Big questions about Henry V

One of the big questions we discussed about Henry V is whether Henry is a good king. It depends on how to define a “good king”. In my opinion, a good king is the one who brings welfare to his people. However, the play barely shows his domestic policies, so there might not be a clear answer in this dimension. The only hint I’ve got is from the chorus in the end, who says that the next king would lose France and make his England bleed. Perhaps it’s the unexpected consequence of Henry’s expedition which had probably exhausted English people and made them vulnerable to the conflicts afterwards. So I think, according to the text, Henry is mostly a successful military leader but not really a good king. If he is dealing with a over-populated country suffering from famines, then his expedition might be a wisely political conduct to remove the crisis. In this way, his “good” is only for England but not for its neighbors.

As an politically powerful figure, like many of them in contemporary time, Henry takes his own benefit as priority to some extent. In the film we watched in class, he has the same aggressive look whenever he listens to the French ambassador’s arrogant speech. It may indicate that Henry cares about his “face” more than even his “legal” right to inherit the throne of France.

The play involves a universal theme of how the decisions of powerful upper class have impacts on lower-class people’s lives. Henry’s decision of war kills many nobles appear in the list in act 4 scene 8. However, more people whose names aren’t worth mentioning have also sacrificed their lives for the King, as well as French soldiers. His old friends’ lives are mostly destroyed by the war. However he has made it, Pistol has survived the war but ends up losing everything but his scars. From my perspective, the play is questioning the class system through the king’s behaviors. He is the one at the highest point, so everything he does can be absolutely right. He can blame the people in lower class for unwilling to fight and then give them no actual advancement afterwards.

The gender division in the play also has overlaps with the class system. It is said that higher-class woman, like Kate, has no right to decide who she is marrying, while the hostess from the lower class can choose to marry Pistol but not Nym. Whichever cases, both women are in the subordinate position. In act five, when Henry is making proposal to Katherine, he uses the language of belonging--- “And Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is France, and you are mine. ” Also, Nym and Pistol’s fight for the hostess ends in Pistol paying money back to Nym. I think it’s reasonable to ask whether the hostess really deserves more than the eight shilling cash.