Class and Brotherhood
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: The promise that war levels men, and the accounting that follows. Henry offers his soldiers brotherhood before Agincourt; the play checks the offer afterwards.
- Key Characters: King Henry V, Williams, Bates, Court, the Boy, Pistol, Fluellen.
- The Core Tension: Henry needs his commoners to believe they are his brothers, and needs them to remain his subjects. The play lets them speak, and they turn out to have views.
- Key Manifestations: The Boy’s judgement on the Eastcheap men in A3S2; the night-time argument with Williams and Bates in A4S1; the Saint Crispin’s Day promise; the glove trick; the casualty lists; Williams and the twelve pence in A4S8.
- Famous Quote:
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…"
(Act 4, Scene 3) - The Outcome: The brotherhood is real for a day. The dead are then counted by rank, Williams is paid off in coin, and Act 5 belongs entirely to kings and dukes.
This Day Shall Gentle His Condition
The play’s central promise about class is made on the morning of the battle, and it is enormous.
Original
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We few, we lucky few, fight here as brothers;
For he that sheds his blood with me today
Will be my brother; even if a pauper,
Will from this day be called a gentleman.
And gentlemen in England now asleep
Will think that they’ve been cursed not being here,
And won’t think they are real men when hearing
You fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
"Gentle his condition" is a technical phrase, not a figure of speech. To be gentled was to be raised into the gentry – a change of legal and social rank that ordinarily required birth, land or a royal grant. Henry is offering to convert blood spilled into status conferred, and he is offering it to men of any degree, "be he ne’er so vile".
The speech then inverts the whole social order for four lines. Gentlemen asleep in England – men who already possess what the soldiers are being promised – will hold their manhoods cheap when a veteran speaks. The men at the bottom of the field are told they will end the day above the men at the top of the country.
It is the most generous thing anyone says in the play, and it costs nothing until the fighting stops. The play is careful to show us when the bill comes due.
Our Obedience Wipes the Crime Out of Us
The night before, the same men are given a scene of their own, and it is the only place in Shakespeare’s histories where ordinary soldiers debate the ethics of a war they are about to fight. Bates takes the practical position.
Original
BATES: Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
BATES: Yes, or more than we should try to find out; for all we need to know is that we are under the rule of the king: if the king’s rationale is wrong, our obedience to the king rids us of any guilt.
This is the orthodox answer, and it is a subject’s answer: obedience discharges responsibility upwards. Bates does not want to know whether the war is just, because knowing would not change what he has to do and might make it harder.
What makes the scene remarkable is that Shakespeare does not leave the argument there. Williams immediately takes the position that obedience cannot launder a bad cause, and the disguised King – who has spent Act 1 arranging for exactly this laundering, with Canterbury taking the sin on his head – finds himself on the wrong end of it.
The class dimension is precise. These men are being asked to die for a genealogical claim explained in sixty lines of Frankish law that none of them heard. Bates’s solution is not to think about it; Williams’s is to hold the King to account. Neither of them can leave.
A Heavy Reckoning
Williams’s reply is the strongest speech given to a commoner in any of the histories, and nobody in the play answers it.
Original
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.
(Williams, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But if the king’s rationale isn’t good, the king himself has a high price to pay, because all those legs and arms and heads that get chopped off in battle will join together on Judgement Day, shouting, ‘We died at that place;’ some will be swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some will wail for their wives left poor when they died, some worried about debts they owe, some by their children harshly left behind.
The imagery is the resurrection of the body, and Williams uses it with terrible literalness: severed limbs reassembling on the Last Day and giving evidence. What they testify about is not glory but domestic wreckage – widows left poor, debts unpaid, children abandoned. The war is being costed in households.
Henry’s reply runs to forty lines and turns on two analogies: a merchant’s son who dies in sin at sea does not damn the father who sent him, and a servant killed while carrying money does not damn his master. Both fail in the same place. A father does not compel the voyage and a master does not compel the errand; a king compels the war, and the men in front of him cannot resign.
Henry ends by insisting that "every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own", which is elegant and concedes nothing. Williams does not press further – he is talking to a stranger in the dark and there is a battle in the morning – and the argument closes with a quarrel about gloves.
None Else of Name
The day after the promise, the accounting arrives. Henry reads out the French dead by rank and then asks for the English list.
Original
Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire:
None else of name; and of all other men
But five and twenty. O God, thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone...
(Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire.
No other nobleman; and of the others,
Just twenty-five. Oh God, you did this work;
It wasn’t us, but you alone who did this...
