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more excuse in the play than in the chronicle. And it is hard, lastly, to resist the wonder, as we listen to the bourgeois jocularities of the last Act, that the consummate master of words and of thoughts, who had shown himself so easily equal to every situation of statecraft and war, should become so obviously the bluff, plain soldier in his wooing. In these scenes we return within a measurable distance of The Famous Victories, where Henry approaches the French princess with

How saiest thou, Kate, canst thou love the King of England? Kate. How should I love thee, which is my father's enemy? Hen. Tut, stand not upon these points,

'Tis you must make us friends.

I know, Kate, thou art not a little proud that I love thee?

No such inequality marks his bearing to his own men. The group of English soldiery in the foreground are, after Henry, by far the most detailed figures, and altogether Shakespeare's creation. They provide a new Eastcheap in which the king indulges the humanities, without the riots, of the old; and one which, in its relation to the old, gives us a subtle measure of the king's relation to his past. Pistol and Bardolph, the old victims of Falstaff's wit, reappear in their disreputable decay with a congenial third, Nym; but Bardolph promptly falls a victim to Henry's insistence on honour and discipline, and Pistol's moment of hollow triumph 1 is but a prelude to his final humiliation; while the Boy, once a promising pupil of Bardolph's, sums up their characteristics at the outset (iii. 2.) with the honest indignation and the merciless candour of youth. Falstaff himself was deliberately excluded, and the omission is the more glaring since the historic Sir John Fastolfe actually 1 The scene between Pistol suggested by The Famous Vicand the French soldier (iv. 4.) is tories.

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accompanied the expedition, and, as Shakespeare read in Holinshed, was left by Exeter in charge of Harfleur. But with Falstaff, Shakespeare must have felt, there was no middle way between banishment and the old camaraderie. His powerful personality would have violently disturbed the focus of the play, and threatened the supremacy of Henry. In his place we have Fluellen, a less wonderful, but hardly a less finished, creation of comic genius. Falstaff's humour is a dazzling solvent of truth: Fluellen's a whimsical enforcement of it. Falstaff's finest jests are rooted in dishonour and breach of trust; Fluellen's quaint analogies from ancient history are arguments for valour, discipline, and hero-worship. It was not in irony, we may be sure, that Shakespeare let him compare Harry of Monmouth with Alexander of Macedon; and there is weighty significance in the grotesque 'parallel' by which he supports it, that 'as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus, being in his ales and his cups; so also Harry Monmouth, being in his right. wits and his good judgements, turned away the fat knight with the great-belly doublet.'

1 Exeter in the play is first made governor of Harfleur and then found (i., iii. 6) defending the bridge near Agincourt. Can

the discrepancy be due to Fastolfe having originally been introduced and then omitted?

THE LIFE OF

KING HENRY THE FIFTH

PROLOGUE.

Enter Chorus.

Chor. O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and
fire

Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram

7. famine, sword and fire. This trio is probably suggested by a speech of Henry's, as reported by Holinshed, in which he replies to suppliant citizens, during his siege of Rouen (1419),

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that Bellona, the goddess of battle, had three handmaidens blood, fire, and famine, all of which were at his choice to use (Hol. iii. 367, ed. Stone).

Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our
kings,

Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;

Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play. [Exit.

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on the opposite (city) side of the river.

13. the very (casques), the very same.

17. accompt, account.

25. puissance (three syllables).

ACT I.

SCENE I. London. An ante-chamber in the
KING'S palace.

Enter the ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, and the
BISHOP OF ELY.

Cant. My lord, I'll tell you; that self bill is urged,

Which in the eleventh year of the last king's reign Was like, and had indeed against us pass'd,

But that the scambling and unquiet time

Did push it out of farther question.

Ely. But how, my lord, shall we resist it now?
Cant. It must be thought on.

against us,

If it pass

We lose the better half of our possession :
For all the temporal lands which men devout
By testament have given to the church
Would they strip from us; being valued thus:
As much as would maintain, to the king's honour,
Full fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights,
Six thousand and two hundred good esquires;
And, to relief of lazars and weak age,

Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil,
A hundred almshouses right well supplied;
And to the coffers of the king beside,

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king's attention from his confiscation bill.

I. self, same.

4. scambling, turbulent.

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