Fluellen
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: A Welsh captain in the English army, and one of the four national captains – Welsh, Irish, Scots and English – who serve together at Harfleur. He is the play’s specialist in military rules and its most consistently honest voice.
- Key Traits: Pedantic, brave, unstoppably talkative, and completely without self-interest. He judges everything by "the disciplines of the war" as practised by the Romans, and applies the same standard to a king and a thief.
- The Core Conflict: Fluellen believes that rules exist and must hold for everybody. The play repeatedly puts him in situations where the rules and human feeling pull in opposite directions, and he never once chooses feeling.
- Key Actions: Drives stragglers to the breach at Harfleur in A3S2 and argues with Captain Macmorris about siege-craft. Refuses to intercede for Bardolph in A3S6 and reports the hanging to the King. Lectures Gower about noise in the camp in A4S1. Denounces the killing of the baggage-boys and compares Henry to Alexander the Great in A4S7. Unknowingly carries Henry’s glove into the Williams quarrel in A4S8. Beats Pistol and makes him eat a leek in A5S1.
- Famous Quote:
"All the water in Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody."
(Act 4, Scene 7) - The Outcome: He survives, is praised by the King, gives Williams twelve pence, and wins the last comic fight in the play. Of everyone who goes to France, Fluellen is the only one who comes back with exactly what he took: his principles.
The Disciplines of the War
Fluellen enters the play mid-siege, driving reluctant soldiers towards the breach at Harfleur with a stick, and his first extended speech establishes the habit of mind that governs everything he says afterwards. Gower has brought him an order from the Duke of Gloucester about mining under the walls. Fluellen does not simply disagree; he disagrees on principle, and cites an authority.
Original
To the mines? Tell you the duke, it is not so good to come to the mines; for, look you, the mines is not according to the disciplines of the war: the concavities of it is not sufficient; for, look you...
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To the tunnels? Tell the duke I don’t think it wise to go to the tunnels, because, listen, the tunnels are not a tactic one should use in war. The excavations are insufficient, for, listen...
The phrase "the disciplines of the war" is Fluellen’s permanent measure, and he uses it something like a dozen times across the play. What he means by it is a body of professional doctrine descending from the Romans, and he genuinely knows it: his objection to the mines – that they are not deep enough and the enemy has countermined beneath them – is technically correct.
The comedy is in the delivery, not the content. "Look you" punctuates almost every clause, his consonants voice and unvoice unpredictably, and his sentences pile subordinate clauses until the main verb is out of sight. But a reader who takes the manner for the man will misread the play. Fluellen is the only officer in Henry V who is consistently right about military matters, and he is standing at the breach while Pistol is hiding from it.
What Ish My Nation?
A3S2 also contains the play’s strangest and most argued-over scene. Four captains meet under the walls of Harfleur: Fluellen the Welshman, Macmorris the Irishman, Jamy the Scot, and Gower the Englishman. Fluellen, who has been longing for a professional discussion, opens with what he plainly means as a compliment, and it detonates.
Original
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?
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
FLUELLEN: Captain Macmorris, listen, correct me if I’m wrong but I think there are not many people from your nation…
MACMORRIS: From my nation! What is my nation? It’s a villain, and a bastard, a scoundrel and a scallywag. What is my nation? Who talks about my nation?
Nobody knows how Fluellen’s sentence was going to end, and that is part of the design. He is interrupted at the exact word that matters. What Macmorris hears is an Englishman’s army officer beginning a generalisation about the Irish, and his response is four lines of fury that turn the question back on the questioner three times.
The exchange nearly becomes a duel. Fluellen’s reply is a marvel of wounded formality – he objects not to the insult but to the discourtesy, and insists he is as good a man as Macmorris "both in the disciplines of war, and in the derivation of my birth". Then the trumpet sounds a parley and the scene simply stops. Nothing is resolved. Four men from four countries have been put on a stage together to demonstrate the unity of Henry’s army, and what they demonstrate instead is that two of them cannot get through a conversation.
