Patriotism and Nationalism
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How a nation gets talked into existence. The play builds an idea of England out of speeches, saints’ days and shared danger – and keeps showing the joins.
- Key Characters: King Henry V, the Chorus, Fluellen, Macmorris, Jamy, Gower.
- The Core Tension: The play needs one nation and keeps producing four. English, Welsh, Irish and Scots fight side by side and cannot get through a conversation.
- Key Manifestations: The Chorus’s account of England arming in Act 2; "God for Harry, England, and Saint George"; the four captains at Harfleur; Saint Crispin’s Day; Fluellen and the leek; the Act 5 Chorus on London and Ireland.
- Famous Quote:
"Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’"
(Act 3, Scene 1) - The Outcome: England wins, and the play’s image of national unity holds for exactly as long as the fighting does. The Epilogue reports that the next generation lost France and turned on itself.
A Country Talked Into Arms
The Act 2 Chorus describes a nation converting itself to war, and the conversion is total.
Original
Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies:
Now thrive the armourers, and honour's thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man...
(the Chorus, Act 2, Prologue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The youth of England now all burn with passion;
They’ve packed away their courting leisure clothes.
Those making armour thrive, and thoughts of honour
Preoccupy the mind of every man.
The claim is absolute – all the youth, every man – and the detail that sells it is domestic: fine clothes for courting folded away in a wardrobe. Patriotism here is not an argument but a change of costume, happening in every house at once.
Then the Chorus withdraws and the play cuts to a London street, where Pistol and Nym are drawing swords over a woman and a gambling debt. Two scenes later Pistol announces what the expedition means to him: France, to be fed on like a leech. The nation of volunteers and the men who actually sail are given consecutive scenes, and the play never remarks on the difference.
This is the pattern for the whole theme. The Chorus supplies the national feeling; the scenes supply the population; and the audience is left holding both.
Whose Limbs Were Made in England
At Harfleur, Henry constructs a nation out of the men in front of him, and he does it by rank – nobles first, then commoners, each given a reason to belong.
Original
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And teach them how to fight. Good common men,
Whose limbs were made in England, demonstrate
The strength of where you’re from; and let’s commit
To prove your life is worthy; I don’t doubt it;
For no one here is so low-born or mean
That their eyes don’t shine with nobility.
The imagery is agricultural and it is doing something specific. "Whose limbs were made in England" treats bodies as produce; "the mettle of your pasture" makes the quality of a man a function of the field he was grown in. The soldiers are being told that Englishness is in the flesh – not a loyalty they have chosen but a substance they are made of.
It is a generous move and a controlling one at once. Generous, because the commonest yeoman is granted "noble lustre" and told he is worth his breeding. Controlling, because a quality that comes with the body cannot be declined, and the man who does not fight is not merely disobedient but a poor specimen of his soil.
The speech ends with the cry Henry puts into their mouths – God, Harry, England and Saint George welded into one shout. A private claim, a country and a patron saint arrive fused, and the fusion is what the army takes into the breach.
What Ish My Nation?
Within a hundred lines the play stages the counter-argument. Four captains meet under the walls: Fluellen the Welshman, Macmorris the Irishman, Jamy the Scot and Gower the Englishman – the whole island in one army, which is precisely the picture the Chorus has been painting.
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?
Fluellen’s sentence is never finished, and the play cuts him off at the one word that matters. What Macmorris hears is a generalisation about the Irish beginning, and the question he throws back three times has no settled answer either for him or for the play.
The moment is unrepeatable elsewhere in Shakespeare. An Irishman in English service, asked to hear his nation described, denies that he has one – and does it in a scene designed to show four nations cooperating. The quarrel nearly becomes a duel and is stopped only by a trumpet. Nothing is resolved, and Macmorris never appears again.
For an audience in 1599, with an English army in Ireland and the Nine Years’ War going badly, the question was not academic. The play raises it, lets it detonate, and moves on to the siege.
The Welsh Blood of an English King
The theme’s most generous moment comes after the battle, when Henry tells Fluellen that he too is Welsh, having been born at Monmouth. Fluellen’s reply turns a courtesy into a history lesson.
Original
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.
(Fluellen, 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.
