SOURCE: Hall, Joan Lord. “Themes.” In Henry V: A Guide to the Play, pp. 77-93. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Hall highlights the complexities of Henry V's principal themes: order versus disorder, the nature of warfare, and the requirements of kingship.]

Image patterns are often a clue to a play's underlying concerns. In Henry V the garden metaphor sets ordered fertility against disorderly chaos; images of blood (symbolizing both familial ties and violent destruction) project a multifaceted concept of war; and the extended personification of “ceremony” in the King's troubled soliloquy before Agincourt expands on the key issue of kingship. These three central themes—the importance of order in the nation, the ambivalence of war, and the challenging nature of kingship—emerge from the play's development of plot and character as well as its language.

As might be predicted in a play that Shakespeare wrote only a year or two before Hamlet, the treatment of these themes is complex; Henry V offers no straightforward celebration of the King and his military mission. The play raises questions rather than providing clear answers. Is it possible to achieve lasting unity in the state of England, or do currents of disorder inevitably destabilize this society? Can war against another nation ever be justified, and is it always a mixture of the vile and the heroic? What is the nature of kingship? Must the successful monarch combine the expediency of a Machiavel with the virtues of a Christian? These issues develop in dialectical fashion.

ORDER AND DISORDER

While the key dramatic topics are clear enough—order, war, and kingship—readers or directors of the play may differ in their interpretation of how these topics are handled in the drama, and thus how they build into fully articulated themes. “Order” is a case in point. The topic is introduced very deliberately in I. ii, where Exeter first develops a musical analogy to evoke the harmony of a well-ordered kingdom:

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. 180-84)

Then the Archbishop of Canterbury elaborates a parable on how the honeybees “by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom.” The speech, a rehearsing of a fable that had classical and Renaissance precedents,¹ is often cited by earlier critics as a key to the play's central theme; J. H. Walter terms it a “reflection of Shakespeare's concern with unity of action in the structure of the play,”² and A. R. Humphreys thinks it “is meant as a genuine celebration of national harmony.”³ Deconstructive critics … have been more skeptical, discovering in the speech a propaganda pitch for the dominant Elizabethan ideology of social order through submission to authority. In its context it is certainly a piece of special pleading by the clergymen—a reminder to Henry that he can achieve the throne of France if his subjects who are left at home cooperate obediently. Social harmony is thus promoted a little too stridently. Canterbury expounds the parallel between the beehive's “rule in nature” and the well-ordered kingdom, where all levels of society (magistrates, merchants, and soldiers) work for the good of the ruler. Yet the bees' monarch, described as “busied in his majesty,” is strangely passive, content merely to survey the labors of his underlings—the pillaging soldiers and the toiling porters. The progression of the imagery suggests that order at home is easily achieved. Canterbury buttresses the concept of unity in diversity—“That many things, having full reference / To one consent, may work contrariously”—with a series of images from nature (fresh streams meeting in one salt ocean) and human culture (arrows flying to one mark, lines converging in the dial's center). This takes him smoothly to the main point at issue, the military campaign:

So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat. …

(211-13)

Yet beneath this ideal of harmonious order in the state lurk rebellious segments, barely kept in check; the Scots are threatening to pour into England “like the tide into a breach” and suck the “princely eggs” of “eagle” England (149, 169-71). In a sense, too, Canterbury's speech deconstructs the premise of order, since its powerful rhetoric is finally in the service of a divided rather than a strongly unified kingdom. The prelate is urging Henry to partition England in four and to trust that the commonwealth will continue to run smoothly in his absence, so that he can deploy one-quarter of the male population in his war against France. Ironically it turns out that Canterbury's paradigm of a unified state, all parts interlocking, is at odds with much of what we see in the play: the conspiracy of Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey; the fraternity of thieves (Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym) defying Henry's decree that nothing be stolen from France; and Williams' muted threat of insubordination when he challenges the King's “cause.” There is even the slight possibility, up to the very end of the play, that Princess Katherine might sabotage Henry's plans for unifying the two kingdoms by failing to exercise her womanly duty and conform to his grand design.

