War and Violence
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: What war actually does – to towns, to prisoners, to children, to farmland – in a play that is also the most stirring recruitment poster in English.
- Key Characters: King Henry V, Exeter, Fluellen, Pistol, the Dauphin, Burgundy.
- The Core Tension: The play gives war its finest speeches and its worst consequences, and refuses to let either cancel the other. Nothing here is simply glorious and nothing is simply condemned.
- Key Manifestations: The threat at Harfleur; the hanging of Bardolph; the killing of the prisoners in A4S6; the murder of the baggage-boys in A4S7; the casualty lists; Burgundy’s account of ruined France in A5S2.
- Famous Quote:
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…"
(Act 3, Scene 1) - The Outcome: England wins at a cost the play records in detail: a French countryside gone to weed, a generation raised to think of nothing but blood, and a peace the Epilogue says did not hold.
Imitating the Action of the Tiger
The most famous war speech in English begins by telling soldiers to stop being themselves. At the walls of Harfleur, with the assault stalled, Henry instructs his men in the physical construction of a fighting face.
Original
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit...
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Then fill your eyes with wild ferocity;
Stare piercingly from portholes in your head
That look like cannons, frowning with your brow
As fearfully as jagged, jutting rock
Protrudes above a cliff that’s doomed below,
That’s bashed by the untamed, corrosive ocean.
Now grit your teeth and flare your nostrils wide,
And hold your breath and summon up your strength...
Every instruction is muscular: the eye, the brow, the teeth, the nostrils, the breath. Henry is not describing courage as a feeling but as a set of things to do with your face and lungs, and the speech works because it gives frightened men something physical to perform.
The premise underneath it is the play’s clearest statement about violence. Henry has just said that in peace nothing becomes a man like modest stillness, and that war requires him to "disguise fair nature". Ferocity, on this account, is not what men are; it is a costume they put on for the duration and take off afterwards. That is a humane view of soldiers and an unsettling view of war, because it means the tiger is manufactured to order – and someone is giving the order.
What the speech never does is claim the war is just. It appeals to fathers, to blood, to England, to the men’s pride in front of each other. The justification was settled two acts earlier by a bishop; on the field, what moves men is something else entirely.
The Gates of Mercy
Two scenes later Henry stands before the same town and describes, to its governor, exactly what his army will do if the gates stay shut. It is the most disturbing speech in the play and among the most disturbing in Shakespeare.
Original
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
(Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The mercy that I’m offering will vanish,
And then my soldiers – blooded in, hard-hearted –
Will freely let their bloodied hands run rampage
Without a conscience, cutting down like grass
Your lovely virgins and your budding children.
Why should I care if this ungodly war
The grammar is what makes it so cold. Henry does not say I will do this. He says the gates of mercy shall be shut, the soldier shall range, the war shall commit its acts – a sequence of events with no agent, arriving like weather. And the question he repeats twice, "what is it then to me", places the responsibility on the men listening from the walls.
He calls the war "impious" in his own mouth, and a few lines later compares his army to Herod’s murderers of children. No one obliges him to make that comparison. A commander describing his own troops as the slaughterers of the Innocents has said something about war that the rest of the play never withdraws.
And then Harfleur surrenders, Henry orders mercy for the town, and the threat is never tested. The audience is left holding a description of an atrocity that did not happen, delivered by the man who prevented it by describing it.
Then Every Soldier Kill His Prisoners
At Agincourt the play stages the same question without the escape route. Hearing a fresh alarum, Henry orders every captive in the English camp killed. The next scene supplies a different reason for the same order.
Original
'Tis certain there's not a boy left alive; and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done this slaughter: besides, they have burned and carried away all that was in the king's tent; wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant king!
(Gower, Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’s certain that no boys survived, and that the cowards who ran from the battlefield have carried out this slaughter. As well as that, they burned and looted everything in the king’s tent; that’s why the king has worthily ordered every soldier to cut each prisoner’s throat. Oh, he’s a courageous king!
