Plot and Subplot in Shakespeare's Henry V

 W.H. Auden made the claim that King Lear was the first of Shakespeare’s plays since Henry IV to have a subplot, overlooking the one in the next Henry, or the next of the Henriad, Henry V.  It’s an odd omission, since, as he observed about King Lear, the subplot of Henry V parallels the plot—Harry, driven by disaster, goes to war in France in the plot, and in the subplot, Harry’s former partners in crime, driven by disaster, go to war in France.  It’s not important whatever might have led Auden to overlook it, but the nature of the relationship between plot and subplot very well may be. 

The death of Sir John Falstaff, the disaster that set his former followers off to war, is in a sense a victory for Harry—not that the death itself benefits him necessarily, but that it represents his shedding of his old, essentially dead self—as one of Sir John’s ‘minions of the moon.”  The “use we made” of those times does not require any of the characters in it to ascend with him, and the obvious use that Sir John attempted to make of hi, to leverage an advantage that might let him continue his myriad forms of harm in immunity, meant that nothing like love or genuine friendship had ever connected them. 

The parallel appears clearly in Bardolph’s parody of Harry, his “On, on, on, on, on!  to the breach, to the breach!” counterpointing the king’s rallying cry, and offers a point of contact and contrast, as Harry is taking this new territory, his drive having transcended the insult that instigated it, while these essentially destitute men have no more drive, are more or less dragged in the same direction as the rest of Harry’s army. 

So, the death that leads to more death for them has given life, or land, or both, to him.