Four names and a number. "None else of name" is the phrase the whole theme turns on: the dead who had names worth reading are listed, and the rest are a quantity. Twenty-four hours after being told that shedding blood beside the King would gentle their condition, the men who shed it are counted in a half-line.
Nothing in the scene registers this as a problem, and that is the play’s method. Henry moves straight from the arithmetic into thanksgiving, and the same speech that rounds off the commoners gives the entire victory to God. Nobody on stage notices the join.
The play notices. It has already shown us Bardolph hanged and reported as a joke about a red nose, Nym hanged offstage, the Boy murdered with the baggage, and it will shortly show Pistol going home widowed and beaten to become a pickpocket. The band of brothers is a real experience with a short duration, and the ledger reopens the moment the fighting stops.
"…even in this play, which is often assumed to be the one where Shakespeare is closest to state propaganda, the construction of ideology is complex."
— Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Alternative Shakespeares, 1985
Key Quotes on Class and Brotherhood
Quote 1
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We do not wish to die beside a man
Who’s scared to face his death beside us all.
Today, one celebrates Saint Crispian’s Day:
Survivors of today that get home safely
Quote Analysis: Henry has just offered a passport and travelling money to any man who would rather go home, and this is the trap inside the offer. Nobody can now leave without publicly announcing that he fears fellowship, which makes the exit a humiliation rather than a choice. It is brilliantly done and it is not free: the brotherhood is being constituted by making non-membership unbearable. The word "fellowship" carries a guild sense too – a body one is admitted to – and Henry is the one controlling admission.
As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to them all three: but all they three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man.
(the Boy, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Though I am young, I’ve observed these three boastful swordsmen. I’m a servant-boy to all three of them, but all three, even if they were my servants, I would not consider them to be a man, because three such clowns do not add up to a single man.
Quote Analysis: The lowest-ranking character in the play delivering the clearest moral judgement in it. The Boy is servant to three men and has taken their measure exactly: Pistol all tongue, Bardolph all face, Nym all silence, and none of them a man. The joke in "could not be man to me" is a class joke reversed – even as his servants they would not qualify – and it establishes that judgement in this play runs upward as often as downward. He goes on to say he must leave them and find better service. He is murdered with the baggage two acts later.
Your majesty came not like yourself: you appeared to me but as a common man; witness the night, your garments, your lowliness; and what your highness suffered under that shape, I beseech you take it for your own fault and not mine: for had you been as I took you for, I made no offence; therefore, I beseech your highness, pardon me.
(Williams, Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Your majesty wasn’t dressed like you are now: you seemed to be a common man to me. Recall that night, what you were wearing, your common appearance; and the offence you suffered like that, I beg that you take it as your fault, not mine. For had you been the person I thought you were, I would have caused no offence; therefore, I beg your highness to forgive me.
Quote Analysis: A private soldier telling the King of England that the fault was his, and asking pardon in the same breath. The logic is unanswerable: Henry chose the disguise, so any offence given to a common man cannot be charged to the man who took him at his word. Williams never withdraws a syllable of what he said that night, and he never apologises for the substance – only for not recognising a face. It is the most dignified thing anyone does in the last two acts, and Henry’s response is to fill the glove with money.
Here was a royal fellowship of death!
Where is the number of our English dead?
(Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That makes a royal band-of-brothers slaughtered!
What are the numbers for our English dead?
Quote Analysis: Two lines that contain the whole theme. Henry has just read a long list of French princes and lords, and "royal fellowship of death" grants the enemy nobility a brotherhood in dying – the same word he used to his own soldiers the previous morning. Then the second line asks for the English figure, and what comes back is four names and a number. Fellowship for the French aristocracy; a total for the English commoners. The play does not comment, and the Retold’s "band-of-brothers slaughtered" makes the echo audible.
Key Takeaways
- A Real Offer With a Short Life: "This day shall gentle his condition" promises social promotion for spilled blood. The offer is genuine and it expires by the next scene.
- Commoners Argue Back: A4S1 gives ordinary soldiers a serious ethical debate and lets one of them out-argue the King, who is in disguise and cannot pull rank.
- The Dead Are Counted by Rank: "None else of name; and of all other men but five and twenty" is the play’s coldest sentence about class.
- Judgement Runs Upward: The Boy assesses his masters, Williams assesses the King, and Fluellen attaches a condition to his loyalty. None of them is contradicted.
Study Questions and Analysis
Does Henry keep his promise of brotherhood?
In spirit for a day, and not at all afterwards – but the case needs stating carefully, because the promise is more precise than it sounds and so is the failure.