Gower is wrong, and the audience knows it. We watched the order given in A4S6, and the reason Henry gave was that the French had regrouped. The baggage-raid had not yet been discovered. Gower is supplying a justification after the fact and calling the King gallant for it.
Shakespeare could have written this scene in either order. Putting the killing first and the excuse second is a deliberate arrangement, and it lets an audience watch a war crime being converted into a reprisal in real time. Fluellen, notably, does not join in: he denounces the murder of the boys as against the law of arms and then changes the subject to Alexander the Great.
The play does not tell us the order was wrong. It gives Henry a real tactical reason, gives the French a genuine atrocity, and then shows the two being welded together by a man who was not there. Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, they have to reach it themselves.
This Best Garden of the World
The last act hands the play’s verdict on war to a Frenchman. Burgundy, brokering the peace, is asked what stands in the way of it and answers with sixty lines about agriculture.
Original
Why that the naked, poor and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas, she hath from France too long been chased,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart...
(Burgundy, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That broken, damaged peace so far prevented,
A peace that fosters art and happiness,
And why in the best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, we can’t see Peace’s face?
Alas, we’ve not seen peace in France for so long
That all our work and harvest lies in heaps,
Preventing it from growing once again.
Her vineyards, that all cheer us up with wine...
The speech is the most beautiful sustained writing in the last two acts, and it is given to the losing side. Burgundy walks through unpruned vines, hedges gone wild as prisoners’ hair, meadows choked with hemlock and thistle, ploughs rusting in fields nobody has turned. No battle is described and no one is blamed. What the war has done is simply shown, growing.
Then the argument turns from the fields to the people, and the play makes its sharpest claim about violence: children who grow up in a country at war learn nothing except war. Burgundy is describing a generation raised to swear, look stern and think about blood, because the skills that would have made them otherwise were never taught.
Placed where it is – minutes before the courtship and the treaty – the speech quietly reframes everything the audience has been enjoying. Henry’s reply is that if the French want peace they must buy it by agreeing to all his demands. The invoice for the garden is presented to the gardener.
"He was a hero, that is, he was ready to sacrifice his own life for the pleasure of destroying thousands of other lives."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817
Key Quotes on War and Violence
Quote 1
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English,
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!...
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now grit your teeth and flare your nostrils wide,
And hold your breath and summon up your strength
As mighty as you can. Go, noble English,
Descendants rich from fathers proved in war!...
Quote Analysis: The turn from body to bloodline, and the exact moment the speech stops being instruction and becomes recruitment. Having told his men how to arrange their faces, Henry tells them who they are: sons of fathers who fought and won. "War-proof" is a made word doing a lot of work – tested by war, proved in it, and therefore inherited. The appeal is not to the justice of the cause but to the shame of failing dead men, and it will be repeated in the next lines when Henry warns the soldiers not to dishonour their mothers by proving their fathers were someone else.
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
(Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Your naked babies skewered on a spike,
While mothers howl in fury and in heartbreak
And cry to heaven, like the Jewish wives did
When Herod ordered all male children killed.
Quote Analysis: The point at which the Harfleur speech becomes unplayable as heroism. The image is precise and physical, and the biblical comparison is Henry’s own choice: Herod is the archetypal murderer of children, and a Christian king has just placed his own army in that role. Productions have cut these lines, played them as calculated bluff, and played them straight; each choice produces a different play. What cannot be avoided is that Shakespeare wrote them for the hero, and gave the massacre of the Innocents to the man the Chorus calls the mirror of all Christian kings.
But, hark! What new alarum is this same?
The French have reinforced their scattered men:
Then every soldier kill his prisoners:
Give the word through.
(Act 4, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, listen up! What is this call to arms?
The French have reinforced their scattered men.
So, every soldier: kill your prisoners,
And spread this order out.