Do we interpret the theme here as the necessity for order in the commonwealth, or the difficulty of maintaining it?⁴ The specious way in which Canterbury's speech sets up the “act of order” as an assured achievement, masking disorder, may undercut its viability. It is clear that the play presents social unity under a strong monarchy as preferable to anarchy (or the cut-throat rivalry of the so-called brotherhood of Eastcheap), but this theme is not presented simplistically. The stability and order of the kingdom partly depend on Henry's proving his qualities as a strong leader (unified in himself),⁵ so that the theme of order and disorder is linked to that of kingship. Moreover, war may temporarily unite England, but it creates havoc and disorder in France; the images of the wasted garden do more to convince the audience of the importance of a unified kingdom than does Canterbury's complacent speech. In particular, Burgundy's dignified exposition of what happens to civilization in wartime, when “hateful docks” and “rough thistles” stamp out the “cowslip, burnet, and green clover” (V. ii. 49-52), drives home in realistic detail the disorderly “savagery” in a society where peace is “mangled.”

WAR

Henry V has been described as the “anatomy of a war.”⁶ Anatomy is an appropriate term: The play presents different aspects of warfare for our inspection, and we are left to decide whether war is a heroic enterprise or one that brings out the worst in its participants. If the theme can be summed up at all, it is that war has many faces. Filmgoers conditioned by Olivier's movie may think that Henry V glorifies war. But the text provides no stirring battle after the call to arms at Agincourt, only a scene in which the mercenary-minded Pistol captures the cowardly Le Fer. We simply do not see much of the “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war” (Othello, III. iii. 354); the heroism of York and Suffolk, for instance, is reported, not shown.⁷ War in this play is frankly the means to an end—a way of unifying the country and extending England's boundaries—but the means is often sordid and always costly.

Because Henry revives an old, somewhat tenuous claim to the throne of France, the war is not strictly necessary. Only by sleight of hand can he turn the French into the initiators; the campaign is more a political opportunity for him to prove his prowess as a leader and a conqueror. Nevertheless, Henry is not depicted as an aggressive warmonger. It is Canterbury who, for pragmatic reasons, urges Henry to “unwind your bloody flag” while Exeter reminds him to emulate his ancestors, the “lions” of his “blood.” Acknowledging both the “waste” and the responsibility incurred, Henry's vision of war is sober:

For never two such kingdoms did contend
Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint
'Gainst him whose wrongs gives edge unto the swords
That makes such waste in brief mortality.

(I. ii. 24-28)

The King's speech personifies drops of blood as bitter complainants, but Williams goes further in imagining how the dismembered body parts of those killed in war will rise up in protest on the Day of Judgment:

all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a 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.

(IV. i. 137-43)

The speech is a graphic reminder of the cost of war in terms of human lives and relationships. Williams also illuminates the corrupting nature of war, the inevitable clash between moral sensibilities and concentration on killing, when he ponders, “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?” Blood, as the Eastcheap Boy remarks, is “unwholesome food” (II. iii. 58). This theme of moral coarsening through an obsession with blood (as murder) is echoed in Burgundy's description of how France is affected by the war. Even the children, suffering from the devastating aftereffects of Henry's military campaign, “grow like savages—as soldiers will / That nothing do but meditate on blood” (V. ii. 59-60).

It is at Harfleur that the “savagery” of war is delineated most clearly. In a passage that again focuses on blood and extends into rape, Henry envisages how, if the town refuses to surrender, “the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart, / In liberty of bloody hand shall range / With conscience wide as hell” (III. iii. 11-13). Despite this human ferocity, the vision of war becomes curiously impersonal, for the images that follow show abstractions, rather than people, taking the initiative: “Impious war” is personified and compared to the “prince of fiends,” Satan himself; “licentious wickedness” races downhill; and “murder, spoil, and villainy” are envisaged as natural phenomena, “filthy and contagious clouds.” Once the war machine grinds into gear, it generates its own horrors, so that the “enraged” warriors are somehow not held morally accountable. Indeed, to be a soldier at all means cultivating a tough impersonality, as Henry makes clear when he backs up his exhortations at the breach—“Disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage” (III. i. 8)—with images of the eye as a brass cannon and the brow as a rock lashed by the sea. In contrast to the Roman warrior Coriolanus, depicted in battle as a “thing of blood, whose every motion / Was tim'd with dying cries” (Coriolanus, II. ii. 109-10), Henry never becomes an inhuman war machine. Nor does he indulge in the mindless fury parodied in Macmorris's “so Chrish save me, I will cut off your head!” (III. ii. 135). He can, nevertheless, be ruthless in military strategy, prepared to use “bloody constraint” in fighting for the French Crown (II. iv. 97) and to kill the prisoners when his dominance on the battlefield is threatened.

