Nym
Nym provides a clipped, deadpan comic counterpoint among the Eastcheap soldiers — his taciturn habitual phrase and his offstage execution for theft are treated with the same economy the play affords the common soldiery generally, in contrast to the sustained attention given its noble figures.
Appears In
Biography
Nym is the most taciturn of the old Eastcheap company, a soldier defined almost entirely by his habitual catchphrase — 'that's the humor of it' — deployed as a response to nearly everything, whether comic, dangerous, or simply confusing. His rivalry with Pistol over Nell Quickly, the hostess both men wanted to marry, predates the play and colours their uneasy wartime camaraderie, a grudge patched over rather than resolved by the demands of the French campaign.
He contributes little to the military action directly, appearing mainly in the comic scenes among the common soldiers, where his clipped, repetitive speech provides a counterpoint to Pistol's overblown rhetoric. Where Pistol performs bravado at length, Nym performs almost nothing at all, his silences and shrugs carrying their own kind of comic deflation.
His end comes offstage and almost in passing: like Bardolph, Nym is hanged for theft during the campaign, a fact reported rather than dramatized, folded into the general reckoning of losses among the common soldiery that the play sets against the miraculously low count of English dead at Agincourt. He exits the story as quietly as he moved through it.
Motivation
Nym is motivated by the same opportunism that drives Bardolph and Pistol, tempered by a fatalistic, close-mouthed acceptance of whatever the humor of the moment happens to bring — profit when it is available, and resignation when it is not.
Personality
Nym's entire comic identity rests on a single repeated phrase and a general economy of speech that makes him the quietest and driest of the tavern company — where Pistol overperforms, Nym underperforms, and the contrast is the joke.