Quote Analysis: Four lines, one of the ugliest orders in Shakespeare, and no hesitation whatsoever. The context sharpens it: Exeter has just finished describing the deaths of York and Suffolk, and Henry has said he is fighting back tears. The distance between the tears and the order is four lines. The tactical logic is real – an army about to be attacked again cannot guard a mass of captives – and the killing of ransomable prisoners was a serious breach of the chivalric code even by the standards of 1415. Shakespeare gives Henry the reason and the ruthlessness in the same breath and lets the audience weigh them.
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: French violence as pure appetite. The Dauphin proposes cutting the horses so their blood sprays into English faces – a fantasy of humiliation rather than a tactic, and one that would cripple his own cavalry. The play uses moments like this to distinguish two kinds of violence: the English kind, which is always attached to a reason, and the French kind, which is decorative. The distinction flatters the English, and it is worth noticing that it is a distinction of style. Both armies are on the field to kill each other, and by nightfall the Dauphin’s side has lost ten thousand men.
Key Takeaways
- Courage Is Manufactured: Henry tells his soldiers to "imitate the action of the tiger" and to disguise their nature. Ferocity in this play is a performance men are ordered to give.
- The Threat Is the Weapon: Harfleur is taken by a description of atrocity, not by an atrocity. The town surrenders and Henry immediately orders mercy.
- Reasons Arrive After Actions: The prisoners are killed for one reason in A4S6 and justified by a different one in A4S7, and the audience has seen both.
- The Bill Is Itemised: Burgundy’s speech on ruined France gives the war’s cost in vines, hedges and untaught children, and it is spoken minutes before the wedding.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is Henry V a pro-war or an anti-war play?
Neither label survives contact with the text, and the most useful thing a student can do is show why. The play contains the finest battle oratory in English and the most detailed account of war damage in Shakespeare, and it puts them in the same five acts without reconciling them.
The performance history makes the point better than any argument. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film, made to support the Normandy landings, cut the Harfleur threat, cut the killing of the prisoners, and cut the traitors; what remains is a genuinely stirring patriotic film, and almost everything it removed is in this article. Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film restored the darkness and ended on a long tracking shot across corpses. Both are faithful productions of the same script.
The play warns about the arithmetic before the war starts. Exeter, delivering the ultimatum, itemises the coming dead to the French King’s face:
On the poor souls for whom this hungry war
Opens his vasty jaws; and on your head
Turning the widows' tears, the orphans' cries
The dead men's blood, the pining maidens groans,
For husbands, fathers and betrothed lovers,
That shall be swallowed in this controversy.
(Exeter, Act 2, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The poor folk who’ll be eaten by this war
That’s beast-like; and upon your guilty conscience
Will be the widows’ tears, the orphans’ cries,
The dead men’s blood, the girls wailing in mourning
For husbands, fathers and their fiancés,
Who will be victims of this violent war.
Norman Rabkin’s "Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1977) remains the best account of the difficulty: the play "points in two opposite directions, virtually daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations it requires of us". John Dover Wilson’s 1947 edition represents the older confidence, calling the campaign "a righteous war, and seemed as much so to Shakespeare’s public as the war against the Nazis seems to us". Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1985) read the contradictions as ideology under strain rather than a balanced view.
Why does Henry describe atrocities he never commits?
Because in siege warfare the description was the instrument. Under the customs of the period, a town that refused a formal summons and was then taken by storm forfeited the protections it would have kept by surrendering; the sack was, in the grim technical sense, permitted. Theodor Meron, writing on the play and the medieval law of arms in the American Journal of International Law (1992) and at greater length in Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws (1993), shows that Henry is describing the customary consequence of the choice he is offering rather than inventing a novel horror.
That explains the content but not the manner. What Henry adds to the convention is a claim about his own powerlessness: his authority over his soldiers is about to lapse, so the atrocity will not be an order but an event. It is the same manoeuvre he uses with Canterbury over the legality of the war and with the traitors at Southampton over their sentence, and it works.
