My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing

Henry V

Henry V is powerful propaganda. “We happy few” has been an inspiration for soldiers for hundreds of years – particularly in WWII – and “band of brothers”, of course, has deep resonance for anyone who has fought a war. The sense of identification is pure and comes from a deeply experiential place.

However. Agincourt is not exactly Normandy. The French are not the Nazis. England and France were never friends but what Henry V does is unprovoked aggression – a land grab, a power grab, a wealth grab, a princess grab. Cynically, two priests are brought in to “sell” the need for war to Henry and their words are cloaked in Christian propaganda and also – even more cynically – a treatise on succession, how France’s king is somehow illegitimate, and the French throne is rightfully Henry’s. But remember, Henry himself is the inheritor of a stolen crown. So is this a story of a man who punishes others for the things he does himself? Hamlet clocks his own hypocrisy. Hamlet is surrounded by mirrors and he can’t help but look within, and despises what he sees. Henry has no introspection. He is not an interior character. His first soliloquy comes in Act IV. Act IV!! The same guy who started off Henry Part 1 with the stunning “I know you all” soliloquy, taking us into his confidence the moment he is alone. Here, he is opaque, a glimmering glittering symbol who … what am I trying to say … buys his own bullshit, I think?

For example: Henry calls himself “a Christian king”. (This is Red Flag #1 at this point. But never mind.) The bishops gave his “excursion” into France the stamp of approval. They glaze him, as the kids say, with how holy he is, this is God’s wish, etc. Henry barely speaks. He just listens. 20 lines later, however, Henry receives the insulting “gift” of tennis balls from the French Dauphin, taunting him on his frivolity, his wild past, his youth. Henry explodes into rage of the “blood and soil” variety. He wanted France for multiple diplomatic-imperialistic reasons, but after the tennis ball “gift”, he wants to destroy France. So yes, the Bishops said, “Your Highness, you are destined to be king of France” (for their own greedy reasons), but the way Shakespeare lays it out, it’s so clear. Henry wants that land but he’s blood-thirsty war-hungry only after the tennis balls. In other words: it’s petty and personal. And Lord save us from leaders who are petty and personal. Henry will take out his anger on the French people. He talks with relish of the widows he will make, the babies that will be killed … it’s unforgivable. The Geneva Convention was invented for leaders like Henry!

And don’t even get me started on Henry’s “wooing” of Katherine, with its language of conquest.

Henry reigned 200 years before Shakespeare wrote the play. Henry was still a legend, a hugely attractive figure. He hung out in taverns, he was a king. He defeated the French in a stunning victory where the English were outnumbered. He married the French princess. (Never mind that it all fell apart after he died.) In Shakespeare’s day, a mighty monarch was on the throne, who had turned herself into a living symbol – far more successfully than Henry V did. The Spanish Armada had basically just happened. There was a lot of reason for English people to be proud of their Queen. Henry V was a very attractive mirror, at least on the surface.

After reading through the two parts of Henry IV, the cumulative effect in Henry V is … mixed feelings. Henry was so compelling in parts 1 and 2. Yes, you got glimpses of the future king in Henry IV, when he kills Hotspur (although Harold Goddard kind of made me re-think some of that: see his quotes below), and also when he put on his dad’s crown while his dad literally lay dying … his occasional cruel comments to Falstaff, the “I know you all” soliloquy which lets you know HE knows exactly what he’s doing and why. The public rejection of Falstaff is of course key and – in a way – Henry V, even with its rousing patriotism and battles, etc. – feels like an epilogue, i.e. Life After Falstaff. Henry’s Act IV soliloquy is beautiful and heartfelt, about the difficulties of being king … but it’s kind of like when some rock bands become so famous they suddenly can only write about famous people things. “It’s hard to be a king” is not exactly “to be or not to be”.

Henry’s transformation makes sense. It’s a tragic change, although Henry V doesn’t present it as such, at least not explicitly. Falstaff is mentioned maybe twice – there’s Mistress Quickly’s description of his death – very touching – and then later in the play, on the battlefield, Gower and Fluellen have a little conversation about the similarities between Alexander the Great and Henry V, and it’s kind of like … “do you all really want to have this discussion DURING the battle?” A small comedic break, Fluellen’s ongoing sob session with Roman warfare is comedic, his word pronunciation is comedic, his brain always in the ancient past. Fluellen makes the comparison, mentioning that Alexander killed his best friend. In other words, he includes “killing best friend” in the list of similarities. Gower, who has been resisting the comparison all along, balks at this, saying, “Henry never killed his best friend” and Fluellen says, “Yes he did” even though he has forgotten the “fat knight”‘s name.

