Henry V: Act 3, Scene 4 – Analysis
Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: The French King’s palace – a private room, far from the war.
- What Happens: Princess Katharine takes an English lesson from her gentlewoman Alice: hand, fingers, nails, arm, elbow, neck, chin – and two final words whose sound in French scandalises her. The entire scene is in French.
- Key Characters: Princess Katharine and Alice.
- Dramatic Function: The play’s only all-French scene, its only all-female scene – and its quietest act of war: the future Queen of England learning her conqueror’s language, one part of her body at a time.
- Famous Quote:
"Alice, tu as ete en Angleterre, et tu parles bien le langage."
(Katharine, Act 3, Scene 4) - Why It Matters: Placed directly after Henry’s threats to Harfleur’s women, the lesson is either charming comedy or the war reaching into a princess’s body – and the play means both at once.
Scene Summary
While the army marches, Princess Katharine begins homework. Alice has been to England and speaks the language “bien” – a little, madame – and Katharine must learn: “il faut que j’apprenne à parler”. The lesson proceeds through the body: la main is “de hand”; les doigts, after some effort of memory, “de fingres”; les ongles, “de nails”. Katharine repeats, miscarries charmingly – “de arma”, “de bilbow” – and grades herself a good student: two words of English learned “vitement”.
The syllabus continues: de arm, de elbow, de neck (which becomes “de nick”), de chin (“de sin”). Alice flatters her pronunciation – as good as a native’s – and Katharine, running her recitation, holds most of it. Then the last two items: le pied and la robe – “de foot” and “de coun”. To Katharine’s ear they sound like the crudest words in French, “mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique” – not for ladies of honour to use before the lords of France for all the world.
And then, deliciously, she says them anyway – running the whole lesson once more, top to toe, ending “de foot, de coun!” – and closes the class for dinner. The princess has her first English: the names of her own body, in the language of the man who will claim it by treaty two acts later.
The English Lesson
The comedy is gentle, feminine and entirely in French – a small island of peace in a play of sieges.
Original
La main, de hand; les doigts, de fingres. Je pense que je suis le bon ecolier; j'ai gagne deux mots d'Anglois vitement. Comment appelez-vous les ongles?
(Katharine, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
‘La main’ is the hand; ‘les doigts’ are fingers. I think I am a good student; I have learnt two words of English quickly. What do you call ‘les ongles’?
The scene’s surface is pure charm: a clever pupil, a flustered teacher who has half-forgotten her own vocabulary, the small triumphs (“j’ai gagné deux mots”) and endearing errors (“de bilbow”). For the original audience the French itself was part of the comedy – and the Retold’s facing translation now does what centuries of footnotes have done, letting every reader hear both the French and the English at once. But the syllabus deserves a second look. Katharine is not learning diplomacy, courtesy or state; she is learning the parts of her own body, in English – hand, fingers, arm, neck – an inventory that moves steadily inward from the extremities. The choice of vocabulary is the scene’s quiet plot: what is being translated, item by item, is her.
Words a Lady May Not Say
The lesson’s punchline is a scandal of homophones – and the princess’s response is the scene’s best character note.
Original
De foot et de coun! O Seigneur Dieu! Ce sont mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user: je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France...
(Katharine, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The foot and the gown! Oh dear God! These words are rude, corruptible, coarse and immodest, and not for a lady-in-waiting to use. I would not like to pronounce these words in front of French lords...
“Foot” sounds like the crudest French verb, and “coun” (gown) like the crudest French noun – so the innocent English syllabus detonates, at its final step, into obscenity. Katharine’s horror is genuine and funny: these are words “non pour les dames d’honneur”, unsayable before the lords of France “pour tout le monde”. And then she says them – twice – running her full recitation with evident relish before declaring the class over. The joke is about decorum and its delighted breach: the princess discovers that a foreign language is a licensed space where forbidden things can be said, because they are only “English”. It is her first lesson in what the wooing scene will confirm: between languages, meanings can be handled that neither language would allow at home.
Language and Technique
- Bilingual comedy: The scene’s humour lives between the languages – mispronunciations (“de nick”, “de sin”), false friends, and the final homophone scandal.
- The blazon inverted: Love poetry catalogued a woman’s body part by part (the blazon); here the woman catalogues herself – in the conqueror’s tongue.
- Accidental meanings: “De nick” and “de sin” are mistakes that speak: a nick is a cut, and sin needs no gloss – the new language arrives already loaded.
- Placement as meaning: Sandwiched between Harfleur’s threatened women and the French court’s rage, the quiet lesson reads as the war’s gentlest – and most intimate – front.
Key Quotes from Act 3, Scene 4
Quote 1
Original
Alice, tu as ete en Angleterre, et tu parles bien le langage.
(Katharine, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Alice, you’ve been to England, and speak the language well.
Quote Analysis: The scene’s opening line, and its whole premise: Alice has been to England and speaks the language well – so teach me. The initiative is Katharine’s own, and the timing is the point: no one in the play has told her of any marriage plan, yet with English guns at Harfleur the princess of France privately decides that English is a language she will need. Whether that is politics, intuition or the play’s dramatic irony working through her, the line makes Katharine the scene’s agent, not its object – she chooses the tongue before the tongue’s owner chooses her.
Original
Neanmoins, je reciterai une autre fois ma lecon ensemble: de hand, de fingres, de nails, de arm, de elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, de coun!