The apparent contradictions in Henry's response to war—compunction coupled with sublime indifference or even callous acceptance—point to a central ambivalence in the way that war is presented. The question of the King's responsibility for lives lost in war, introduced in Act I, resurfaces in Act IV. Henry cannot completely argue away his nagging sense of shedding “guiltless drops” of blood by separating the state of the individual's soul from his “duty” to go to war for his king, as he attempts to do in his conversation with Williams. And the idea that death in battle can serve as the scourge of God—“War is his beadle, war is his vengeance” (IV. i. 173-74)—may come across as a convenient rationalization too. On the other hand, the King at Harfleur accurately points out the inexorable momentum of war, where the “blind and bloody soldier,” swept up in battle fury, acts like an automaton. Such momentum, Henry argues, is out of his control and therefore beyond his jurisdiction. These perspectives on war in the play remain antithetical; they cannot be reconciled.

There is a tension, too, between the creative energy of being transformed into an effective soldier (“bend up every spirit / To his full height!” is phallic, as are other images connected with storming the breach) and the repulsive acts of destruction engendered by this ferocity: rape, carnage, and mortal combat leading to the stench of corpses on the battlefield. Exhilaration is counterbalanced by grotesque detail in the exhortation at the breach, which A. R. Humphreys defines as “desperate, appalling, and inspiring at once.”⁸ War in Henry V is envisaged as a test of manhood, ranging from the images of virility at Harfleur (“Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood” [III. i. 7]) to the Dauphin's lament that French “mettle is bred out” (III. v. 29). To be on the losing side of the war game is to experience impotence or sexual dishonor, as when Bourbon feels an overwhelming “shame” at seeing the broken ranks of the French. Refusing to return to the fray, says Bourbon, is equivalent to being a “base pander” who watches his daughter being raped by a “slave” (IV. v. 15-17). And war lust is always yoked to death, as suggested in the erotic image of York and Suffolk embracing as they die on the battlefield (IV. vi).

The theme of war in Henry V encompasses more than heroic excitement and violent bloodshed. Hard work and drudgery are also required in any military campaign. With his consternation that the mines at Harfleur are not “according to the disciplines of the war” and his pride at the “excellent discipline” of his compatriot Exeter at the bridge, Fluellen represents the military man's meticulous attention to detail. War is exhausting, too. Branagh's movie adds to the text by showing the slog through mud and rain as part of the campaign's horrors; but a simple stage direction in Shakespeare's play, “Enter the King and his poor Soldiers” (III. vi. 90), is enough to convey the total enervation of the army as they march toward Calais. Exhaustion, as well as resolve, emerges from the halting rhythms and monosyllabic weight of the speech in which Henry addresses Montjoy at the end of this scene. What at first glance appears to be flat, even repetitive verse gives a clue to Henry's underlying emotions: He is bracing himself, presenting a bold front to the French despite being terribly weary. He admits that “My people are with sickness much enfeebled, / My numbers lessened” but continues:

If we may pass, we will; if we be hind'red,
We shall your tawny ground with your red blood
Discolor; and so, Montjoy, fare you well.
The sum of all our answer is but this:
We would not seek a battle as we are,
Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it.

(168-73)