By the time we get to the Battle of Agincourt, there’s Mr. Christian King telling the soldiers to “kill their prisoners”. Horrific. A stark contrast to Prince Hal. Even Falstaff’s name being uttered on the battlefield shows how much things have changed. And not for the better. Henry is most interesting in his own play when he dresses up in disguise just like the good old days to circulate among his soldiers.

Henry’s victory did not “stick”. He died, his child son became King, and all hell broke loose across the land in the Wars of the Roses, which stretched out over 20-plus years! Fighting the outward enemy turned inward as the Lancasters and the Yorks murdered each other off, crawling their way towards the crown. Henry’s victory, then, had no real meaning. I’m sorry I realize my unimpressed attitude is probably because I’m Irish and my Mayo ancestors were catapulting boulders at the British ships patrolling Galway Bay, building forts – the ruins of which I have wandered through – pillaging the shipwrecks, and pillaging the sailing ships too. At the very same time Shakespeare was writing his plays, the O’Malley clan was led, ferociously, by my famous pirate ancestor Gráinne O’Malley. So I like my family’s history better. haha

However, I will admit, in this last re-read, when I came to the line “Old men forget” a wave of goosebumps covered my body. Not an exaggeration. In fact, I had goosebumps as I typed it out. I know the speech almost by heart from that moment on. One of the great speeches in Shakespeare’s work.

Both Olivier and Branagh made great movies of Henry V, and it’s interesting to look at all the many interpretations of the St. Crispin’s Day speech. The speech is perfect. It works on you even when you resist it.

I watched Olivier’s version in high school, because a theatre director talked about Olivier’s line reading of “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” – basically imitating with Olivier did, and I still remember how Kimber showed astonishment at the boldness of what Olivier did, the build of it, but also the little breaths and the crescendo of volume as he culminated everything in that rallying cry:

I was 16 and a hungry young actor who could feel my own ignorance and so wanted to nod sagely as Kimber described this to me, I wanted to alREADY have seen it. So I rented it! Listen, we all have to start somewhere and thanks, Kimber, again, for everything. I saw the Branagh in the theatre with a big crowd of friends and it was overwhelming. If you ever get the chance to see Branagh’s version in the theatre, do it.

I will end on this note. I read Henry V in high school, I guess? My favorite scene was where the Dauphin goes on and on singing praise to his horse. His own true love. This is still my favorite scene! With some deviations, Shakespeare stuck to the “chronicles” for this one, the lead-up to Agincourt, the battles, etc., but the Dauphin praising his horse for an entire scene feels like it comes from out of nowhere, nowhere being the imaginative space where the unexpected can happen.

Quotes on the play

 
“Here, Shakespeare is really getting bored…”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

lol

“Henry IV is conscious of the corruptions of power because he has had to struggle for power, Henry V is less conscious of it, because he is always successful and Henry VI pays the price.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Henry V is an authentic charismatic, who has learned the use of charisma from his disreputable but endlessly gifted teacher.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Henry V has the gross vices, the coarseness, of one who is to rule among violent people, and he is so little ‘too friendly’ to his friends that he bundles them out of door when their time is over. He is as remoseless and undistinguished as some natural force, and the finest thing in the play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their way to the gallows.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives .. How then do we like him? We like him in the play. There he is a very amiable monster, a very splendid pageant.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Hazlitt, a republican, is merciless about Henry V. “amiable monster” is very famous.

“Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments apart from its shows and splendors. Its turmoils and battles, its flamings-out of the uncivilized heart.”
— W.B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil

“Shakespeare watched Henry V not indeed as he watched the greater souls in the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale as he spoke all tales, with tragic irony.”
— W.B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil

“The young Henry V ‘killed’ his old friend when he rejected him … Brutus did precisely the same thing when he assassinated Caesar. The analogy is startling. Sir John and the mighty Julius make strange bedfellows, but their situations are so similar that it is easy to imagine Falstaff saying to himself at the moment he was rejected … ‘Et tu, Henry!” Indeed, that is just what his silence does say.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Shakespeare does not let us locate Hal/Henry V’s true self; a king is necessarily something of a counterfeit and Henry is a great king. Hamlet, infinitely complex, becomes a different role with each strong performance. Henry V is veiled rather than complex, but the pragmatic consequence is that no actor resembles another in the part. Henry V or What You Will might as well be the play’s title.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“In [Henry V] Shakespeare flirts with failure almost as perversely, almost as daringly, and at least as blatantly as he does in Henry IV Part 2. Henry V demands that we adore its hero, but Shakespeare persistently and meticulously undercuts each of his best efforts to secure, and make us secure in, our adoration (note in particular the Chorus’s introductions and their pertinence to the scenes that immediately follow them.) These are, throughout the Henriad, but particularly in the last two plays, distinct signs that Shakespeare seeks to make rhetorical use of calculated audience awareness of the play’s inadequacy to do what they signal a desire to do.”
— Stephen Booth, Close Reading Without Readings

