SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “Neighbourhood in Henry V.” In Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, pp. 9-26. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Hopkins demonstrates that France's position as “the Other” is portrayed in ambivalent terms throughout Henry V, commenting that France and the French, while still a place and a people to be conquered, are discussed by Henry as known and familiar, not strange or foreign.

Shakespeare's Henry V ostensibly tells a story of enmity. The main plot of Henry's triumphant subjugation of the over-confident French seems to have its emotional dynamic of hostility subtly but tellingly underwritten by the subplot: the story of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym enacts the ever-widening breach of sympathy and circumstance between the King and his erstwhile companions of the tavern. From the outset, however, the development of the opposition is...