Henry V is the final play in Shakespeare’s second Henriad, following Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Written and first performed around 1599, it dramatises the young king’s invasion of France and his unlikely victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The play is famous for its soaring patriotic rhetoric — the St Crispin’s Day speech, the rallying cry at Harfleur — but it also interrogates the cost of war, the theatricality of kingship, and the moral ambiguity of a ruler who threatens civilian slaughter one scene and walks disguised among his troops the next. A Chorus opens each act, apologising for the inadequacy of the stage and inviting the audience to piece out the play’s imperfections with their thoughts. The result is a drama that is at once a celebration of English national identity and a sustained examination of the rhetoric that creates it.
Quick Info
Plot Summary
Main Characters
Key Themes
Historical Context
Key Quotations
See it unfold
The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.
Tension arc
How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.
Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.
Key moments
“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them”
Moment 1 of 24 · Prologue
The Chorus asks for imagination
Setting: The bare stage of the playhouseTension
The Chorus apologises that a small wooden playhouse and a handful of actors cannot hold the fields of France or the armies of Agincourt. He asks the audience to imagine the horses, to see each actor as a thousand men, and to let many years pass in the turning of an hour-glass.
Who
CThe Chorus
Why it matters
The play announces at once that it is a performance and makes the audience partners in creating the story of England’s hero.
Performance and persuasionNationalism and English identity
Prologue: The Chorus asks for imagination. The Chorus apologises that a small wooden playhouse and a handful of actors cannot hold the fields of France or the armies of Agincourt. He asks the audience to imagine the horses, to see each actor as a thousand men, and to let many years pass in the turning of an hour-glass. The play announces at once that it is a performance and makes the audience partners in creating the story of England’s hero.
Act 1, Scene 1: The Church makes an offer. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely fear a bill that would take half the Church’s lands. Canterbury praises the reformed young king and reveals he has offered Henry a larger sum than the clergy has ever given, in connection with France. "Consideration like an angel came" Before Henry appears, the audience learns the Church has its own reasons to want a war, which colours the case Canterbury makes next.
Act 1, Scene 2: The claim and the tennis balls. Henry charges Canterbury on his conscience to say whether the Salic law bars his claim to France, and the Archbishop argues at length that it does not. The Dauphin’s ambassadors then deliver a gift of tennis balls mocking Henry’s youth, and Henry replies that he will answer them with cannon. "Hath turn’d his balls to gun-stones" Henry makes the war look both lawful and provoked, and lays its cost at the Dauphin’s door.
Act 2, Scene 1: Old friends, new quarrels. In a London street Bardolph tries to reconcile Nym and Pistol, who have fallen out over Nell Quickly, now Pistol’s wife, and a betting debt. The Boy, and then the Hostess, call them to Sir John Falstaff, who is very ill, and the Hostess says the King has broken his heart. "The King has kill’d his heart" The Chorus has just described a nation united by honour; the first scene shows men squabbling over money, and a friend the new king has cast off.
Act 2, Scene 2: The traitors at Southampton. Henry pardons a man who railed at him while drunk, and Cambridge, Scroop and Grey urge him to be harsher. He hands them papers that show he knows they took French money to kill him, turns their own advice against their pleas for mercy, and sends them to execution. "Another fall of man" Henry stages the trap like a play, and separates his personal hurt from what he calls his kingdom’s safety.
Act 2, Scene 3: The death of Falstaff. Outside the tavern the Hostess describes how Falstaff died, fumbling with the sheets, crying out to God, and growing cold from his feet upward. Pistol, Nym, Bardolph and the Boy then set off for France, Pistol urging them to suck blood like horse-leeches. "’A made a finer end" A tender comic death offstage marks the end of Henry’s old life, and the survivors go to war for plunder, not glory.
Act 2, Scene 4: The French court divided. The French King orders his towns defended, but the Dauphin dismisses England as ruled by a vain, giddy youth. The Constable warns that Henry’s wildness was a disguise, and Exeter arrives to demand the crown of France, threatening war if it is refused. "Covering discretion with a coat of folly" The French disagree about who Henry really is, which is the question the whole play keeps asking.
Act 3, Scene 1: Once more unto the breach. Before the walls of Harfleur, with scaling ladders ready, Henry drives his soldiers back into the gap their guns have made. He tells them to become tigers, to prove their fathers’ blood, and to charge crying for God, Harry and Saint George. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more" One of the two great battle speeches in the play shows Henry’s power over men, and admits that courage has to be acted.
Act 3, Scene 2: The breach seen from below. Bardolph echoes the King’s cry, but Nym, Pistol and the Boy would rather be in a London alehouse until Fluellen drives them on. Alone, the Boy calls his masters cowards and thieves; then the Welsh captain Fluellen and the Irish captain Macmorris quarrel, with the English Gower and the Scottish Jamy looking on, until a parley sounds. "What ish my nation?" Comedy tests the heroic speech at once, and the captains show a British army that is not yet one people.