In Henry V the different dimensions of war—its exhilaration and opportunities for courage, juxtaposed with its horrors, grinding weariness, and inhumanity—build into a complex vision, a questioning of whether war can ever be fully justified. King Henry does harness the military venture to his advantage and to the glory of England, for the war effort makes possible not only national unity in the abstract sense but the strongly forged brotherhood felt in the Crispin's Day speech. What is more, the speed with which Shakespeare turns from this heroic speech to Pistol's capture of Le Fer, and from Montjoy's somber request to collect the French corpses to the comic interlude between Fluellen and Williams (IV. viii), may discourage too prolonged a questioning of war's bleakness. Darker nuances remain, however, in the unheroic thievery of the Eastcheap men, sucking the blood of France, and the vision of atrocities that the “blind and bloody” soldier may at any moment perpetrate. And although the English are granted a relatively bloodless victory (few of their men are killed), the war, as Burgundy points out, is disastrous for the fertile garden of France. While a performance of Henry V with a totally anti-war message would be a distortion of the text (and run counter to the energy Henry inspires as a military leader), stage productions in the second half of the twentieth century have taken up hints from the play script and delivered some critique of the war. The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1984-85 version, for instance, did not allow the audience to forget the cost of the French campaign. Even as the marriage between Henry and Katherine was being sealed, “the battlefield, with candles glimmering beside corpses, was seen through a gauzy traverse curtain behind the tableau of Henry's triumphant diplomatic wedding.”⁹ Branagh's film … reveals more of the contradictions of war than does Olivier's, with its firmer emphasis on the pageantry and patriotism of the military endeavor. As Henry V itself continues to insist, war is both terrible and energizing.

KINGSHIP: THE PLAY AS THE TESTING OF A MONARCH

The central theme of Henry V is kingship; in terms of both plot and character, the play unfolds as the testing of a monarch. Henry cannot rely on the sacred “name” of king that Richard II invoked, since divine right has been cancelled by his father's act of usurping the throne. As a de facto rather than a de jure ruler, Henry IV struggles to maintain his authority throughout the Henry IV plays, and Henry V, once he is King of England, must also prove his fitness to rule through appropriate choices and actions. A long list of “king-becoming graces,” helpful in defining the ideal monarch, appears in Macbeth when Malcolm is addressing Macduff. The future king specifies

… justice, verity, temp'rance, stableness,
Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,
Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude …

(IV.iii. 92-94)

Arguably Henry exemplifies most of these Christian qualities during the course of the play; yet, like Malcolm disguising his true nature from Macduff in order to test him, he is also capable of deviousness, even machiavellianism. As Robert Egan comments, there is an inevitable “dichotomy between conqueror and Christian”¹⁰ in Henry V. Strong leadership, Shakespeare implies, requires cunning as well as open “courage”—the combination that Machiavelli outlines when he advises the prince to be both “fox” and “lion.”¹¹ And far from being a straightforward demonstration of kingship, with Henry displaying various facets of the royal persona in a fairly static way,¹² the play allows for undercurrents of uneasiness or doubt, moments of possible failure as Henry refines his roles as monarch.

Before we see him, Henry is projected as a kingly paragon; Canterbury expresses wonder at this new king's attributes in the opening scene. As well as being a great orator, Henry excels in four areas: he can “reason in divinity,” he is an expert in “commonwealth affairs,” his “discourse of war” is highly impressive, and he can expound on “any cause of policy” (i.e., argue about politics). What is more, Henry goes beyond the rhetorician who theorizes on abstract propositions, for he has put into practice an active rather than a contemplative virtue:

… the art and practic part of life
Must be the mistress to this theoric.

(I. i. 51-52)

King Henry has much to live up to. Can he establish himself as an accomplished orator, a pious man of God, a statesman-politician, and a military leader? All of these roles are manifested, to some degree, as the play progresses, and most of them are touched on in Henry's opening scene.

When Henry first appears on stage, in I. ii, he is very much on trial. Not only is this the first time that the theater audience sees him, but he is still a relatively new king—and a young one, historically only twenty-five—who needs to make a strong initial impression on the inner circle of noblemen. As a decisive ruler he must take command of the situation and display his control publicly. The key term here is “resolved.” Almost Henry's first words, referring to the legitimacy of his title in France, are “We would be resolved,” and once Canterbury's explanations are complete and the King is ready to call in the Dauphin's ambassadors, he closes the debate with “Now are we well resolved” (I. ii. 222). Not only has the issue been clarified, enabling him to proceed, but he is fully determined (“resolved”) to go ahead with his military campaign. In addition, Henry projects himself as both responsible and pious before he allows Canterbury to launch into his discussion of Salic law. Concerned with the “truth” of his claim, he urges the Archbishop to expound the case “justly and religiously.” In effect the King adopts the role of spiritual authority (the “prelate” who can “reason in divinity”) when he warns Canterbury

Under this conjuration, speak my lord:
For we will hear, note, and believe in heart
That what you speak is in your conscience washed
As pure as sin with baptism.