Notice what Fluellen actually does. He is offered inclusion in Englishness and answers by asserting Wales – a Welsh battle, a Welsh badge, a Welsh saint’s day – and then invites the King of England to wear the leek himself. The subordinate nation is not being absorbed here; it is negotiating terms.
Henry agrees, and says so warmly. It is the play’s most attractive vision of what a British army might be: not one identity swallowing three, but four kept and worn openly. Fluellen presses the point until it becomes a claim rather than a compliment, telling the King that all the water in the Wye cannot wash the Welsh blood out of his body.
The play then tests the vision in the crudest possible way. In A5S1, Pistol mocks the leek, and Fluellen beats him with a stick and makes him eat one. Gower spells out the moral: Pistol assumed a man who could not speak English without an accent could not handle an English cudgel. The last physical victory in the play is won in defence of a national badge, by the man with the strongest accent on stage.
"…the play’s own reconstruction of history consciously intervened in the historical process."
— Michael Neill, Henry V: A Modern Perspective
Key Quotes on Patriotism and Nationalism
Quote 1
They sell the pasture now to buy the horse,
Following the mirror of all Christian kings,
With winged heels, as English Mercuries.
(the Chorus, Act 2, Prologue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
They sell their field so they can buy a horse
To follow model Christian king, King Henry,
Like Mercury, who flew on shoes with wings.
Quote Analysis: Patriotism costing something, in the play’s most concrete image of it. Men are selling the land that feeds them in order to buy the means of leaving it, and the Chorus presents this as inspiring. The phrase "the mirror of all Christian kings" is the play’s central claim about Henry – a mirror in this period meaning a model to be copied – and it is worth noticing that it is never spoken by anyone inside the action. National feeling in this play tends to be voiced by the figure who stands outside the story and addresses the audience directly.
If we are marked to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If we’re destined to die, there are enough men
For our country to lose; and if we live,
Then fewer share the honour and the glory.
Quote Analysis: The arithmetic that makes the Saint Crispin’s Day speech work. Westmoreland has wished for ten thousand more men from home, and Henry converts the shortage into an asset in two moves: if we die there are already enough of us to be a national loss, and if we live there are fewer to divide the honour. The first half is bleaker than it usually sounds – the men are being told their deaths would be sufficient – and the second turns a battle into a distribution of a scarce good. Patriotism here is not sentiment but a redefinition of the odds.
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Straining to start to run. The hunt is on:
Follow your gut instinct, and as you charge,
Shout, ‘God help Harry, England and Saint George!’
Quote Analysis: The most efficient piece of nation-building in the play. Three things with no necessary connection – a man’s private name, a country, and a saint who was not English – are fused into a single shout and handed to the army as a battle-cry. Once the men are shouting it, Henry’s dynastic claim to France has become England’s cause and God’s. The greyhound image just before it is worth keeping: the soldiers are hounds on a leash, straining, and the cry is the moment the leash is dropped.
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!
(Fluellen, 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: A Welsh captain telling the King of England, on the field of his greatest English victory, that he is Welsh and cannot stop being it. The image is of washing that will not take – a whole river insufficient to rinse out an identity – and it is offered as praise. The politics behind it are real: the Tudors were a Welsh dynasty, and Henry was genuinely born at Monmouth, so the claim was one Shakespeare’s own monarch had an interest in. What makes the line land is that Fluellen is not asking permission. He is stating a fact about the King’s body and daring him to disagree, and Henry does not.
Key Takeaways
- The Nation Is Spoken Into Being: England’s unity is asserted by the Chorus and constructed by Henry’s speeches. It is never simply there.
- Four Nations, Not One: The captains scene puts Welsh, Irish, Scots and English on stage together and lets the conversation collapse within a dozen lines.
- Belonging Is Made Physical: "Whose limbs were made in England" turns nationality into something in the body – generous to the yeoman, and impossible to decline.
- Difference Is Kept, Not Dissolved: Fluellen wins the play’s last fight in defence of a Welsh badge, and the King agrees to wear one.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does the play construct the idea of England?
Deliberately, and mostly out of words. The play has no map, no institutions and very little landscape; what it has is a set of speeches that keep telling an audience what England is, and the definitions do not all agree.
The Chorus offers the most emotional version, and it is worth noticing that it arrives as a conditional rather than a boast.
O England! Model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,
What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural!