Act 3, Scene 3: The ultimatum to Harfleur. Henry warns the Governor that if Harfleur does not surrender his soldiers will be let loose on its people, and says the blame will be the town’s own. Told the Dauphin cannot relieve them, the Governor yields, and Henry orders Exeter to use mercy as sickness spreads through the English army. "The gates of mercy shall be all shut up" The voice that inspired soldiers now terrifies civilians, and the audience never learns whether the threat was meant.
Act 3, Scene 4: An English lesson. In the French palace Princess Katherine asks her gentlewoman Alice for the English words for hand, arm, neck, chin and foot, and practises them. The scene is almost all in French and comic, but the Chorus has already said her father offered her to Henry. The princess begins learning the language of the country invading hers, a hint of the marriage the war will end in.
Act 3, Scene 6: Bardolph is condemned. Pistol begs Fluellen to plead for Bardolph, condemned for stealing a pax from a church, and Fluellen refuses because discipline must be kept. Told of the sentence, Henry does not mention knowing Bardolph and orders that nothing be taken from the French without payment. Montjoy demands ransom, and Henry admits his army is sick but will not shun a battle. "the gentler gamester is the soonest winner" Henry lets an old companion hang without a word about their past, and the audience has to decide whether that is justice or coldness.
Act 3, Scene 7: The French wait for morning. In the French camp the night before the battle, the Dauphin praises his horse in extravagant terms. Once he has gone to arm, Orleans defends him while the Constable mocks his courage and the two trade proverbs. They scorn the hungry English and their king, and Orleans reckons that by ten each of them will have a hundred Englishmen. "When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk" French overconfidence, in idle prose, is set up to fall, and contrasts with the anxious English camp the Chorus describes next.
Act 4, Chorus: A little touch of Harry. The Chorus describes the two camps in the dark: the confident French playing dice for English prisoners, the English sitting like sacrifices by their fires. Henry walks among his men, and the Chorus says every soldier takes comfort from his cheerful looks. "A little touch of Harry in the night" The Chorus gives the official picture of a calm and loving king, which the next scene quietly tests.
Act 4, Scene 1: The king in disguise. Wearing Sir Thomas Erpingham’s cloak, Henry talks with the soldiers Bates, Court and Williams, who doubt the war’s justice and the King’s promise not to be ransomed. He argues that a king is not answerable for each soldier’s soul, exchanges gloves with Williams as a pledge to fight later, then alone questions the worth of ceremony and prays that God will not punish his father’s seizure of the crown. "every subject’s soul is his own" The play’s hardest questions about war are put by a common soldier, and the King’s answer does not quite meet them.
Act 4, Scene 3: The feast of Crispian. Told the French outnumber them five to one, Westmorland wishes for more men from England. Henry answers that fewer men means a greater share of honour, offers any man who will not fight his passage home, and promises the rest they will be remembered as brothers every Crispin’s Day. He sends Montjoy away with no ransom. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" The speech turns impossible odds into a privilege, and makes a promise of brotherhood the rest of the play puts to the test.
Act 4, Scene 4: Pistol takes a prisoner. On the battlefield Pistol captures a French soldier who begs for his life, and the Boy translates as Pistol bullies him into promising two hundred crowns. Left alone, the Boy says Bardolph and Nym have both been hanged and that the English luggage is guarded only by boys. "there is none to guard it but boys" A comic scene of ransom-hunting ends by setting up the killing of the boys, reported three scenes later.
Act 4, Scene 6: York, Suffolk and the prisoners. Exeter tells Henry how the wounded Duke of York died beside the Earl of Suffolk, kissing him, and confesses he wept at the sight. A new alarm sounds, the French seem to be regrouping, and Henry orders every soldier to kill his prisoners. "Then every soldier kill his prisoners" Chivalric grief and a brutal order sit side by side in one short scene.
Act 4, Scene 7: The boys and the luggage. Fluellen and Gower report that French runaways have killed the boys guarding the luggage and looted the King’s tent, and Gower says that is why the King ordered the prisoners’ throats cut. Henry, angry, he says, for the first time since he came to France, threatens the French horsemen and the prisoners he holds; Montjoy arrives to ask leave to bury the dead and admits the day is Henry’s. "I was not angry since I came to France" Gower offers one reason for the killing of the prisoners and the order of the scenes suggests another; the play leaves both standing.