“Richard II had found Judases everywhere, and traitors in both Mowbray and Bolingbroke, but his own weakness was such that he allowed Bolingbroke to live, and to return to England — and Bolingbroke became responsible for Richard’s death. Henry V, King Harry, is by contrast unyielding to the traitors in his midst, his own Judases…Richard’s inward wars became outward wars. Richard’s weakness with traitors becomes a necessary and merciless execution of malefactors. Just as Henry IV Part 2 echoed and balanced Part 1, so will Henry V repeatedly echo and balance Richard II.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[The St. Crispin’s Day speech] returns the play to many of the same themes raised at the beginning by the Prologue: memory, epitaph, and mortality. It proposes a kind of immortality in fame, familiar from Shakespeare plays in other genres, like Love’s Labour’s Lost. But in this drama of English history the very existence of the play as a commemorative object confirms the ideology of the King’s impassioned claim.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The issue of ‘reputation,’ so vital in Richard II, here returns with a positive result. Where King Richard II lay ‘in reputation sick’ on the deathbed of his land, King Henry V confidently predicts that the outcome of this battle ‘from the day to the ending of the world’ will be ‘freshly remembered’ in annual celebration. Instead of appealing ineffectually to the angels on behalf of a theory of divine right, like Richard II (‘Arm, arm my name!’), Henry appeals to ‘a band of brothers’. The fewness of ‘we few’ may be a Hotspur trait, but the concept of a band of brothers is pure Hal. His education in the tavern world, his awareness of his own desire for ‘small beer,’ common comforts and common company, make him more than a vainglorious Hotspur. He has become the modern king a modern England reads.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Shakespeare, in Henry IV, had still been able to pour all of his thought and feeling into the heroic drama without demolishing its form. His respect for English history as a subject, his tendency to conceive kings in tragic terms, his interest in exalted dialogue as a medium through which important actions could be advanced — these, corrected by comedy which flooded the whole with the wisdom of a warm and proper light, may have reached their natural limit, but that limit was not transgressed. Henry IV, in other words, both was and is a successful play; it answers the questions it raises, it satisfies every instinct of the spectator, it is remembered as fabulously rich and at the same time simply ordered. Henry V is no such play.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Veering so suddenly away from tragedy, he is unable to free himself from the accidents of the form; or because, with Julius Caesar and Hamlet on his horizon, he finds himself less interested than before in heroes who are men of action and yet is not at the moment provided with a dramatic language for saying so.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“We are being entertained from the top of his mind.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The prologues are the first sign of Shakespeare’s imperfect dramatic faith. Their verse is wonderful but it has to be, for it is doing the work which the play ought to be doing, it is a substitute for scene and action.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Nor has he at this point developed the compound epithet into that interesting mannerism — the only mannerism he ever submitted to — which is to be so noticeable in his next half-dozen plays, including Hamlet. The device he is to use will involve more than the pairing of adjectives or nouns; one part of speech will assume the duties of another, and a certain very sudden concentration of meaning will result.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

I love Shakespeare’s compound-epithets. Nerdy college me kept a list of my favorites, a list lost to time.

“There are no conflicts.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The truth is that the poet’s matter failed him in the fifth act, and he was glad to fill it up with whatever he could get; and not even Shakespeare can write well without a proper subject. It is a vain endeavor for the most skillful hand to cultivate barrenness, or to paint upon vacuity.”
— Dr. Johnson

“I know not why Shakespeare now gives the king nearly such a character as he made him formerly ridiculous in Percy. This military grossness and unskillfulness in all the softer arts does not suit very well with the gaieties of his youth, with the general knowledge ascribed to him at his accession, nor with the contemptuous message sent him by the Dauphin, who represents him as fitter for the ballroom than the field, and tells him that he is not ‘to revel into dutchies’ or win provinces ‘with a nimble galliard.'”
— Dr. Johnson

“Shakespeare has little interest in the ideal English king.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“His imagination has already sped forward to Brutus and Hamlet: to a kind of hero who is no less honorable than Henry but who will tread on thorns as he takes the path of duty — itself unclear, and crossed by other paths of no man’s making. Henry is Shakespeare’s but attempt at the great man who is also simple. Henceforth he will show greatness as either perplexing or perplexed; and Hamlet will be both.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

Yes.