(the Chorus, Act 2, Prologue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh England! You are small, but great inside,
A little body with a massive heart,
What things could you achieve, given the chance,
If every Englishman was true and loyal!
"Were all thy children kind and natural" is the hinge. England’s greatness is stated as something that would follow if its people were loyal, and the next twenty lines explain that three of them are not: Cambridge, Scroop and Grey have taken French money to kill the King. The most patriotic speech in the play is also the one that introduces treason.
Claire McEachern’s The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (1996) examines how late-Elizabethan writing builds a loving, corporate idea of the nation, and where that fiction strains. Michael Neill’s "Broken English and Broken Irish" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1994) is the essential companion piece, tracing how Englishness in the histories is defined against neighbours it is simultaneously trying to absorb.
Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) adds a useful caution against reading any of this as settled doctrine: the histories "occupy various sites of contention, between older and newer conceptions of history". The England of this play is under construction throughout, and the scaffolding is left visible.
What is the point of the four captains scene?
On the face of it, to show the island united. Fluellen, Macmorris, Jamy and Gower are Welsh, Irish, Scots and English, they are all in the same army, and they all want to get on with the siege. No other Shakespeare play assembles the four.
What complicates the reading is that the scene does not work. Fluellen begins a courteous sentence about Macmorris’s nation, Macmorris explodes, and the two are close to fighting within a dozen lines. A trumpet interrupts and the subject is dropped permanently.
"What ish my nation?" carries at least four possible readings, and a good essay names them rather than choosing hastily. It can be a man refusing to be reduced to his origins; a man ashamed of them; a man whose country is in armed revolt against the crown he serves, and who therefore cannot answer safely; or simply a soldier who wants to stop talking and blow up a wall.
Michael Neill (1994) treats the line as the moment the play’s colonial contradiction becomes audible. Christopher Highley’s Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (1997) devotes a chapter to Henry V and the Earl of Essex’s expedition, and reads the scene against a live 1599 emergency in which Irish loyalty was exactly the question the English state could not answer.
One textual fact belongs in any serious answer: Macmorris does not exist in the 1600 Quarto, which cuts the scene entirely. Whoever prepared that text either found the material awkward or found it expendable, and a reader of the Quarto meets a play in which British unity is asserted and never tested.
Is the Saint Crispin's Day speech patriotic or personal?
It is far less patriotic than its reputation, and noticing that is one of the most useful observations a student can make about the play.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
(Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Today, one celebrates Saint Crispian’s Day:
Survivors of today that get home safely
Will stand up tall each time this day is mentioned,
The name of Crispian inciting pride.
Count what the speech actually offers. It offers old age, a feast with neighbours, the right to show scars, a name remembered in the mouths of ordinary men, and promotion in rank for anyone who bleeds. England is barely mentioned; the word "country" appears once, in the calculation about how many deaths would constitute a national loss. What Henry sells is not the nation but membership – of a small group, on a specific date, with a story attached.
The nationalism is real but it is a by-product. By naming a saint’s day and predicting its annual observance, Henry invents a national holiday on the spot, and the invention worked: Saint Crispin’s Day is remembered in England because of this speech rather than the other way round. Michael Neill (1994) argues that the play’s "own reconstruction of history consciously intervened in the historical process", and this is the clearest case.
The scene also carries a caution. Twenty-four hours later the casualty lists are read, and the dead are counted by rank with the commoners rounded off. The brotherhood offered here is genuine while the speech lasts, and the play is careful to show what happens to it afterwards.
Why does the Act 5 Chorus mention Ireland?
Because the play is briefly speaking about its own present rather than its subject, and the passage is the most precisely datable in Shakespeare.
How London doth pour out her citizens!
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of the antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in:
As, by a lower but loving likelihood...
(the Chorus, Act 5, Prologue)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
How London’s citizens all swarm the streets!
The mayor and his colleagues in their finest,
Like senators adorned in ancient Rome,
With commoners amassing all around them,
Go out and carry home the conquering Caesar.
It would be similar, though he’s lower ranked...
The sentence continues into a comparison with "the general of our gracious empress" returning from Ireland with rebellion on his sword – almost certainly the Earl of Essex, who left London in March 1599 to suppress Tyrone’s rising and returned in disgrace that September. The lines therefore date the play between those months.
