Henry V: Act 4, Scene 2 – Analysis
Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: The French camp, the morning of Agincourt.
- What Happens: The French lords mount for battle in a fever of confidence: the English are a “poor and starved band” who will yield to a mere show of force. Grandpré paints the enemy as living scarecrows – carrion waiting for the crows.
- Key Characters: The Constable, the Dauphin, Orleans, Rambures and Grandpré.
- Dramatic Function: The scale for the miracle. Every boast here is a measurement of the odds – and the audience, having just heard Crispin’s Day promised, watches the French dress for a triumph the play has already given away.
- Famous Quote:
"They have said their prayers, and they stay for death."
(the Constable, Act 4, Scene 2) - Why It Matters: Shakespeare lets the French describe the English army – starved, ragged, motionless – more vividly than any Englishman does. Their contempt is the play’s best evidence of what Agincourt overcame.
Scene Summary
Sunrise gilds the French armour, and the lords are in ecstasies – the Dauphin calling for his horse in a spray of French exclamations, trading elements with Orleans: water, earth, air, fire – nothing but heaven itself left. His one tactical suggestion is characteristically gorgeous: cut the horses’ hides so their hot blood spurts in the English soldiers’ eyes.
The Constable’s battle-plan is simpler still: none is needed. Let the English merely behold them – their “fair show” will suck the souls out of that “poor and starved band”, leaving husks. There is not work enough for all their hands; the lackeys and peasants swarming uselessly around their squares could purge the field alone while the nobility watched from a hillside – but honour forbids. “A very little little let us do, / And all is done.”
Grandpré arrives to hurry them with the scene’s masterpiece: a portrait of the English as carrion – ragged banners, rusty armour through which “big Mars seems bankrupt”, horsemen fixed like candlesticks, horses with drooping heads and dead-pale eyes, and above them the “knavish crows”, executors already, “impatient for their hour”. The Constable’s summary is quiet and, as the play knows, exactly wrong in its meaning: “They have said their prayers, and they stay for death.” They mount, and ride to Agincourt.
The Fair Show
The Constable’s strategy is the French aristocracy’s whole world-view in three lines.
Original
Do but behold yon poor and starved band,
And your fair show shall suck away their souls,
Leaving them but the shales and husks of men.
(the Constable, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Look over there and see that ragtag army;
Your elegance will suck the life out of them
And make them but the empty shells of men.
Victory by appearance: the English need only look at the French – the “fair show” of gilded armour and plumes – and their souls will be sucked away. It is the logical end of a chivalry that has mistaken display for power, and the play has prepared the irony with care: this is the same nobility that spent the night before the battle in competitive wit about horses and mistresses, and the same “show” Henry answered in advance when he told Montjoy his army’s gayness and gilt were all besmirched – “but, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim”. One side has dressed for the battle; the other has dressed for the triumph. The play spends the rest of Act 4 pricing the difference.
Grandpré’s Scarecrows
The scene’s finest poetry is spent describing the army that is about to win.
Original
The horsemen sit like fixed candlesticks,
With torch-staves in their hand; and their poor jades
Lob down their heads, dropping the hides and hips,
The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes...
(Grandpré, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The skinny horsemen look like candlesticks
With torch handles for weapons; and their horses
Lower their heads, their bodies droop, exhausted,
And gunk seeps from their pallid eyes like ropes...
Grandpré’s portrait is brilliant, pitiless and – on every visible fact – true: the English are starving, rusted and exhausted, their horses dying under them, the crows circling in earnest. “Big Mars seems bankrupt” is the scene’s great line – the god of war himself peeping “faintly through a rusty beaver” – and “Description cannot suit itself in words” concedes that the wretchedness beggars even his eloquence. The speech’s function is double. It measures the miracle in advance – whatever beats this army of candlesticks will need another explanation than strength – and it convicts its speaker: the French can see everything about the English except what matters, having no category for an army whose worth is not visible. The audience, who heard the candlesticks promised Crispin’s Day an hour ago, knows exactly what the rusty beavers contain.
Language and Technique
- Dramatic irony as structure: Every French boast is measured against the Crispin’s Day speech the audience has just heard – the scene’s meaning is made entirely by its placement.
- Blazon of wretchedness: Grandpré’s set-piece describes the English item by item – banners, armour, horsemen, horses, crows – a formal catalogue lavishing the play’s richest imagery on its poorest subject.
- Hyperbole as self-portrait: Souls sucked out by a show; a battle won by blowing on the enemy – the French exaggerations characterise the speakers, not the enemy.
- The borrowed element game: The Dauphin’s French exclamations – water, earth, air, fire – replay his Act 3 horse-worship: a prince still composing variations while a battle waits.
Key Quotes from Act 4, Scene 2
Quote 1
Original
Mount them, and make incision in their hides,
That their hot blood may spin in English eyes,
And dout them with superfluous courage, ha!
(the Dauphin, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Mount them, and then make cuts within the hides
So that their blood will spill in English eyes
And douse their flames with our superior courage!
Quote Analysis: The Dauphin’s single tactical idea: wound the horses so their hot blood sprays into English eyes and “dout” – extinguish – them with superfluous courage. The image is pure Dauphin: gorgeous, cruel, useless, and in love with its own excess (“superfluous” is the exact word – courage to spare, spent for spectacle). Rambures’ dry reply – shall we make them weep blood? – punctures it, briefly. This is what French valour has become by the play’s account: a figure of speech on horseback.
Original
And their executors, the knavish crows,
Fly o'er them, all impatient for their hour.
