Henry V is the play from which we get the famous speech of the king rallying his troops on the eve of battle: “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”. And it concerns an actual historical king, who led an invasion of France in the year 1415. In that battle, the vastly outnumbered English troops defeated the French and won a decisive victory. Before the battle, the French commanders, many of them nobles and aristocrats, mocked the English as a ragtag band of starving, sick, exhausted men. They assumed that their knights on horseback would easily defeat them. However, it rained throughout the night, turning the battlefield into a sea of muck, and as a result, their horses got bogged down, making the French knights easy prey for the English archers with their longbows. The result was that 6,000 French soldiers were killed, compared to only about 400 English fighters. Fifteen to one. And the quote I mentioned comes from the French Duke of Bourbon, as he sees their forces being routed: "Shame,” he says, “and eternal shame, nothing but shame!" Because at that moment in the play, he realizes that all of his false confidence was nothing but foolish pride, and that the stain of this defeat would ruin his reputation and leave him disgraced for the rest of his life.
Now, this long-ago battle may seem like a long way to go for an introduction. But human nature doesn’t really change over time; the people of those days were not that different from us. And Shakespeare is recognized as having keen insight into the human condition. So in the scene I described, we have a man, the Duke of Bourbon, whose entire life has been built around his reputation for military prowess; around notions of honor, and pride, and glory. And he sees all of that being destroyed in the course of a few hours, as his men are mercilessly slaughtered. Not so different from someone today, perhaps, who sees the reputation that they have carefully built over a lifetime being ruined because of one foolish or careless mistake, one fatal miscalculation. Someone who sees the brutal consequences of their error, not only to themselves, but to others who trusted and depended on them. And who realizes at that moment that they have brought lasting shame upon themselves.