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Henry the Fifth has become synonymous with English patriotism. A dashing young king achieves a stunning military victory against all odds, stirring his men to impossible valour through sheer rhetorical force. The phrases have become legendary: 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more'; 'Cry ''God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'' '; 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.' Whereas all Shakespeare's other history plays of the 1590s portray an England riven by faction and anxiety over rightful succession to the throne, here the nation seems united and all-conquering. Perhaps no other Shakespeare play has such a simple plot: King Harry makes his claim for France, thwarts a small conspiracy, sets sail, takes Harfleur, wins the battle of Agincourt and marries the defeated king's daughter. The cast consists almost entirely of his loyal army and his French enemies, among whom the dauphin in particular is parodied as a kind of poor man's Hotspur. Yet, as so often with Shakespeare, a wealth of reservations are held within that 'almost'. 2 Henry IV ended with an epilogue promising a continuation of the story 'with Sir John in it': the fat knight's absence casts a shadow across the king's triumphs.
The play does not begin with a ceremonial entrance and a large-scale royal court scene. First the Chorus appears alone on the bare stage. The audience are invited to reflect upon the fact that what they are about to witness is performance, not reality, and that their imaginary forces will be necessary in order to transform stage and playing company into battlefield and army. The play is intended to work upon us as King Harry works upon his followers: the dazzling power of words creates the triumph out of extremely limited resources. Between each act the Chorus returns to remind us that it is all a theatrical trick: we only suppose that we have been transported to France and that the little band of players and extras constitute a great army on the march or fighting to the death in hand-to-hand combat. Players, as Macbeth and Prospero will remind later Shakespearean audiences, are but shadows. After two or three turns of the hourglass, the revels end and the action vanishes like a dream. So too with Harry's triumph: the closing chorus, an artfully turned sonnet, compares the imaginative work of the author ('In little room confining mighty men') with the brevity of the victorious king's reign ('Small time, but in that small most greatly lived / This star of England'). Could it then be that the secret of Harry's success is linguistic might rather than the right of his cause?
The action proper commences with the representatives of the Church confirming the 'reformation' of the king, his conversion to piety from the 'wildness' of the Henry IV plays. He has transformed himself into a master of divinity, political affairs and the theory of war. The dialogue of the bishops also introduces another theme, familiar from the historical Reformation of the sixteenth century: the sequestration of ecclesiastical assets by the state. This precipitates a political deal: the archbishop will provide legal justification for the king's proposed invasion of France and in return the crown will take the side of the Church in their financial dispute with parliament. The whole apparatus of justification by precedent and lines of descent and debate over the applicability of the Salic law, elaborated in the archbishop's interminable speech in the following scene is a charade acted out for politic ends. The king has a one-line question – 'May I with right and conscience make this claim?' – and he gets the answer he wants to hear: yes. He is not interested in the small print.
By starting the action with the scheming bishops, Shakespeare suggests that the motivation for war is a matter more of political pragmatism than high principle. King Harry is anxious about a possible Scottish incursion and he is aware that his own hold on the throne is insecure – hence the need to dispatch the traitors Cambridge, Scroop and Grey by means of a piece of theatre that shows his capacity for both mercy and stern justice, to reveal the iron fist in his velvet glove. For all the talk of ancient rights to France and the need to bounce back the insult of the tennis balls, one cannot help suspecting that Harry's real motivation for going to war is driven by his dying father's strategic advice:
… Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days. ( 2 Henry IV , 4.2.350–3)
There is nothing like an overseas military adventure to unite a divided nation.
Prince Hal's riotous behaviour in the Henry IV plays is now revealed to have been an elaborate game, a piece of play-acting. He continues to play games once he is king: his handling of the traitors in the second act and the business of the glove in the cap after Agincourt are theatrical devices designed to demonstrate his quasi-magical power of seeing into his subjects' souls. The manner in which an actor plays the part of King Harry will be largely determined by the extent to which he plays up the character's actorliness. The wooing of Katherine is a crux in this regard: how much of a performance is the combination of charm, wit, boyish embarrassment and delight in power ('in loving me, you should love the friend of France, for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it')? Or is Harry genuinely smitten with Kate?
