Themes in Henry V

A Chorus opens Henry V by apologising for the limitations of the stage — within this "wooden O" it cannot contain the armies or the oceans or the fields of France. What follows is a sustained examination of whether any stage can contain Henry himself, or whether the performance of kingship and the reality of it can ever be the same thing.

Henry never stops performing leadership. His speech before Harfleur in Act 3 — "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; / Or close the wall up with our English dead" — is a masterwork of military rhetoric. It builds in three movements: appeal to English fighting nature, appeal to the example of their fathers, appeal to the particular men standing in front of him. It works. The assault goes forward.

But Shakespeare immediately complicates this by cutting to Pistol, Bardolph, Nym and the Boy, who are not going unto the breach. They are frightened, mercenary, and practical. Fluellen has to drive them toward the walls with a sword. The gap between the king's speech and the soldiers' experience is the play's central gap.

The night before Agincourt, Henry wanders the camp in disguise, a king pretending not to be a king. He encounters Williams and Bates, soldiers who speak frankly about the king's responsibility for their deaths. Henry argues back without being able to identify himself. When Williams tells him that if the cause is unjust "the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make," Henry cannot answer him directly.

"What infinite heart's-ease / Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!" This soliloquy in Act 4 is the play's most honest moment. Henry is not celebrating kingship; he is counting its costs. Ceremony — "What art thou, thou idle ceremony?" — gives him nothing that the ordinary soldier has, except responsibility for everything that goes wrong.

The St Crispin's Day speech is the other pole of this. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" — Henry transforming military disadvantage into solidarity, mortality into memory. It works in the theatre as surely as it must have worked in the field. Shakespeare does not ask the audience to choose between these two Henry's. The man who sat alone counting the cost of ceremony then steps forward and delivers this. Both are real.

What the play refuses to resolve is whether a leader who understands the gap between the performance of kingship and its reality is a better leader for understanding it, or whether that understanding is simply what makes the performance more effective. Henry knows exactly what he is doing. The play watches him do it and leaves the question open.

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Act 4 Scene 7 contains a moment most productions pass over quickly: Henry orders his soldiers to kill the French prisoners. This is a battlefield massacre of unarmed captives, and Shakespeare gives it a few lines before moving on. No character argues about it at length. No one is punished for it. The play's silence on the ethics of the order is more disturbing than any debate would be.

The question of whether the war is just runs through every act. The Archbishop of Canterbury's speech in Act 1 Scene 2 — a long, tangled argument about Salic law designed to give Henry legal cover for the invasion — is so convoluted that Henry himself asks: "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" Canterbury says yes. Henry proceeds. Whether the audience believes Canterbury is the play's first test.

Williams makes the moral argument more plainly in Act 4 Scene 1. If the king's cause is unjust, every limb lost, every soul killed, lies on the king's conscience. Henry argues back — in disguise — that soldiers bear responsibility for their own sins at death; the king is responsible only for the justice of the cause. It is a clever distinction. Williams accepts it reluctantly and immediately bets his glove that he still has the better of the argument.

Bardolph is hanged for stealing a small liturgical object from a French church. Henry enforces the law: "We would have all such offenders so cut off." Bardolph was Hal's companion in the Henry IV plays, the man he drank with at the Boar's Head. The play gives Henry no moment of private grief about this. He moves on.

The St Crispin's Day speech is genuinely moving. It is also a king telling thousands of men that dying today will make them famous, because that is the only argument available when you are outnumbered five to one. "He that shall live this day, and see old age, / Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours." What is being offered is the possibility of a story about oneself. Shakespeare does not undercut it, but he has already shown you what the story costs.

Fluellen's insistence in Act 4 Scene 7 that Henry is like Alexander the Great is the play's blackest joke. He means it as the highest praise. His reason — that both great captains turned on their companions — links Henry's rejection of Falstaff to Alexander's murder of Cleitus in drink. Fluellen does not notice the implication. The audience does.

Honour in this play is always a performance of honour as much as the thing itself. Henry performs it to his soldiers before battle. The soldiers perform it to each other. The French lords perform it before Agincourt and then die. Whether the performance creates the reality it claims to represent is the question the play leaves with the final Chorus, who reminds the audience that Henry VI lost everything his father won.

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Henry V is the most self-aware play Shakespeare wrote about its own theatrical condition. The Chorus appears five times, each time acknowledging what the stage cannot do — the armies, the oceans, the passage of time — and asking the audience to supply the deficiency with imagination. "And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, / On your imaginary forces work." This is not theatrical modesty. It establishes language as the medium through which the war is being fought, remembered and made meaningful.

Henry understands this more precisely than anyone else in the play. Every major speech is a tactical act. The Canterbury consultations, the ultimatum to Harfleur, the St Crispin speech, the wooing of Katherine — he shifts register with accuracy at each moment. Formal authority before Harfleur. Stripped-down camaraderie before Agincourt. Plain blunt English suitor to Katherine in Act 5.

He tells Katherine: "I know no ways to mince it in love, but directly to say — I love you." He is mincing nothing. He is performing plainness to someone who finds plainness in a foreign king appealing. It is the most controlled speech in the play precisely because it sounds most like it is not.

Katherine's French lessons in Act 3 Scene 4 are comic but carry weight. She learns English words for body parts — foot, arm, chin, neck — mispronouncing them in ways that sound, in French, like obscenities. Two languages are colliding. One of them is going to be imposed on the other. Her lessons are an act of preparation for a conquest that has not yet been completed.