Act 4, Scene 8: The glove and the count of the dead. Williams strikes Fluellen, who is wearing the glove Henry gave him, and Henry reveals he was the man Williams quarrelled with, then has Exeter fill the glove with crowns. The herald’s lists give ten thousand French dead against four named Englishmen and twenty-five others, and Henry gives the victory to God alone. "O God, thy arm was here" The night’s argument ends in a joke and a payment, and the impossible victory is claimed as God’s.
Act 5, Chorus: Home and back again. The Chorus asks the audience to picture Henry’s return: crowds on the beach, Henry at Blackheath refusing to have his dented helmet and bent sword carried before him, and London pouring out to greet him as Rome greeted Caesar. The Chorus compares the welcome to one a general returning from Ireland might receive, then carries the story back to France. "Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride" The play reaches out of 1415 into its audience’s present: the general from Ireland is usually taken to be the Earl of Essex in 1599.
Act 5, Scene 1: Pistol eats the leek. Fluellen, still wearing the leek Pistol mocked, beats him with a cudgel until he eats it. Alone, Pistol says “my Doll is dead” of disease in hospital, and resolves to steal his way home to England and swear his cudgel scars are war wounds. "By this leek, I will most horribly revenge" The last of the tavern world goes home to lie about the war, a mocking echo of the veteran Henry imagined proudly showing his scars.
Act 5, Scene 2: Peace and the wooing. The two courts meet and the Duke of Burgundy describes France’s farms and vineyards running wild for want of peace. While the French King and the councils withdraw to study the terms, Henry woos Katherine in plain prose and broken French. The French King returns having agreed the terms, yields at Henry’s request the one article he had not yet signed, that his formal grants call Henry his son and heir of France, and gives him his daughter. "O Kate, nice customs curtsy to great kings" The war ends in a marriage treaty, and the wooing leaves open whether Katherine is being loved or acquired.
Epilogue: Small time. The Chorus returns with a sonnet, apologising for the author’s rough pen and small stage. He reminds the audience that Henry lived only a short time, that his son Henry VI became king while still a baby, and that those who governed for him lost France. "That they lost France and made his England bleed" The triumph is framed as brief, and the play ends by reminding the audience of the loss to come.
Character map
Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.
King Henry V · rivals · The Dauphin
The Dauphin mocks Henry’s youth with the tennis balls and scorns him before Agincourt. The two never share a scene, and the Dauphin is absent from the peace in Act 5, so their rivalry is fought through ambassadors, heralds and armies.
King Henry V · wooer and wooed; a treaty marriage · Princess Katherine
In the Act 3 Chorus her father offers her to Henry with some small dukedoms, and in Act 5 Henry calls her his “capital demand” in the articles of peace. His wooing is charming and plain-spoken, but she is being bargained for while her father studies the terms.
King Henry V · king and uncle · Exeter
Exeter is Henry’s most trusted servant: he carries the claim to the French court, arrests the traitors, holds the bridge in Picardy and weeps as he reports the deaths of York and Suffolk.
King Henry V · trusted friend turned traitor · Scroop
Henry’s grief at Scroop, who “didst bear the key of all my counsels”, is more personal than his anger at the other traitors, yet he still sends him to his death for the kingdom’s sake.
King Henry V · disguised king and common soldier · Williams
Williams argues with a stranger in a borrowed cloak, who says he serves “Under Sir Thomas Erpingham”, about the King’s responsibility for the dead, and pledges to fight him. When the truth comes out he defends himself with dignity, and Henry rewards him with a glove full of crowns.
King Henry V · king and loyal Welsh captain · Fluellen
Fluellen compares Henry to Alexander and claims him as a fellow Welshman; Henry agrees, “For I am Welsh”, and uses Fluellen in the trick with Williams’s glove.
King Henry V · old drinking companion · Bardolph
Bardolph belongs to the Eastcheap tavern world of Henry’s youth. When Fluellen reports that he is to be executed for robbing a church, Henry says nothing of their past and answers “We would have all such offenders so cut off”.
Fluellen · enemies · Pistol
Fluellen first praises Pistol’s bravery at the bridge. When Pistol curses him for refusing to plead for Bardolph, Gower tells him Pistol is a fraud, and Fluellen vows to tell Pistol his mind when the chance comes. He takes his revenge with a cudgel and a leek.
Pistol · husband and wife · Mistress Quickly
Pistol has married Nell Quickly, the Hostess, who had been promised to Nym. Pistol’s news in Act 5 that “my Doll is dead” is read by some editors as her death, which is why some editions print Nell there.
Fluellen · fellow captains and friends · Gower
Gower, the English captain, is the patient straight man to Fluellen’s learned speeches, and he defends Fluellen against Pistol’s mockery of the Welsh.
The Dauphin · fellow French commanders · The Constable
The Constable warns the Dauphin not to underestimate Henry, and on the night before the battle mocks his boasting behind his back. Their divisions foreshadow the disorder of the French defeat.