The king's mastery comes above all from what the archbishop calls 'his sweet and honeyed sentences'. Rhetorical force is his greatest gift: he can debate, cajole, command, inspire. Shakespeare gives him more than three times as many words as any other character in the play. Only Hamlet can match Harry in the ease with which he moves between highly-wrought verse and conversational prose. Many a modern general has reached for the Saint Crispin's day oration in preparing his men to go into battle: Laurence Olivier's 1944 film, dedicated to the British, American and other Allied troops who were liberating Europe from the Nazis, is only the most renowned of the frequent military appropriations of the play (it was reputedly at Winston Churchill's insistence that Olivier cut the scene with the three traitors – at such a critical historical moment, there had to be unity in the Allied ranks). Even hardened cynics find themselves becoming patriotic when the king addresses his band of brothers, especially in film when the words are further pumped up by sweeping camera action and rousing music.
Harry's rallying speeches reveal a sharp political intelligence at work. For instance, 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more' is carefully modulated in three parts. The 'dear friends' with which it begins are the king's immediate kinsmen and closest followers. They set the lead example. Attention then turns to the aristocracy and gentry, the 'noblest English', whose role is to 'Be copy now to men of grosser [i.e. less high-class] blood / And teach them how to war.' Then come the 'yeomen' and finally 'the mean and base'. All will be of 'noble lustre' if they surge forward into the breach in Harfleur's wall. The speech thus enacts the chain of command down the ranks. It offers a textbook image of the officer class leading from the front by example. Even lowly Corporal Bardolph is momentarily inspired. But Nym, Pistol and Falstaff 's boy are not. They stop in their tracks and have tobe physically beaten to the breach by loyal Captain Fluellen. The power of the king's rhetoric is thus called into question.
Fluellen believes in fighting war by the book. His modern equivalent would be a liberal-minded army officer intent upon fighting according to the rules of the Geneva convention. But his very mode of thinking exposes cracks in the king's moral armour. King Harry of Monmouth is compared to Alexander the Great of Macedon not only because they are both great warriors (who both come from places beginning with 'M', each of which has a river running through it, 'and there is salmons in both'), but also because 'as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, being in his ales and his cups, so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wits and his good judgements, turned away the fat knight with the great belly-doublet'. The audience is thus reminded that the price of Harry's greatness is the killing of Falstaff 's heart.
There is also the matter of the killing of the French prisoners, strikingly omitted not only from Olivier's wartime film but also from Kenneth Branagh's generally more hard-edged portrayal of Agincourt in his 1989 movie. For Fluellen, the French army's killing of the boys and the baggage-handlers is 'expressly against the law of arms'. Gower replies that, since the French have broken the rules, the English have been forced to do so as well: 'wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant king!' But the text is quite explicit that King Harry gives the order to kill the prisoners before he hears of the attack on the camp followers. The reason for their summary slaughter is that every last soldier is needed to cope with the arrival of French reinforcements. It is a pragmatic decision, not a gallant or a worthy one. So too at Harfleur earlier: though a threat rather than an action, the idea of raping the maidens and massacring the innocents of the city does not immediately conjure up the terms 'gallant' or 'worthily'.
Most searching of all is the debate between the disguised Harry 'le Roi' and Michael Williams on the night before the battle:
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place' – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument?
This little touch of Michael in the night pricks Harry's conscience, leading him to soliloquize on the responsibilities of leadership and to pray that God will not choose this moment to punish him for the fault his father made in compassing the crown. After the battle, the king succeeds in embarrassing and, with typical double-handedness, then offering to reward Williams. But he never finds a full answer to the point: every subject's duty is the king's while every subject's soul is his own, but the fact remains that bloody battle is not a place for 'dying well' in the sense of drawing up one's spiritual accounts and making peace with God.