The play then places the technique alongside its consequences. Bardolph is hanged for stealing a brass plate from a church, and Henry approves without appearing to recognise the name; the boys guarding the baggage are murdered; the prisoners are killed. Stephen Greenblatt’s "Invisible Bullets" (1988) argues that the play "deftly registers every nuance of royal hypocrisy, ruthlessness, and bad faith" and then absorbs the registering into the celebration – a description that fits Harfleur exactly, since the threat is horrifying, effective, and immediately followed by an order for mercy.
One structural point worth making in an essay: Henry never carries out any of the things he describes. Every atrocity in the play is either committed by the French, ordered against combatants, or prevented by the surrender the threat produces. That is a real defence, and it does not dispose of the Herod comparison, which Shakespeare put in Henry’s mouth for no reason except that he wanted it there.
What are the rules of war in the play, and who breaks them?
The play is unusually interested in the law of arms – the customary code governing sieges, prisoners, heralds, ransom and non-combatants – and it appoints Fluellen as its unofficial registrar. He invokes "the disciplines of the war" roughly a dozen times, and he applies the standard to both sides.
Kill the poys and the luggage! 'Tis expressly against the law of arms: 'tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offer't; in your conscience, now, is it not?
(Fluellen, Act 4, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Killing the boys who looked after the luggage! That’s expressly against the accepted code of war. It’s the worst type of villainy, I tell you, as anyone can do. Is it on your conscience now?
The ledger runs roughly as follows. The French murder unarmed boys guarding the baggage, which is unambiguously a breach. The English kill ransomable prisoners, which is a breach and was controversial in Henry’s own century. Bardolph robs a church, which is sacrilege, and is hanged for it under Henry’s own ordinances – the historical Henry’s articles of war really were severe about church property. Heralds pass freely and are respected on both sides throughout, which is the code working.
Theodor Meron (1992, 1993) is the authority here and is worth citing precisely because he is an international lawyer rather than a literary critic: he tests the play’s conduct against the actual rules rather than modern intuition, and finds Shakespeare unusually accurate.
The interesting structural fact is that the play’s most reliable moral voice on war is a comic Welshman with an accent written for laughs, and that he is right every time. Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) built much of its reading on this pattern, treating the play’s comic figures as a running commentary on the main action rather than as relief from it.
What does Burgundy's speech add that the rest of the play does not?
It gives the war a landscape and a future, which nothing else in the play does. Every other account of the fighting is about people – who was brave, who died, how many. Burgundy describes what happens to a country afterwards.
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country;
But grow like savages, – as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood, –
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire...
(Burgundy, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Our houses and ourselves and children also
Have lost, or cannot learn through lack of time,
The skills that ought to make our country proud.
Instead, they grow like savages – like soldiers
That don’t do anything but think of blood –
And swear, appearing stern, with scruffy clothing...
The argument moves from hedges to houses to children, and its claim is developmental: a country at war does not merely lose people, it stops teaching. The children of the war grow up fluent in soldiering and illiterate in everything else, and the damage will outlast the treaty by a generation.
Three things make the placement remarkable. It is spoken by the defeated side, in the scene where the victors take their winnings. It is the longest uninterrupted speech in Act 5, longer than anything Henry says in the wooing. And Henry’s answer to it is a demand: if Burgundy wants that peace, France must agree to every article.
For an essay, this speech is the strongest single piece of evidence that the play knows what it has been celebrating. Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) argued 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"; giving the finest verse in the last act to the loser, on the subject of what the winner has destroyed, is complexity of exactly that kind.
How does the play handle the dead?
Very unevenly, and the unevenness is the point. Agincourt is settled by two lists read aloud, and the difference between them is the play’s sharpest comment on how war accounts for people.
Charles Duke of Orleans, nephew to the king;
John Duke of Bourbon, and Lord Bouciqualt:
Of other lords and barons, knights and squires,
Full fifteen hundred, besides common men.