Archbishop of Canterbury · Church and crown · King Henry V
Canterbury needs the King to reject a bill against Church lands, and offers money for the war in France. His case for Henry’s claim is learned, but the audience has heard his motive first.
Characters as described
Each portrait is drawn from the words of the text, not from a film or a stage production. The numbers on the picture point to those words.
King Henry V
For forth he goes and visits all his host, Bids them good morrow with a modest smile1, And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen. Upon his royal face there is no note2 How dread an army hath enrounded him; Nor doth he dedicate one jot of colour Unto the weary and all-watched night, But freshly looks, and over-bears attaint With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty; That every wretch, pining and pale before, Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks. A largess universal like the sun His liberal eye doth give to everyone3, Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all Behold, as may unworthiness define, A little touch of Harry in the night.
Act 4, Chorus
This is the Chorus’s picture of the King on the night before Agincourt: a fresh, untroubled face that gives every frightened soldier courage. The next scene tests it, and wooing Katherine in Act 5 Henry describes his own face very differently: “an aspect of iron”.
The Chorus describes how he looks, not the shape of his face. He is drawn young, as the play calls him, with the crown so that the King is known, in the plain armour of 1415.
Archbishop of Canterbury
The words the numbers point to
1My learned lord
2The sin upon my head
3we of the spiritualty
Act 1, Scene 2
Canterbury argues at length that the Salic law does not bar Henry’s claim to France, and offers the Church’s money for the war. The audience has already heard him tell the Bishop of Ely, in Act 1, Scene 1, of a bill that would strip the Church of its lands, “the better half of our possession”, and of the sum he has offered the King.
The play does not describe him. His skull cap, white rochet and cross are how the panels draw a prelate of 1414 in council; his white hair and lined face are invented only to tell him from the younger Bishop of Ely.
Study guide sections
The rest of the guide, section by section: analysis, vocabulary and exam practice for this text.
Key passages for close reading
Exeter
The words the numbers point to
1And all my mother came into mine eyes
2as magnanimous as Agamemnon
Act 3, Scene 6; Act 4, Scene 6
Exeter is the King’s uncle and his most trusted man: he carries the claim to the French court, arrests the traitors and holds the bridge in Picardy. At Agincourt he weeps as he tells the King how the Duke of York fell beside the Earl of Suffolk.
The play does not describe his face. His grey hair and beard are how the panels tell the King’s uncle from the younger lords; his armour is the plain harness of 1415.
Bardolph
His face is all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’ fire1; and his lips blows at his nose2, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes plue and sometimes red3
Act 3, Scene 6
Bardolph was one of the King’s drinking companions in his wild youth. In France he is condemned for robbing a church, and Fluellen gives the King this picture of him; the King answers without a word about their past.
The print has one colour besides black, and a red nose on a face reads at phone size as an injured one, so the colour of his nose, “sometimes plue and sometimes red”, is left to the words.
Pistol
The words the numbers point to
1a beard of the general’s cut
2a horrid suit of the camp
3swelling like a turkey-cock
Act 3, Scene 6; Act 5, Scene 1
Pistol, the ensign, Bardolph’s and Nym’s swaggering friend and the Hostess’s husband, talks like the hero of an old play. Gower sees through him: a man who goes to the wars to brag of them in London taverns. The Boy puts it in a proverb: “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”
The play gives his beard and his coat through Gower’s scorn, not his face. His small cap with its curling feather is how the panels pick him out among the soldiers; nothing in the play gives it to him.
Mistress Quickly
The words the numbers point to
1the quondam Quickly
2Go, clear thy crystals
Act 2, Scene 1; Act 2, Scene 3
The Hostess, Nell Quickly, keeps a house in London, where Sir John Falstaff lies ill, and has married Pistol. In Act 2, Scene 3 she tells the others how Falstaff died, gently and comically, and then says goodbye to her husband as he leaves for France.
The play does not describe her looks. Her linen coif is how a married woman of 1415 covered her hair, and how the panels draw her; the tear is drawn from Pistol’s “clear thy crystals”.
Scroop
Show men dutiful? Why, so didst thou. Seem they grave and learned1? Why, so didst thou. Come they of noble family? Why, so didst thou. Seem they religious? Why, so didst thou. Or are they spare in diet2, Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger, Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood, Garnish’d and deck’d in modest complement3, Not working with the eye without the ear, And but in purged judgement trusting neither? Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem.
Act 2, Scene 2
Scroop was the King’s close friend, the man who “didst bear the key of all my counsels”, and he took French money to betray him. Unmasking him, Henry lists everything Scroop seemed to be, and calls his treason “Another fall of man”.
