[In the following essay, Reese defends the character of Henry V against critical attack, maintaining that "Henry is an appointed symbol of majesty, and the action of the play is directed with the most elaborate care to show him doing everything the age expected of the perfect king."]

After the sustained conflicts of [King John and Henry IV], Henry V is in the main a demonstration. The hero is no longer in the toils. The end has proved the man, and his victory over himself has been much more than a personal victory. Riot and dishonour have been put to flight, reason is passion's master, and England has at last a king who can physic all her ills. Because he has proved himself a valiant and chivalrous prince, and one who acknowledges the sovereignty of law and justice, the crown comes to him 'with better quiet, better opinion, better confirmation', and all the soil of the Lancastrian achievement has gone with his father to the grave. In Henry V Shakespeare celebrates England's recovered majesty through the deeds of 'the mirror of all Christian kings'.

A formidable body of critical opinion is hostile to this view. In general it is held that, if this really was what Shakespeare was trying to do, he failed to bring it off; his natural scepticism could not help revealing the essential hollowness of this idealised and unlikely figure. Obviously there is something in this. Shakespeare was much too conscious of the human pressures that weigh on a public man to believe that a whole reign—even a short one that enjoyed God's special care— could be conducted on this rarefied level, and he has allowed the human material to be transformed by the universalising tendencies of epic. But the hostile critics have various kinds of objection to the play. They are united only in their dislike of Henry, and they find different ways of rationalising their prejudice. Purely subjective notions paralyse their judgment, and they write as pacifists, republicans, anti-clericals, little Englanders, moralists, even as arbiters of etiquette, until one is astounded at the prejudice Henry has managed to arouse. In all the canon only Isabella, in Measure for Measure, has stirred so much personal distaste. In the meantime all contact is lost with Shakespeare's purpose and achievement. Dr. Johnson wrote of the play without much enthusiasm, but at least he noted (with reference to Shakespeare's endless enjoyment of the joke about the warming properties of Bardolph's nose) that 'this poet is always more careful about the present than the future, about his audience than his readers'. The immediate effect in the theatre was what concerned him most.

Hazlitt went full-tilt at the play [in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays], branding Agincourt as a royal Gadshill and describing the Archbishop of Canterbury as a pander to riot beside whom Falstaff was only 'a puny prompter'. Henry made war on his neighbours because his own crown was doubtful and he did not know how to govern the country anyway. Hazlitt concedes that 'we like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant', to be admired rather as one gazes at a caged panther in the zoo. But objective criticism of the play was made impossible by the writer's Francophil republicanism. He admired Napoleon but not 'this star of England'. A hundred years later Mr. John Masefield [in Shakespeare], in not dissimilar terms, found in Henry 'the knack of life that fits human beings for whatever is animal is human affairs' : a back-handed compliment at the best, but almost the only one he is willing to pay to a man whom he reckoned to be 'commonplace'. Bradley, who could not stomach the rejection of Falstaff, allowed [in Oxford Lectures on Poetry] Henry a certain coarse efficiency but thought him to be inescapably his father's son, 'the son of the man whom Hotspur called "a vile politician".' The key to the reign is therefore to be found at 2 Henry IV IV v 176-218; and presumably there is not much point in reading Henry V at all. Granville-Barker [in From 'Henry' to 'Hamlet'] found the play to be lacking in any 'spiritually significant idea': which is patently absurd, since in Shakespeare's time the wise government of states was one of the highest destinies to which God might call a man. But Chambers says [in Shakespeare: A Survey] much the same thing: 'Here you have a Shakespeare playing on the surface of life, much occupied with externalities and the idols of the forum. And with the exception of a few unconsidered words that fall from the mouth of a woman of no reputation, there is nothing that is intimate, nothing that touches the depths.'

More recently, and more soberly, Dr. Tillyard has given Shakespeare credit for good intentions but concludes that he set himself an impossible task [Shakespeare's History Plays]. Shakespeare's Hal, so warm and human, was irreconcilable with the copy-book hero of popular tradition; and Tillyard blames the sources for the fact that the king is a lesser person than the chivalrous prince who won Vernon's heart (I Henry IV IV i 97-110.) Mr. Traversi finds human flaws in Henry's total self-dedication to the business of being a king, and, like Bradley, he feels the father's influence to be still pervasive [Shakespeare from 'Richard II' to 'Henry V']. The coldly official manner masks a personal inadequacy of which Shakespeare was evidently aware.