Discipline Ought to Be Used
In A3S6 Pistol comes to Fluellen to beg for Bardolph’s life. Bardolph has stolen a pax from a French church and has been sentenced to hang. Pistol’s case is that the punishment is grotesquely out of proportion to a cheap piece of brass, and he is right. Fluellen’s answer is four lines long and does not hesitate.
Original
Certainly, aunchient, it is not a thing to rejoice at: for if, look you, he were my brother, I would desire the duke to use his good pleasure, and put him to execution; for discipline ought to be used.
(Act 3, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Certainly not, Ensign, it is not the type of thing to be happy about: for if, you see, he was my brother, I would be calling on the duke to act honourably and have him executed, because discipline is essential.
The clause that decides it is "if he were my brother". Fluellen has understood exactly what is being asked – special treatment for a friend – and has answered by removing himself from the equation entirely. A rule that bends for people you like is not a rule.
This is the moment where a reader has to decide what Fluellen is. It can be played as heartlessness: a pedant sending a man to the gallows over a formality. It can equally be played as the play’s one uncorrupted position, in a drama where almost everyone else – the bishops, the King, the traitors, Pistol – is quietly working an angle. What is not available is the comfortable middle. Fluellen holds himself to the same standard, and the play never catches him breaking it.
Alexander the Pig
A4S7 opens on the murdered baggage-boys, and Fluellen is the first voice heard: the killing is expressly against the law of arms, and he says so before anyone else has drawn breath. Then, in the same scene, he does something much odder. Trying to praise Henry, he embarks on a laborious comparison between Monmouth, where the King was born, and Macedon, where Alexander the Great was born – both have rivers, both rivers have salmon in them – and arrives, without apparently intending to, at this.
Original
It is not well done, mark you now take the tales out of my mouth, ere it is made and finished. I speak but in the figures and comparisons of it: as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, being in his ales and his cups; so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right wits and his good judgments, turned 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.
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It is not polite, I have to say, to take the words I am speaking before I’ve finished what I’m saying. I’m speaking merely in parallels and comparisons of them both: as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, when he was intoxicated, so Harry of Monmouth, being sober and of sound judgement, turned away the fat knight with the beer belly. He was full of jest and jokes and tricks and mockery; but I’ve forgotten his name.
This is one of the most quietly devastating speeches Shakespeare ever gave a comic character, and Fluellen has no idea what he is doing. He means to say that Henry resembles Alexander. What he actually says is that Alexander killed his best friend while drunk, and Henry destroyed his while stone-cold sober – and the sobriety is offered as the point in Henry’s favour.
The refusal to name Falstaff finishes it. Fluellen genuinely cannot remember; the audience remembers perfectly well; and the man he cannot name died in A2S3 of a broken heart. Placed in the scene that begins with dead children and ends with the King ordering French heralds off the field, the comparison lands as something much heavier than a joke about salmon. Henry is not on stage to hear it.
If You Can Mock a Leek
Fluellen’s last scene is his victory. On Saint David’s Day Pistol mocked the leek in his cap and told him to eat it. Fluellen, who could not start a quarrel in a place where quarrelling was forbidden, has worn the leek ever since and waited. In A5S1, with the war over, he finds Pistol.
Original
You called me yesterday 'mountain-squire'; but I will make you to-day a squire of low degree. I pray you, fall to: if you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Just yesterday you called me a mountain-man; but I will make you a low-man today. So come on, eat up: if you can make fun of a leek, you can eat a leek too.
The logic is Fluellen’s logic exactly: symmetrical, literal-minded, and inescapable. Mockery and eating are made into the same act, and the punishment is simply the offence performed correctly. He even keeps the courtesy going while he does it – "I pray you", "will you have some more sauce" – and gives Pistol fourpence afterwards to heal his head.
