Why Henry V?

Henry V is a great play to teach when asking students to think about nationalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and immigration. On the surface, the play extols a sense of English identity and community—that is, it is looking to England’s history and inviting Shakespeare’s audience to partake in the organizing of such a community.

Despite all the jingoism, though, the play is giving this sense of nationalism quite a bit of side-eye and ultimately allows us to look at the English themselves through the perspective of the stranger.

Legitimacy and linguistic identity

Given the urgency of anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation in the U.S., the idea of who is deemed a legitimate insider is a significant entry point for American students to discussions about national identity, race, and belonging. Notions of legitimacy in the U.S. are often tethered to linguistic identity, so the play’s attention to language is critical for these conversations.

While the sentiment behind Henry’s “band of brothers” (4.3.60) speech espouses kinship for all men fighting for England, all men are clearly not alike. The Scot Jamy, the Irish MacMorris, and the Welsh Fluellen (who all fight for the English) represent cultural otherness. We can home in on the importance of this representation of otherness when we encourage students to interrogate how the language and cultural identity of the stranger impacts the construction of Henry and of English identity.

When Henry famously historicizes the English victory at Agincourt by connecting it to Saint Crispin’s Day, for example, Fluellen reminds him of Edward the Black Prince’s victory in France and the role of the Welsh in that victory. Fluellen explains how this victory was and continues to be commemorated:

"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 honorable badge of service. And I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leeks upon Saint Tavy’s day" (4.7.89-94).

Fluellen is referring to the practice of commemorating the feast of Saint David (the patron saint of Wales), and it was observed not only by the character Henry V in the play but also by Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I. It is important because Fluellen infuses Henry’s historicizing moment with alternative, equally significant, and much older cultural tradition. In short, the cultural identity of the foreigner here precedes and supersedes Henry’s historicizing moment.

Fluellen then takes it a step further in connecting Henry with the Welsh tradition. Responding to the leek-wearing custom, Henry says, “I wear it for a memorable honour, / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman” (4.7.95-96). Henry’s Welsh connection is tenuous (he was the Prince of Wales), but Fluellen responds in kind: “All the water in the Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody” (4.7.97-98). There is no desire to assimilate with the English here, but instead a clear desire on the part of Fluellen to honor Wales.

Leeks against ethnocentrism

To attend to this understanding of the dominant culture’s identity in Henry V is to encourage our students to scrutinize structures that govern notions of national identity and legitimacy. The play deploys Fluellen’s confidence in his cultural identity to speak to England’s own emerging self-perception, and it questions that ethnocentrism. When, in an offstage moment the knavish Englishman Pistol ridicules Fluellen and his cultural practices and foreignness in a public sphere, for example, Fluellen demands to be treated with dignity. He confronts Pistol, force-feeds him a leek, beats him, and says, “If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek” (5.1.34). The bloody scene is so striking that the English Gower says to Fluellen, “Enough, captain, you have astonished him” (5.1.35).

While the violence is sobering, Gower sides with the foreigner standing up for himself by saying to Pistol after Fluellen departs:

Will you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honourable valour, and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valour, and dare not avouch in your deeds any of your words? I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition (5.1.70-80).

To be certain, Fluellen has been teaching his English audience all along—reminding Henry that history is larger than the moment, and demonstrating that respect breeds respect, and indignity engenders violence. Gower calls for respect of the stranger’s cultural traditions and personhood and also for dignified behavior on the part of the host society. The critical moment allows our students to see how language discrepancies—as Fluellen employs a broken English—and cultural identity, issues vividly relevant in our present moment, infuse a play that imagines an inclusive brotherhood while demonstrating how that inclusion is always just out of reach for the stranger.

A neighbor worthy of respect

The many markers of identity in this play—patron saints, religious affinities, language, customs, and cultural traditions—are all facets of nation building and concurrent markers of divisiveness. However, when one looks past difference, when one listens beyond the broken English, when one sees Fluellen not as an object shedding light on Henry’s identity, but rather as someone distinctly valuable and decisively self-possessed, one will recognize in him the many foreigners, and the many immigrants, who demand to be, and who should be, treated with dignity.

To treat others with dignity, it seems, renders one a neighbor worthy of respect. In the U.S., and in our present moment, we have yet to accomplish this.