(29-32)

At the end of the Archbishop's speech Henry checks again, in front of witnesses, that his own “conscience” will not be sullied by pursuing a title that is specious:

May I with right and conscience make this claim?

(96)

Showing his skill in “commonwealth affairs,” he cuts through Canterbury's rousing talk of heroic royal ancestors to discuss instead practical steps to “defend / Against the Scot” while the English troops are away in France. Shrewdly Henry recalls how the Scots invaded England while Edward III was away campaigning in France, but Canterbury, also a politician, caps this by reminding Henry how England under Edward III not only defended itself adequately against the Scots but also captured the Scottish King. The King listens carefully to his counselors; he is persuaded by their pragmatic arguments that one-quarter of the English forces can win the war in France while the rest defend their own country.

Once Henry is “resolved,” he is ready to act decisively: “France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe, / Or break it all to pieces” (224-25). Whatever Henry's other possible motives (desire for a heroic enterprise to unify England or the need to busy “giddy minds with foreign wars” as his father advised), it is clear that winning France is also a personal quest for him—a means of proving his prowess as king. The sentiment that he expresses more openly at the end of II. ii, “No king of England, if not King of France!”, is registered here in his extremist attitude to the enterprise. Either he will succeed magnificently and rule France “in large and ample empery,” or he will die in obscurity with no memorial tomb, his deeds uncelebrated. Achieving France will be, as Robert Ornstein comments, “an ultimate proof” of his “kingliness.”¹³

The arrival of the French ambassador and his entourage presents Henry with another opportunity to demonstrate his royal command of the situation. In assuring them that they may deliver their message from the Dauphin “freely,” Henry contends

We are no tyrant, but a Christian king,
Unto whose grace our passion is as subject
As is our wretches fett'red in our prisons. …

(241-43)

Henry is promising to behave temperately; because he is gracious (Canterbury respects him as “full of grace” [I. i. 22]), he is not prey to outbursts of anger or tyrannical behavior. Although highly provoked by the Dauphin's references to his earlier frivolity (“galliard” and “revel”) and by the demeaning present of tennis balls, the King keeps his promise. The English court, as shown in Branagh's movie, may be watching keenly. How exactly will Henry react? He keeps his temper under control, converting anger into irony and rousing rhetoric:

And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turned his balls to gunstones. …

(281-82)

Again, he is aware that the campaign will test him, enabling him to display to both nations the “practic part of life”:

But tell the Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king, and show my sail of greatness,
When I do rouse me in my throne of France.

(273-75)

“Be like a king” is significant. The opening Chorus regrets that the stage lacks resources to show “the warlike Harry, like himself,” but here Henry goes one better; he promises to “dazzle all the eyes of France” with his intrinsic “greatness.” Although this is kingship in quest of national glory, his heroic impulse is always tempered by rational control. In planning the French campaign Henry judiciously recommends an “expedition” (punning on military invasion and speed) that will progress with “reasonable swiftness” rather than reckless haste.

In Act II Henry faces a more probing test: how to deal with the traitors in a way that proves he understands when “mercy” must give place to just punishment. His related dilemma—can a king be powerful and popular?—is pointed up by Cambridge's hypocritical tribute, “Never was monarch better feared and loved / Than is your Majesty” (II. ii. 25-26). As Machiavelli comments in The Prince,¹⁴ it is difficult to inspire both emotions equally, and more important for the strong leader to be respected than adored. In an ideal society, the king could rely on “hearts create of duty, and of zeal” (31). But Henry learns by hard experience that his “bedfellow” Scroop appeared to love him only to take advantage of his friendship. Holinshed captures some of the precarious balance between being “loved” and “feared” when he describes Henry as “so severe a justicer” that “his people both loved and obeyed him”; he left “no offence unpunished nor friendship unrewarded” and proved a “terror to rebels, and suppressor of sedition.”¹⁵ In the Southampton scene Henry does not hand out rewards for friendship (although he promises “quittance of desert and merit / According to the weight and worthiness” [34-35]), but we do see him firmly administering punishment, acting the part of “severe … justicer” so that he can effectively crush sedition.