Every word of the passage is how Scroop seemed, not what he was. His dark hair and bare head are how the panels draw him; his plain gown is the modest dress the passage gives him.
The Dauphin
The words the numbers point to
1Prince Dauphin
2the most active gentleman of France
3When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk
Act 2, Scene 4; Act 3, Scene 7
The Dauphin mocked Henry’s youth with a gift of tennis balls. On the night before the battle he can talk of nothing but his horse, and once he has gone to arm, the Constable mocks his courage behind his back.
The play does not describe his face. His circlet with three points and his long hair are how the panels tell him from his father and from Henry; the lilies of France mark the French in every panel.
The Constable
The words the numbers point to
1You are too much mistaken in this king
2I have the best armour of the world
3Stars, my lord
Act 2, Scene 4; Act 3, Scene 7
The Constable commands the French army. At the French court he warns the Dauphin not to underrate Henry, whose wild youth, he says, was a cover for good judgement. On the night before the battle he boasts of his armour and mocks the Dauphin’s boasting behind his back.
The play gives his armour and the stars on it, not his face. His dark pointed beard is how the panels tell him from the French King and the Dauphin.
Fluellen
The words the numbers point to
1a little out of fashion
2much care and valour in this Welshman
3wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps
Act 4, Scene 1; Act 4, Scene 7
Fluellen talks without end about the Roman wars and how they should be fought, and the King, overhearing him at night, finds care and valour under the old-fashioned manner. The leek is the Welsh badge he wears with pride, and the one he makes Pistol eat for mocking it.
The play does not describe his face. His leek and his Monmouth cap are his own words, and his old hood is how the panels show him a little out of fashion; the leek’s green is left to the words, since the print has no green.
Gower
Gower is a good captain1, and is good knowledge and literatured in the wars2.
Act 4, Scene 7
Gower is the English captain and Fluellen’s friend, the patient listener to his long speeches about the wars of the Romans. He sees through Pistol before Fluellen does, and in Act 5 he takes the Welshman’s side against him.
The play praises what he knows, not how he looks. His steel cap and padded jacket are how the panels draw an English captain of 1415, and he is clean-shaven, as they draw him, so that he is never taken for the bearded Williams.
Princess Katherine
The words the numbers point to
1Fair Katharine, and most fair
2de hand
3my fair flower-de-luce
Act 3, Scene 4; Act 5, Scene 2
Katherine asks her gentlewoman Alice for the English words for her hand, her arm and her chin: the language of the country invading hers. In Act 5 Henry woos her in it, and calls her the “capital demand” in his terms of peace.
The play gives no description of her looks beyond “fair”. She is drawn as a princess of France in 1415, her circlet showing her rank and her gown sprinkled with the lilies that Henry’s “flower-de-luce” names.
Williams
The words the numbers point to
1that glove in thy cap
2By his blunt bearing he will keep his word
Act 4, Scene 1; Act 4, Scene 7
Williams tells a stranger in a borrowed cloak that if the King’s cause is bad, the King must answer for every soldier who dies for it. They swap gloves as a pledge to fight. When the stranger turns out to be the King, Williams stands by what he said, and Henry fills his glove with crowns.
The play does not describe his face. The glove in his cap is from his own words; his steel cap, short beard and padded jacket are how the panels draw a common soldier of 1415, and tell him from Captain Gower.
Henry at the breach
Act 3, Scene 1
Where to find it: The whole of the scene: Henry’s speech before the walls of Harfleur, from “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” to “God for Harry! England and Saint George!”
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead1.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man2
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage3;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon4; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as does a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English,
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought,
And sheath’d their swords for lack of argument.
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture5; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips6,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot!
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry, “God for Harry! England and Saint George!7
1“Or close the wall up with our English dead” The alternative to victory is stated in the second line: if the breach is not taken, English bodies will fill it. Henry makes death part of the building work of the siege, and the plain monosyllables keep the image unsoftened.
2“In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man” The speech admits that the ideal man is gentle, with “modest stillness and humility”, before asking for the opposite. War is presented as a change of role for a season, which is how Henry makes violence acceptable to men he calls “dear friends”.
3“Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage” The key verb is “Disguise”. Courage here is a costume put on over a man’s “fair nature”, and “imitate the action of the tiger” asks for acting too. The speech about fighting is also a speech about performance, which is the play’s own subject.
4“Like the brass cannon” The simile turns the soldier’s eye into a gun looking out through the “portage” of the skull, and the following simile makes his brow an overhanging rock. The men are asked to become the weapons and landscape of war, not merely to use them.
5“The mettle of your pasture” Henry turns from the nobles to the “good yeomen”, small farmers who owned their land, and praises the English land that bred them: “mettle” means spirit or courage, and “pasture” the fields that fed them. In Shakespeare’s time mettle and metal were one word, so the phrase can also suggest men tempered like weapons by English soil.