The scene matters more than its slapstick suggests. Gower, left alone with the beaten Pistol, spells the point out: Pistol assumed that a man who could not speak English without an accent could not handle an English cudgel, and he was wrong. In a play that spends five acts constructing an English national voice, the last physical victory goes to the Welshman, and it is won in defence of a national badge. It is also the play’s only quarrel that is settled rather than deferred.
"…the play’s own reconstruction of history consciously intervened in the historical process."
— Michael Neill, Henry V: A Modern Perspective
Key Quotes
Quote 1
So! In the name of Jesu Christ, speak lower. It is the greatest admiration of the universal world, when the true and aunchient prerogatifes and laws of the wars is not kept: if you would take the pains but to examine the wars of Pompey the Great, you shall find, I warrant you, that there is no tiddle toddle nor pibble pabble in Pompey's camp; I warrant you...
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oi! For Christ’s sake, speak quieter. It is the most astonishing thing in the world when the real ancient prerogatives and laws of war are not observed. If you could be bothered to study the wars of Pompey the Great, you will find, I assure you, that there is no chitter-chatter nor jibber-jabber in Pompey’s camp. I assure you...
Quote Analysis: Fluellen telling Gower to be quiet, at length and at volume, on the night before Agincourt. The joke is perfect and entirely at his expense: a lecture about noise discipline that is itself the loudest thing in the camp. "Tiddle toddle" and "pibble pabble" are his own coinages for chatter, and they are the sort of words that draw attention to a speaker rather than away from him. But the substance is serious and the timing is not accidental. The King is a few yards away in disguise, listening, and what he hears is one of his officers insisting that ancient laws must be kept even when nobody is watching. That is exactly the question Williams is about to put to him.
All the water in Wye cannot wash your majesty's Welsh plood out of your pody, I can tell you that: God pless it and preserve it, as long as it pleases his grace, and his majesty too!
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
All of the water in the River Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh blood out of your body, I can tell you that. God bless it and look after it, as long as it pleases his grace and majesty!
Quote Analysis: Henry has just told Fluellen "For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman", and this is the answer – delivered with such force that it stops being a compliment and becomes a claim. The King was born at Monmouth, so the statement is literally true, and Fluellen presses it as far as it will go: the Welshness is in the blood, it cannot be washed out, and no amount of English kingship will dilute it. Coming from the man with the thickest accent on stage, it is a quietly radical thing to say to the King of England in the hour of his greatest English victory. Henry, notably, does not argue.
one Bardolph, if your majesty know the man: his face is all bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire: and his lips blows at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes plue and sometimes red; but his nose is executed and his fire's out.
(Act 3, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
one Bardolph, if your majesty knows the man. His face is covered in pimples, swollen lumps and bumps, inflamed red like fire; and his lips blow up towards his nose that glows like coals on a fire, sometimes blue and sometimes red; but his nose has been executed, and its fire’s gone out.
Quote Analysis: Fluellen reporting a hanging to the King, and doing it as a joke about a red nose. The tone is grotesque and completely unselfconscious – he has no idea he is describing a man Henry drank with for years, and the phrase "if your majesty know the man" is the play’s coldest piece of unintended irony. The last clause is the sting: "his nose is executed and his fire’s out" reduces a human death to the extinguishing of a running joke. Henry’s response contains no flicker of recognition. Two men who both knew Bardolph discuss his execution, and neither of them mourns.
By Jeshu, I am your majesty's countryman, I care not who know it; I will confess it to all the 'orld: I need not to be ashamed of your majesty, praised be God, so long as your majesty is an honest man.
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
In Jesus’ name, I am a countryman to your majesty, and I don’t care who knows it; I will tell this to the whole world. I will not be ashamed of your majesty, praise be to God, so long as your majesty remains an honest man.
Quote Analysis: The most extraordinary sentence any subject speaks to Henry in the play, and Fluellen almost certainly does not realise what he has said. It begins as pure loyalty and ends on a condition. He is not ashamed of the King – so long as the King is honest. Nobody else in Henry V attaches a term to their allegiance; Williams comes close in A4S1, but Williams does not know who he is talking to. Fluellen does, and says it to his face, on the field, in front of witnesses. The King lets it pass. Coming three scenes after the order to kill the prisoners, the condition sits on the page and waits.