The scene opens with Bedford's reassurance that “the king hath note” of all that the traitors “intend.” This ensures that the audience can savor the dramatic irony, knowing that Henry is orchestrating the situation toward disclosure and that what appears to be naive overconfidence in his subjects (“We carry not a heart with us from hence / That grows not in a fair consent with ours” [21-22]) is actually a tactic for unmasking his enemies. Admittedly the King's strategy is machiavellian. But he is using deception (the pointed irony of referring to the traitors' “too much love and care” of him [52-53]) to expose hypocrisy; one might view him, in John F. Danby's terms, as the “machiavel of goodness,”¹⁶ doing what the cunning leader must do to establish his authority. He shows magnanimity in pardoning a drunken man for verbal abuse, even when Grey, damning himself in advance, urges the “taste of much correction.” (In a parallel sequence in IV. viii, Fluellen advocates “martial law” for Williams, whereas Henry pardons him because, as Williams explains, “All offenses … come from the heart” and his heart has remained loyal to the King.) For the traitors, however, there can be no mercy. Henry perhaps speaks as a man in his long speech where he deeply regrets the perfidy of Scroop, who has “infected / The sweetness of affiance” (126-27). But his voice is that of a responsible monarch who puts the safety of his kingdom first when he declares:

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.

(174-77)

At Harfleur the King's challenge is to prove himself a military giant, displaying the qualities of “courage” and “fortitude” as a warrior-king. Strong leadership, Shakespeare suggests, is a matter of playing the role convincingly and encouraging others to do the same—to become what they act:

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger.

(III. i. 3-6)

The aggressive soldier must “Disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage” and assume the properties of a war machine or a predatory animal. By the time he speaks to the Governor (III. iii), Henry has completely appropriated the persona of the soldier, calling it “A name that in my thoughts becomes me best” (6). His threatening speech is thus predicated on a total divorce between the sensitive mortal who is bound to feel “pity” for violated women and butchered babies and the hardened military leader who would fatalistically let his soldiers run amok. If Henry actually allowed this brutality to take place, could he remain a respected ruler, full of “king-becoming graces”? Again there is a tenuous balance between the monarch's ruthlessness¹⁷ (a kind of “justice,” if Harfleur breaks the rules of war that Henry outlines here) and “mercy.” It is possible, though not certain, that the blood-chilling threats are merely a clever tactic to coerce surrender, so that once the Governor has capitulated Henry can “Use mercy to them all” (54). There is a similar conflict between the King's “lenity” and “cruelty” toward an individual when Henry, while insisting on treating the French with respect and not stealing from their land because “the gentler gamester is the soonest winner,” nevertheless approves Bardolph's execution (III. vi. 112). He reveals no regret over the death of an old comrade for theft. The expedient military leader clearly cannot afford to be sentimental.

Michael Goldman comments astutely on how Henry V reveals “the effort of greatness” and “the demands on the self that being a king involves.”¹⁸ In Act IV Henry as king faces several challenges: keeping up the morale of his soldiers before and during battle, and justifying his cause (while in disguise) to his men. The Chorus paints a glowing picture of Henry as the “royal captain” who rallies his troops the night before battle with his resilience and “sweet majesty.” Indeed when we first see him at the beginning of IV. i, he is succeeding admirably in cheering up his comrades. He makes the best of a bad situation, “gathering honey out of the weed” by turning adversity to advantage:

For our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful, and good husbandry.

(IV. i. 6-7)

Even the mind, he argues, is “quick'ned” by harsh conditions. It is quite possible, judged by his later “I and my bosom must debate a while” (31), that the King is experiencing anxiety on a deeper level; yet he projects a “cheerful semblance”—the king-becoming grace of “stableness”—so convincingly that we believe in his fundamental optimism and, most important, in his ability to transmit a positive outlook to his subordinates.