There is no means of persuading people to like Henry if they lack the inclination, but at least we should recognise what Shakespeare was trying to do and how he set about it. Popular legend gave him a paragon, as Tillyard says. It was sufficiently potent to cause Polydore Vergil to break off his mainly critical narrative and insert a most uncharacteristic eulogy. Hall, Daniel, Drayton and Raleigh all came under Henry's spell, Hall in particular finding him the cradle of all the royal virtues: 'a king whose life was immaculate and his living without spot … a shepherd whom his flock loved and lovingly obeyed … he was merciful to offenders, charitable to the needy, indifferent to all men, faithful to his friends, and fierce to his enemies, toward God most devout, toward the world moderate, and to his realm a very father'. This was Shakespeare's feeling about him too; and it is important to remember that he did not accept the legend without examining it. In two plays devoted to the education of a prince he built up Henry's character so that men could believe in it, showing the human weaknesses as well as the dedication and conveying the magnitude of the responsibility by hinting at the personal sacrifices which it demanded. He does not allow us to think of Henry as an angle temporarily borrowed from above. The character gains its strength and conviction from all that has gone before, not from Henry IV only but from all the poet's earlier studies of kingship and society. In these studies he has shown us not only the sort of man the ideal king will be but also the roots from which he must grow; good government results from a complex of social and moral relationships, and Henry V is a play about England as well as about a single heroic man.

Is it a successful play? The proof is in the theatre; and critics who dislike the play may fairly be asked to give an honest answer to the question of what their response has been when—if they ever have—they have seen it acted on the stage. No play of Shakespeare's has such a simple, unvarying effect. It is absolutely proof against the perversity of directors. It is quite impossible to do anything 'clever' with it, and the only way of producing it is the way the author indicated long ago. Nor does it fail in its impact. In times of war and national danger men have been inspired by it; but even at ordinary times, when one perhaps goes to the theatre in no mood to be stirred by elementary heroics, the play's energy and its uncomplicated sentiment unite the audience in common surrender. In the theatre it is no longer possible to have any doubts about Henry himself. If Shakespeare had any secret reservations about the character, they are not apparent on the stage, where Henry is virtuous, strong and gay, a born leader of men. It is quite evident that Shakespeare approves of him; just as, in his own dramatic terms, he approves of Isabella and does not approve of Shylock.

Of course the play's appeal and interest are limited, and this very limitation makes its unfailing success in the theatre the more remarkable. Technically it is a considerable achievement, since Shakespeare was writing in a mode that he recognised (and he admits it often enough) to be extremely difficult. 'O for a Muse of fire.' He decided that the noble deeds of Henry V, which were of a kind to inspire wonder and imitation, could not be fittingly celebrated except through the medium of epic; and epic and drama are not naturally congenial to one another. The well-known admissions in the Prologue are not just an apology for the theatre's failure to accommodate marching armies: Shakespeare was quite ready to stage a battle when it suited him, and with no apology for the small numbers engaged in it. The Chorus was a device that he seldom used, and never so extensively as in Henry V. Its function here is to apologise for the unsuitability of any stage for the breadth and sweep of epic; but at the same time Shakespeare uses it with great boldness and ingenuity to make good some of the deficiencies he so modestly admits. He tells the story of the reign in a sequence of episodes, linking them by speeches in which the Chorus supplies gaps in the narrative and generally sets the mood for the following scene. This is a practical function of some value, as we can discover from those episodic chronicle-plays where no such assistance is supplied. But the verse of the choruses, corresponding to the passages of heightened description which a narrative poet habitually employs, has the further function of establishing the epic stature of the hero.