The Chorus is nominally apologising throughout the play. Actually it is making a larger claim about how history is constructed: through stories, through words, through what is decided to be worth telling. "Following the mirror of all Christian kings" — the Chorus names Henry as an ideal even before the audience has seen him do anything. The naming creates the reputation.

Pistol has the play's most theatrical language — booming verse and classical references that amount to nothing useful. He talks like a hero and acts as badly as possible. His language is performance without substance: theatre that is only noise, which is exactly what the Chorus warns against if the audience refuses to engage its imagination. Pistol is the Chorus's fear made human.

Fluellen's comparison of Henry to Alexander the Great is the play's most direct examination of how history is made through the stories people tell. His argument is technically wrong and instinctively right. He means to praise Henry; he names what the play has been quietly suggesting. Language does not simply describe things in Henry V. It makes them, and it unmakes them, and the play knows this from the first line of the first Chorus.

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Pistol, Bardolph, Nym and the Boy are the play's underside. They are Henry's former companions from the tavern world of the Henry IV plays, now following him to France for entirely mercenary reasons. Their commentary on the war runs alongside the heroic plot like a second play — one in which people talk about boots and loot and getting home alive.

Bardolph is hanged for theft. Nym is hanged for theft, reported off stage in a single line. The Boy watches both of them go with clear-eyed contempt, telling the audience in Act 3 that the three of them are sworn to France in name but it is "no English valour" — they talk bravely and act badly. He is assigned to guard the baggage while the men fight. He dies in the baggage-train raid that Henry orders avenged in Act 4 Scene 7.

Fluellen is a different kind of common soldier: a Welsh captain obsessed with military discipline and classical precedent, furiously serious about the correct conduct of war. His comparison of Henry to Alexander the Great in Act 4 — linking Henry's rejection of Falstaff to Alexander's murder of Cleitus in a drunken argument — is accidentally damning. Shakespeare gives this reading of Henry's character to the one man who means it as the highest praise.

Williams is the clearest-eyed character in the play about what the king's war costs. His argument in Act 4 Scene 1 — that if the cause is unjust, all the deaths are on the king's conscience — is not answered, only deflected. Henry argues back in disguise. When he reveals himself next day and sends Williams the glove full of crowns, Williams accepts the money without satisfaction. The transaction is not an absolution.

The St Crispin's Day speech makes a direct promise to these men. "He to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition." Brotherhood across class, a king making his soldiers his equals for the duration of one battle. It is the most generous thing Henry says in the play. Whether it survives the battle — whether Williams and Fluellen will actually be treated as brothers next week — the play does not say.

The Boy's death is the play's quiet answer. He is the character with the sharpest intelligence and the least protection. He observes everything, understands everything, reports everything to the audience with perfect accuracy. He dies in the baggage train while the great men fight their famous battle on the field.

Fluellen makes him the subject of a brief memorial: the boys guarding the luggage were killed against the law of arms, and this is what Henry avenges by ordering the prisoner massacre. The Boy is turned into a justification for something the play has already made uncomfortable. Common soldiers do not get funerals in Henry V. They get counted.

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"Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'" — the battle-cry Henry ends his Harfleur speech with is a summoning of three things: a king, a nation, and a patron saint. None of the three is straightforwardly present. Henry is from a dynasty whose claim to the throne began with his father's usurpation. England is being fought for in France. Saint George was Palestinian.

The Chorus opens Act 2 by calling Henry "the mirror of all Christian kings" — an ideal the play immediately qualifies by cutting to Bardolph, Pistol and Nym arguing about money and past grievances. The England that follows Henry to France is not a unified body of patriots. It is a collection of people with different reasons, different fears, different investments in the outcome.

The English army at Agincourt includes Welshmen, Irishmen and Scots — Fluellen, Macmorris and Jamy — whose relationships to English national identity are complicated at best. Macmorris's question — "What ish my nation?" — is the play's most politically loaded line and the play declines to answer it. He is defending an English siege alongside a Welshman who argues constantly about Welshness, and a Scotsman who speaks in a comic accent. The war is called English; the army is not.

Henry's English in Act 5 Scene 3 is strategic. He woos Katherine in blunt English, refusing French, performing the plain soldier rather than the courtly diplomat. "I know no ways to mince it in love, but directly to say — I love you." He is selling an identity — the honest English plain-dealer — as aggressively as he sold martial brotherhood before Agincourt.

Katherine's position complicates every reading of the play's national project. She is the French princess whose marriage to the English king seals a conquest. Her English lessons earlier in the play — learning the words for body parts while preparing to be handed to the victor — make the political stakes of the wooing scene hard to ignore. Her agreement to the marriage is required for the story to end as a comedy.

The Chorus in Act 5 praises Henry as "this star of England." The final epilogue — delivered immediately after — tells the audience that Henry VI, the sickly child who will lose France and trigger the Wars of the Roses, is what England gets next. "Which oft our stage hath shown" is a reference to the Henry VI plays, already written and already performed. The audience knows what comes after Agincourt.

National identity in Henry V is always also a performance of national identity — a story that leaders tell and soldiers repeat, with real consequences for the people inside it. The play takes the performance seriously and refuses to take it entirely on its own terms. Both things are true at once.

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