Key Takeaways
- Rules Before People: Fluellen would hang his own brother for stealing from a church. He is the only character in the play who applies one standard to everybody.
- The Comic Surface, the Serious Centre: The accent and the pedantry are funny; the judgements underneath them are almost always sound, and the play knows it.
- Britain on One Stage: As one of four national captains, Fluellen is part of the play’s attempt to show a united island army – an attempt the Macmorris quarrel immediately complicates.
- Accidental Truth-Telling: The Alexander comparison and the "so long as your majesty is an honest man" condition are the play’s sharpest criticisms of Henry, and Fluellen means neither of them.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is the point of Fluellen's Welshness?
Fluellen is not simply a comic Welshman; he is the most fully developed of the play’s four national captains, and his Welshness carries a political argument that would have been legible to the first audience.
The Tudor dynasty was Welsh in origin, and Henry V really was born at Monmouth, which made him claimable as a Welsh king of England. The play presses this hard in A4S7, where Henry tells Fluellen he is Welsh and Fluellen responds with a lesson in national history:
Your majesty says very true: if your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honourable badge of the service; and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy's day.
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Your majesty states the truth: if your majesty can remember it, the Welshmen served well in a garden where leeks were growing, and wore leeks in their woollen soldiers’ caps, which, I’m sure your majesty knows, even to this day is a badge of honourable service; and I believe your majesty doesn’t mind wearing a leek on Saint Davy’s day.
Michael Neill’s "Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1994) is the essential essay here. Neill argues that late-Elizabethan writing defined Englishness against its neighbours while simultaneously trying to absorb them, and that the histories stage that contradiction in dialect and accent. Christopher Highley’s Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (1997) reads the play against Essex’s Irish campaign of 1599 and finds the same tension running through it. Claire McEachern’s The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (1996) examines how such writing builds a loving, corporate idea of the nation – and where the fiction strains.
Two cautions are worth carrying into an essay. First, Fluellen’s dialect is written for laughs – the voiced consonants turned unvoiced ("pody", "prave", "Cheshu") are a stage convention of the period. Second, the play gives him the moral high ground anyway, and gives the last physical victory in the play to his leek. Whatever else the comedy is doing, it is not dismissing him.
What is the four captains scene about?
The scene puts Fluellen (Welsh), Macmorris (Irish), Jamy (Scots) and Gower (English) on the same stage under the walls of Harfleur, and it is usually read as the play’s emblem of a united British army fighting a foreign enemy. That reading is available, and it is not wrong: the four men are on the same side, they all want to fight, and they all despise the French more than each other.
What complicates it is that the scene almost immediately breaks down. Fluellen begins a sentence about Macmorris’s nation, Macmorris explodes, and within a dozen lines the two are close to a duel. The trumpet then interrupts and nothing is settled.
Macmorris’s "What ish my nation?" is one of the most-discussed lines in the histories, partly because it is genuinely ambiguous. It can be heard as a man refusing to be defined by his origins; as a man ashamed of them; as a man whose nation is currently in armed revolt against the crown he is serving; or simply as a soldier who wants to get back to the siege. Michael Neill (1994) treats it as the point where the play’s colonial contradiction becomes audible – an Irishman in English service, asked to hear a generalisation about the Irish, and finding no position from which to answer. Christopher Highley (1997) situates it in the 1599 Irish crisis, when an English army was in Ireland and the question of Irish loyalty was extremely live.
It is also worth noting a textual fact: Macmorris does not exist in the 1600 Quarto, which cuts the scene. Whoever prepared that text either found the material difficult or found it dispensable. Either way, the play as most people read it contains a moment where the fiction of British unity is put on stage and immediately fails to hold.
Is Fluellen a figure of fun or a serious character?