(Exeter, Act 4, Scene 8)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Charles, Duke of Orleans, nephew to the king;
John Duke of Bourbon, and Lord Bouciqualt.
Of all the other noblemen and lords,
Some fifteen hundred, not including plebs.
"Besides common men" is the phrase to sit with. The French prisoners and dead are enumerated by rank and then rounded off, and the commoners are not counted at all. The English list that follows is the same shape: four noblemen named, and then "none else of name; and of all other men but five and twenty".
The play has spent the previous act promising that this would be different. On Saint Crispin’s Day Henry told his soldiers that whoever shed blood with him would be his brother and would be gentled by it, however vile his condition. Twenty-four hours later the accounting reverts to the ordinary form.
Two individual deaths get proper treatment, and both are noble. Exeter’s report of York and Suffolk dying in each other’s arms is the tenderest passage in the play. Set against it are Bardolph, hanged and reported as a joke about a red nose; Nym, hanged offstage; the Boy, murdered with the luggage; and Pistol’s wife, dead of disease in a London hospital. The play notices all of them, and it notices that nobody on stage does.
Why does Shakespeare show so little actual fighting?
Partly for practical reasons and partly by design, and the play is explicit about both. The Act 4 Chorus apologises in advance that Agincourt will be represented by "four or five most vile and ragged foils" in a ridiculous brawl, and asks the audience to mind true things by what their mockeries be.
What replaces the battle is more interesting than a battle would have been. Agincourt occupies four short scenes, and the only sustained action in them is Pistol extracting a ransom from a terrified French gentleman while a boy interprets. The great victory of English history is dramatised as a haggle.
The technique has a name in classical rhetoric, enargeia – making an absent thing vividly present to the mind – and the Chorus is the play’s instrument for it. Joel B. Altman’s "‘Vile Participation’" (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1991) argues that the play works on its audience by generating strong feeling and then directing it, and that the Chorus does most of that work: the night before the battle is described in extraordinary sensory detail precisely because the battle itself cannot be.
There is a thematic dividend. By keeping the fighting offstage, the play spends its time on the things around the fighting – the justification, the threat, the argument about conscience, the ransom, the casualty list, the ruined farmland. A play that showed the battle would be about the battle. This one is about everything that surrounds it, which is why it can be staged as a celebration and as an indictment without changing a word.
How should students write about violence in this play?
The commonest weakness is to pick a side and marshal evidence for it, which is easy to do and always leaves half the play unaccounted for. Three moves produce stronger answers.
First, be specific about which violence. The play contains at least five distinguishable kinds: the threatened sack of Harfleur, the judicial violence of Bardolph’s hanging and the Southampton executions, the battlefield killing at Agincourt, the war crime against the baggage-boys, and the killing of the prisoners. They raise different questions and a good answer does not blur them.
Second, use the placement. Shakespeare’s most consistent technique here is juxtaposition: the breach speech is followed by Pistol refusing to go through the breach; Exeter’s tears are followed within four lines by the order to kill the prisoners; Burgundy’s ruined garden is followed by a marriage negotiation. Nothing in this play is placed carelessly, and the argument is usually in the seam rather than in either speech.
Third, hold the two readings open and say what the openness achieves. Rabkin (1977) supplies the framework; Greenblatt (1988) supplies the mechanism by which acknowledging the ugliness can end up reinforcing the celebration; Dollimore and Sinfield (1985) supply the counter-argument that the contradictions are not contained at all. Meron (1992) supplies the legal facts, which are worth having because they stop an essay asserting that Henry breaks rules he does not break, and let it be precise about the one he does.
A final caution against anachronism. Applying modern humanitarian law to a 1599 play about a 1415 campaign produces confident conclusions and bad criticism. The useful question is not whether Henry would be prosecuted today, but what Shakespeare's own audience was being asked to admire, and where the play makes admiring difficult.
