Then, as the battle of Agincourt approaches, his reply to Montjoy, the French Herald, shows all his earlier resource—vaunting wit, pride, modest self-blame, confidence in God, unhesitating threat of carnage, concise utterance. Expectation for the crisis of the action is heightened and wide, but in a new manner “objective” or watchful. The audience has seen more aspects of each figure in the picture than those figures seem to have seen themselves.

Yet the battle is prepared for in leisurely manner. The Chorus describes its setting with careful artistry, as in the multiple epithets of “cripple tardy-gaited night,” or the Spenserian prettiness of “paly flames.” Then Harry, disguised in a great cloak, wanders alone, meeting his various soldiers. He is no longer attended as a king, and speaking as a man in isolation he comes closer to the audience. Two very brief soliloquies are his first in the play. Then, talking to Williams, a tendentious, “ordinary” soldier, he considers the responsibility for life and death and deeds in a new vein:

some (peradventure) had on them the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder; some, of beguiling virgins ... some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery. Now, if these men have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God. - (4.1.165-73)

This is the voice of Hamlet

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if ‘twere Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder! This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o’erreaches, one that would circumvent God, might it not? (5.1.76-81)

These thoughts were to stay in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote Macbeth, five or six years later:

Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. (2.3.8-11)

Despite its length, Harry’s meditative, elaborating prose has the conviction to keep Williams silent until its conclusion, when his only comment is simple agreement. For the audience, the unusual lack of concision, meter and pace gives Harry a new voice, helping to realize the new range of his thought and feeling which may well embody some of their own incipient comments on the action. As the soldiers move off and Harry is alone, the dramatic focus will be, for the first time, potentially intense and deep. There follows a questioning, yet formal, consideration of the cares of kingship, and a lyrical, yet still formal, consideration of a peasant’s laboring life. This is yet another aspect of Harry’s response, but he seems to shape his thoughts consciously and concludes as if presenting another concise summing-up in public. When Erpingham enters to call him to battle, the widest view seems about to be reestablished. But this valued messenger is sent away and Harry falls on his knees and prays:

O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts. (4.1.294)

He knows their weakness:

Possess them not with fear! Take from them now
The sense of reck‘ning, or th’ opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. (295-97)

Then he speaks of himself, urgently, repetitively, impulsively. He mentions precisely a fear which hitherto has not been made an issue anywhere on the surface of the drama:

Not today, O Lord,
O, not today, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
I Richard’s body have interrèd new,
And on it have bestowed more contrite tears
Than from it issued forcèd drops of blood.
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay. (297-303)

The expression of purpose—“to pardon blood”—is emphasized by word order and by meter, and twice the lines break before their end, to give urgency and weight to a new idea:

Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a day their withered hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood;
And I have built two chantries,
Where the sad and solemn priests sing still
For Richard’s soul. More will I do:
Though all that I can do is nothing worth;
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon. (303-11)

There is a half-line pause, then Gloucester enters and Harry is once more the leader, assured and ready:

Gloucester. My liege !
King. My brother Gloucester’s voice? Ay.
I know thy errand ; I will go with thee.
The day, my friends, and all things stay for me. (311-14)

This sequence has shown Harry as king, son and man, conscious of his responsibility and that of other men in war as in peace, and acknowledging a fear within himself, an awareness that, though he may outstrip the judgment of men, he has “no wings to fly from God.” As he prepared for battle a short moment of intense focus has revealed his inmost secrets, and his knowledge that no human help can redress the past.

It is possible to read Harry’s prayer as another calculated maneuver—to judge, with Una Ellis-Fermor in her Frontiers of Drama, that:

when he prays, ...