ACT V

CHORUS

Picture Henry's return to England like a conquering Caesar -- always a disparaging comparison in Shakespeare (Goddard I 259) -- "Where that his lords desire him to have borne / His bruised helmet and his bended sword / Before him through the city. He forbids it, / Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride" (17-20). Again, no evidence that he really involved himself on the battlefield. And then, making this a rather pointless exercise of our imaginations, we zip over again to France. The gap between the material from Chorus and what we see on stage has widened.

The phrase "brook abridgment" puns on Brook's Abridgment, published 1573/74, 1576, 1586, as the best legal textbook before Coke's (Ogburn and Ogburn 737). With Holland disguised under an Ireland reference, the Chorus may be alluding to Leicester overstepping in the 1580s (Ogburn and Ogburn 734).

SCENE i

Fluellen is wearing a leek past the day on which it is a Welsh custom (see Asimov 491f). When he sees Pistol, he beats him and makes him eat the leek, since Pistol had mocked the custom. Gower insults Pistol too. Afterwards, Pistol reports further dejection in that he has learned that his wife -- "Doll" as a misprint for "Nell"? (Asimov 512) -- has died from "a malady of France" (V.i.82): syphilis: "To England will I steal, and there I'll steal" (V.i.87). In other words, Henry's wars have provided an education and opportunity for this final real result: a hardened criminal.

SCENE ii

Act V is often seen as "the worst anticlimax in any of Shakespeare's greater plays" (Goddard I 261). The poet seems to have run out of material, so the act is viewed as an epilogue essentially. At best, the act serves as a culmination among the history plays, ending "as comedies conventionally do, with a marriage, one that will unite realms as well as hearts" (Wells 156).

But the real purpose of this act is to show us the final Machiavellian insidiousness of Henry as he cuts such a sorry figure as a suitor -- and it doesn't matter, since the "conquest" here is already a done deal, a foregone conclusion" (Goddard I 263). He demanded her from her father as a condition of settlement: "capital demand" (V.ii.96). And it's a bit horrifying that the country's leaders act as if nothing has happened. This is more forced leek-eating but under the sugar-coating of Ceremony, which Henry had deconstructed earlier. What a hypocrite! "Henry V made himself into something that comes too close for comfort to Machiavelli's ideal prince.... Richard III was a mere bungler: he was still conscious of his evil" (Goddard I 267).

"'I love thee cruelly,' he protests, letting slip a Janus-faced adjective" (Goddard I 264).

Historically, the Dauphin died two months after Agincourt (Asimov 509). The Duke of Burgundy makes an honorable speech about peace -- "sincere, profound, and imaginative, a touchstone" (Goddard I 262) -- but Henry reduces it to the level of concessions to his conquest and as a commodity, something to be bought (V.ii.70). "What it all adds up to is that the Battle of Agincourt was the royal equivalent of the Gadshill robbery" (Goddard I 260). To Henry, and probably most others, the match with Katherine is a marriage of nations, not of humans. This marriage is about rapacity for land rather than love, as is clear from Henry's rhapsodizing about France itself (V.ii.172-176). At best, "I love thee cruelly" (V.ii.202-203), he tells Katherine, or as he calls her, Kate. He thinks calling her "a good soldier-breeder" (V.ii.206) is an appeal to maternal instincts. (And besides, it'll be Henry VI, not the world conqueror Henry envisions here.) Historically, Henry married Catherine de Valois on 2 June 1420 (Asimov 517).

This can be played as somewhat comical awkwardness on Henry's part, but it's pretty dark really. The result of this supposed wooing is a foregone conclusion, so the pretense that any fate is in her hands is hypocritical. The "conquest" is achieved and all look forward, incorrectly, as the audience knows, to a lasting peace.

An Epilogue in the form of a sonnet points out the ultimate futility of all this pomp, manipulation, and warfare, and "The sense of history as progressive is replaced by the sense of history as cyclical" (Sutherland 124). But "his essential, his persistent, his heartfelt theme" is included in the leaving of a kingdom to a son (Ogburn and Ogburn 1199).

Henry V died on August 31, 1422. He was thirty-five years old and he had reigned not quite ten years. Ironically, the mad King of France outlived him, so that Henry V never succeeded to the throne he had won. (Asimov 518)