Both, and the play is careful to make the two inseparable. The comic apparatus is obvious: the dialect spelling, the "look you" tic, the classical citations delivered to men who did not ask, the inability to stop a sentence. Audiences laugh at Fluellen from his first line to his last.
But the play never lets the laughter settle into contempt, because it keeps arranging for him to be right. He is correct about the mines. He is correct that killing the baggage-boys breaks the law of arms. He is correct that Pistol is a fraud, and says so before anyone else. And in A4S1 he is correct about noise discipline while being extremely noisy, which is exactly the play’s joke about him:
If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb? In your own conscience, now?
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If the enemy is an idiot and a fool and waffling twerp, is it appropriate, do you think, that we should also, you see, act like an idiot and a fool and a waffling twerp? What do you reckon now?
The line is funny because Fluellen is a prating coxcomb and does not know it. It is also a completely sound piece of moral reasoning – that the enemy’s bad conduct does not license your own – and it is the principle he will apply to the baggage-boys three acts later, and the principle that Henry arguably breaks when he orders the prisoners killed.
Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), which reads the play as sustained irony, is useful here: the comic characters are not decoration but commentary, and their apparent foolishness is one of the play’s main ways of saying things it cannot say directly. On that reading Fluellen’s pedantry is not an obstacle to his function; it is the licence for it. A man this ridiculous can tell the King his loyalty is conditional and survive it.
What does the Alexander the Great comparison really do?
It is the most sophisticated joke in the play and one of its sharpest criticisms of Henry, and Fluellen delivers it while trying to pay a compliment.
The set-up is a parody of a real Renaissance rhetorical exercise, the "parallel lives" comparison familiar from Plutarch, in which two great men are set side by side and their careers matched. Fluellen’s version establishes the parallel through geography, and the geography is absurd:
There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There is a river in Macedon; and, importantly, there is also a river in Monmouth: it is called the River Wye in Monmouth, but my brain forgets what the other river is called. But it doesn’t matter, they’re the same as my fingers are to each other, and there are salmon in both.
Two rivers, some fish, therefore two comparable men. The reasoning is worthless and Fluellen is delighted with it. Then, having built the frame, he fills it: Alexander killed his friend Cleitus in a drunken rage, and Henry "turned away the fat knight with the great belly-doublet".
The comparison Fluellen intends is flattering – Henry acted soberly where Alexander acted drunk. The comparison the audience receives is the opposite: a killing done in temper is at least explicable, and the play has already told us, through the Hostess, that Falstaff’s heart was broken by the King. The failure to remember Falstaff’s name completes the effect; the audience supplies it, which makes them participants in the accusation.
This is the sort of moment Norman Rabkin had in mind in "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V" (1977) when he argued that the play "points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us". Nothing in the scene tells us how to take it. Fluellen means praise; the words say something else; Henry is not present to respond; and the play moves on.
Why does Fluellen refuse to save Bardolph?
Because saving him would require exactly the thing Fluellen exists in the play to refuse: an exception. His answer to Pistol is that he would have his own brother executed for the same offence, and there is no reason to doubt him.
The legal position supports him. Theodor Meron, writing on Henry V and the law of war in the American Journal of International Law (1992) and at length in Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws (1993), shows that the historical Henry’s ordinances of war were unusually severe about church property, and that the play reproduces that severity accurately. Bardolph has committed sacrilege as well as theft, in a country Henry is trying to hold by good behaviour. The sentence is not a caprice.
Fluellen’s consistency is easier to assess against A4S7, where the same principle is turned against the enemy:
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 offer't; in your conscience, now, is it not?
(Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Killing the boys who looked after the luggage! That’s expressly against the accepted code of war. It’s the worst type of villainy, I tell you, as anyone can do. Is it on your conscience now?
The same phrase – the law of arms – and the same appeal to conscience, applied to the French. Fluellen does not have one standard for his own side and another for the enemy. It is worth noticing what he does not say in that scene: Gower is busy explaining that the baggage-raid is why the King had the prisoners’ throats cut, and Fluellen never endorses that argument. He changes the subject to Alexander.