What matters thematically is the move being made. The Chorus reaches out of the fifteenth century and asks a London audience to feel about Essex what they are feeling about Henry, so the play’s patriotism is being pointed at a living campaign. It is national feeling used as current affairs, and the hedge in "as in good time he may" suggests the Chorus knows the outcome is not guaranteed.
Christopher Highley (1997) reads the whole play against this crisis, arguing that the confrontation between English power and a Gaelic other shapes how the play imagines English identity – which connects the Essex passage directly to Macmorris. Within two years Essex was executed for leading a rebellion, which gives the comparison an irony Shakespeare cannot have intended and no modern audience can avoid.
Does the play celebrate English nationalism or examine it?
Both, and the mechanism by which it does both is the play’s most sophisticated feature. The celebration is not faked: the speeches work, audiences are moved, and productions in wartime have used them for exactly that purpose. What the play adds is a series of quiet audits.
The pattern is consistent. The Chorus says all England’s youth is on fire; the next scene shows Eastcheap thieves going to France to loot. Henry tells his yeomen their limbs were made in England; two scenes later four captains from four nations cannot hold a conversation. The Saint Crispin’s Day speech promises that any man who bleeds will be gentled; the casualty list counts nobles by name and commoners by number.
None of these is a refutation. Each is a juxtaposition, and the play never comments on any of them. Norman Rabkin’s "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1977) described the resulting effect exactly: the play "points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us".
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, in Alternative Shakespeares (1985), pressed harder, arguing that "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" – the contradictions are not decorative, and the play cannot fully contain them. Stephen Greenblatt’s "Invisible Bullets" (1988) takes the opposite view of the same evidence: the play registers every doubt and absorbs the registering into the celebration, so that scepticism becomes part of the patriotic effect rather than a limit on it.
For an essay, the productive question is not which critic is right but what the audience is doing while both things happen at once.
How does the play treat the Welsh, Irish and Scots?
Unevenly, and the unevenness is informative. Fluellen is a substantial part with several hundred lines, real moral authority and the play’s last victory. Jamy the Scot has a handful of lines and is treated with respect. Macmorris the Irishman has fewer than twenty lines, loses his temper, and disappears. The hierarchy of attention matches the political hierarchy of 1599 fairly precisely.
All three are written with comic dialect spelling – Fluellen’s voiced consonants turned unvoiced ("pody", "prave", "Cheshu"), Jamy’s Scots, Macmorris’s "ish" for "is" – and the humour is at their expense. But the play then hands Fluellen the most consistent moral judgement in the cast, and gives him this:
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.
(Fluellen, 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.
Loyalty with a condition attached, spoken to the King’s face by the man with the thickest accent on stage. Nobody else in the play qualifies their allegiance; the Welshman does, and Henry lets it pass.
Michael Neill (1994) and Christopher Highley (1997) both read the play’s dialect comedy as part of a larger project of imagining an England that could absorb its neighbours. What complicates the project, on the play’s own evidence, is that its best Welshman refuses to be absorbed – and is rewarded for it.
What happens to the play's national unity after Agincourt?
It dissolves quickly and quietly, and the play does not draw attention to the dissolution.
Look at what Act 5 actually contains. Fluellen beats Pistol with a cudgel over a national insult; Gower delivers a lecture about English manners; Pistol learns his wife has died and announces he will go home to run brothels and pick pockets, passing off his beating-scars as war wounds. That is the entire English content of the last act outside the treaty scene, and none of it is a band of brothers.
Meanwhile the royal plot completes without any commoners in the room at all. The treaty is negotiated between kings and dukes; the marriage is arranged; Exeter reads out an unsigned clause about the exact Latin wording of Henry’s title. The men whose limbs were made in England are not present.
Then the Epilogue closes the account. Henry died within a few years; his son was crowned in infancy; the councillors who governed for him "lost France and made his England bleed". The nation that the play has spent five acts assembling is reported, in fourteen lines, to have fallen apart and turned on itself – the civil wars Shakespeare had already dramatised in the Henry VI plays a decade earlier.
James L. Calderwood, in Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad (1979), argued that the order Henry’s language creates carries a "built-in obsolescence", holding only while the speaking continues. National unity in this play behaves exactly like that: it is real while someone is producing it, and it does not outlive the producer.