(Katharine, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Nevertheless, I will recite my lesson one more time together: the hand, the fingers, the nails, the arm, the elbow, the nick, the sin, the foot, the gown!
Quote Analysis: The final recitation: having declared “foot” and “coun” unspeakable, Katharine speaks the entire syllabus – hand to gown, top to toe – obscenities and all, with the schoolgirl’s pleasure of the forbidden. The list itself is the play’s most disarming inventory: a princess assembled in English, one bodily noun at a time. Quote it beside the treaty scene’s “capital demand”: what Act 5 will transact in law, this recitation has already performed in vocabulary.
Key Takeaways
- The war’s quietest scene is still the war: A princess learning her conqueror’s language, body part by body part – conquest proceeding by vocabulary.
- Katharine chooses first: No one orders the lesson; she does – the play’s first evidence of the intelligence the wooing scene will confirm.
- Comedy with a loaded syllabus: The homophone scandal is genuinely funny – and the “mistakes” (nick, sin) carry meanings the play does not disown.
- The placement is the argument: Directly after Harfleur’s threatened maidens, the scene shows the other way an invading power reaches women’s bodies: by treaty, softly.
Study Questions and Analysis
What happens in this scene – and why is it entirely in French?
Princess Katharine asks her gentlewoman Alice, who has been to England, for an English lesson, and receives a syllabus of body parts – hand, fingers, nails, arm, elbow, neck, chin, foot – which she repeats, mangles endearingly, and masters:
Original
Je te prie, m'enseignez: il faut que j'apprenne a parler. Comment appelez-vous la main en Anglois?
(Katharine, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Please teach me: I must learn to speak. What do you call ‘la main’ in English?
It is the only scene in Shakespeare conducted wholly in a foreign language, and the choice is calculated. For the Globe audience, hearing French burble across the stage was itself the comedy – they were eavesdropping on the enemy’s boudoir, catching the English words as they surfaced like stepping stones. The scene needs no translation to play, because its structure – teacher, pupil, repetition, error, scandal – is legible in any language; but every real meaning in it doubles when the French is understood, which is precisely the service the Retold’s translation performs. Dramatically, the scene is also a breather – the play’s only domestic interior, its only scene without men – placed between the fall of Harfleur and the fury of the French court, where its gentleness reads as both relief and, on reflection, something far less innocent.
Why does Katharine learn the parts of the body, of all things?
On the surface, because it is the natural beginner’s syllabus – concrete, pointable, easily mimed between a pupil and a teacher who has half-forgotten her English. But no audience watching a princess name her hand, arm, neck and chin in her invader’s language – two scenes after that invader threatened the “pure maidens” of Harfleur – can keep the innocence intact. The lesson is a blazon in reverse: where love poets catalogued a mistress’s parts in verse, Katharine inventories herself, and the language she renders herself into is English.
Juliet Fleming, in her 1989 study of “women’s French”, the specialist treatment of this scene’s tradition, showed how French-language teaching texts of the period were themselves saturated with exactly this eroticised body-vocabulary – Shakespeare’s syllabus parodies real phrasebooks his audience knew. And the political reading needs no scholarship at all: Katharine will be the treaty’s “capital demand”, her body the clause that seals the peace, and the play shows her – with no marriage yet proposed – already translating that body into the terms of the coming transaction. Charming scene, chilling syllabus: both readings are fully in the text, and the strongest essays hold them together.
What is the joke about "foot" and "coun"?
A bilingual obscenity trap. The last two words of the lesson are innocent English – foot, and gown (which Alice pronounces “coun”) – but to a French ear they land as foutre and con, the two crudest words in the language:
Original
De foot, madame; et de coun.
(Alice, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The foot, madame; and the gown.
Katharine’s explosion of scandalised delight – the words are “mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique”, unfit for ladies of honour before the lords of France – is the scene’s climax, and her decision to say them anyway, twice, running the full recitation “de hand” to “de coun”, is its punchline. The joke was riskless for Shakespeare precisely because it is deniable: nothing indecent is ever said in English, and the audience members who caught the French caught it at their own confession. For essays on language in the play, the moment is a miniature of the whole: meaning is not in words but between languages – where Pistol will mishear ransom, where Henry will woo in broken French, and where a princess can savour the unsayable under diplomatic cover.
Why is this scene placed directly after the fall of Harfleur?
Because the juxtaposition is the meaning. Act 3, Scene 3 ends with Henry’s ultimatum – the threatened rape of Harfleur’s “fresh-fair virgins”, mothers’ howls, infants on pikes – averted only by surrender; Scene 4 opens on the most protected female space in France, where the King’s daughter is quietly fitting herself with English words. The war has not touched her room, and the war is entirely inside it: what the soldier threatens to take by force at Harfleur, the treaty will take from Katharine by negotiation – and she, with the intelligence the play consistently grants her, is already preparing for the language in which the taking will be conducted.
Lance Wilcox, in his 1985 essay Katherine of France as Victim and Bride, made this pairing the hinge of his reading: the play systematically converts the war’s sexual violence into courtship – the threatened women of Harfleur refined, by Act 5, into one woman wooed – and the language lesson is the conversion’s first step, comedy standing exactly where coercion stood a scene earlier. A gentler reading is equally available: the scene gives Katharine agency, wit and privacy before the plot disposes of her, so that the woman in Act 5 is a person, not a clause. Either way, the placement is Shakespeare at his most deliberate – and pointing it out, with both readings, is worth more in an essay than any paraphrase of the scene’s charm.