Properly the hero's qualities should be established through the dramatic action, and the prominence of the Chorus, like the element of rhetorical strain often detectable in the verse, is a weakness that necessarily results from the use of the epic mode: Shakespeare was trying to do something that did not wholly belong to drama. His method was to illuminate his hero in a succession of facets. Dover Wilson [in his introduction to the Cambridge edition] calls them tableaux, and they may be compared with magnificent stained-glass windows whose panels unfold a story. But tableaux and stained-glass windows do not move. Their nature is to crystallise an emotion, and it is a just criticism, so far as it goes, that the ritualistic style of the play confines the hero to certain rigid, one-dimensional attitudes. Henry's character is immediately established in the opening conversation between the two ecclesiastics, and it does not develop thereafter. Nor, despite the immense surface energy which keeps the play moving in the theatre, is there any real conflict. Henry has risen above temptation, and there is nothing to excite us in his calm pursuit of an assured destiny. Doubts assail him only twice, when his bedfellow betrays him and when ordinary soldiers question the justice of his war. But even then—so it is said—the official manner does not relax. He always seems to be speaking 'for the record', and even in soliloquy he addresses himself as though he were [at] a public meeting.

The familiar criticisms start from here. Henry is smug and hypocritical; or he exists only on the surface and is simply too good to be true. Then it is only a short step to more serious accusations, and Henry's behaviour is condemned by standards not in the least applicable to his time and state. It is easy to see how this has happened. Epic praises heroes and denounces villainy. It does not deal in light and shade, and its blacks and whites have a definition too simple for the give-and-take of ordinary life. Aeneas is always pius, Odysseus always πολ not mean to complicate the fundamental issues. So with Henry: if in the play his virtues seem to be superhuman, this does not invalidate the seriousness of Shakespeare's purpose nor, within the restrictions imposed by his medium, the success of his execution. Henry is an appointed symbol of majesty, and the action of the play is directed with the most elaborate care to show him doing everything that the age expected of the perfect king. If real life is not quite as simple as that, no matter. Human virtue is always muddied, or it would not be human; epic is the art that on special occasions transforms it into the ideal.

Shakespeare opens the play with two churchmen marvelling at Henry's recent conversion. 'His addiction was to courses vain; his companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow,' and so on; but

The breath no sooner left his father's body
But that his wildness, mortified in him,
Seem'd to die too; yea, at that very moment,
Consideration like an angel came,
And whipp'd the offending Adam out of him.

I i 25.

This does not mean that Shakespeare has turned his back on Henry IV. Spectators familiar with these two plays would understand the true character of the Prince and would know that there had been no unpremeditated change in him. But there is no reason why the two bishops should have known it too, and their assumption of a heavensent conversion is an effective and economical way of emphasising the reputation that Henry now enjoys. It is the reputation that matters, not the manner of it; and it would be odd if the Church did not find in it the occasion for a certain amount of professional congratulation. In any case Ely does also allude to the explanation of Henry's behaviour that had earlier been given by Warwick:

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality:
And so the prince obscur'd his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty.

I i 60.

They enter the King's presence and at once he raises the question of his claim to France. This is the crux of the play. Henry's detractors say that he had not forgotten his father's advice to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, and that he was base enough to seek the clergy's blessing for a war for which he had no better excuse than this need for diversionary activity, coupled later with his personal anger at the insulting message sent by the Dauphin. The clergy, for their part, sanctioned the campaign, and even made a hand-some donation towards expenses, because there was a bill before parliament to confiscate their temporalities. If this is a just interpretation, Henry is beyond our pardon. The idea of the godly ruler fails at once, and all the later heroism and fair words and gallant comradeship in battle cannot gild the fault. Henry's reformation would be mere expediency, and Shakespeare's picture of him as the mirror of all Christian kings would be a shocking irony.

It is improbable that Shakespeare would have deliberately wrecked his play in the first ten minutes: not even in his so-called 'bitter' period was he as outrageously as cynical as that. In fact we have only to read these two scenes carefully to realise that he did nothing of the kind, and two recent editors of the play [J. H. Walter and J. Dover Wilson] have convincingly argued that, however it may appear to us today, the French war was a righteous war which a virtuous king was bound in honour to undertake. Shakespeare deliberately departs from the sources in order to make this plain. Hall's untempered Protestantism, echoed in spirit by Holinshed, seized on the opportunity to accuse the clergy of seeking to divert the attack on their property by urging the King to conduct the anti-clerical laity upon a campaign in which, if God were just, many of them would be killed. Shakespeare will have none of this. In I i Canterbury says that he has offered money to the King. It may indeed be a bribe to ward off sequestration, but that is not how Henry receives it. He gives Canterbury the most solemn warning not to twist the facts when he pronounces on the English claim to France. To consult his spiritual advisers on a matter of this gravity was the correct thing for a king to do, and it is ironical that Henry's critics should have regarded it as a brazen invitation to the clergy to consecrate commotion's bitter edge. But Henry warns Canterbury of the dreadful responsibility that rests on him:

For God doth know how many now in health
Shall drop their blood in approbation
Of what your reverence shall incite us to.

