is to fight in a foreign war which will unite his country against a common enemy.  Henry's claim to the French throne was not weak.  It was legitimate.

Although in some of his history plays, Shakespeare bent and stretched the truth to tell his story, the actual facts of the Battle of Agincourt are reported in the play.  Henry was not looking for a fight.  He was trying to get his weak and hungry army back to Calais, then home to regroup.

The French army, on the other hand was fresh and ready for a fight.  They out numbered the English army.  Providence was on the English army's side.  It had been raining, the ground muddy.  Henry deployed his Welsh long bowman on the hillsides behind a barrier of wooden spikes that would impale any French horse and rider to make it through.  When the battle began, it was like shooting fish in a barrel for the bowman.  Under the constant barrage of arrows raining in, horses and riders slipped down on the muddy battlefield.  Mounds dead French horses and knights filled the valley.  The result was the loss of most of the French battle commanders and thousands of men.  The English losses were under a 100.

The slaughter of the boys who were unarmed at the camp actually happened and Henry actually did order the French prisoners killed.

As a military king, Henry did not punish the cities he conquered.  Looting was forbidden.  His logic was that these people were his citizens and therefore should treated with respect.

Shakespeare understood the affects of war and depicts them throughout his history plays.  Henry is one of the good guys.  We see him struggle with the whole question of what gives him the right to ask the men under his command to die for him.

He was a great leader.  His men respected and followed him.

Although there are times in William Shakespeare’s tragedyHenry V, where the dialogue seems to be glorifying war, the author’s message becomes clearly the opposite. Young Henry has been duped by his advisers into entering a war with little cause, and he blindly leads his men into the fray. Shakespeare highlights the nonsense behind many wars and the near brainwashing soldiers receive both in training and on the battlefield. This theme peaks with the St. Crispin’s Day speech (act IV, scene iii) wherein Henry proclaims to his “brothers” that they will, in fact, receive a greater honor in that there are so few of them going into the battle. The ridiculous and far unrealistic body counts of the French wounded, captured and dead that follow (when juxtaposed with the count of the English casualties) seal Shakespeare’s stance that war is futile, thoughtless, and barbaric.

Shakespeare’s approach to war in Henry V is multi-faceted. While the play does deal in some detail with the political motivations for the war, what sets it apart is its concern for the human costs of warfare, both in terms of lives lost and in terms of lives transformed. In this way, Agincourt is seen less as a military victory than as a personal rite of passage for Henry; through it, he emerges as a full-fledged Monarch.

Any evaluation of Henry in “Henry V” has to begin with consideration of Prince Hal in Henry IV. King Henry is shown to be a matured version of his carousing younger self; his embrace of war in France is in part a petulant reaction to his image as “playboy,” as reflected by the gift of tennis balls, and a testament to his emergence into adulthood and his assumption of the responsibilities of the monarch. Although Henry is, to a certain extent, manipulated into war in part by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wants to reclaim church lands in France, Henry’s execution of the war, his loyalty to his troops, and his valor on the field show that he has fully matured.

At the beginning of the play, the reasons for going to war are simple: birthright. King Henry feels the time is right to stake his claim to France by way of being related to Edward III. King Henry feels it is his right to do so and that God is on his side. He also realizes the costs of war, which for one is the loss of human life. War always ends life and some of those lives are of the innocent. King Henry and the King of France, both realize this. There is also the lost of establishments. War is devastating to any region it is in. King Henry even sends a message by the Duke of Exeter to the king of France to hand over the title for the sake of these loses. The consequence of the war is on the military itself. King Henry visits his soldiers and learns the realization of just how the war is affecting them. He thinks the benefits of the war are to gain France for his own. The nature of war is usually always the same. King Henry, with the help of some of his aids, comes to believe that because of his birthright, France should be his. In war there is always someone wanting something that belongs to someone else. King Henry truly believes that France is his and that gives him the justification of going to war. He believes that the benefits far out way the consequences of war. France will be his and all costs. 

Critics are divided about Henry V's attitudes, suggesting that Shakespeare may have intentionally left his character ambiguous and ill defined. One clue is Henry's conversation with Canterbury about the Salic law that decrees the passing of the Crown through the male line. Before the Ambassador from Fance enters with his tennis ball gift, Henry has already decided to "bend [France] to our awe, / Or break it all to pieces.” After the Ambassador presents the gift, Henry is even more resolute, saying, "Tell you the Dauphin I am coming on / To venge me as I may.”

Another clue is that Henry V was a knight as well as King and the code of knighthood was war. When his remarks stated above are coupled with his code of beliefs as epitomized by knightly code of conduct the balance seems to tilt toward the idea that Henry's attitude toward war is in accord with the attitude and milieu of the era, that being that war is an opportunity for service to God and the Crown and an opportunity for honor gained through valor. This would seem to be reinforced by his much later conversation with a soldier in the battlefield in which the soldier asserts that a sovereign has an irrevocable duty to fight only just wars or else to take the souls of the killed soldiers and peasants and children-soldiers on his head and soul. Henry's response is that duty to the King requires service in the King's causes and the soldiers' souls are to be on their own heads.