Chapter Synopsis of Henry V - Study Guide by William Shakespeare

To welcome him!"

In fact Essex’s mission was not a success, and within four years he was executed for plotting against his Queen, Shakespeare’s patron with him.

Returning to France, the business of the peace and betrothal of the French princess to Henry which occupy the rest of the act are augmented by the inclusion of another scene between Fluellen and Pistol. The Welshman has taken exception to Pistol’s rudeness on St. David’s day and has retained his ceremonial leek which he now forces down the soldier’s throat while bashing him round the head with a cudgel, maintaining a comically polite manner of address throughout. This business over, Pistol is given the last word as the last of the Eastcheap crew still surviving; all he can look forward to is spending his remaining days stealing and playing up his recently acquired cudgel wounds in London.

The final scene reasserts the ceremonial feel appropriate to the play, as the Royal families of both nations come together for peace. The Duke of Burgundy produces a lengthy personification of "the naked, poor and mangled peace", elaborating on the familiar Shakespearean metaphor (see, for instance, Richard II ) of the ‘rank and unweeded garden’ representing a society not at peace with itself:

"And as our vineyards, fallows, meads and hedges,

Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,

Even so our houses and our selves and children…"

As the nobles leave to thrash out the details of the settlement, Henry keeps on stage the most precious of the clauses, namely Katherine, the French princess. The value of the earlier scene in which she practised her English becomes clear as Henry sets to wooing her, with the light tone repeated and Katherine able to speak, but leaving the King with the lion’s share of the business. Katherine diverts the repartee from verse into prose at line 102, and the scene, which would have been played with a boy in the role of the Princess, maintains this easy-going feel throughout. Only when Katherine says "Is it possible dat I sould love de enemy of France?" does she demur at all, and Henry is ready with the neat quip "in loving me you should love the friend of France; for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it… ".

The bargain is sealed with kisses, one informal and another ceremonial, and the play is all but over, the French/English antipathy sealed in a light-hearted marriage, the traditional closure of comedy. It falls to the Chorus, in an epilogue, to admit that the "world’s best garden" that Henry had won was soon thick with weeds again as the son of the great match, Henry VI, gave the hard-earned conquests away. This, however, is in the nature of historical drama, we are told, and the next stage might be seen elsewhere in the repertoire, in Shakespeare’s own cycle of plays.