Was Henry Smooth?

Honestly, I struggled when reading Henry V. The militaristic plot has never grasped my attention, so it took a little bit to actually get into the plot. Out of the entire play, though, Act 5, Scene 2 was by far my favorite scene both in the play as well as in the movies produced of it. Maybe it because of how many times I read over it, maybe it was because it was something different in the militaristic plot, either way, I enjoyed it more than the last. It might just be because I am a hopeless romantic, still not sure, but the list goes on and on, but I whole-heartedly loved this scene. I always had one question though, in the day and age of arranged marriage, how was Henry so smooth while wooing Katherine?

What surprised me the most about this scene, though, was how charming Henry was. One of Kate’s most famous responses of “I do not know wat is like me” after Harry asked if she liked him or not. The best part of all of this was how Henry so gracefully reacted with the response expressing that “you are like an angel, Kate.” How was Henry able to bounce back so fast. One solution to this is the fact that chivalry was technically still alive during this time, so this was the norm and was not as uncommon as I thought it was. Another solution to this was that Henry planned and rehearsed the entire “wooing” sequence and knew exactly what Kate was going to say and how he would be able to respond perfectly to it. Both of these solutions could be seen as mildly extreme and I may be overthinking the scene, but no one will ever know.

Personally, I thought the scene itself was a bit unnecessary. Henry had just won, everyone knew he was going to marry Kate, this was not a forbidden secret. Henry did not need to make this big scene of wooing Kate, but yet he felt as if it needed to be done. One thing I picked up throughout the novel was that our Henry was, pardon my modern slang, extra.