The comedy is carefully restricted, its incidents being short-lived and its characters severely limited in sensibility, that is in vocabulary and ideas. And on the other hand, Shakespeare used contrasts between consecutive scenes to sharpen the audience’s appreciation: so Harry’s “Once more unto the breach, dear friends ...”, confident that there is none “so mean and base” that has not a “noble luster” in his eyes (3.1.Iff.), is followed by Bardolph’s mimicry and by thoughts of “a pot of ale, and safety” (3.2.1—13); such “friends” have to be driven to the breach by Fluellen calling them “dogs” and “cullions.” The broad expanse of the stage-picture has no dark shadows in which attention can dwell and no individual issues on which it can concentrate; but, cunningly, its lines are kept sharp and agile. In particular Shakespeare has ensured by small details that the central figure can arouse the keenest perceptions. The duologue of two bishops that prepares the audience for Harry’s first appearance presents two differing qualities in the man without suggesting conflict: his “grace,” or “celestial spirits,” and his “policy” that makes even God’s ministers circumspect towards him. His own early speeches easily command the responses he wishes from those presented with him, thus suggesting a superior awareness not fully explicit in his words; and for all their verbal control, they are fired by a wide range of ideas, thus hinting at a varied awareness stretching beyond the immediate context. His reply to the French ambassador (1.2.259ff.), for instance, gives jest for jest, mentions his “wilder days” with equal firmness as his present “majesty,” and moves lightly from his own will (“I will keep my state ... When I do rouse me ... But I will rise there ... I will dazzle”) to the will of God (“But this lies all within the will of God ... in whose name ...”). These last transitions may also cause some of the audience to see Harry as a limited figure, apparently unaware of the size of the assumptions he makes; and so may the manner in which he speaks of widows, curses and tears with no slackened pace or tender epithet. Yet these incipient inquiries are never made a dramatic issue by presenting alternative courses, or by criticism of Harry on stage, or by a hint of his private thoughts, such as Shakespeare had already achieved for Prince Hal or Henry the Fourth and was to develop so fully in Julius Caesar and Hamlet written one or two years later. The Chorus is at hand to keep the picture fully animated and expectation forward, with:

Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies.
(2.Prologue.1—2)

So the predominant focus is maintained, a wide view of a pageant narrative.

But even the first act is not superficial. Because Shakespeare has not sharpened the focus by his usual devices as he could so effectively have done, this needs to be especially noticed. The audience’s appreciation is quickened without bringing the hero closely and intimately to its attention; there is no soliloquy, no aside, no self-conscious or nervous speech, no sudden, unprepared exit or utterance, or transition of mood. The audience’s view is centered on Harry and its perception is acute, but Harry is always the central figure of a group, and the audience knows him in the same kind of terms as it knows the other characters.

The second act, like the first, gives no occasion for an intense focus on Harry, but Shakespeare has ensured still greater clarity, and more deeply questioning responses. Among the noisy quarrels of Pistol and his fellows comes news that Falstaff is sick and broken in heart after Harry has banished him; and this, in turn, is followed by the contrasting affirmation, “The King is a good king ... it must be as it may.... lambkins, we will live”; here the audience cannot give one simple emotional response. Then Harry in public discloses the treachery of three friends, elaborating formally on the evil hearts under their apparent goodness:

thy fall hath left a kind of blot
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. (2.2.138-40)

The audience is being made aware that the wide scene can be viewed in more than one way. Harry himself may be moved, for before pronouncing judgment he speaks a short sentence:

I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall man. (140-42)

This is not a clear intensification of the focus in a deeply revealing soliloquy, for the words are spoken formally for all to hear; but it makes sure that any questioning aroused by this incident may touch Harry as well as others. Then he concludes the scene securely, with a final conciseness that is habitual to him:

Let us deliver
Our puissance into the hand of God,
Putting it straight in expedition.
Cheerly to sea; the signs of war advance:
No king of England, if not King of France! (189-93)

But now even this does not remain simple: Harry’s confident committal into the “hand of God” is followed by the hostess’ reflective account of Falstaff fumbling with the sheets and playing with flowers, and crying out “God, God, God!” three or four times:

Now I, to comfort him, bid him ‘ a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So ’a bade me lay more clothes on his feet. (2.3.20ff.)

Harry went to France asserting that he went hand in hand with God; Falstaff is said to have gone “away and it had been any christom child”; and then Pistol leaves to follow the King:

Let us to France, like horse-leeches, my boys, To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck! (56-57)

Contrasts sharpen the wide view; and some of the audience, if they stopped to consider, would think they knew more of the over-all issues than any one of the dramatis personae.

Bickering at the French Court, differences among Harry’s soldiers, the charm, absurdity and prim bawdiness of the French Princess learning English, all may cause the audience to question, in a general way, the motives and comprehension of the characters. And Harry’s invocation of the “fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart ... With conscience wide as hell” as a threat to Harfleur (3.3.1—43), may heighten its sense of what is involved and cause it to question Harry’s attitude to the brutality he is prepared to encourage.