The sequence where the King is in disguise points up the ultimate irony: Henry is unable to shed the royal persona and its responsibilities. The price of kingship is isolation from other people, even though Henry is eager to present himself to the commoners (Bates, Court, and Williams) as an ordinary human being: “I think the King is but a man, as I am. … His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing” (103-10). He does not appear to convince them. Indeed, whatever emotions he may be feeling, Henry must remain committed to the public role of “outward courage” in order to rally his subjects; as he goes on to explain, “no man should possess [the king] with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army” (112-14). For a king, the appearance of strength is paramount. Yet Henry continues to defend the King's private self and his “conscience,” maintaining that the King's cause is “just” and his quarrel “honorable.” Whereas Bates expresses unquestioning loyalty, Williams probes the implications, the “heavy reckoning” at the Day of Judgment, if the cause is not “good.” Sensitive on the issue of the King's responsibility for so many lives lost in battle, Henry concentrates on separating the “duty” of the subject, which belongs to the King, from the “soul” of the subject, which is that person's own concern, regardless of whether or not he has been sent to war on a valid pretext. The long speech (150-90) is perhaps a Pyrrhic victory for the King's position. It convinces Williams that “the king is not to answer” for the sins of individual subjects but leaves him suspicious of the King's “word,” his promise that he will never be ransomed: “Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed, and we ne'er the wiser” (197-99). Henry's defense of kingship, so coherent on one level, has confirmed the wide chasm—the lack of complete trust, the sense of operating by different standards, the inability to communicate frankly—between the monarch and his subjects.

Henry's meditation on “ceremony” bitterly explodes the mystique of kingship: its dependence on empty forms, which calls into question its genuine substance. Suddenly the emperor is admitting that he has no clothes. Whatever authority the King possesses he must forge for himself, since “place, degree, and form” have no creative or healing powers. No wonder that Henry deeply resents the “ceremony” that both insulates him from his subjects and traps him in a web of anxieties and public responsibilities. Inevitably he romanticizes the lives of the private man (as “infinite heart's-ease”) and the peasant (who “Sleeps in Elysium”), just as he exaggerates the “hard condition” of being a king. On a deeper level, though, he faces up to the implications of his title. When he prays that God will take from his men the “sense of reck'ning” he refers literally to the soldiers' ability to count the huge number of the French enemy, but he also touches on the somber meaning that Williams has introduced just before: a “reckoning” on the Day of Judgment.

The two soliloquies crystallize the King's dilemma; he must accept the penalties of his role if he is to play it successfully on the following day. Acknowledging and coming to terms with his solitary burden (that he alone must “bear all”) releases fresh confidence in his public persona. His oratory before Agincourt demonstrates the positive side of kingship, for it is not only a superb display of his own “courage” and “fortitude” but of the king-becoming grace of “perseverance” in building the same confidence in his followers. To Westmoreland, desperate for ten thousand more fighting men, Henry responds, “What's he that wishes so?” Again turning adversity to advantage, he stresses, “The fewer men, the greater share of honor” and projects a Hotspur-like persona who thirsts for glory in battle when he describes himself as “the most offending soul alive” in coveting “honor.” But whereas Hotspur wanted no “corrival” in the honor stakes (Henry IV, Part i, I. iii. 207), Henry inspires others to join him in a fellowship of heroic feats. The Crispin's Day speech is the ultimate proof of Henry's strength as a leader. Gone is the defensiveness that made communication with the three commoners difficult; paradoxically, in his public address to the army he can reach out to his men on personal terms, abandoning the royal “we” for the “we” of shared enterprise as he forges English brotherhood on French soil:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

(IV. iii. 60)

The apocalyptic overtones of “The day, my friends, and all things stay for me” (IV. i. 315) have dissolved into the absolute conviction that he and his men together have the necessary mental fortitude: “All things are ready, if our minds be so” (IV. iii. 71). No longer fearing the infamy or silence of a failed campaign, Henry proudly tells Montjoy that even those Englishmen who die this day will “draw their honors reeking up to heaven” and be remembered for the terrible plague they bred in France. Valiant as ever, the King again swears that the French will never ransom his living body. Moreover, Henry projects confidence without appearing boastful; he takes pride in his “warriors for the working day,” but his fundamental humility, his submission to the will of God, is underlined in the proviso that they will win the battle only “if God please” (120). This humility (the “lowliness” outlined by Malcolm in Macbeth) is most fully revealed in his conclusion, after he reads the brief list of English dead at Agincourt, that “O God, thy arm was here!” (IV. viii. 108). Regardless of the underlying reasons for Henry's piety, what matters is that he manifests it appropriately, and, by making it a capital offense to “boast” of victory, he deflects his army from the kind of arrogance that has undermined the French.