I ii 18.

Canterbury follows with his exposition of the English claim, more than 60 lines of it. It would be a remarkable audience that did not fidget, but we must remember that the English pretensions to the crown of France, for us long buried in a distant past, were by no means a dead issue when Shakespeare was writing. The loss of Calais was still in living memory, and Elizabeth had not in theory surrendered either this or any other French possession that was lineally hers. Dover Wilson believes that Shakespeare's audience would have thrilled at this reminder that their claims on France had not been abandoned but only slept; and might indeed, if the hour produced the man, one day be revived. Henry V was such a man, and Canterbury assures him that his cause is just: a point on which Shakespeare has to satisfy us if we are to believe in his conception of the King. Historically Canterbury was quite right. The Salic Law had been in the particular instance a dishonest contrivance by French jurists to deny the claims of Edward III; and in addition to these claims Henry had also inherited the rights of his own Angevin ancestors. The present century has made us suspicious of the excuses invented to countenance aggression, but in feudal law Henry's war was justified.

Even so, he will not leave until he is satisfied that the kingdom is safe from the Scots. It is Henry himself who raises this point, showing himself to be aware of his duty to protect his people from attack; and he is rewarded by Exeter's assurance of the unity of the realm.

For government, though high and low and
 lower,
Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,
Congreeing in a full and natural close,
Like music.

I ii 180.

It is a wonderful evocation, especially significant in this context, of the harmonious relationship between Henry and his people, and it is followed by Canterbury's elaborate comparison between society and the hive:

  Therefore doth heaven divide
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavour in one continual motion;
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,
Obedience: for so work the honey-bees.…

I ii 183.

Its biological accuracy has been challenged but it is a classic statement of the Tudor theory of status. At its close Henry announces his decision to enforce his claims, and the French envoys are summoned to be made acquainted with it. They produce the Dauphin's gift of tennisballs, a painful reminder of carefree days in the company of Falstaff. It is absurd to pretend that the French war was a personal vendetta to avenge this trivial insult. That decision had already been made, and in his reply Henry leaves the French in no doubt of the real issues.

 This all lies within the will of God,
To whom I do appeal; and in whose name
Tell you the Dauphin I am coming on,
To venge me as I may and to put forth
My rightful hand in a well-hallow'd cause.

I ii 289.

Actors of Henry tend to go through a certain amount of foot-stamping during this speech, but the text does not seem to warrant it. Henry is sarcastic, masterful and icily determined; there is no evidence of lost control, and the chief impression given by the speech is that it is the Dauphin who is the irresponsible playboy now.

The next scene introduces us to the reprobates, but not to Falstaff. His presence was promised in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV, 'if you be not too much cloyed with fat meat'. It seems, too, that the author went sufficiently far towards keeping the promise by including him in the original draft of the play, where it was he, and not Pistol, who ate Fluellen's leek; and where he may have had a meeting with the King in the night before Agin-court that we should dearly like to have overheard.

It has been suggested that the Cobhams, not content with getting his name altered from Oldcastle, now managed to get him off the stage altogether; and so it needed nothing less than a royal command to get him back again in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But the influence of the Cobhams in these matters tends to be overrated, and they were seemingly powerless to prevent the use of their family name of Brooke as a nom de guerre for the jealous Ford. Falstaff's disappearance is also attributed to the departure of the comedian Will Kempe, who left the company at about this time. But it is by no means certain that Kempe ever played Falstaff: the part may have been created by Thomas Pope. Moreover, Kempe was still in the company when the Globe was built during 1599, being one of the small group of actors who shared the financial risk; so it seems likely that he was available to play Falstaff if it had been required of him.

What then did happen to Falstaff? It has escaped notice that his omission may have been Shakespeare's deliberate artistic choice. The Epilogue to 2 Henry IV is suspect anyway. It contains two further paragraphs after the prayer for the Queen which should have closed the entertainment, and it is evident that there is more matter in the printed text than was ever spoken at a single performance. The promise that Falstaff should reappear seems to have been added at some time after the original performance: possibly for an appearance at court, in regard for the Queen's known affection for the character, or possibly to appease the public outcry at his most unpopular rejection. It may well be that, at the request of the company and to please the audience, Shakespeare genuinely tried to introduce Falstaff into Henry V but later abandoned him as alien to the spirit of the play.

