As you read Henry V, you may notice some unfamiliar words. In the opening scenes, for example, you will find the words casques (i.e., helmets), fain (i.e., gladly), severals (i.e., details), and naught (i.e., worthless). Words like these, which are no longer used today, are explained in notes to the text in the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of the play. They will also become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s plays.
More problematic are the words that we use today with a different meaning. In the opening scenes of Henry V, the word nicely has the meaning of “subtly,” floods is used where we would say “rivers,” dishonest where we would say “unchaste,” and happy where we would say “fortunate.” The Folger edition also explains such usages, and these words, too, will become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read.
Some words are strange not because of changes in language over the past centuries but because Shakespeare is using them to build a dramatic world. In Henry V, within the larger world of early-fifteenth-century Europe that the play creates, Shakespeare uses one set of words to construct Henry V’s court (and then his royal pavilion on the battlefield); a second set to fashion the court of the King of France and the French camp; yet a third to mark King Henry’s former tavern companions who are now following him to war; and, finally, a fourth to present Henry’s captains, who are drawn from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as from England.
Henry V’s court is built through early references in the play to “chivalry,” “esquires,” “exhibitors,” “commonwealth affairs,” the “cause of policy,” “the main intendment of the Scot,” and ambassadors’ “embassies” (or messages), as well as to the earlier history of Edward III and Edward the Black Prince. The French court shares with the English court some reference to their common history of past English victories over France; but the language of the French court is richer, with names exotic to English speakers—“the Dukes of Berri and of Brittany, / Of Brabant and of Orléans”—and with an ornamental style of expression in such phrasing as “means defendant” and “our quick blood, spirited with wine,” and, especially, with its use of French words—“les dames d’honneur,” “les seigneurs de France,” and “Ô Dieu vivant.”
In the tavern peopled by Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, Hostess Quickly, and the Boy, we enter yet another world; it is a place constructed of an odd medley of language: “shaked of a burning quotidian-tertian,” “thou prick-eared cur of Iceland,” “that’s the humor of it”—including even some broken French: “Couple à gorge.” Still more unusual is the language used to stage the Welsh, Scots, and Irish captains who serve under Henry V: “Kill the poys and the luggage,” “ay’ll de gud service,” “By Chrish, la, ‘tish ill done.” However strange such expressions appear at first, the words and phrases that create these language worlds will become increasingly familiar to you as you read further into the play.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Henry V. © 1995 Folger Shakespeare Library