This is a superb display of practical kingship. The scenes that follow, presenting the King in action at Agincourt, are less clear in their intention—in particular, Henry's order to kill the French prisoners followed by a second threat to cut the throats of all those captured by his soldiers is confusing.¹⁹ Shakespeare may be trying to encompass too much here—presenting Henry as a shrewd leader who is coldly ruthless when he foresees danger for his army but also as a furious, spontaneous avenger of the slaughter of the boys in the camp, to the point where he is no longer required to be temperate or magnanimous: “And not a man of them that we shall take / Shall taste our mercy” (IV. vii. 66-67). At any rate, Henry's royal magnanimity is again tested when he has the chance to punish Williams for his “bitter terms” the previous night. Instead of doing so, he graciously accepts Williams' entreaty to “take it for your own fault, and not mine” and rewards the man for his honest heart: “Here uncle Exeter, fill this glove with crowns, / And give it to this fellow” (IV. viii. 58-59). This gesture may serve as an example of Henry's generosity (or the King rewarding his loyal friends); yet it has the effect of patronizing Williams, who is now addressed as “fellow” and not as the “brother” of the Crispin's Day speech. And it is ironic that Henry thinks it appropriate to reward Williams—possibly to buy his loyalty—by giving him gold, even though he himself has spurned wealth in favor of “honor.”

The ambivalence here points to the complexity of Shakespeare's treatment of the theme of kingship. On one level the sequence illustrates Henry's “bounty” as one of the king-becoming graces, just as Henry has displayed “temperance” to the Dauphin's messengers, “justice” to the traitors, “devotion” to God, and “courage” and “fortitude” in battle. But the King's justice is sometimes akin to ruthlessness and his honesty undercut by deviousness or cunning, although these too (the play suggests) may be necessary attributes of kingship. Henry V reflects what Michael Manheim terms the Renaissance “acceptance of deception and intrigue and violence as legitimate instuments of political behavior.”²⁰ And for Henry the dark side of royalty is its utter isolation—the king, vulnerable to betrayal, can have no close friends—as well as its deceptive appearance of glory. Since the “ceremony” of monarchy is merely symbolic, the king must work on his own initiative, with talents honed through trial and risk, to win solid achievements for his country.

Notes

1. The fable of the bees was developed by both Virgil (Georgics, Book IV) and Pliny (Natural History, Book XI). Shakespeare might have found it in the Renaissance authors Erasmus (Institutio Principis Christiani) and Lyly (Euphues); see Andrew Gurr, “Henry V and the Bees' Commonwealth,” ShS, [Shakespeare Survey] 30 (1977), 61-72.

2. Henry V (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare (1954), p. xvi.

3. Henry V (ed.), The New Penguin Shakespeare, p. 11.

4. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: From Richard II to Henry V (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), decides that “the principal theme of Henry V … is the establishment in England of an order based on consecrated authority and crowned successfully by action against France” (166). Conversely, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), single out “insurrection” as the play's “obsessive preoccupation” (216).

5. Rose A. Zimbardo, “The Formalism of Henry V” (1964), in Michael Quinn (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry V: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 163-70, pushes this idea to its ultimate conclusion, arguing that the play is a formal celebration of how “the ideal king embodies in himself and projects upon his state the ideal metaphysical order” (164).

6. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 114.

7. See Anthony Brennan, “‘Mangling by Starts the Full Course of That Glory’: The Legend and the Reality of War in Henry V,” in Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 196.

8. Henry V (ed.), p. 34.

9. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (eds.), Players of Shakespeare 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 5.

10. “A Muse of Fire: Henry V in the Light of Tamburlaine,” MLQ, [Modern Language Quarterly] 29 (1965), 15-28, 26.

11. The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), Chapter 18, pp. 99-100.

12. As Moody E. Prior concludes in The Drama of Power: Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 323.

13. A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 185.

14. Chapter 17, p. 96.

15. Chronicles, in J. R. Brown (ed.), Henry V, The Signet Classic Shakespeare (1965; 1988), p. 208.

16. This is the term he uses for Prince Hal, in Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), p. 91.

17. Ronald S. Berman, “Shakespeare's Alexander: Henry V,” CE, [College English] 23 (1962), 532-39, explores the “dark side of Henry's majestic purposefulness” (537).

18. “Henry V: The Strain of Rule,” in Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 73.

19. John Arden, To Present the Pretence (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), calls it a “part-justified, part unmotivated moment of horror” (206).

20. The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973), p. 13.