If he had appeared in person, it would have been necessary to degrade him out of recognition—or else to diminish the conception of Henry that Shakespeare was trying to create. Shakespeare's eventual compromise is brilliant. Falstaff is present only to die one of the most moving deaths in all our literature. It is not just anyone who dies, and the emotion that this scene creates is born of our happier memories of him in his prime. It is hard to believe—and Shakespeare could not make it harder, either for himself or for us—that it is a better world in which this man has no place. The Arden editor writes that 'the "finer end" that Falstaff made changes the tone of the play, it deepens the emotion.… The play gains in epic strength and dignity from Falstaff's death, even as the Aeneid gains from Dido's death, not only because both accounts are written from the heart with a beauty and power that have moved men's hearts in after time, but because Dido and Falstaff are sacrifices to a larger morality they both ignore' [J. H. Walter]. In the England of Henry IV, Falstaff was a symbol and source of the corruption that he was confident would still prevail in the following reign, but Shakespeare allows us to forget the dishonour that now dies with him. 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' There is a heavy loss in the death of so large a morsel of our common nature, and Shakespeare gives us leave to think, if we are so inclined, that there is something frigid and unnatural in the perfectly disciplined soul. He even has the audacity to allow his hero to be cursed for ingratitude, by the honest Gower as well as by the disreputable Nym. But the point is this: the better we can be induced to think of Falstaff, and the more we regret his absence, the higher is the tribute which, consciously or not, we are paying to Henry and the larger virtue that he represents.

The country's unity demands a further sacrifice before Henry sets out for France. The unmasking of the conspirators is not a comfortable episode, but that kind of thing never is. It can never be pleasant to see men bared to the soul. But the scene further illustrates Henry's kingly qualities, in his willingness to pardon the drunkard whose railing was offensive to his person but did not harm his royal office; and then in his severity to the close friend who had plotted to destroy him.

Touching our person seek we no revenge;
But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,
Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws
We do deliver you.

II ii 174.

For the country's good he rises above personal affection and suppresses any impulse he may have to show mercy to men he had loved and honoured. Their fate shall be according to the course of law.

But this is one of the few occasions in the play when we are admitted to Henry's inner thoughts.

O! how hast thou with jealousy infected
The sweetness of affiance.

II ii 126.

This is at the heart of his grief and disappointment. Breach of trust weakens the defences of society, and even while he is publicly denouncing the traitors he is on the rack of bitter self-questioning. He is moved to dwell upon the harsh realities that may lie beneath the 'glistering semblances of piety'. The fair face of unity may conceal a thousand other treacheries in men who seem to be dutiful, free from gross passion and constant in spirit. Scroop's fault strikes him as another fall of man, because of its implicit threat to loose all the hideous forces of appetite and anarchy. The speech, Which many critics regard as an insufferable piece of sanctimonious ranting, exposes the tensions in which a king must live. The revelation of this treachery has opened up for Henry the gulf that separates his own conception of honour from the passions of the men he has to rule.

He derives genuine consolation from the thought that God has revealed the plot before it could do any actual harm, and this strengthens his faith in his mission as he leaves for France. Many things in his conduct of the war have been disliked because they have not been understood. He is a man well versed in 'the disciplines of the wars', and Fluellen's praise of him is not to be taken lightly. Where he seems to modern ideas to have been quite astonishingly insensitive, he was in fact directing the campaign according to the recognised principles of his age. Thus he begins by sending Exeter to give the French a further opportunity to avoid the whole bloody business. The justice of his cause, 'no sinister nor no awkward claim', is reasserted and France is warned to surrender.

The borrow'd glories that by gift of heaven,
By law of nature and of nations 'long
To him and to his heirs.

II iv 79.

