When The Life of Henry the Fift (sic) was first performed c. 1599, the warrior king’s heroic deeds at Agincourt and beyond (1415-1420) were well-established and the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) still fresh in the collective memory. Even the war in Ireland (1593-1603) was still going in England’s favour: Elizabethans were feeling increasingly prosperous under their long-ruling Virgin Queen, and Shakespeare’s history plays capture the buoyant optimism of the era.
Nowhere has this spirit of optimism been given more lasting expression than in young Harry’s triumphs - drawn up before our eyes not with the help of actual horses printing their proud hooves i'th'receiving earth, but through the words spoken by the Chorus, and the images we must form in our minds. This, too, sets the play apart from other contemporary efforts whose values may have been the same but whose methods were steeped in ancient tradition. With Henry V, it is the black-cloaked Chorus we must trust to paint in vivid colours the perillous narrow Ocean or the vasty fields of France.
Shakespeare certainly did not invent the institution of the Chorus; as a dramatic device it is as old as the theatre itself. Nor did he come up with the idea of a framing monologue. Their combination, however, creates a powerful new entity: as the narrator of off-stage events, the Chorus ensures that the unity of action is preserved and the goodwill of the audience is sought, both in accordance with the “rules.” But his profuse apologies for the alleged inadequacies of the production have reminded some critics of the play’s “essential simplicity,” which has led others to comment sarcastically on the “simplicity” of the Bristol production; while a third cluster noted vaguely the way in which Shakespeare here “forestalled modern dramatic methods.”
Since the critic does not elaborate on those modern methods, ironically, he illustrates the very point he is making: the growing self-awareness of the modern age brought with it an increasing abstraction in all forms of artistic expression. There were exceptions, of course, even at the height of the modern period: in 1953, none other than the Bristol director pondered the question and came to the pragmatic conclusion that Shakespeare felt the need to apologize for the perceived shortcomings of his presentation because the plague had decimated the cast - surely his imaginary forces could not have failed him more spectacularly: it is not merely the goodwill of the audience, but the quintessential Romantic call for the willing suspension of disbelief that the Chorus formulates - two centuries before Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s now familiar coinage.
Perhaps we ought to be surprised that the Chorus never tells us how to feel about the imaginary scenes he evokes. And perhaps no such appeal is needed because the effect of the imagination on our emotions is very much in evidence to this day - as it was in 1953: the success or failure of any production of Henry V must needs be measured by the ability of the Chorus to impress the first night critics, a coterie of hardened professionals who generally pride themselves on their emotional detachment. In the case of the Bristol production, emotional detachment is not what emerges from a study of the wildly, violently diverging views on the merits (or otherwise) of individual players, and of the entire project.
Underwhelmed by John Neville’s low-key Henry, the Bristol commentators were not even tempted to sing his praises and seized instead on what was by the sheer force of its intensity the more compelling display of the two when it opened on 2 June 1953: from the mildly appreciative “Patrick McGoohan sets the attacking mood of the production with a vivid Chorus” and friendly nods to the other parts played by the same actor in “the company’s versatility is shown by such performances as […] Patrick McGoohan’s humorously conceived Chorus, stately French herald and knock-about MacMorris,” and a full essay extolling the virtues of the Chorus without a single reference to the performer who brought him to life in the Zurich press, where the company appeared for two nights.
By the time the play arrived in London on 30 June 1953, the mood had shifted, though the focus remained very much on the efforts of the Chorus: “It is upon our imagination that we must work, though the Chorus of Patrick McGoohan, who exhorts us to do this, is unleashed upon us with an astonishing savagery. Instead of gently coaxing these imaginary forces, Mr McGoohan would bludgeon us into submission as he bludgeons the rich, sinewy verse at his disposal,” followed by the anything-but-graceful coup de grâce: “a Henry V which cannot initially put into the field a Chorus rather better than the well-intending young actor who plays it here is a Henry V severely handicapped.”
As a play of war and victory, of a confident nation in its ascendancy, Henry V has served to embellish many a festive state occasion, despite the softly-foreboding whispers of impending decline by the all-knowing Chorus at the end of the play. The Bristol premiere was scheduled to coincide with the coronation of Elizabeth II and, like the all-knowing Chorus, we can pronounce that, much to the credit of the well-meaning young actor, his fiery mused proved to be no handicap. Shakespeare survived the vicious assault by the Bristol bunch of “ruffians.” Elizabeth II still reigns supreme.