6“like greyhounds in the slips” The closing simile is from hunting: dogs straining at the leash before the hare is released. With “The game’s afoot!” war becomes a sport and the soldiers eager animals, a flattering image that also hides the danger they face.
The question: How does Shakespeare use language and structure in this speech to show Henry persuading his soldiers to fight? Refer closely to the extract.
1“steel my soldiers’ hearts” The metaphor asks God to harden the men’s courage like metal, the work Henry’s own speeches have been doing. In private he admits that his army’s courage is not something he can guarantee himself.
2“The sense of reckoning” “Reckoning” means counting, so Henry asks God to stop his men counting the French numbers. It is also the word Williams used minutes earlier, when he said that if the cause were bad the King would face “a heavy reckoning” for the dead. The echo suggests the argument has stayed with him.
3“think not upon the fault” The repeated “Not today, O Lord, / O, not today” is urgent and almost bargaining. The “fault” is his father’s seizure of the crown from Richard II, so on the eve of battle Henry admits that his own title rests on a crime.
4“I Richard’s body have interred new” Henry lists what he has done to make amends: reburying Richard, weeping more tears over his body than the blood forced from it, paying five hundred poor people to pray, and building two chantries. The list sounds like an account being settled, which fits the language of reckoning.
5“Though all that I can do is nothing worth” The prayer turns on this admission. Penance that “comes after all” cannot undo the wrong, and Henry still wears the crown it won. One reading finds a sincere conscience here; another finds a king who knows that no amount of piety can make his claim clean.
The question: How does Shakespeare present Henry’s private thoughts about guilt and responsibility in this prayer, and how does it change the audience’s view of him after his argument with Williams earlier in Act 4, Scene 1?
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars4
,
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford, and Exeter5
,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers6
.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition7
;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
1“The fewer men, the greater share of honour” Henry turns the army’s weakness into its advantage by treating honour as a fixed treasure divided among those present. The balanced comparison, fewer and greater, makes a desperate situation sound like good fortune.
2“if it be a sin to covet honour” Henry has just said he is “not covetous for gold” and that “outward things” mean nothing to him; now he confesses to a sin in order to boast of it. The admission links him to the play’s competing ideas of honour: the French lords’ vanity, Pistol’s pretence, and a king who claims to want nothing but glory.
3“Let him depart. His passport shall be made” The offer of a safe-conduct and travel money is a shrewd move: nobody on stage accepts it, so the whole army appears to choose to stay. Freedom offered in public becomes pressure to remain.
4“Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars” Henry imagines the future before the battle has begun, turning wounds into trophies shown off at a neighbours’ feast. Contrast Pistol in Act 5, Scene 1, who plans to pass off the bruises of a cudgelling as wounds from the French wars.
5“Harry the King, Bedford, and Exeter” The list of names that will be “Familiar in his mouth as household words” is a list of lords. The common soldiers are promised remembrance, but the names to be remembered are the nobles’.
6“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” The tricolon builds from “few” to “happy few” to “band of brothers”, and the repeated “we” includes speaker and listeners in one group. Numbers that should frighten the army become a mark of distinction.
The question: Starting with this speech, explore how Shakespeare presents ideas about honour in Henry V. Write about the speech and about the play as a whole.
Animal imagery and war as hunting
Example: Henry’s soldiers are to “imitate the action of the tiger” and stand “like greyhounds in the slips” (Act 3, Scene 1); in the French camp Orleans calls English mastiffs “Foolish curs”, and the Constable says that, fed on beef, the English will eat like wolves and “fight like devils” (Act 3, Scene 7).
Effect: Both sides describe men as animals, but to opposite ends. Henry’s images make his soldiers fierce and eager; the French images make the English stupid beasts to be crushed. Shakespeare lets the audience enjoy the French arrogance knowing Agincourt is coming, and also notice that Henry’s own rhetoric needs his men to stop being fully human.
Verse, prose and which Henry speaks
Henry speaks verse as king, in council, at Harfleur and at Agincourt. Disguised among his soldiers in Act 4, Scene 1 he speaks prose, the language of ordinary men, and when they leave he returns to verse for his soliloquy and prayer. In the wooing he speaks prose again, and claims plainness. The French lords chat in prose the night before the battle, idle and boastful, and Pistol talks in a comic imitation of old heroic verse. Tracking the form tells you which role Henry is playing, and it supports the reading that his kingship is a set of performances.