“Fluellen is one of Shakespeare’s most humorous men, and one of his best used.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Henry V is a very favorite monarch with the English nation, and he appears to have been also a favorite with Shakespeare, who labors hard to apologize for the actions of the king … He scarcely deserves this honor. He was fond of war and low company: — we know little else of him. He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious — idle, or doing mischief. In private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

I love how much Hazlitt hates monarchy and tyranny.

“He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

See what I mean?

“Henry V was vaguely troubled by nocturnal stirrings of the spirit. He saw no ghost.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Will is then only triumphant when it is opposed to the will of others, but when it insults and tramples on all justice and all humanity. Henry declares his resolution ‘when France is his, to bend it to his awe, or break it all to pieces’ — a resolution worthy of a conqueror, to destroy all that he cannot enslave; and what adds to the joke, he lays all the blame of the consequences of his ambition on those who will not submit tamely to his tyranny. Such is the history of kingly power, from the beginning to the end of the world — with this difference, that the object of war formerly, when the people adhered to their allegiance, was to depose kings; the object latterly, since the people swerved from their allegiance, has been to restore kings, and to make common cause against mankind.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

You can feel his fury.

“Might was right. Without equivocation or disguise, in that heroic and chivalrous age. The substitution of right for might even in theory, is among the refinements and abuses of modern philosophy.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Yes.

“Falstaff is dead, and without him, Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph are satellites without a sun.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Before I begin with Harold Goddard’s quotes: his chapter on Henry V was the longest in volume 1, rivaling the Hamlet chapter. This is because he goes scene by scene. He takes issue with the conventional view, that the play is sycophantic royalist propaganda, that Shakespeare basically agrees that Henry V is the perfect “Christian king”. In other words, Goddard shifts the lens a bit, making the play far more interesting, drenching it with irony.

“Through the Choruses, the playwright gives us the popular idea of his hero. In the play, the poet tells the truth about him. We are free to accept whichever of the two we prefer.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Could anything make clearer the atavistic character of the change that is coming over Henry than these references to blood and ancestry and graves. His nobler self is regressing not merely into his father but into ‘the fathers’.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“What fun Shakespeare must have had making such a fool of his Archbishop, knowing all the while that his audience would swallow his utterances as grave political wisdom.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“And thus the first act ends. One wonders whether any who find it lacking in drama may possibly have missed some of its irony.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“‘O braggart vile and damned furious wight!’
Shocking as it may sound to say it, that line is a vulgar, but nonetheless a psychologically accurate, description of Henry, when, beside himself with anger, he resents the insults of the Dauphin. Not Henry, but Henry-beside-himself’. (‘Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.’) Shakespeare can never be trusted not to comment on his main plot into underplot.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“There are those who hold that the sins of men in high places should be less stressed than the sins of those in private life. There is no evidence that to Shakespeare right and wrong are one thing for kings and another for commoners or even for the underworld.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“It was not Falstaff that Hal rejected. It was himself.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

Yes.

“That so many have been willing to accept the man Henry became with all his defects, as Shakespeare’s portrait of the ideal king, is a fact of the highest psychological interest. One could almost fancy that Shakespeare foresaw how many would be taken in by his ‘hero’ and was speaking of them through Henry’s own mouth.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

On “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man”:

“What this boils down to is the doctrine that in peace the manly virtues are all right but that in war man ought to become a beast. That men often do become beasts when they fight is notorious. But that it is the duty of the soldier deliberately to transform himself into a beast in advance is a totally different proposition, and Henry’s unabashed advocacy of it shows how nearly dead at such a moment at least, the chivalric conception of honor was in his mind. What did Shakespeare think of this red-blooded doctrine? The question ‘What did Shakespeare think?’ about this or that is frequently a futile one. But on this particular point his plays are so full of evidence, converging to one conclusion, that I believe we are entitled to say exactly what Shakespeare thought down to the very noun he would have used to characterize Henry. He thought Henry was talking like a savage.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

On Henry’s “tiger” imagery:

“Whoever holds that Shakespeare endorses Henry’s advice about imitating the action of the tiger should trace with the aid of a concordance the poet’s use of the word ‘fury’.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“The wit, humor, and even reticence [Faulconbridge] displayed on this [same type of] occasion puts Henry’s verbal orgy of blood lust in the sorriest light … Those in our day who wrote into international law the doctrine that offensive war is a crime were hailed as pioneers. They were anticipated by Shakespeare.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“‘Brother John Bates,’ he says, ‘is not that the morning which breaks yonder?’ Just eleven words — and the rest is silence. But those words let us into the secret thoughts of a man who never expects to see another dawn, and in his silence we hear his heartbeat. We hear them to the end of the scene — of the act — of the play. Did he fall in the battle? We never know. Even Shakespeare seldom packed so much into so little Put the one word ‘brother’ over against its plural ‘brothers’ as used by Henry. Put all eleven words — with the silence that follows them — over against the speech of the Constable of France that opens the previous scene: ‘Tut! I have the best armour of the world. Would it were day!’ with the loquacity that follows it, and it is scarcely too much to say that in the two we have the reason why, in this play at any rate, the English won the Battle of Agincourt.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

Never would have picked up on this.

“The contempt with which he turns on ‘the forced title running ‘fore the king’ indicates how far he is at this moment of soul-revelation from the ambitious boy who put the crown on his head when his father was dying, or the leader who urged his soldiers to imitate the action of the tiger. He is closer, indeed, as the rest of his speech with its envious references to those of low degree, shows, to the spirt of his son-to-be, Henry VI.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Indeed, apart from both Henry and Shakespeare, the experience of two world wars has made our own generation a bit suspicious of extreme protestations of democracy from those in high position if uttered at a moment when national safety depends on the loyalty of those of lower situation.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

I wish we were more suspicious now. As a whole. I remain suspicious always.

“The fourth battle scene seems to digress even further. Yet it is one of the best illustrations in all the author’s work of the rule that the more casual and incidental one of the scenes appears to be, the more significant and central it often is. What this one appears to be is just a bit of conversation between Fluellen and Gower, two of the King’s officers, precipitated by the killing of the prisoners. What it is, if I’m not mistaken, is nothing less than Shakespeare’s last judgment on the rejection of Falstaff.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“‘It is the soldiers; I by bargain should
wear it myself.’
Bargain! It is a bourgeois word. Henry has pawned his honor — supposedly a noble word. But what is the word of honor of a king when given to a commoner? Thus does Shakespeare demonstrate how long it takes after the battle — half an hour? — for Henry’s protestations of democracy and equality before the battle to evaporate.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Shakespeare has portrayed many battles and shown many military leaders in combat, but not King Henry V in the Battle of Agincourt. No one, of course, can question the valor of the man who killed Hotspur. What anyone can question — and, it seems to me, must question — is whether Henry at Agincourt is the man who killed Hotspur. There is much indeed to indicate that Shakespeare deliberately created a detailed contrast between Henry’s conduct at Shrewsbury and his conduct at Agincourt.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“… what Shakespeare thought of Henry V’s French conquest is utterly crushing…What it all adds up to is that the Battle of Agincourt was the royal equivalent of the Gadshill robbery. If Shakespeare did not mean it, it means itself. The analogy between imperialism and highway robbery is no invention of modern radicals. It is probably as old as the organization of men into predatory groups.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“When Henry ’embraced’ the Chief Justice as his father, rejected Falstaff, and embarked on his conquest of France, it was not a new leaf, but the oldest of leaves, that he turned over.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“[The fifth act] has been put down as more of an epilogue than anything else — a sort of tailpiece. But we had better be on guard. Supreme poets, when approaching the crest of their power, are not in the habit of attaching tailpieces to masterpieces.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Not maliciously and in cold blood but against the train of his own nature and by insensible degrees, the man who began as Hal and ended as Henry V made himself into something that comes too close for comfort to Machiavelli’s ideal prince. ‘Then why did not Shakespeare make it plain?’ those will exclaim who hold that at any sacrifice everything must be clear in the theatre. Samuel Butler has demonstrated in convincing detail that no art or mental process is perfect until it becomes unconscious. The perfect thief is the kleptomaniac, who steals as it were automatically. In that sense Henry V was possibly the perfect Machiavellian prince. In that sense Richard III was a mere bungler: he was conscious of his evil.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Embracing scenes of politics and battle juxtaposed with vivid genre paintings of the London underworld, this design not only gives to Henry IV an unmatched sense of life, it enables us to watch the preparation of a king and to gauge the cost of royal power. It is the product of the preparation that we see in Henry V.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“… here, as in the chronicles, the wild young prince of popular tradition becomes the patriotic emblem of success. Despite the hardships he endures, he is not really imperiled … we have merely to await his predetermined triumph.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

