The advice Henry gives to his soldiers appears to apply as much to himself as to them, ‘stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood..set the teeth..hold… bend.’(III.1.6-9, 15-17) They are all active verbs stating that the men have to make a conscious, active effort to become war-like. All these events, Henry’s speech implies, must be willed. Yet there is a further more puzzling point through the use of the verbs, ‘imitate’ and ‘disguise.’(III.6-8) These suggest that it is not simply a matter of calling up their war-like emotions, the soldiers must pretend to be what they are not. They must ‘act’ the part. ‘Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide,’ sounds like the director of a play telling his actors how to perform. Therefore his ‘great speech’ is not, as it is often taken to be, simply the inspiring call to action of a great soldier, but an elaborate rhetorical device. It is the performance of an act deliberately designed to encourage his soldiers to fight, to the death if necessary, ‘Or close up the wall with our English dead!’
In the build up to the battle, Henry speaks to his soldiers not as subservients but as equals, ‘dear friends..our English’ and ‘our ears,’ (III.1.1-5) bound together as if ‘brothers’ in the equality of desperate sacrifice. Although addressing his first remarks to all those besieging Harfleur, he goes on to distinguish between parts of his army. ‘On, on you noblest English,’ he exhorts to the nobility to set a good example to those below ‘Be copy now to men of grosser blood,/And teach them how to war.’ (III.1.24-5) Henry also addresses their social inferiors: ‘And you, good yeomen,’ (III.1.25) but brings their social divisions together in the unifying ‘nobility’ of battle: ‘There is none of you so mean and base/That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. The final simile confirms their unity: ‘I see you stand like greyhounds’ (31) but ends on a curious image.
The tone of the rest of the speech has been one of heroic endeavour, the similes comparing the men favourably to siege weapons ‘like the brass cannon’ and their fathers to classical heroes ‘like so many Alexanders.’ Yet the image of a dog has been used in many instances, as an insult ‘coward dogs.’ (II.4.69) Placed at the end of the heroic Harfleur speech, the dog image therefore gives it a strange twist and perhaps a moral uncertainty, which is compounded by the behaviour of the low-life characters in the next act.