Summary: Prologue
The Chorus—a single character, whose speeches open each
of the play’s five acts—steps forward and announces that we are
about to watch a story that will include huge fields, grand battles,
and fighting kings. The Chorus notes, however, that we will have
to use our imaginations to make the story come to life: we must
imagine that the small wooden stage is actually the fields of France
and that the few actors who will appear on the stage are actually
the huge armies that fight to the death in those fields.
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Prologue →
Summary: Act I, scene i
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, two
powerful English churchmen, confer with one another. They both express concern
about a bill that has been brought up for the consideration of the
king of England, Henry V. Canterbury and Ely don’t want the king
to pass this bill into law because it would authorize the government
to take away a great deal of the church’s land and money. The money
would be used to maintain the army, support the poor, and supplement
the king’s treasury. The clergymen, who have been made wealthy and
powerful by this land and money, naturally want to keep it for themselves.
In order to achieve his goal, the Archbishop of Canterbury
has come up with a clever political strategy. The young King Henry
V has been thinking about invading France, for he believes he has
a claim to the throne of France as well. Canterbury anticipates
that a war would distract the king from considering the bill to
confiscate church property. So, to encourage Henry to concentrate
on the invasion, Canterbury has made a promise to the king: he will
raise a very large donation from the clergymen of the church to
help fund the king’s war efforts.
Canterbury and Ely also spend some time admiring the
king’s virtue and intelligence. They note that “[t]he courses of
his youth promised it not” (I.i.25)—in other
words, no one knew that the king would turn out so well, considering
he wasted his adolescence taking part in “riots, banquets, [and]
sports” (I.i.57) and hanging around with
lowlifes. His reformation has been nothing short of miraculous.
The new, improved Henry is about to meet with the delegation of
French ambassadors who have come to England. Ely and Canterbury
head for the throne room to participate in the meeting.
Read a translation of
Act I, scene i →
Analysis: Prologue and Act I, scene i
The Chorus, or Prologue, appears at the beginning of every
act to introduce the action that follows, serving as a commentator
as the action of the play progresses. Shakespeare frequently makes
use of epilogues (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The
Tempest), but the recurring Chorus is atypical for him.
The Chorus serves a different purpose in every act, but its general
role is to fire the audience’s imagination with strong descriptive
language that helps to overcome the visual limitations of the stage.
At the start of Act I, the Chorus’s specific purpose is to apologize
for the limitations of the play that is to follow. This use of apology,
usually as a means of encouraging the audience to express its approval,
was a common technique in the drama of Shakespeare’s time, though
it was more often put into an epilogue that followed the play.
The Chorus’s comments emphasize the fact that the play
is a performance that requires the audience’s mental cooperation
to succeed. From the outset, the play suggests the impossibility
of presenting the events as they really were, as the Chorus vainly wishes
for “[a] kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to
behold the swelling scene” (I.Prologue.3–4).
But even as he (on Shakespeare’s stage, a single actor would have
played the Chorus) apologizes for the fact that his stage cannot
show the full reality of events, the Chorus uses striking language
to help the audience picture that reality for themselves: “Think,
when we talk of horses, that you see them, / Printing their proud
hoofs i’th’ receiving earth” (I.Prologue.26–27).
The Chorus’s opening invocation of the muse, a classical figure
of creative inspiration, also brings to mind the first lines of
ancient epics of war, such as Virgil’s Aeneid,
and helps to situate Henry V within the imaginative
tradition of ancient war epics that depict the deeds of great heroes.
Shakespeare uses his most characteristic meter for the Chorus’s
speech: slightly irregular iambic pentameter—that is, lines composed
of five feet, or groups of syllables, with the emphasis on the second
syllable of each foot. The irregularities of the meter tend to call
attention to certain important words and inject energy into the
passage. The iambic pentameter continues as the action begins, although
with far less rigor.