On “Once more unto the breach”:

“Shakespeare’s early histories are a string of helter-skelter episodes selected to present the dynastic struggles of the fifteenth century and thus to illustrate the dangers of dissension. Packed with people and events that cover more than sixty years, the three Henry VI plays are crudely stitched together, and despite the presence of a dominating villain in their sequel, Richard III, the so-called first tetralogy is mainly rough apprentice work, short on character and construction but long on crime and horror … Although Richard II, which inaugurates the second tetralogy, marks a great advance in style and depth of characterization, to say nothing of construction, it partakes almost of ritual in its somber grace and elevation.
With 1 and 2 Henry IV, however, Shakespeare opens up a new terrain. These are not unwieldy narratives in the style of Richard III and Richard II, but serio-comic treatments of historical events as seen from different levels of perception … They combine a novelistic range of observation with a richly contrapuntal structure that shows the full extent of Shakespeare’s art.
In writing of a man like Henry V, however, Shakespeare clearly felt the need of something different.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“The young Henry V ‘killed’ his old friend when he rejected him … Brutus did precisely the same thing when he assassinated Caesar. The analogy is startling. Sir John and the mighty Julius make strange bedfellows, but their situations are so similar that it is easy to impagine Falstaff saying to himself at the moment he was rejected … ‘Et tu, Henry!’ Indeed, that is just what his silence does say.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Shakespeare had … to strive for grandeur — and to settle for the grandiose.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“Shakespeare really had to kill [Falstaff] off, for Falstaff, with his tonic disrespect and his genius for subversion, would have been a greater threat to Henry V than all the French at Agincourt.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“Richard III is a sort of biography of Force, a fitting close to the series of nine plays that began chronologically with King John, a confirmation of the Bastard’s belief that Truth in the long run gets the better of Commodity, a crowning demonstration of the diabolic rather than the divine right on which absolute power rests, of the nemesis that is bound in the end to take over the “strong” man. How likely is it that Shakespeare would have composed this pitiless exposure of the hollowness and rottenness of power, only to turn a few years later to the glorification of it on an imperialistic scale? That is the paradox and the question with which the conventional interpretation of Henry V confronts us.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

Quotes from the play

Yea, at that very moment,
Consideration like an angel came
And whip’t th’ offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
T’envelop and contain celestial spirits.
— CANTERBURY, I.i.27-31

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best,
Neighbor’d by fruit of baser quality.,
— ELY, I.i.60-62

Gracious lord,
stand for your own, unwind your bloody flag,
Look back into your mighty ancestors.
— CANTERBURY, I.ii.100-102

Your brother kings and monarchs of the earth
Do all expect that you should rouse yourself,
As did the former lions of your blood.
— ELY, I.ii.122-124

We are no tyrant, but a Christian king.
— HENRY, I.ii.241

^^ 20 lines later he is a tyrant.

NYM:
The King hath run bad humors on the knight, that’s the even of it.
PISTOL:
Nym, thou hast spoke the right.
His heart is fracted and corroborate.
— II.i.121-124

The King hath kill’d his heart.
— MISTRESS QUICKLY, II.i.88

SCROOP:
That’s mercy, but too much security.
Let him be punish’d, sovereign, lest example
Breed, by his sufferance, more of such a kind.
HENRY V:
O, let us be merciful.
— II.ii.44-47

The mercy that was quick in us but late,
By your own counsel is suppress’d and kill’d.
You must not dare (for shame) to talk of mercy
For your own reasons turn into your bosoms.
— HENRY, II.ii.79-82

See you, my princes and my noble peers,
These English monsters!
— HENRY, II.ii.84-85

‘Tis so strange,
That, though the truth of it stands off as gross
As black and white, my eye will scarcely see it.
— HENRY, II.ii.102-104

I love that.

BOY:
Yes, that ‘a did, and said they were devils incarnate.
MISTRESS QUICKLY:
‘A could never abide carnation — ’twas a color he never lik’d.
— II.iii.31-34

Well, the fuel is gone that maintain’d that fire.
That’s all the riches I got in his service.
— BARDOLPH, II.iii.43-44

Falstaff.

And you shall find his vanities forespent
Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus,
Covering discretion with a coat of folly,
As gardeners do with ordure hide those roots
That still first spring and be most delicate.
— FRENCH KING, II.iv.36-40

Julius Caesar is coming up – at least in the timeline I have – so the Brutus comparison is interesting.

