The most military of Shakespeare’s plays is ‘Henry V.’; there are other plays with much fighting in them, but neither within nor without the chronicle series is there one with so little of other interest in it. Henry V. is the only Shakespearean king who is a typical soldier, so much so that the type all but swallows up individual character. Mr. Masefield, who is always ingenious and often profound, thinks that Shakespeare did not admire the type; that he studied it with full knowledge and carefully framed the so-called heroic figure, a competent but no more than sufficiently competent leader, carrying on with fine animal spirits, unthinking, just and fair according to his lights, keen on playing the game as he knows it and scorning those who do otherwise with a scorn capable of being merciless, living by custom and not seeking ideas, never doubting that he is right—I am not using Mr. Masefield’s own words, but putting his judgment in a slightly less severe form; and then, Mr. Masefield will have it, Shakespeare holds up a piece of our own image to us in the jolly, obtuse soldier-king, with a whisper in his sleeve for the more knowing:—These be your gods, O Englishmen! I will not say there is nothing in Mr. Masefield’s point, but I cannot go all the way with him, the rather that if I am wrong it is in Sir Walter Raleigh’s company. Shakespeare’s command of human nature included other, richer, more complex, and more interesting characters; he knew very well that a prince always posing like Richard II., who is an accomplished _cabotin_, or always thinking like Hamlet, who fails not because he is weak but because he knows too much, would not have done Henry V.’s business; it does not follow that he thought ill of that business, and for my part I conceive that he admired Henry V. as the right man for his place and meant the audience to admire him. King Henry V.’s ostentatious repudiation of Prince Hal’s ways and companions is violent and awkward, and to a modern judgment unpleasant, as Mr. Masefield says. But that was forced on Shakespeare by the tale which he had to accept as history. Another difficulty is to see why a war of conquest against France should have been glorified on the stage at a time when France and England were not only at peace but in all but formal alliance against Spain: to which I see no answer except that chronicle plays were in fashion, a good play was a good play, and people did not go to the Globe to learn current European politics. We have not to consider whether Shakespeare thought Henry V. was in truth such a man as he put on the stage; or whether he did or did not stop to think that the real Henry V. must have known French quite well, if not as well as English, from his infancy; or other little puzzles that any observant reader may put, and get no certain answer, in this and most of the plays: for these things are not to our present purpose.