Analysis of the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V
In the prologue to Henry
V, Shakespeare effectively tells us how to watch−and how to read−his plays.
The prologue begins with the expression of a desire for: (1) a “Muse of fire”
that could lead the poet to the pinnacle of historical truth; (2) “a kingdom
for a stage”; (3) “princes to act”; and (4) “monarchs to behold” the spectacle.
Since the story we are to see concerns kings, princes, and monarchs, who would
be more fit to represent−and to observe−the events of the story than the actual
characters involved in it? In this the poet conveys a kind of ideal for the
theater, an ideal which would equate it to the world. But contrary to what
might seem at first, that is not the poet’s ideal precisely, as we shall see.
Shakespeare
knows his audience is familiar with the military conquests and glory of Henry V
and would therefore expect a great show, that indeed they would like to watch
something as close to the real deal as possible. Yet he knows also the
limitations and the true nature of his medium. If we could have “a kingdom for
a stage,” then we should see the “warlike Harry” himself perform his famous
deeds, but unfortunately for the audience’s unrealistic expectations we do not.
So he proceeds to a captatio
benevolentiae, calling them “gentles all” and begging their pardon,
demeaning himself and his company as “flat unraisèd spirits” (note the pleonasm
in “flat unraisèd,” meant to show greater humility), portraying his stage as an
“unworthy scaffold” (rather than a “kingdom”), and asking forgiveness for being
bold enough to present his audience with a paltry rendition of “so great an
object.” After all, “this cockpit,” that is, his theater, cannot contain the “vasty
fields of France” nor the “very” soldiers that did battle at Agincourt. Or can
it?
The word
O is used three times in the text up
to line 15. The first time it is clearly an interjection expressing a desire.
The second time the word is used to represent the letter O itself and, by association, Shakespeare’s theater, whose shape
was roughly circular. The third time it is primarily an interjection again,
though Shakespeare’s “O, pardon” could also be interpreted as “pardon the O,”
that is, “forgive my theater” for not being the world and moreover, as in line
15 there is reference to the round-shaped number zero, “forgive this nothing”
that is my theater, my company, my play. However, as the poet will tell us in
the sequence, this nothing, this O,
this theater, can be all the world. “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare says
in As You Like It, and conversely a
stage can be all the world, as he is telling us here. It can effectively be the
globe.
All
that is required is that we let the players “on [our] imaginary forces work.”
Just as a “crooked figure” may represent “a million” through the power of our
imagination, so may the “ciphers,” the nothings of the theater depict this
great tale. Shakespeare plays on two meanings of the word account−the reporting of events and a mathematical operation−to
show us, by means of the incongruous metaphor of “ciphers in a tale,” that the
procedure for reading mathematics and for reading a play is basically one and
the same. It is “mak[ing] imaginary puissance.” Mathematics and the theater are
both forms of representation, and merely the degree in which the power of the
imagination needs to be exerted is different in each case.
When
we are watching a play, we need to “suppose” place, character, action, and time.
First, the poet informs us, we must imagine that within the walls of his
theater “are now confined two mighty monarchies,” and here the meaning of monarchies, by metonymy, is primarily that of “countries,”
namely, England and France, as is made clear by the statement in the following
two lines that their high coastlines (the “high uprearèd … fronts”) are divided
by the “per’lous narrow ocean” of the English Channel. Secondarily, monarchies evidently refers to the
political systems of each country. But there is yet a tertiary sense, anticipating
the poet’s description of character. The word may refer to the country’s kings
themselves, in conjunction with an understanding of “fronts” not as “forward-facing
sides” but as “faces,” and so the lines would be painting a picture of the
proud monarchs staring down each other. In the second place, we ought to “into
a thousand parts divide one man,” that is, allow one actor to play multiple
characters in our imagination, and perhaps also, foreshadowing the playwright’s
description of action and the violence of war that is to come later in the
story, to envision men being cut into pieces in battle. Next, Shakespeare asks
us to visualize quite vividly and concretely the action of horses “printing
their proud hoofs” in the ground, indicating to us the level of detail in which
we should conceive of action. And, finally, he requests that with our thoughts
we “deck our kings,” “carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,” and “turning”
the sum of several years “into an hour-glass.”
In
this last entreaty, although it refers chiefly to time, the poet fuses together
the diverse categories of place, character, action, and time, signaling that
they are not independent one from the other. This fusion is aptly expressed in
the word deck. It means first of all “to
attire” and thus refers to character, but if we consider that clothing was one
of the few elements of spectacle that Shakespeare materially supplied, this
sense loses some of its purchase. Perhaps the poet means, by to deck, “to put on the deck of a ship,”
whereby the kings could be carried “here and there,” from England to France, or
“to furnish with a dais,” in which case we could imagine the kings in all their
majesty on their raised platforms of state. The placing of the kings on a dais
provides a setting of place, and their carrying from one country to another on
a ship provides a description of action. But action occurs in time and place,
and is performed by characters; and therein are compounded all the categories.
We are to fill the gaps between the actions presented in the play with
imagining the actions that ought to have taken place but were not shown, and
likewise we should turn “th’accomplishment of many years” into a figurative “hour-glass”
that can easily be handled in our minds, accelerating time to jump “o’er times”
not staged, or else to compress them into the span of a few hours, to make them
all revolve in the duration of the play.
Shakespeare
is telling us that, in order to properly understand a play, we need suspension
of disbelief, even though this concept would only be named by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in 1817, and to “piece out [his] imperfections with [our] thoughts,”
that is, to actively engage our “imaginary forces” in making the play come
alive. These forces can only be worked upon in the sense of being directed or
guided by the playwright and performers; the burden of imagining is under our
responsibility. But to aid us in this task, the poet asks us to “admit” the
character who presents the prologue as “chorus to this history.” The chorus in
Greek drama often had the function of commenting on−thus helping the audience
understand−the action of a play, and that is the purpose of the chorus in Henry V. In total, there are six
interventions of the chorus in the play, this one being the first. And, “prologue-like,”
it pleads for our patience, our gentleness, and our kindly judgment. Aside from
their obvious meanings, the words patience,
gently, and kindly carry as well other semantic possibilities that seem to fit
the context. We need patience not only in the sense of excusing the natural
limitations of the dramatic medium, but also in the etymological sense of letting
ourselves be worked upon or in the sense of docility. We need to hear the play
gently not only in the sense of hearing it politely or in good disposition, but
also of hearing it like gentlemen−which, in Shakespeare’s time, would have presupposed
a certain level of literary education. And lastly, we need to judge the
performance kindly not just in the sense of doing so with kindness, but above
all of judging it according to its kind or species, that is, of judging it not
as actual history, but as an actual play.
Finally,
something remains to be said about the word history
in the context of the prologue, and indeed of all the so-called “history plays”
of Shakespeare. The first desire expressed by the poet in the prologue is “for
a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.” Our
propensity would likely be towards taking the word invention to mean “creativity,” but etymologically it means “to
come up against” or “to run into,” in
venire, and therefore we would be correct rather in interpreting it as “discovery”−the
discovery of the historical facts as they truly occurred. The poet mentions
this discovery as the first element in a list of unrealistic desires regarding
the theater, so we should be wise in not taking the first desire at face value
either. It seems highly improbable that a man so intimate with stories would
foolishly suppose his condensed and stylized version of a story from an already
condensed and stylized chronicle could be called history in our modern sense.
If he calls his plays “histories” it is not because they give scientific
treatment to historical fact, but simply because they deal with historical
matter, with events, factual or otherwise, from the past.
