Henry V

The Dauphin is the title given to the heir apparent to the King of France. The Dauphin in the play is Louis, the eldest surviving son of the French King Charles VI. The real Louis was only 18 years old during the battle of Agincourt in September 1415 and died in December of that year.

In the play, the Dauphin appears as a foil for King Henry and is the personal focus of the conflict between the English and the French. The Dauphin’s first significant act is to taunt Henry. As intrigue mounts over Henry’s potential claim to the throne of France, the Dauphin dispatches his messenger with his arrogant, mocking message and the gift of tennis balls. The Dauphin is basing his assessment of Henry’s character on the stories he has heard about Henry’s youth. Although the play hints from the beginning that Henry has reformed (and Shakespeare’s audience would know him as a victorious historical king), the Dauphin still dismisses Henry’s abilities. This creates dramatic irony and emphasizes the Dauphin’s lack of judgement, not least because the French King and courtiers warn him against underestimating his enemy. Henry has changed since becoming King, but the Dauphin lacks the humility to update his understanding of his rival. He is content to depend on his outdated information, mocking Henry by sending a case of tennis balls to the English court as a jibe. The Dauphin’s character serves to inform the audience of just how much Henry has changed. The Dauphin himself seems immune to change; his arrogance and his lack of humility become his defining qualities.

The Dauphin is the man who stands to lose the most from Henry’s invasion. If Henry succeeds, the Dauphin will lose his position as heir to France. In spite of this jeopardy, the Dauphin unwisely mocks Henry with the gift of tennis balls, putting not only his own future in danger but all of France. With his gift, the Dauphin makes Henry all the more determined to prove to the world that he is a changed man. The gift does not cause the invasion, but it increases Henry’s resolve; not only does Henry resent the Dauphin’s disdain, but he realizes that he must prove the alteration of his character since his youth, and his competence as king. In this manner, the play suggests that that the Dauphin is responsible for his own downfall.

After Henry’s victory, the play shows that he replaces the Dauphin in the line of succession, disinheriting the Dauphin, who does not appear in the play after the battle. In showing the Dauphin to be a deeply flawed, and likely incompetent future monarch, the play reduces potential friction around questions of divine right, the line of succession, and the justice of Henry’s cause. Henry V is not only a young king but from a new line; his father deposed Richard II when Henry was a boy. Although the play uses the treatment of kingship to uphold the rights of monarchs, it emphasizes that this right rests on the abilities and qualities of monarchs, including to take and hold the crown.

Fluellen is a Welsh Captain serving in the English army. His character is likely modelled on a number of famous Welsh soldiers who fought for English kings in the 15th century, and on Roger Williams, a Welsh hero of the Elizabeth I’s 1590s campaign in France. Fluellen is part of a foursome of officers in the play who symbolize the constituent parts of the British Isles (whether these territories were inside or outside Henry’s kingdom at the time). All four of these characters are written to reflect ideas of the archetypal characteristics of their national identities at the time (as seen through the English perspective). Fluellen is the most developed character of the four and is in many ways a comic stereotype of the Welshman, although his Welshness—and the attitudes of others to it—forms an essential part of the play’s treatment of national/regional identity in the British Isles.

Fluellen’s dialogue is written to approximate a Welsh accent (or an exaggerated impression of one) and, at first, he seems conceived as a straightforward (insulting) stereotype of the Welsh as seen by the English: loquacious, rustic, old-fashioned, and pedantic. It becomes clear, however, that Shakespeare creates the comic stereotype of Fluellen in order to set up and then explore the audience’s expectations. This is hinted by Fluellen’s name, a play on the traditional Welsh name Llewellyn, a possible joke by Shakespeare on the English who routinely corrupt the names of Welsh people and places as they are unable to pronounce them. Fluellen is also a major character with 281 lines, many of them in dialogue with King Henry, and his character becomes increasingly well-rounded as the play progresses. He draws the eye of the King who considers him to have “care and valor” although his manners are “a little out of fashion” (4.1.82-83). The King trusts him enough to enlist Fluellen in his practical joke with the glove, and to give him the charge “to be friends with” Williams (5.8.62). Fluellen is also shown finally asserting his dignity and national pride over Pistol who has impugned his Welshness. When Gower says that Pistol has made the mistake of underestimating Fluellen because of his accent, he makes explicit to the audience the dramatic lesson of Fluellen’s character development in the play. Although Shakespeare wrote many culturally stereotyped characters in his plays, many containing what would not be considered slurs, Shakespeare himself was a largely self-taught provincial man working as a migrant in London; he would have spoken with a regional accent and there is evidence that he met with some prejudice as a result of his “rustic” and “unsophisticated” background. His ultimately sympathetic treatment of Fluellen, exploding the cultural stereotype, possibly speaks to his personal experience and to the experience of many of his London audience, as well as supports the play’s message of unity and collaboration under a good monarch.

Fluellen also serves to emphasize Henry V’s (and the Tudor monarchs’) Welsh-origin identity, as Henry and Fluellen discuss directly after Agincourt: “I am Welsh, you know, good countryman” says Henry V (5.7.103). Henry himself was born in Monmouth Castle in Wales. The royal Welshness in the play mirrors the (partly mythologized) identity of the Tudor monarchs (including Elizabeth I) whose ancestor Henry VII was the first Tudor monarch, born at Pembroke Castle in Wales into the family of the Tudors of Penmynydd. Henry VII was the descendant of both English royal and ancient Welsh royal nobility; in this way the later Tudor monarchs cemented their “right” to rule Wales as part of the English Crown.