As Gregory M. Colón Semenza has underlined, when Shakespeare employs sports metaphors to describe battles and conflicts in his works, particularly in his history plays, they often serve to expose, if implicitly, the futility of war. Although this is especially striking in the plays from the first tetralogy, the cock-fighting metaphor in the Prologue of Henry V strikes a very different chord. The at first self-deprecatory and apologetic trope of the theatrical stage as a ‘cockpit’, whose dimensions cannot possibly represent the bloody battles of the Hundred Years’ War truthfully, is extended in the same passage when both countries are implicitly likened to two fighting animals:

As we shall see, this extended metaphor resonates deeply with the practice and symbolism of cock-fighting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It is also crucial in shaping the audience's dramatic experience. According to Gina Bloom, games on the early modern stage

Over the course of this chapter, I will argue that conjuring up the image of cockfighting at the beginning of the play is, in fact, a way to shore up the epic tone of the Chorus's Prologue and fuel a nationalist sentiment amongst the audience.