King Henry V rallies his troops at the siege of Harfleur, urging them to attack the breach in the city walls once more. His rousing speech transforms ordinary soldiers into warriors through vivid imagery of battle.
The English army has been besieging the French town of Harfleur. They have just been repulsed from a breach in the walls and are wavering — some are fleeing, most are exhausted. Henry arrives at the front line and delivers this speech directly to retreating and demoralised soldiers in the middle of active combat. The Chorus has prepared us for this with images of ordnance and "culverins" belching fire. Immediately after the speech, Bardolph picks up the energy with a parodic "On, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!" and Fluellen drives the soldiers forward with his sword. This is not a parade-ground oration; it is a battlefield intervention at the moment when a siege either succeeds or collapses.
Henry wants bodies moving toward a wall. Everything in the speech is engineered toward that single physical outcome. He is not expressing himself; he is operating on a crowd. He shifts register deliberately — first addressing the noble officers ("dear friends"), then the yeomen ("good yeomen, / Whose limbs were made in England"), giving each group their own version of the appeal. Psychologically he is performing a kingship he is still inventing. The Hal-Henry transition is recent and incomplete; this is one of the moments where the new king demonstrates to himself that he can do the job. There is calculation under the fire. He is also frightened — the speech imagines the body in extreme states (eye, brow, blood, sinew, breath) because he is in a body that knows it could die in the next ten minutes.
The single biggest pitfall is starting at eleven. If you open at full volume there is nowhere to go and the speech becomes monotonous shouting. Find a quieter, more urgent opening — these men are close to you, some of them are wounded, and you need them to listen. The bodily images ("stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, / Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage") are operational instructions, not poetry. Demonstrate them. Let the speech work on your body and let the soldiers see it working. Mark the social shifts: "noblest English" gets one rhythm, "good yeomen" gets another, and "you, good yeoman" near the end is a personal address to an individual you can pick out of the crowd. The "greyhounds in the slips" image is a hunt metaphor for soldiers who would have understood hunting viscerally — sell it. End on "Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'" as a cue, not a curtain — the army has to go after you say it. Tempo accelerates across the speech; the last twenty lines are faster than the first ten.
Massively over-used. Casting directors and drama school panels have heard this speech more than almost any other piece in the canon. Use it only if you can do something they have not heard before — most often that means playing the fear under the rallying, or playing the calculation, or finding the quietness at the top. If you do it well it shows command, breath, status, and the capacity to handle a crowd, all of which are useful for classical and screen leading-man casting. If you do it averagely you will blur into the audition panel's memory of forty other Henrys. For most actors there is a better choice. Acceptable if you are auditioning specifically for Henry, or for a director who has asked for muscular rhetorical Shakespeare. Cut to under two minutes; the full speech exceeds most audition limits.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English,
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'