(Grandpré, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And wily crows, who’ll eat them as they die,
Fly overhead, impatient for their deaths.
Quote Analysis: The climax of Grandpré’s scarecrow portrait: above the motionless English army, the crows – named “executors”, the officials who administer dead men’s estates – wheel “impatient for their hour”. The legal metaphor is the cruellest touch in the scene: the English are so certainly dead that the paperwork of their carcasses is already in progress. It is magnificent – and it is the scene’s epitaph for its own speakers, since by nightfall the crows will feed, ten thousand to one, on the French.
Original
A very little little let us do.
And all is done. Then let the trumpets sound
The tucket sonance and the note to mount...
(the Constable, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let’s do the very least that we can do.
And we will win. So let the trumpets sound
A flourish to announce it’s time to mount...
Quote Analysis: The Constable’s forecast of the battle’s labour: “A very little little let us do, / And all is done.” The doubled “little” – a verbal shrug – makes contempt into music, and the couplet that follows sends the trumpets to announce a victory not yet fought. Set it against the working-day plainness of Henry’s camp: one army expects to labour, the other to be applauded. The line is the scene’s whole argument in nine syllables, and Agincourt is its refutation.
Key Takeaways
- Contempt is the plan: The French bring no strategy to Agincourt beyond being seen – the “fair show” that will suck away English souls.
- The scarecrow portrait serves the miracle: Grandpré’s pitiless catalogue of English wretchedness is true – which is exactly what makes the coming victory inexplicable by strength alone.
- Placement is everything: Sandwiched between Crispin’s Day and the battle, every French boast arrives pre-refuted – the audience holds the answer before the question is asked.
- The prayers line cuts both ways: “They have said their prayers, and they stay for death” – true in every word, wrong in its meaning: the deaths they stay for are French.
Study Questions and Analysis
What is this scene for, dramatically?
Scale – and irony. The battle itself will happen almost entirely offstage, so the play must make the audience feel the odds before it happens, and this scene is the instrument: French confidence so total that no plan is thought necessary, English wretchedness so complete that the crows are circling. Every line raises the price of the miracle to come.
The placement does the rest. Shakespeare sets this scene directly between the Crispin’s Day speech and the battle, so that the audience watches the French preen while still holding Henry’s promises in mind. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), called the play “a very splendid pageant” – and this scene shows the pageant’s machinery openly: the French exist in it as magnificent, doomed foils, given the best costumes and the worst lines of judgement, so that the English victory arrives already framed as providence rather than luck. Noticing that framing – and who it serves – is where the strongest essays on the play’s staging of war begin.
Why is the description of the English army so detailed – and so ugly?
Because the play needs the audience to see the real state of Henry’s army, and lets the enemy do the describing:
Original
Yon island carrions, desperate of their bones,
Ill-favouredly become the morning field:
Their ragged curtains poorly are let loose...
(Grandpré, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Those island men are carcases, all bony,
And make the morning field look desperate.
Their shabby flags are hung up dreadfully...
“Island carrions, desperate of their bones” – the English as walking carcasses who despair even of their skeletons. Grandpré’s catalogue – the ragged banners, bankrupt Mars, candlestick horsemen, dying horses – is the most vivid picture of the English army anywhere in the play, and nothing in it is contradicted: Henry himself told Montjoy his host was worn into “slovenry”. The rhetorical trick is that contempt and testimony are the same speech. Every sneering detail doubles as evidence of English endurance – men in that condition who stand their ground are either fools or something the French vocabulary lacks a word for. Shakespeare makes the enemy’s mockery do the work of a muster-roll, and the uglier the portrait, the greater the glory it unknowingly prepares.
What does the horse-blood image tell us about the Dauphin?
That nothing – not even the morning of Agincourt – can make him serious. His proposal to cut the horses’ hides so that hot blood spins into English eyes is not tactics but imagery: war imagined as a spectacular effect, with living animals as the props. It completes the portrait begun in Act 3, Scene 7, where he spent the eve of battle composing praises of his horse – “my horse is my mistress” – while the Constable needled him. The prince experiences the war as an aesthetic occasion, and his single contribution to the battle-plan is a special effect.
For essays on the play’s design, the Dauphin is Henry’s engineered opposite: the born heir who treats kingship as decoration, against the crowned performer who treats it as work. The tennis balls established the contrast; this scene finishes it. And Shakespeare’s verdict is structural rather than spoken – in the battle’s aftermath the Dauphin simply vanishes from the play, unmourned and unmentioned, while the working-day king counts his dead and prays. Decoration, the play quietly concludes, does not survive contact with Agincourt.
How does the scene create dramatic irony?
By letting the French be right about everything except what it means. The Constable’s quiet line when Grandpré finishes is the masterpiece:
Original
They have said their prayers, and they stay for death.
(the Constable, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
They’ve said their prayers, and they await their death.
Every word is true. The English have said their prayers – the audience watched Henry pray in Act 4, Scene 1, and heard him give the day to God moments ago; and they do stay for death – Crispin’s Day was built on accepting it: “if we are marked to die, we are enow”. The Constable reads both facts as symptoms of despair; the audience knows them as the sources of the English strength. Critics in the providential tradition – most influentially E. M. W. Tillyard, in Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) – read the whole scene this way: French pride ripening on schedule for a providential fall, the boasts themselves part of the design. But the irony works without the theology too: the scene is a machine for making the audience know more than the speakers, and the pleasure of Agincourt, when it comes, is the discharge of everything stored here. Quote the prayers line with its double meaning – it is the cleanest example of dramatic irony in the play.