Where 1 Henry IV began with rebellion coming from Scotland (the Douglas) and Wales (Owen Glendower), Henry the Fifth brings the whole of the British Isles together in the fight against France. Included in King Henry's army is a quartet representing England (Gower), Wales (Fluellen), Scotland (Jamy), and Ireland (MacMorris). But we cannot say for sure that the play is celebrating the unification of the four nations into one, for during the campaign against France, King Harry's army is not without its tensions. The Irish MacMorris, in particular, is an odd man out, not even at peace with the affable Fluellen:
FLUELLEN Captain MacMorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation——
MACMORRIS Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?
In the chorus to the fifth act, the Earl of Essex is celebrated because as the audience is watching the play in London in 1599 he is 'broaching' (spiking) the Irish on his sword. Yet here in the body of the third act, Shakespeare gives a voice to Ireland. Or rather, he questions England's – for the Welsh Fluellen in his loyalty to Harry of Monmouth, once Prince of Wales and now King of England, speaks for England – he questions England's right to speak for Ireland. What Englishman or anglicized Welshman dare talk of MacMorris' nation? What kind of a nation can Ireland be when the Irish are construed by the English as villains and bastards and knaves and rascals? And that is how the dominant voice of Elizabethan England's national poet, Edmund Spenser, did construe them in his dialogue of the mid-1590s, A View of the Present State of Ireland . But even Spenser had his counter-voices. A View is written in the form of a dialogue and it is more sharply critical of the 'Old English' settlers in Ireland than the Irish themselves, while in The Faerie Queene there is a Savage Nation resembling Ireland, but also a Savage Man who is the noblest man.
As for Shakespeare, he is all counter-voice. When MacMorris says 'What ish my nation?' Ireland in its anguish is allowed to speak, just as in The Tempest Shakespeare's most beautiful poetry is put into the mouth of a 'savage and deformed slave' whose name evokes Carib and Cannibal. Because he was hardly ever narrowly topical in his own age and culture, Shakespeare has remained topical in other ages and cultures. Because he addresses great political issues rather than local political circumstances, his plays speak to such perennial problems as tyranny and aggressive nationalism. Because his own positions are so elusive, because every one of his voices has its counter-voice – Fluellen his MacMorris, King Harry his Michael Williams, Prospero his Caliban – he has become the voice of many positions.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the amount of space that is given to the king's stirring speeches and the archbishop's convoluted history lesson, Henry the Fifth has almost as a high proportion of prose as the two parts of Henry IV . And it is the prose scenes that are the most emotionally engaging: Hostess Quickly's simultaneously comic and moving account of Falstaff 's death, the moment of tenderness as the women say farewell to their men going off to war, the figure of Fluellen (portrayed with great affection for his loyalty and professionalism, yet simultaneously teased for his pedantry in the history and theory of warfare), the utterly authentic combination of fear, common sense and bloody-mindedness shown by the common soldiers in their debate with the disguised king on the night before the battle.
Falstaff is dead, but his spirit is reanimated in his friends who follow the wars to France. Throughout the
Henry IV/V
trilogy, there is an under-commentary cutting away at Prince Hal's growth into the role of warrior-king and patriot: a confused but vibrant prose voice is counter-pointed against the polished verse of law, order and military glory. It is a voice summed up most concisely in the words of Falstaff 's sometime page. In response to the king's cry that battle is the opportunity to achieve immortal fame, the boy says 'Would I were in an ale-house in London: I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.' This is not just the sentiment of a pint-sized Falstaff out from under King Arthur's bosom: it is the voice of the foot-soldier in every age. After Agincourt, the king thanks God for the miracle whereby fewer than thirty English have been killed in the battle. In his listing of the dead, he does not mention Falstaff 's proxies, yet they are the ones whom the audience mourns most: Bardolph and Nym, hanged; the boy, killed with the luggage; Quickly or Doll,
dead in the spital of a malady of France. They have died not for Harry's but for Falstaff 's England; they have fought not for a palace or parliament in Westminster but for an ale-house in Eastcheap.