What Henry undertakes is specific: any man who bleeds beside him today becomes his brother and is gentled – raised in rank. Nobody in the play is subsequently gentled. Nobody is named. The one commoner who gets individual attention afterwards is Williams, and what he receives is a glove full of crowns, which is payment rather than promotion.
Against that, three points in Henry’s favour deserve weight. He does share the field and the risk. He walks the camp the night before, however badly the conversation goes. And the promise clearly works on the men who hear it – the play shows no desertions and the army fights.
The strongest evidence for the prosecution is structural rather than moral. Act 5 contains no commoners at all in its royal scenes: the treaty is negotiated by kings and dukes, and the only working men left on stage are Pistol, beaten and going home to crime, and Fluellen, who is an officer. The brotherhood does not merely lapse; the play stops representing it.
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, in Alternative Shakespeares (1985), read this as the contradiction the play cannot contain: "even in this play, which is often assumed to be the one where Shakespeare is closest to state propaganda, the construction of ideology is complex". Stephen Greenblatt’s "Invisible Bullets" (1988) reads it the other way, as the play acknowledging the gap precisely in order to absorb it – we notice the promise lapsing and admire the King anyway.
What does the argument with Williams and Bates achieve?
It gives the play its one genuine debate between unequal parties on equal terms, and the King loses it.
The scene works because of the disguise. Bates and Williams say what soldiers actually think, because they believe they are talking to another soldier. Bates opens with weary realism:
He may show what outward courage he will; but I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in Thames up to the neck; and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here.
(Bates, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He can demonstrate whatever courage he likes; but I think, however cold it is tonight, he is wishing he was up to his neck in the River Thames; and so do I, standing beside him, whatever the risk, to get out of here.
The line is affectionate and completely unillusioned. Bates assumes the King is as frightened as everyone else and is performing otherwise, which is exactly right – and he does not resent it. Then Williams raises the harder question of whether obedience absolves a soldier if the cause is bad, and Henry’s answers do not hold.
Anne Barton’s essay "The king disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the comical history" (1975) supplies the essential context. The disguised-monarch device was a familiar popular motif in which a ruler moves among his subjects and the encounter ends in warm mutual recognition. Barton argues that Shakespeare invokes the convention in order to break it: this encounter measures the distance between king and commoner rather than closing it. Marilyn Williamson’s "The Episode with Williams in Henry V" (SEL, 1969) remains the standard treatment of the exchange itself.
What the scene achieves dramatically is to put the play’s central moral question into the mouth of someone with no power and no stake in flattering anyone. It is never answered, and it is never withdrawn.
Why does Henry give Williams a glove full of money?
Because it settles the quarrel without settling the argument, and because it is the only currency the situation leaves him.
The sequence is worth following exactly. Henry and Williams exchange gloves in the dark as a pledge to fight when they meet again. In A4S7 Henry gives his glove to Fluellen, telling him it was taken from a French duke, and sends him out wearing it. Williams strikes Fluellen; Fluellen arrests him as a traitor; the King reveals himself and the joke collapses. Williams then makes his defence, and it is unanswerable: the King came disguised, so the offence belongs to the disguise.
Henry does not argue. He fills the glove with crowns. Fluellen, characteristically, adds a shilling of his own, which Williams refuses – the one small act of independence available to him.
Read generously, this is grace: the King is rewarding a man for honest speech and closing the matter without punishment, which no fifteenth-century soldier could have relied on. Read sceptically, it is a purchase. Williams asked whether a king carries the deaths he causes, and the answer he receives is money.
The pattern is the one that governs the whole theme. Joel B. Altman’s "‘Vile Participation’" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1991) argues that the play is designed to make an audience "admire the King and nurture hostile feelings toward him" at the same time, and this scene is the cleanest example: the gift is genuinely generous, and it lands exactly where the question was.
How does the play use the Eastcheap characters to comment on class?
They supply the view from below, and the play is careful to make it unsentimental. Pistol, Nym, Bardolph and the Boy are not noble poor; they are thieves who have come to France to steal, and Pistol says so in the same breath as he says goodbye to his wife:
Go, clear thy crystals. Yoke-fellows in arms,
Let us to France; like horse-leeches, my boys,
To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!
(Pistol, Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So, dry your eyes. My comrades, joined together,
Let’s go to France, like parasitic leeches
To suck their blood, to suck and suck their blood!
That refusal to idealise is what gives the commentary its force. When the Chorus says all the youth of England are on fire with honour, the audience has just watched Eastcheap pack for a looting trip. Neither picture is the whole truth and the play supplies both.