Paired scenes: each triumph has a shadow
Much of the play is built in pairs. In Act 2, Scene 2 Henry pardons a drunk who railed at him, then refuses mercy to the traitors, telling them “The mercy that was quick in us but late” has been killed by their own advice. The rousing Harfleur speech is followed two scenes later by the threats to the town. The St Crispin’s Day promise of brotherhood is followed by Henry’s order to kill the prisoners. Montjoy the herald comes three times, twice to demand ransom and the third time to ask leave to bury the French dead, when Gloucester notes “His eyes are humbler than they us’d to be”. The repetitions measure the change of fortune.
The order of events at Agincourt
At the end of Act 4, Scene 6, hearing a “new alarum” and seeing that “The French have reinforc’d their scatter’d men”, Henry orders “Then every soldier kill his prisoners”. Only at the start of 4.7 do Fluellen and Gower report that French runaways have killed the boys guarding the luggage and looted the King’s tent, and Gower says that is why the King, “most worthily”, has had every soldier cut his prisoner’s throat, adding “O, ’tis a gallant king!” The Boy had warned in 4.4 that the luggage was guarded only by boys. Shakespeare lets two explanations stand: military necessity in the scene order, and revenge in Gower’s account. Strong answers notice which one they are using.
History compressed
Historically, Henry landed in France in August 1415, Harfleur surrendered on 22 September and Agincourt was fought on 25 October, but the Treaty of Troyes that made Henry heir of France was not sealed until 21 May 1420. The play moves straight from the victory to the peace, with the Act 5 Chorus asking the audience to “brook abridgement”. It is also the last of four plays that follow the same royal line, after Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV. Falstaff, Henry’s companion in the two parts of Henry IV, never appears here: he is dying offstage, “The King has kill’d his heart” says the Hostess, and in Act 4 Fluellen recalls how Henry “turn’d away the fat knight”. The absent Falstaff is a structural reminder of what the King gave up.
The glove plot
The quarrel with Williams in Act 4, Scene 1 ends with an exchange of gloves as a pledge to fight later. Henry gives Williams’s glove to Fluellen in 4.7, Williams strikes Fluellen in 4.8, and Henry reveals himself and has Exeter fill the glove with crowns. Williams’s defence, “Your Majesty came not like yourself”, puts the blame on the disguise, and he refuses Fluellen’s shilling: “I will none of your money.” Structurally, the serious night-time argument about a king’s responsibility is resolved not by an answer but by a joke and a payment, which some readers find generous and others find evasive.
A sonnet to end a war play
The Epilogue is a sonnet of fourteen lines rhymed in the Shakespearean pattern: pen and men, story and glory, through to a closing couplet on sake and take. The form of love poetry closes a play about conquest, and its second quatrain opens on “Small time”: Henry’s life was short, his son became king “in infant bands”, and those who governed for him “lost France and made his England bleed”. The line “Which oft our stage hath shown” reminds the audience that they already know the sequel. The ending undercuts the triumph without cancelling it, which is why it is such good evidence in an essay about how far the play celebrates Henry.
Ransom
Money paid to free a prisoner. Noble prisoners were valuable, which is why the French repeatedly ask what ransom Henry will pay, and why Pistol bullies his captive for crowns.
Breach
A gap broken in a wall or defence by an attack, as at Harfleur in Act 3, Scene 1.
Parley
A conference between enemies, usually to discuss terms. “The town sounds a parley” at the end of Act 3, Scene 2, signalling that Harfleur will talk.
Gage
A pledge, such as a glove, given or thrown down as a challenge to fight. Henry and Williams exchange gloves as gages in Act 4, Scene 1.
Pax
A small carved or painted tablet with a holy image, kissed during Mass. Bardolph is hanged for stealing one from a church in France.
Ancient
An old word for an ensign, the officer who carried the company’s flag. It is Pistol’s rank, so Fluellen calls him Anchient Pistol.
Leek
The Welsh emblem, worn on St David’s Day, 1 March. Fluellen wears one, Henry says he wears it too “For I am Welsh”, and Pistol is made to eat one.
St Crispin’s Day
The feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, patron saints of shoemakers and leather workers, on 25 October. The Battle of Agincourt was fought on that day in 1415.
Chantry
A chapel, or a gift of money, for priests to sing masses for a dead person’s soul. Henry says he has built two for the soul of Richard II.
Usurpation
Taking a throne by force rather than by right. Henry’s father took the crown from Richard II, which is why Henry prays “Not today, O Lord” before the battle.
Ceremony
In Henry’s soliloquy in Act 4, Scene 1, the outward show and ritual of royal power: titles, crowns, bowing subjects. He asks what it is worth.
Soliloquy
A speech a character makes alone on stage, revealing thoughts to the audience. Henry’s two in Act 4, Scene 1, on ceremony and then in prayer, follow his argument with the soldiers.
Blank verse
Unrhymed lines of ten syllables with five stresses (iambic pentameter). Henry’s public speeches use it; his disguised talk and his wooing are in prose.