Turn head, and stop pursuit, for coward dogs
Most spend their mouths when what they seem to threaten
Runs far before them.
— DAUPHIN, II.iv.68-71

While this is macho talk, there’s a lot of truth to this observation!

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin
As self-neglecting.
— DAUPHIN, II.iv.73-74

A lesson I have spent my whole life learning.

For if you hide the crown
Even in your hearts, there will he rake for it.
— EXETER, II.iv.97-98

A terrifying image of an autocrat. Not even in your HEARTS are you free.

On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws.
— EXETER, II.iv.104-105

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 …
Disguise fair nature with hard-favor’d rage.
— HENRY, III.i.3-8

I see you stand like grey hounds in the slips
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot!
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry, “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
— HENRY, III.i.31034

FLUELLEN:
Captain MacMorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation.
MACMORRIS:
Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?
— III.ii.120-124

MacMorris hating his own people!

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up;
And the flesh’d soldier, rough, and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range,
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins, and your flow’ring infants.
What is it then to me, if impious War,
Arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do with his smirch’d complexion all fell feats
Enlink’d to waste and desolation?
What is it to me, when you yourselves are cause,
Of your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
— HENRY, III.iii.10-18

He’s a monster.

Why, in a moment, look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend hearts dash’d to the walls
Your naked infants spitted on pikes …
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus’d
Do break the clouds.
— HENRY, III.iii.33-40

Same speech. He’s an absolute monster.

And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine
Seem frosty? O, for honor of our land,
Let us not hang like roping icicles
Upon our houses’ thatch, while a more frosty people
Sweet drops of gallant youth in our rich fields!
— CONSTABLE OF FRANCE, III.v.31-35

FLUELLEN:
There is an aunchient lieutenant there at the pridge, I think in my very conscience he is as valiant a man as Mark Antony, and he is a man of no estimation in the world, but I did see him do as gallant service.
GOWER:
What do you call him?
FLUELLEN:
He is call’d Aunchient Pistol.
GOWER:
I know him not.
— III.vi.12-19

First Brutus, now Mark Antony.

PISTOL:
Die and be damn’d and figo for thy friendship!
FLUELLEN:
It is well.
PISTOL:
The fig of Spain.
FLUELLEN:
Very good.
–III.vi.57-60

… but one that is like to be executed for robbing a church, one Bardolph, if your Majest know the man.
— FLUELLEN, III.vi.100-102

He sure does know him and he executes him anyway.

Would it were day!
— CONSTABLE, III.vii.1

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk, he trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it. The basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipes of Hermes…It is a beast for Perseus. He is pure air and fire, and the dull closeness of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness, while his rider mounts him. He is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.
— DAUPHIN about his horse, III.vii.15-18

DAUPHIN:
It is the prince of palfreys, his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch, and his countenance enforces homage.
ORLEANCE:
No more, cousin.
DAUPHIN:
Nay, the man hath no wit that cannot, from the rising of the lark to the lodging of the lamb, vary deserv’d praise on my palfrey … I once wrote a sonnet in his praise and began thus: “Wonder of nature…”
ORLEANCE:
I have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress.
DAUPHIN:
Then did they mistake that which I compos’d to my courser, for the horse is my mistress.
— III.vii.27-44

He is so delightfully weird. And I love how Orleance is like “Enough already, pal.”

Will it never be day?
— DAUPHIN, III.vii.80

Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.
— CHORUS, 46-47

There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distill it out,
For our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful and good husbandry …
Thus may we gather honey from the weed,
And make a moral of the devil himself.
— HENRY, IV.i.4-12

So good.

The King’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold,
A lad of life, an imp of fame,
Of parents good, of fist most valiant.
I kiss his dirty shoe, and from heart-string
I love the lovely bully.
— PISTOL, IV.i.44-48

For thought I speak it to you, I think the King is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it doth to me, the element shows to him as it does to me; all his senses have but human conditions.
— HENRY, in disguise, IV.i.101-104

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms, and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together of 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. Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that let them to it.
— MICHAEL WILLIAMS, IV.i.134-145

He has no idea with whom he is talking so freely. But I’m with you, Michael.

Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.
— HENRY, IV.i.176-177

There’s a perilous shot out of an elder gun, that a poor and private displeasure can do against a monarch. You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning on his face with a peacock’s feather.
— MICHAEL WILLIAMS, IV.i.197-201

I love that imagery.

What infinite heart’s ease
Must kings eglect, that private men enjoy!
— HENRY, IV.i.236-237

Cry me a river.