The Boy is the exception and the play’s conscience. He judges his masters accurately, decides to leave them, and never gets the chance. The most morally alert character in the underplot is a servant child who is murdered offstage while guarding luggage, and whose death is reported in a subordinate clause.
Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) built its reading on exactly this structure, treating the Eastcheap material as sustained ironic commentary rather than comic relief. The pattern holds throughout: Bardolph is hanged for a theft the war itself is a larger version of; Pistol ransoms a Frenchman in the same act in which Henry refuses ransom; Pistol goes home to fake his war wounds while the Chorus describes London welcoming a conquering Caesar.
The cast list makes the argument on its own. Of the five who leave London in A2S3, one dies of disease, two are hanged, one is murdered, and one returns a criminal.
Is Fluellen's treatment of Pistol about class or nation?
Both, and the scene is unusually clear about how the two work together. Pistol mocked Fluellen’s leek; Fluellen waits until the war is over, then beats him and makes him eat it raw, and gives him fourpence afterwards.
Gower supplies the analysis, and it is explicitly about status. Pistol assumed that a man who could not speak English without an accent could not handle an English cudgel – he read the accent as inferiority, and was wrong. The mistake is national in its content and social in its logic.
Fluellen’s own conduct elsewhere shows how carefully the play distinguishes rank from worth. He is an officer, and he applies the same standard to everyone in reach:
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.
(Fluellen, 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.
He praises Williams’s courage, presses money on him, and lectures him about quarrelling – condescending and generous in the same breath, which is roughly how the play’s hierarchies actually operate. Williams refuses the shilling.
Michael Neill’s "Broken English and Broken Irish" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1994) and Christopher Highley’s Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (1997) both read the play’s dialect comedy as part of a wider argument about who counts as English. The leek scene is where that argument gets settled with a stick, in favour of the man with the accent.
What does the play suggest about obedience and responsibility?
That responsibility is constantly being passed upwards and downwards, and that nobody in the play ever manages to make it stay anywhere.
Track the chain. Canterbury begins it by taking the sin of the war onto himself, which moves it off Henry before a single soldier has embarked:
The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!
(Canterbury, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If wrong, the blame’s all mine, respected king!
Henry tells the Governor of Harfleur that the sack will be the Governor’s fault. Bates says obedience wipes the crime out of the soldier, moving it back up to the King. Williams says the King has a heavy reckoning, keeping it there. Henry replies that every subject’s soul is his own, moving it back down. Gower says the prisoners died because of the baggage-raid, moving it onto the French.
No two characters agree, and the play never adjudicates. What it does instead is show the consequences of each position. Bates’s obedience is comfortable and produces nothing; Williams’s scruple is admirable and changes nothing; Canterbury’s guarantee is theologically dubious and works perfectly, since the Archbishop is never seen again after Act 1.
The class content is that the transfers are not symmetrical. The King can lodge his responsibility with a bishop, in public, on the record. The soldier can only lodge his with the King, in the dark, to a man he does not recognise, and be paid off for it in the morning.
Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare’s Political Drama (1988) studies the histories as accounts of "the ordering and enforcing, the gaining and losing, of public power in the state", and the A4S1 debate is where this play puts the question most directly. Norman Rabkin (1977) would note that the play supplies excellent arguments on both sides and declines to say which is right.
How should students write about class in this play?
Three moves lift an answer above the obvious.
First, take the Saint Crispin’s Day promise literally. "Gentle his condition" is a legal upgrade, not a warm feeling, and treating it as a specific undertaking makes it possible to check whether it is honoured. It is not, and the checking is more interesting than either praising or debunking the speech.
Second, notice who is allowed to speak. This play gives more lines to named commoners than any other Shakespeare history – Williams, Bates, Court, the Boy, Pistol, Nym, the Hostess – and it gives them arguments rather than atmosphere. Williams is not a comic rustic; he is the person who states the play’s moral problem most clearly. An essay that treats the commoners as light relief has missed the design.
Third, use the structure. The play repeatedly places a promise and its accounting a short distance apart: the brotherhood speech and the casualty list; the disguise and the glove full of money; the Chorus’s nation on fire and Eastcheap packing to loot. The argument is almost always in the gap rather than in either half.
For critics, Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) and Greenblatt (1988) offer the two main frameworks and disagree usefully about whether the play’s contradictions are contained or exposed. Anne Barton (1975) is essential on the disguise scene, and Marilyn Williamson (1969) on Williams. Goddard (1951) is the best guide to the Eastcheap underplot as commentary. Cite them to open the question rather than to settle it – on this theme, the play does not settle it either.