Whether the play approves of him is left open, and productions differ sharply. Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film gives Bardolph’s hanging real weight and makes Fluellen’s position feel bleak; more traditional stagings play him as the army’s conscience. Both are supportable, because Shakespeare gives Fluellen the correct answer and gives Pistol the sympathetic one.
What is Fluellen's role in the Williams glove episode?
He is the instrument, and he is used without being told. In A4S1 the disguised King quarrels with the soldier Williams and they exchange gloves as a pledge to fight later. In A4S7 Henry gives his glove to Fluellen – pretending it was taken from the French Duke of Alençon – and sends him out wearing it. Williams sees the glove, strikes Fluellen, and Fluellen, entirely sincerely, arrests him as a traitor.
The joke works, the truth comes out, and Henry fills Williams’s glove with crowns. Fluellen then adds his own coin:
By this day and this light, the fellow has mettle enough in his belly. Hold, there is twelve pence for you; and I pray you to serve Got, and keep you out of prawls, and prabbles' and quarrels, and dissensions, and, I warrant you, it is the better for you.
(Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
In the light of day, this brave man has fire in his belly. So, here is twelve pence for you; and I pray that you serve God, and keep out of brawls and squabbles and quarrels and disagreements, and I assure you, you’ll be better for it.
Williams refuses the shilling – the one small act of dignity left to him – and Fluellen presses it on him anyway, offering to change it if it is not good enough. It is a completely characteristic moment: generous, tactless, and slightly comic.
What matters is what the episode does to the argument Williams started. Marilyn Williamson’s "The Episode with Williams in Henry V" (SEL, 1969) is the standard treatment, and Anne Barton’s "The king disguised" (1975) supplies the wider frame: the disguised-monarch convention normally ends in warm recognition between king and commoner, and Shakespeare uses it to expose a gap instead. Williams asked whether a king with a bad cause carries the deaths he causes. He is answered with a trick, a glove full of money, and Fluellen’s twelve pence. Nobody ever addresses the question, and Fluellen – the play’s great insister on rules – has been made an unwitting part of the manoeuvre that buries it.
Why does the play give Fluellen the last comic victory?
The leek scene occupies the position immediately before the treaty and the wooing, and Shakespeare could have put anything there. What he puts there is a Welsh captain beating an English braggart with a stick and forcing him to eat a vegetable.
The scene settles two things the play has left open. First, it disposes of Pistol, whose mock-heroic language has been the play’s running joke about empty rhetoric, and it disposes of him by making his words physically inedible. Second, it resolves the national question that the Macmorris quarrel opened and abandoned in A3S2 – not by argument, but by establishing that the man with the accent has the authority. Gower says so explicitly to Pistol afterwards: he mocked Fluellen because he could not speak English in the native garb, and found the cudgel English enough.
Fluellen’s parting line is the summary of his whole method:
If I owe you any thing, I will pay you in cudgels: you shall be a woodmonger, and buy nothing of me but cudgels. God b' wi' you, and keep you, and heal your pate.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If I owe you anything, I will pay you by clubbing you with a bat: you’ll be a timber-merchant and buy nothing from me except clubs. God be with you, care for you and heal your head.
A threat and a blessing in the same breath, delivered with total courtesy. It is the exact tone he used to refuse Bardolph mercy, and the exact tone he used to correct Macmorris.
Michael Neill (1994) and Christopher Highley (1997) both read the play’s treatment of Welsh, Irish and Scots speech as part of a larger Elizabethan project of imagining an English nation that could absorb its neighbours. If that is right, the leek scene is the project’s most optimistic moment: the Welshman is not absorbed, he wins, and what he wins is respect for a badge of difference. Claire McEachern’s The Poetics of English Nationhood (1996) would locate the same scene at the point where the loving corporate idea of the nation is under most strain and doing most work – a unity that has to be enforced with a stick is a unity with a problem, but it is still, at the end of this play, a unity.