If the warning is not heeded, the King's reply will be 'bloody constraint', and the French will be responsible for all the innocent blood that will be shed. Before Harfleur Henry in person threatens terrible destruction if the town will not surrender. It sounds the utmost in hypocrisy to call the citizens 'guilty in defence' if they try to save their town from a foreign invader, but if in justice Harfleur was his by rightful inheritance, then they would indeed be guilty of impious defiance in attempting to withhold it from him. That is what the rules of war prescribed, and the effectiveness of Henry's highly-coloured threats does succeed in preventing bloodshed, so that in the end he is able to tell Exeter to 'use mercy to them all'. At Agincourt his order to the soldiers to kill their prisoners has again been misunderstood, and Dover Wilson's analysis of the situation—which was historical—deserves to be carefully studied. Henry's action has the immediate endorsement of Gower, who was a professional. 'The king most worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O! 'tis a gallant king.' This is followed, again significantly, by Fluellen's enchanting comparison of Henry of Monmouth and Alexander of Macedon, and of the fish that swim in the rivers at both these towns. Then Montjoy appears to bring the French surrender to the leader whose determination and tactical insight have averted an ugly situation.

It may well be that no amount of explanation will make these incidents acceptable to modern taste. There are many matters on which Shakespeare's thinking is so utterly different from ours that reconciliation is impossible. It never seems to have occurred to him, for instance, to question the morality or wisdom of capital punishment as a social expedient: he lived in a world where this drastic medicine was probably necessary. Warfare similarly had a code of behaviour that was found to be satisfactory for the short-season campaigning of feudal armies, and the civil war of the seventeenth century was fought broadly by the same conventions as Shakespeare accepted for Henry V.

In any case these blemishes, if they are blemishes at all, do not spoil Shakespeare's wonderful picture of the King as he leads his tiny force to victory. This is no lay figure just striking the right attitudes. The battle scenes glow with the warmth and inspiration of a man leading his people in fulfilment of a sacred trust bequeathed to him by his ancestors. Already his personality has healed the bitter wounds of civil war, and from 'that nook-shotten isle of Albion' his armies come 'as fierce as waters to the sucking of a gulf', the youth of England all on fire with his spirit. The French King fears his dreadful prowess, 'the native mightiness and fate of him' (II iv 48-64), and the scenes in the enemy camp, with their boastfulness and bickering and essential triviality, show by contrast the doom of a nation that has lost its soul. Weakened by disease and their losses before Harfleur, the English army limp through France with colours dimmed by 'rainy marching in the painful field', and here Shakespeare bids us remember the band of scarecrows that Falstaff led across the midland plain to Shrewsbury. But in the face of overwhelmning numbers the English are united by the King in that sort of fatalistic courage of which great deeds are born. In Henry's speech on the eve of battle Shakespeare rises unmistakably to the height of his epic theme.

And Crispin Crispían shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.

IV iii 57.

The literal-minded hasten to point out that this prophecy has been disappointed: we no more remember Agincourt than we remember who Crispin was. But they are wrong. The English race have remembered Agincourt whenever the odds were long and the future dark and doubtful, and Henry superbly touches the strings that move men to be greater than themselves. 'How thou pleasest, God, dispose the day.' Almost, in such a mood, it does not matter. This is the triumphant cry of one who has done all within the reach of man.

Henry's 'band of brothers' is composed of men who are free. They are human enough to 'have no great cause to desire the approach of day', and Falstaff's Boy is not the only one who would give all his hope of fame for a pot of ale and safety. But they would not be there unless they chose to be. Henry wants no lagging spirits, and if any have no stomach for the fight, he will find their passages home to the safety of their English beds. In a heroic hour there is no place for Bardolph, whose fire is out. In the whole army only Pistol asks for greater indulgence than perhaps we ought to give him, and Shakespeare has many ways of showing the single-mindedness and quiet comradeship of the men whom Henry leads. Fluellen, an indomitable cocksparrow, is given latitude to develop a richly idiosyncratic character within the framework of the honesty and loyalty that are his most significant virtues. The interlude that he plays with Gower, Jamy and MacMorris offers, as Johnson very rightly said, only 'poor merriment', but these four men of different races are a further symbol of the unity and spirit that Henry has inspired. 'By the mess, ere theise eyes of mine take themselves to slumber, aile do gud service, or aile lig i' the grund for it.' Finally, in a lull in the action before the stirring movement of the battle, three ordinary soldiers show the true nature of their loyalty in the very act of asking themselves why they give it.

