Henry V: Famous Quotes

The play's first lines are an apology and a boast at once. The Chorus wishes for a Muse of fire, a kingdom for a stage, and real princes to act — everything the wooden theatre cannot supply — and in wishing for them, half conjures them.

The opening sets the contract for the whole evening: the audience's imagination will provide what the stage cannot. It is also a quiet statement of the play's deepest subject, because conjuring great things out of confident words is exactly what King Henry does for five acts. The theatre and the King work the same trick.

Henry has just asked, solemnly, whether he may claim the French crown with a clear conscience. Canterbury answers in a single line: if the claim is wrong, let the guilt be mine.

It sounds like reassurance and works like an indemnity. The audience already knows, from the previous scene, that the Church needs this war to head off a bill threatening its lands — so the play lets us watch the war's moral paperwork being signed by a man with a motive. Henry proceeds; the Archbishop disappears from the play after Act 1; the guarantee is never tested.

The Dauphin has sent Henry a chest of tennis balls — a joke about his misspent youth. This is the reply: the balls are now cannonballs, and the joke will knock down castles.

Watch the word "mock" being worked through the speech until the joke itself becomes the killer — mocking widows from husbands, mothers from sons — and the guilt for the whole war is relocated into the mouth of the man who made a jest. It is the first full display of Henry's real weapon, which is not the sword but the sentence.

The Chorus describes a nation converting itself to war: courting clothes folded away, armourers thriving, honour the only thought in every man's breast.

The claims are absolute — all the youth, every man — and the very next scene shows Eastcheap packing for France to steal. The play gives us the anthem and the exceptions side by side and never comments on the difference. That gap between the official picture and the people in it is one of the play's favourite instruments.

Falstaff — the great comic companion of the Henry IV plays — dies offstage, and the Hostess describes it: a peaceful end like a christened child's, fumbling with the sheets, playing with flowers, a nose sharp as a pen, and babbling of green fields.

It is one of the most celebrated death reports in drama, and its poetry is accidental — a tavern landlady reaching for comfort and landing on images no poet would dare. Earlier in the play she gives the cause of death plainly: the King has killed his heart. The old world of the tavern ends here, in prose, before the war has fired a shot.

Pistol's war aims, announced to his companions as they leave for the coast: France is blood, and they will suck it.

The Chorus has just told us the youth of England are on fire with honour; here is what some of them are actually on fire for. Pistol is the play's honest looter — the man who says aloud what the campaign means from the bottom of the army — and his plans end, five acts later, with a beating, a cudgelled leek and an empty purse.

The most famous battle order in English. The assault on Harfleur has stalled; Henry sends his men back into the gap in the wall — or tells them to fill it with their own bodies.

The horror and the inspiration are in the same breath, which is why the line has never worn out. The speech that follows rebuilds its listeners for war — in peace, nothing becomes a man like modest stillness; now, imitate the action of the tiger — identity issued to the ranks like equipment. It works: the men go back in.

The last line of the Harfleur rally, and the play's great patriotic cry — king, country and saint fused into a single shout.

By the time Henry reaches it he has worked through the whole army, nobles first, then the yeomen whose limbs were made in England, so the cry lands as the first thing the whole army does in unison. Whether the unity is real or manufactured is the question the rest of the play keeps open — but as a piece of leadership, the line is perfect.

Fluellen has barely mentioned Macmorris's nation before the Irish captain explodes. The question detonates in the middle of the play's four-nations scene — English, Welsh, Irish and Scots captains serving in one army.

It is a real question, and the play conspicuously declines to answer it. What is an Irishman's nation when he fights for an English king — in 1599, with an English army campaigning in Ireland as the play opened? The scene collapses into a quarrel, the siege interrupts, and the question is left standing. It has been debated ever since.

Henry's ultimatum to Harfleur. If the town does not yield, his soldiers will be beyond restraint — and everything that follows will be the Governor's fault, not his.

The speech names the war itself as impious — ungodly, dressed like the devil — so Henry is not pretending the threatened horrors are holy. He is arguing that they cannot be controlled, and pre-assigning the guilt to whoever refuses to prevent them. The town yields; mercy is ordered; the threat is never audited. It is the play's moral method in one speech: evil fully described, then relocated.

Princess Katharine's English lesson. Her gentlewoman Alice has taught her the parts of the body in English, and two of the new words sound, to a French ear, like obscenities. The princess is scandalised — and repeats them anyway.

The scene is genuinely funny and quietly pointed. Katharine is learning the conqueror's language while her father's towns fall — the lesson sits between the siege of Harfleur and the French court's panic — so the comedy carries the war inside it. Learning to name her own body in English is the treaty of Act 5 in miniature.

The English army is sick, hungry, outnumbered and a long way from home. Henry's reply to his brother Gloucester is the calmest line he speaks in the whole campaign.

