Source of the Plot. The play of The Famous Victories of Henry V. Holinshed's Chronicles. (Possibly) an earlier play, now lost.
The Fable. The play describes the determination of Henry V to fight with France, his progress in France, the battle of Agincourt, the articles of peace between the French and English, and the courtship of the King with Katharine, daughter of the French King. It is a chronicle of the coming, seeing, and conquering of the "fellow" "whose face was not worth sun-burning."
The play bears every mark of having been hastily written. Though it belongs to the great period of Shakespeare's creative life, it contains little either of clash of character, or of that much tamer thing, comparison of character. It is a chronicle or procession, eked out with soldiers' squabbles. It seems to have been written to fill a gap in the series of the historical plays. Perhaps the management of the Globe Theatre, where the play was performed, wished to play the series through, from Richard II to Richard III, and persuaded Shakespeare to write this play to link Henry IV to Henry VI. The lines of the epilogue show that Shakespeare meant the play to give an image of worldly success between the images of failure in the other plays.
The play ought to be seen and judged as a part of the magnificent tragic series. Detached from its place, as it has been, it loses all its value. It is not greatly poetical in itself. It is popular. It is about a popular hero who is as common as those who love him. But in its place it is tremendous. Henry V is the one commonplace man in the eight plays. He alone enjoys success and worldly happiness. He enters Shakespeare's vision to reap what his broken-hearted father sowed. He passes out of Shakespeare's vision to beget the son who dies broken-hearted after bringing all to waste again.
"Hear him but reason in divinity,"
cries the admiring archbishop. Yet this searcher of the spirit woos his bride like a butcher, and jokes among his men like a groom. He has the knack of life that fits human beings for whatever is animal in human affairs.
His best friend, Scroop, plots to kill him, but is detected and put to death. Henry accuses Scroop of cruelty and ingratitude. He forgets those friends whom his own cruelty has betrayed to death and dishonour. Falstaff dies broken-hearted. Bardolph, whose faithfulness redeems his sins, is hanged. Pistol becomes a cutpurse. They were the prince's associates a few months before. He puts them from his life with as little feeling as he shows at Agincourt, when he orders all the prisoners to be killed.
He has a liking for knocks. Courage tempered by stupidity (as in the persons of Fluellen, etc.) is what he loves in a man. He, himself, has plenty of his favourite quality. His love of plainness and bluntness makes him condemn sentiment in his one profound speech—
"All other devils that suggest by treasons
Do botch and bungle up damnation
With patches, colours, and with forms being fetch'd
From glistering semblances of piety."
The scenes between Nym and Pistol, and the account of Falstaff's death, are the last of the great English scenes. This (or the next) was Shakespeare's last English play, for Lear and Cymbeline are British, not English. When he laid down his pen after writing the epilogue to this play he had done more than any English writer to make England sacred in the imaginations of her sons.