This is an important episode in several ways. It demonstrates, 'as may unworthiness define', the royal leadership promised in the fourth chorus, and we see Henry comforting his troops, 'even as men wracked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide'. It is not done in a few empty phrases drawn from the cheap currency of military exhortation. Henry reasons quietly with his men, soberly admitting the dangers and conceding their right to hold the doubts and reservations they have expressed. It was a king's duty to feel his responsibility for the men he was leading into battle, and his claim on their obedience is complemented by his obligation to satisfy them that the cause is just and 'his quarrel honourable'. The relationship between king and subjects in this scene crystallises Shakespeare's idea of majesty. All know their duty. The subjects owe obedience, for 'to disobey were against all proportion of subjection'; but 'if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make'. The soldiers' blunt questioning moves Henry to a further examination of his conscience, and when he is alone he contemplates the terrible responsibilities of his office. 'Every subject's soul is his own': wherein he is luckier than the King, whose public conscience faces problems beyond the understanding of ordinary man. In Henry's speech on ceremony (IV i 250-304) Shakespeare relaxes the epic mood to sum up his earlier reflections on power and the nature of kingship. We are back in the taverns as Henry longs for the 'infinite's heart's ease' that his subjects are free to enjoy, and human feeling makes a momentary challenge to the austere disciplines of royalty. His recent conversation with the soldiers has reminded him again of the isolation which he has forgotten in the free-and-easy comradeship of the camp. But the moment of weakness passes, and Henry's acceptance of his burden is the more impressive for his admission of a personal sacrifice. His speech acknowledges the sleepless hours of care and service, and dismisses the pomps of office as the baits in which flatterers offer their deceiving poison. The scene closes with Henry committing his cause to God and praying that his father's usurpation shall not decide the issue of the coming day. In the course of some 320 lines he has shown almost every quality that Shakespeare thought to be fitting for a king.

Johnson believed that Shakespeare found himself short of material for the final Act, but Henry's wooing, so often criticised as heavy-handed and hypocritical, was in the accepted manner of the lighthearted gallant. It is important to Shakespeare's purpose to have the righteous war crowned by a peace that unites the two countries, and of this new and wider unity Henry's marriage is the fitting symbol. Burgundy's lengthy declamation (V ii 23-67) urges the need for harmony, for war is not man's right condition. This play, which shows like no other the particular virtues that war can breed, also examines its horrors with penetrating dis-illusion. It has been hailed both as a glorification of war and as an exposure of its corruption and brutality. Both views are correct. Suffering, bloodshed and cruelty are always implicit in the action; the foibles of the professional soldier are mocked, although not unkindly, in the blinkered pedantry of Fluellen; war's heroics are debunked in the response made by Pistol and his crew to Henry's speech before Harfleur; and Pistol stands also for the type of man to whom war brings the opportunity to line his pocket and acquire at the same time a bogus reputation as a hero (II iii 58-9, V i 90-4). The desolation pictured by Burgundy is a final condemnation of war as destructive and unnatural, and the signing of an honourable peace is therefore to be regarded as Henry's concluding achievement.

But only through war could Shakespeare fully express the sort of man that he wanted Henry to be. As well as frailty and weakness, war develops special qualities. Possibly they are the highest virtues, possibly not; but at any rate they are particular virtues and they are valuable. Shakespeare insists on this in Henry V. In the ordinary way we come to know many things about Henry—that he is self-controlled and dedicated, superior to flattery, pious and God-fearing, and so forth.

But war is the ultimate test of a country's unity and spirit, and the ultimate challenge to the men who rule it. This was the challenge that Shakespeare needed if he was to draw Henry in the fullness of his majesty.

It may not be a wholly convincing portrait: in the bold, bright colours of epic it is not always easy to recognise a human being. It is natural, too, to react against a surfeit of perfection, and without going to the extreme position of Henry's more implacable critics, many readers of the play have found him too coldly official for their taste. But Shakespeare's ideal king is a composite figure, and in Henry VI he found qualities of humanity and compassion that the stylised epic mode prevented him from revealing in the son. It is perhaps easier to admire Henry V than to like him. But an Elizabethan audience may not have had this difficulty, and it does not seriously weaken the effectiveness of the play that Shakespeare was intending to write. He brought his historical sequence to an end with a heartening picture of a society cured of its sickness and united under a prince whose own redemptive experience corresponded with that of his people. To an England living under the shadow of the Queen's approaching death, with all that this might mean, he offered this final assurance that under strong and disciplined leadership men had nothing to fear.