And what have kings that private lives have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idol Ceremony?
What kind of god art thou…
O Ceremony, show me but thy worth!
— HENRY, IV.i.238-244

Reminds me of Faulconbridge’s speech on “Commodity”.

Not today, O Lord,
O, not today, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
— HENRY, IV.i.292-294

ORLEANCE:
The sun doth gild our armor. Up, my lords!
DAUPHIN:
Montez à cheval! My horse, varlot lackey! Ha!
ORLEANCE:
O brave spirit!
DAUPHIN:
Via! les eaux et terre.
ORLEANCE:
Rien puis? l’air et fou?
DAUPHIN:
Cieux! cousin Orleance.
— IV.ii.1-6

Orleance is like “again with the horse?”

Description cannot suit itself in words
To demonstrate the life of such a battle,
In life so liveless as it shows itself.
— GRANDPRÉ, IV.ii.53-55

The play is filled with people describing the grandeur of what they are looking at, and finally saying “I can’t really put it into words.” Cinema had to be invented.

But if it be a sin to covet honor,
I am the most offending man alive.
— HENRY, IV.iii.28-29

Says the man who killed another man obsessed with honor (Hotspur).

Old men forget …
— HENRY, IV.iii.49

Goosebumps.

BOY:
He says is name is Master Fer.
PISTOL:
Master Fer? I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him! Discuss the same in French unto him.
BOY:
I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.
— IV.iv.27-31

Suffolk first died, and York, all haggled over,
Comes to him where in gore he lay insteeped,
And takes him by the beard, kisses the gashes
That bloodily did yawn upon his face.
— EXETER, IV.vi.11-14

Horribly vivid.

The French have reinforc’d their scattr’d men.
Then every soldier kill his prisoners.
— HENRY, IV.vi.36-37

I think of his “For worms, brave Percy.” COLD. Not to mention a war crime.

Kill the poys and the luggage! ‘Tis expressly against the law of arms. ‘Tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert; in your conscience, now, is it not?
— FLUELLEN, IV.vii.1-4

People didn’t need the Geneva Convention to know that killing POWs is wrong.

GOWER:
Our king is not like him in that, he never kill’d any of his friends.
FLUELLEN:
It is not well done, mark you now, to take the tales out of my mouth, ere it is made and finished. I speak but in the figures and comparisons of it: Alexander kill’d his friend Clytus, being in his ales and his cups, so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wit and his good judgments, turn’d away the fat knight with the great belly doublet. He was full of jests and gipes and knaveries, and mocks — I have forgot his name.
GOWER:
Sir John Falstaff.
FLUELLEN:
That is he.
— IV.vii.40-52

Why that the naked, poor, and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France put up her lovely visage?
— BURGUNDY, V.iii.34-37

If, Duke of Burgundy, you would the peace,
Whose want gives growth to th’ imperfections
Which you have cited, you must buy that peace.
— HENRY, V.ii.68-70

You have one cousin, Katherine her with us.
She is our capital demand, compris’d
Within the fore rank of our articles.
— HENRY, V.ii.95-97

“She is our capital demand.” Those who find this scene charming I find SUSPECT.

In loving me, you should love the friend of France, for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it … I will have it all mine.
— HENRY, V.ii.172-174

This wooing scene is WILD. Under no circumstances could she ever say no.

I love thee cruelly…
I get thee with scrambling and thou must therefore needs prove a good soldier-breeder. Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard!
— HENRY, V.ii.202-209

When you think of the son he ended up having …

Now beshrew my father’s ambition! he was thinking of civil wars when he got me; therefore was I created with a stubborn outside with an aspect of iron, that when I came to woo ladies, I fright them.
— HENRY, V.ii.225-228

No shit, Hal.

O kate, nice customs cur’sy to great kings.
— HENRY, V.ii.268

Oh and I forgot to mention when Henry basically forces Katherine to kiss him, even though she says she doesn’t want to kiss before Marriage. He TAKES it from her. They literally met 5 minutes ago. Also: she said NO. I love how Burgundy basically understands the situation and speaks up:

Can you blame her then, being a maid yet ros’d over with the virgin crimson of modesty, if she deny the appearance of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self? It were, my lord, a hard condition for a maid to consign to.
— BURGUNDY, V.ii.295-299

And so I shall catch the fly.
— HENRY, V.ii.313

So now he’s the spider and she’s the fly. Trapped. This whole thing is such a FASCINATING way to end this play. The conquest is not complete until he conquers her.