It is faith and generalship at the same time, and impossible to separate: a sincere Christian conviction, and exactly what a commander must say the night an army is measuring the odds. That doubleness — belief that is also always useful — runs through every religious moment Henry has.

The Chorus's most loved image: the King walking his camp on the eve of Agincourt, warming every soldier he passes like a general sun, thawing cold fear.

Then the scene begins, and the visits go quite differently — Henry walks the camp in disguise, argues with his soldiers, loses the argument, and ends the night alone and bitter. The Chorus tells us what to see; the stage shows us something harder. Nobody in the play ever says "a little touch of Harry in the night" — it is how the official account remembers what the audience watches go wrong.

Disguised in a borrowed cloak, Henry tells two of his own soldiers what a king really is: a man like any other — the violet smells the same to him, his senses are human, and with his ceremonies laid by he is simply a man.

Every word is true, and the situation makes it literal — his ceremonies are laid by; he is proving his own point as he speaks it. But the honesty cannot be checked, because the king is hidden inside the reassurance. The most truthful thing Henry says in the play is said under a false name, which is the play's idea of appearance in a single scene.

A private soldier, not knowing he is talking to the King, states the play's hardest moral question: if the cause is bad, the King must answer for every leg, arm and head chopped off in his battle — limbs that will reassemble at Judgement Day and testify.

The image is grotesque, biblical and unanswerable, and the play knows it. Henry replies at length — every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own — and wins on debating points without ever touching the picture Williams has painted. The next morning he pays him a glove full of crowns. The argument itself is never closed.

Westmoreland has just wished aloud for ten thousand more men from England. This is Henry's answer: if we die, England loses few enough; if we live, fewer men means more honour each.

It is leadership as arithmetic — scarcity rebranded as privilege, an outnumbered army persuaded it is a lucky one. The trick is visible and it still works, on the men and on the audience; that double effect, seeing the device and being moved anyway, is the Saint Crispin's Day speech in miniature.

The heart of the Saint Crispin's Day speech, and one of the most quoted sentences in the language: whoever sheds his blood with the King today becomes the King's brother, and — be he never so vile — is gentled, raised in rank, by the day itself.

In quotation it is pure inspiration; in context it is a specific promise made downwards, to named common men the audience has already met. The play then quietly reads out the invoice: the casualty list of Act 4, Scene 8 names four gentlemen and dismisses the rest as "all other men... but five and twenty", and nobody is gentled. The line's afterlife — recruiting posters, war films, band-of-brothers everywhere — quotes the promise without the audit.

The French have raided the English baggage camp and murdered the boys guarding it. Fluellen's outrage gives the play its clearest moral vocabulary: this is expressly against the law of arms — the worst knavery the war has produced.

The comic Welsh captain, so easily laughed at for his accent and his pedantry about the disciplines of war, is the one man on stage with a rulebook and the nerve to apply it. Note the asymmetry the play leaves standing: one scene earlier, Henry ordered every soldier to kill his prisoners, and nobody — not even Fluellen — measures that order against the same law.

Pistol mocked Fluellen's leek — the Welsh national badge, worn on Saint Davy's day. The war now being over, Fluellen has waited for his moment: he beats Pistol with a cudgel and makes him eat the leek raw.

It is the play's final fight, and it is won in defence of a national symbol by the man with the strongest accent on stage. Gower points the moral: Pistol assumed a man who could not speak English in the native fashion could not handle an English cudgel, and he was wrong. The play's argument about who belongs ends here — settled, comically and completely, in Fluellen's favour.

The wooing scene. The treaty is agreed, the marriage is one of its terms, and Henry sets about courting the bride anyway — asking her to love him soundly with her French heart and confess it brokenly with her English tongue.

"Soundly" against "brokenly" is the whole scene in two adverbs: whole feeling requested in damaged speech, from a princess negotiating in her conqueror's language. The charm is real — this is one of Shakespeare's funniest, warmest courtships — and so is the power underneath it, which is why the scene reads so differently at fifteen and at forty.

Katharine's protest at the start of the wooing: the King will mock her, because she cannot speak his language. Her English slips as she says so — she means "your English" and says "your England".

The mistake tells the truth better than the correct word would have. In this play the language and the country are the same possession, and she is being asked to take on both at once. Her few English words keep landing like this — limited vocabulary, perfect precision — which is why she loses every exchange and still never looks a fool.

The play's last fourteen lines. Henry lived greatly in a small time, the star of England; Fortune made his sword; and by his sword, the world's best garden — France — was won and left to his son.

Then the same sentence keeps going, and un-tells the triumph: the son was crowned in infancy, France was lost, England bled. Everything the play spent five acts winning is reported gone in a single stanza — the audience of 1599 had watched it happen in the Henry VI plays years before. The star and the loss are held in one breath, which is this play's whole way of meaning.