KEY FACTS
PLOT: Soon after his accession to the throne King Henry V is considering asserting his right to rule France as well as England. Consulting the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the justness of his claim, he receives a gift of tennis balls sent by the dauphin – a scornful jibe at his youth, which spurs him on to the invasion of France. The king's former companions from his days in the Eastcheap tavern hear of the death of Sir John Falstaff from Hostess Quickly. They take their leave of her and set out to join Henry's army. Despite the dauphin's insistence that Henry is an unworthy opponent, the French king receives the English ambassadors but finally rejects Henry's claim to the crown. Henry's forces besiege and then take the town of Harfleur. While her father rouses his nobles to retaliation, Princess Katherine begins to learn English with the help of her companion Alice. Following the victory at Harfleur, the English forces begin a retreat through Normandy on account of the poor condition of the men, who are disheartened by sickness and foul weather. Even so, Henry rejects the French Herald's offer of ransom and the two armies prepare to fight. On the eve of the battle of Agincourt, Henry tours the camp in disguise and, sounding out the opinions of his men, is led to consider the heavy responsibilities of kingship. In the French camp, by contrast, confidence is high. As battle is joined, Henry rallies his troops and places them all in God's hands. An English victory is confirmed, with miraculously small losses. As part of the subsequent treaty, Henry woos and wins Katherine to ensure the linking of the two countries through marriage.
MAJOR PARTS: ( with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage ) King Henry V (32%/147/11), Fluellen (9%/68/6), Chorus (7%/6/6), Archbishop of Canterbury (7%/18/2), Pistol (5%/62/7), Duke of Exeter (4%/22/8), Constable of France (4%/40/5), Lewis the Dauphin (4%/31/5), French King (3%/19/3), Boy (2%/16/4), Williams (2%/28/3), Duke of Burgundy (2%/8/1), Gower (2%/5/1), Katherine (2%/33/2), Montjoy (2%/11/3), Nym (1%/20/3), Hostess (1%/11/2), Duke of Orléans (1%/29/3).
LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 60% verse, 40% prose.
DATE: 1599. Must have been written soon after 2 Henry IV ; not mentioned by Meres in 1598; published 1600. It is nearly always assumed that 'the general … from Ireland coming' (Act 5 Chorus) refers to the Earl of Essex's Irish expedition, which lasted from March to September 1599. A small minority of commentators suppose that 'the general' is Lord Mountjoy, who was Master-General of the Ordnance and Lord Deputy of Ireland from February 1600 onwards, which would date the play, or at least the choruses, rather later, but the allusion implies public fame much more fitting with Essex than Mountjoy. Self-conscious theatrical references ('this wooden O') suggest that the play may have been written as a showpiece for the newly-built Globe theatre, which opened some time between February and September 1599, but it could have opened at the Curtain.
SOURCES: Based primarily on the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles ; some probable use of Holinshed's main source, Edward Halle's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548). Like the Henry IV plays, also draws on the anonymous play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court (published 1598, but in the repertoire for up to a decade before this). The old play includes such details as Canterbury's justification of the claim to France, the tennis balls and the courtship of Princess Katherine. The rival acting company of Philip Henslowe also had a Henry V play, but it is lost, so its influence on Shakespeare cannot be determined. The sequence on the night before Agincourt is influenced by a 1590s dramatic tradition of scenes in which a ruler goes in disguise among his people.
TEXT: A Quarto was published in 1600 ( The Chronicle History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France. Together with Auntient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times playd by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants ). Less than half the length of the later Folio text, with many errors and inconsistencies, and some notable differences from the Folio (e.g. no Chorus whatsoever; Bourbon instead of the dauphin on the French side in the Agincourt scenes), it is some kind of reconstruction, perhaps from memory, of a version of the play as performed on stage. This Quarto was reprinted in 1602 and 1619 (the latter with a false date of 1608). The Folio text is much fuller and better printed; it is almost certainly derived from Shakespeare's manuscript or a scribal copy of it. There are, however, some occasions when the Quarto can be used to correct errors. It is possible that the Folio editor occasionally consulted a copy of the Third Quarto. The most awkward speeches for modern editors are those written in French: a combination of Shakespeare's imperfect French, incomprehension on the part of the printers and the differences between sixteenth-century and modern French means that the creation of a usable text requires more than usual editorial licence in correcting and modernizing.