Entering the patriotic imagination of Henry V
But being outside patriotism he is outside "Henry V."
Henry's Harfleur address invokes English ancestry and birth before joining king, country, and patron saint in its final battle cry (3.1). At Agincourt, the St. Crispin's speech turns shared danger into fellowship and anticipated national remembrance (4.3). These scenes explain Chesterton's choice: patriotism supplies a dramatic energy which a reader determined never to enter that sentiment would miss. The witness used here is the modern Folger Shakespeare digital edition, not the first quarto of 1600; Folger's textual introduction distinguishes that early printing from the substantially different 1623 Folio version.
Yet entering this feeling need not settle one's judgment of the war or the king. The play itself places the king's inspiring rhetoric beside a soldier's questions about royal responsibility (4.1), and ends by recalling the subsequent loss of France. Chesterton's claim works best as a demand for emotional hospitality: universal literary sympathy must be capable of inhabiting a particular allegiance. Read as a claim that patriotic assent exhausts the play, it would be too restrictive.
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