Author Roger Warren’s numerous publications include five editions for the Oxford Shakespeare series. He has also collaborated with Edward Hall on a dozen Shakespeare productions.
By the time Shakespeare wrote Henry V in 1599, his central character was already half submerged in legend: a prodigal prince who seemed miraculously transformed into the heroic warrior-king who won the Battle of Agincourt. The Chorus has some of Shakespeare’s most magnificent, eloquent verse—if you want a picture of the legendary hero-king, here it is—but from the start, the Chorus’s idealistic view is consistently juxtaposed with scenes of political and psychological realism.
After the Chorus’s opening panegyric, what does the audience see? Not the King in glory, but two ecclesiastical politicians offering Henry a bribe to invade France as a way to defeat a possible attack on church finances. It is important to stress that the effect is not wholly ironic or cynical: Henry is not easily bought. He interrupts the Archbishop’s mumbo-jumbo about the Salic law with the penetrating single-line inquiry: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” Once reassured, he calls in the French ambassador, who presents him with the Dauphin’s present of tennis balls and the mocking message that he “cannot revel into dukedoms here.” Henry points out that the Dauphin, in deriding “our wilder days,” has not noticed “what use we made of them”—that is, acquiring the common touch that will prove so useful with his soldiers, especially at Agincourt. His speech then builds to an elaborate threat to revenge the Dauphin’s insults by invading France: he makes it seem like the invasion is the result of the Dauphin’s mockery, when in reality, he had already decided to invade before that. This habit of making a decision and then finding a reason for it is characteristic of the King’s mental processes.
Something similar occurs at the siege of Harfleur. At first, in his exhortation to his troops (“Once more unto the breach”), he sounds like the heroic warrior king whom the Chorus describes. But his threat to the inhabitants of Harfleur takes on quite a different tone. In the midst of vividly evoking the rape and pillage with which he threatens them, he asks: “What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause?” If they suffer from the siege, they have only themselves to blame. So, with the lack of mercy shown to the three conspirators. In a characteristic cat-and-mouse game, Henry invites them to recommend mercy to another offender. They don’t, and so when they themselves plead for mercy, he can reply: “The mercy that was quick in us but late/By your own counsel is suppressed and killed.” As at Harfleur, as with the Dauphin’s tennis balls, he passes the buck for tough decisions on to others; it is their responsibility, not his.
This question of a King’s responsibilities comes to the fore in the great central scene of the play, the night before Agincourt. Introducing it, the Chorus are at their most eloquent in describing the King’s “largess universal, like the sun,” so that his soldiers see “a little touch of Harry in the night.” The audience, however, sees something more complicated. An argument breaks out between the soldier Williams and the disguised Henry about the extent to which the King is responsible for his soldiers and their souls. Williams says: “If these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.” Henry concludes that “every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.” This is perhaps the moment when we see the private man, as opposed to the efficient politician, most clearly. At his lowest point Henry feels that all his efforts may be in vain—not the most positive frame of mind to face the confident French at Agincourt. But characteristically he sets such doubts aside, pulls himself together, and concludes: “The day, my friends, and all things stay for me.”
He is thus able to inspire the troops with his “Crispin day” speech—and also able, amid battle, to ruthlessly order the killing of the French prisoners (because they have become a military encumbrance). In the next scene, Fluellen discovers that the deserters from the French army have massacred the baggage boys, “wherefore the King most worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner’s throat. O ’tis a gallant King.” This provides an interesting echo of the tennis balls scene because the killing of the prisoners happens before the discovery of the killing of the boys. Fluellen, like his King earlier, attributes a subsequent motive to an event that has already taken place.
In Henry’s wooing of the French princess, there is certainly charm and humor, but also an undertow of that practical sense of political realities that Henry always shows.
In the Epilogue, the Chorus calls Henry “this star of England,” but also points out that his son was Henry VI, “whose state so many had the managing/That they lost France and made his England bleed”: the marriage of Henry and Kate led eventually to the Wars of the Roses. So it is interesting that even the Chorus ultimately bears witness to the unheroic aspects that we have seen throughout the play: in its closing moments, legendary ideals and practical realities finally come together.