Shakespeare plays with language in any number of ways. Here we will mention only two kinds of wordplay, puns and similes. A pun is a play on words that sound the same but that have different meanings, or—as is sometimes the case in Henry V—on a single word that has more than one meaning. In the Chorus to Act 2, as we have already noticed, there is an example of the first kind of pun in the line “for the gilt of France (O guilt indeed!).” Here “gilt” refers to the French gold used to bribe the conspirators to attempt Henry’s assassination, while the identical sounding “guilt” is the Chorus’s moral condemnation of their treason.
The second kind of pun is used extensively by Henry himself when the French ambassador presents him with the Dauphin’s gift of a chest filled with tennis balls:
When we have matched our rackets to these balls,
We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.
Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
That all the courts of France will be disturbed
With chases.
In the first lines of this excerpt, Henry is made to speak only of playing a game (or “set”) of royal tennis, a sport played inside a walled court. But as the excerpt continues, the terms used become puns in their reference both to tennis and to the war that Henry plans to make in France to win the French crown. For example, “hazard” can mean a hole in the wall of a royal tennis court through which the ball can be hit; but “hazard” can also mean the peril and jeopardy into which Henry intends to put the French crown. In further puns, “courts” are both (1) royal courts and (2) tennis courts; “chases” both (1) winning strokes in tennis and (2) routs of enemies in battles. Thus the language needs to be listened to carefully if one is to catch all its meanings.
A simile is a play on words in which one object or idea is explicitly compared to something else, something with which it shares common features. One speech in the play’s first scene is entirely devoted to a single simile comparing the growth of plants to the early life of King Henry, whose youthful “wildness” is said to be weed-like in contrast to the “wholesome”-ness of his mature “contemplation”:
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbored by fruit of baser quality;
And so the Prince obscured his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness, which [i.e., his contemplation], no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen yet crescive in his faculty [i.e., growing by its own power].
This simile characterizes the Bishop of Ely by identifying him with an old-fashioned way of writing, called euphuism, named after the book Euphues, by John Lyly, published in 1579, about twenty years before Henry V was staged. As a euphuist, Ely is made to explain human behavior by reference to a little-known “fact” from natural history (or science): that summer grass grows at night through its own power, without benefit of sunlight.
The most famous simile in Henry V is the bee simile given to Canterbury in the second scene, a simile that was already famous before its appearance here. Its fame arose from its use by the Roman poet Virgil, who, in the century before the birth of Christ, wrote, among other poems, the Georgics, a poem celebrating rural life, and the Aeneid, an epic poem offering a fictional account of the founding of Rome. Although Virgil developed his discussion of bees most prominently in the Georgics, he also employed a bee simile in the first book of the Aeneid. Since Canterbury is encouraging Henry to undertake a war of conquest of the kind often celebrated in epics, this simile is appropriate to his speech.
The Duke of Exeter has just explained that “government, though high and low and lower,” works all to one mutual goal. Canterbury replies:
Therefore doth heaven divide
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavor in continual motion,
To which is fixèd as an aim or butt
Obedience; for so work the honeybees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home,
Others like merchants venture trade abroad,
Others like soldiers armèd in their stings
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent royal of their emperor,
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
The sad‑eyed justice with his surly hum
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
In Canterbury’s simile, the kingdom of the bee is a model for a human kingdom: the bees, he claims, have social ranks in which all work happily—king bees, magistrate bees, soldier bees, mason bees who sing as they build, citizen bees who knead up the honey, porter bees who carry the heavy loads, even executioner bees who slaughter the lazy drones. In Henry V, simile is most often used to lift a character’s rhetoric to a “high style,” demonstrating his linguistic powers, his control over language.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Henry V. © 1995 Folger Shakespeare Library