History play
A play dramatising events from a nation’s past, usually the reigns of its kings. Henry V is the last of a sequence of four, after Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV.
Rhetoric
The art of persuasive speech, and the techniques it uses: repetition, questions, lists, imagery. The play is full of speeches designed to move listeners to act.
Analyse the extract closely: the imperatives that direct the body, the animal and hunting imagery, and the admission in “Disguise fair nature” that courage is acted.
Comment on the speech’s structure: it moves from “dear friends” to “you noblest English” to “good yeomen”, gathering every rank, and ends by giving the soldiers words to shout.
Move to what surrounds it: Bardolph’s comic echo in Act 3, Scene 2, and the threats to the Governor in 3.3, where the same voice turns from inspiring soldiers to terrifying civilians.
Range across the play: the controlled anger of the tennis-ball reply (1.2), the trap for the traitors (2.2), the doubts in disguise (4.1), St Crispin’s Day (4.3), the order to kill the prisoners (4.6) and the wooing (5.2).
Use context to explain, not decorate: the ideal of a Christian warrior king, the Chorus’s praise of “the mirror of all Christian kings”, and how productions differ, such as Olivier’s wartime film of 1944 cutting the darker scenes.
End with a judgement: is Henry an inspiring leader, a skilful manipulator, or both at once, and which moment in the play settles it for you?
Quotations are short, exact and embedded, and single words are analysed where the effect lies in them: “imitate” and “Disguise” carry the point about acting.
It comments on structure within the speech, the movement through the ranks, and on structure across the play, the pairing of 3.1 with 3.3.
It offers two readings of the Harfleur threat, says which is more convincing and why, and supports both from the text.
The final sentence links the moment to the rest of the play and to the central debate about Henry, which is what lifts a strong paragraph above a competent one.
7“God for Harry! England and Saint George!” The final war cry joins God, the king by his familiar name, the nation and its patron saint in one breath. Henry ends by giving the men words to shout, so the speech closes by putting his rhetoric into their mouths.
7“This day shall gentle his condition” “Gentle” is used as a verb: to make someone a gentleman. Henry promises that shared blood will raise the lowest soldier in rank. Set it beside the English casualty list in Act 4, Scene 8, where after four named men come “None else of name”.
Analyse Williams in Act 4, Scene 1: the “legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off” that will cry out at the Day of Judgement, and the wives and children left poor. This is the cost seen from below.
Weigh Agincourt itself: Exeter’s account of York and Suffolk dying together is noble and moving, but it sits beside the order to kill the prisoners and a casualty list that names only four English dead and adds “None else of name”.
Use Burgundy’s speech in 5.2, with France’s gardens and vineyards running wild, “naked, poor, and mangled Peace”, as the cost to the land.
Conclude with the Epilogue: those who ruled for Henry’s son lost France and “made his England bleed”. Does this make the play anti-war, or a celebration with its eyes open?
Make the case for the politician: the Church’s interest in the war (1.1), the trap at Southampton, the threats at Harfleur, the silence over Bardolph, the prisoners, and the shifting of blame in 4.1.
Show how Shakespeare’s methods keep both views alive: the Chorus against the scenes, paired triumphs and shadows, the scene order in 4.6 and 4.7, and the soliloquy that reveals doubt beneath the confidence.
Use contexts of reception: Olivier’s 1944 film, made as a patriotic rallying cry in the Second World War, cut the traitors, the Harfleur threats, the killing of the prisoners and Bardolph’s hanging; Branagh’s 1989 film put more weight on the horrors of war.
Use contexts of production: a play probably written in 1599, whose Act 5 Chorus is usually read as a reference to the Earl of Essex’s campaign in Ireland that year, and whose Epilogue assumes the audience has already seen the loss of France on stage, “Which oft our stage hath shown”.
Reach your own judgement rather than splitting the difference: which view explains more of the play, and what does the other view still explain that yours cannot?
Note that the 1600 quarto has no Chorus at all, so the frame is something only the Folio text gives us.
End with the Epilogue sonnet and its turn to loss, and argue what the Chorus finally leaves the audience believing about Henry.
Give Katherine her voice. In Act 5, Scene 2 her strongest answers are “Is it possible dat I should love de enemy of France?” and “Dat is as it shall please le roi mon père”, and her father and the councils settle the articles of peace while she is being wooed. Consider how much choice she has.
Handle context precisely and with caution. The play was probably written in 1599; the Act 5 Chorus is usually taken to refer to Essex in Ireland; where it was first staged is uncertain. Claims that are hedged in the scholarship should be hedged in your essay.
Argue, and give the alternative. Examiners reward a clear view of Henry, supported across the play, that also shows you understand the case against it.
