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref53\" id=\"_edn53\">[53]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. ibid.<\/em> See 669, 3.2.63.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref54\" id=\"_edn54\">[54]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. ibid.<\/em> See 636, 1.2.188-90, 192.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref55\" id=\"_edn55\">[55]<\/a> It is commonly noted that during the Middle Ages, a person\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref56\" id=\"_edn56\">[56]<\/a> On the development of this theory, see Ernest Kantorowicz\u2019s 1959 book, The King\u2019s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology. <\/em>With regard to Thomas More\u2019s Utopia, <\/em>his narrator, in the book\u2019s final chapter (titled \u201cOf the Religions of the Utopians\u201d) questions Raphael Hythloday\u2019s enthusiasm for the communistic utopian society he visited on the grounds that such a society must lack \u201csplendor\u201d and \u201cmajesty,\u201d which he calls \u201cthe true ornaments of a nation.\u201d See More, Thomas. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/2130\/2130-h\/2130-h.htm#chap10\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Utopia<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Ed. Henry Morley. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref57\" id=\"_edn57\">[57]<\/a> See, for example, Lord Alfred Tennyson\u2019s Arthurian long poem <a href=\"https:\/\/d.lib.rochester.edu\/camelot\/text\/tennyson-idylls-of-the-king.html\">Idylls of the King<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>A king is to seek \u201cglory gained, and evermore to gain.\u201d The Camelot Project. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref58\" id=\"_edn58\">[58]<\/a> See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/event\/Battle-of-Crecy\">Battle of Cr\u00e9cy<\/a>\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/event\/Battle-of-Poitiers-French-history-1356\">Battle of Poitiers<\/a>.\u201d Britannica.com. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref59\" id=\"_edn59\">[59]<\/a> On the issue of \u201cthe law of war\u201d in connection with this incident and more broadly, see Leslie C. Green\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/digital-commons.usnwc.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=1468&context=ils#:~:text=The%20sacred%20writings%20of%20ancient,%22hyperdestructive%22%20weapons%2C%20since%20these\">The Law of War in Historical Perspective<\/a>.\u201d International Law Studies<\/em>, Vol. 72. Liber Amicorum Prof. Jack Grunawalt. Ed. Michael N. Schmitt. Green\u2019s 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\u2014i.e. covering common infantrymen, not only knights\u2014going at least as far back as 1385 during the reign of Richard II, when he set forth his doctrine \u201cArticles of War.\u201d Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref60\" id=\"_edn60\">[60]<\/a> See Capt. Anthony A. Contrada, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/tjaglcs.army.mil\/Periodicals\/The-Army-Lawyer\/tal-2020-issue-3\/Post\/4564\/Practice-Notes-Law-and-the-Morality-of-War-Today-in-Henry-V\">Practice Notes–Law and the Morality of War Today in Henry V<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u201d In The Army Lawyer, <\/em>Issue 3, 2020. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref61\" id=\"_edn61\">[61]<\/a> See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.agincourt600.com\/2015\/06\/09\/can-we-follow-henrys-route-today\/\">Agincourt Castle<\/a> image in the article \u201cCan we follow Henry\u2019s route today?\u201d Agincourt600.com. See also the YouTube documentary video \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=N3SKqc-9k7M\">Secrets of Agincourt<\/a>.\u201d Both accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref62\" id=\"_edn62\">[62]<\/a> See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.englishmonarchs.co.uk\/plantagenet_60.html\">Mary de Bohun<\/a>\u201d entry at Englishmonarchs.co.uk. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref63\" id=\"_edn63\">[63]<\/a> See Britannica\u2019s entry \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/event\/Battle-of-Agincourt#:~:text=The%20battle%20probably%20lasted%20no,many%20of%20whom%20were%20noblemen.\">The Battle of Agincourt<\/a>.\u201d 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, \u201cmany of whom were noblemen.\u201d See also historian Mike Loades on History Hit: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=v0Xwx12ekSU\">Historian Mike Loades Debunks \u2018The Agincourt Myth\u2019<\/a>.\u201d Oct. 24, 2021. YouTube.com. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025. Loades takes apart some of the myths and nationalist propaganda that still haunt \u201cAgincourt.\u201d He sees it as essentially an act of \u201cland piracy\u201d on the part of the English\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref64\" id=\"_edn64\">[64]<\/a> See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Psalm%20115&version=GNV\">Psalm<\/em> 115<\/a>. Geneva Bible. Biblegateway.com. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref65\" id=\"_edn65\">[65]<\/a> See Rev. J. Franck Bright\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/61358\/61358-h\/61358-h.htm#Page_298\">A History of England: Medieval Monarchy, pg. 298<\/a><\/em>.Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref66\" id=\"_edn66\">[66]<\/a> The Norton editors point out the relevant date and circumstances in footnote 7 on 848. See also \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/medievalhistory.info\/henry-v-the-scourge-of-god\/\">Henry V: The Scourge of God<\/a>.\u201dMedievalhistory.info. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref67\" id=\"_edn67\">[67]<\/a> On Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and his rebellion against Elizabeth I, see \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.rmg.co.uk\/stories\/topics\/elizabeth-i-earl-essex\">Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex<\/a>.\u201d Royal Museums Greenwich. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref68\" id=\"_edn68\">[68]<\/a> See \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/museum.wales\/articles\/1183\/St-Davids-Day\/\">Saint David\u2019s Day<\/a>.\u201d Museum.Wales. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref69\" id=\"_edn69\">[69]<\/a> Henry V<\/em> present edition, see 837, 4.3.57-59.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref70\" id=\"_edn70\">[70]<\/a> Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. <\/em>See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/205\/205-h\/205-h.htm#chap02\">Chapter 2, \u201cEconomy<\/a>.\u201d Project Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref71\" id=\"_edn71\">[71]<\/a> The peace process involved the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Treaty-of-Troyes\">Treaty of Troyes<\/a> (1420; Britannica.com) in which Henry took for his wife Charles VI\u2019s young daughter Katherine of Valois and was recognized as heir to the French throne. Then came the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Treaty_of_Amiens_(1423)\">Treaty of Amiens<\/a> 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\u2019s on to the events that would see the French win the Hundred Years\u2019 War by 1453, and the English, under Henry VI, lose the French territories that they had won during Henry V\u2019s reign. Both accessed 9\/1\/2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<a href=\"#_ednref72\" id=\"_edn72\">[72]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. As You Like It.<\/em> In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies,<\/em> 3rd ed. 673-731. See 715, 4.1.92-94.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shakespeare\u2019s Henry V Commentary by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. Folio. 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{"id":185,"date":"2024-04-13T18:08:16","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T01:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/?page_id=185"},"modified":"2026-02-20T06:00:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T14:00:44","slug":"henry-v-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/henry-v-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry V"},"content":{"rendered":"