[In the following essay, Walch argues that the Chorus helps us distinguish the political ideology represented in the play from the protagonist and the play itself Far from being an objective reporter of events, the critic contends, the Chorus is a propagandist who underscores the discrepancy between mythology and history, and highlights the use of ideology as a mechanism of power.]

Among the features specific to the text of Henry V its apparent property of giving rise to particularly acrimonious division of opinion has often been noted. To say that there are two camps sharply opposing each other is indeed almost a commonplace of critical literature, the one camp fervently applauding what they see as a panegyric upon, indeed a rousing celebration of, 'The mirror of all Christian Kings"¹ and most successful English monarch of all the histories; and the followers of the other camp deriding with no less conviction the exaltation of a machiavellian conqueror in a rapacious and, after all, senseless war. Little wonder, then, that in 1939 Mark Van Doren should have thought even Shakespeare's genius baffled vis-à-vis such hopeless material;² that E. M. W. Tillyard should have consid-ered Henry V, remarkably enough at the time of the Second World War, a dramatic failure on account of its puerile patriotism and lack of form;³ or that Moody E. Prior should consider the play 'A theatrically handsome fulfillment of an obligation, performed with skill but without deep conviction'.⁴ Puzzled by such an unprecedented attack of Tudor apologetics suffered by an author almost simultaneously engaged in composing Julius Caesar (1599) and Hamlet (1599-1601), scholars have since suggested readings of the text assuming either that 'The play is full of ironies, most of which challenge the legend, well-established at the time the play was written, of Henry the "mirror of all Christian Kings" '⁵ or of disparate presentations co-existing in unbridgeable contradiction: Henry as ideal ruler and brutal conqueror for instance;⁶ or as a politically strong monarch and weak human being;⁷ or Harry as model ruler saddled with a nation sadly deficient in moral virtue,⁸ to give just a few examples.

I am not quarrelling with interpretations of this kind which add inscriptions which can enhance our understanding of the text. But one of the things that seem to have happened in the process of an intensifying search for implicit ironies is that the dramatic character of the protagonist has dwindled in stature. He has been reduced even from Hazlitt's 'Amiable monster' to a rather commonplace person, at times intensely unpleasant, occasionally a neurotic, compulsively circumnavigating the pressures of having to make decisions,⁹ and so forth.

I'd better say at this point that this is not my view of the protagonist, not the image suggested to me by the text, and even less by its representations on the stage. For on the stage the young king appears to have a knack of capturing audiences by his youthful and intelligent vitality even against their will, as it were, in spite of all reservations, triumphing sometimes over directors whose sympathy he does not seem to enjoy. In fact, Harry on the stage seems to wrest sympathies from audiences understandably reluctant to embrace the ideological tenets, the Tudor orthodoxies, and above all the warmongering with which he must be associated. From that derives the point I wish to make. As Robert Egan has shown, negative as well as positive reactions to the text have, encouraged by the Chorus, usually been produced by identifying both the central character and the play as a whole with the ideological material represented in it.¹⁰ But that is just what the text carefully sets out to avoid. That is why the general poststructuralist objection to all representation as establishing or reinforcing authority can be seen not to apply: Shakespeare does not reinforce authority by representing or re-writing or inscribing in the text an interpretation of an historical personage agreed upon in advance. As I shall argue, the dramatist does far more in the text than write a pageant, at best ambiguous—but ambiguity will not solve our problem—, about the audience's favourite ruler. He creates, through his text, the score for a theatricalization of that material, and in the process turns the text—if I may vary one of the Chorus's invigorating appeals to our imagination—into a 'quick forge and working-house' (5, Chorus, 1. 23) of ideology.

The history of Henry V in the theatre and the other more recent mass media shows distinctly, more clearly perhaps than is the case with most Shakespearian plays, that the play's reputation has depended heavily on its political and ideological contexts. Since the Second World War theatres in many countries seem to have been somewhat wary of a text that in times of national crisis was put to superbly efficient use as a patriotic morale booster. Sir Laurence Olivier's war-time film, naturally always referred to in this connection, demonstrates this kind of significant use of the text, always keeping in mind some 1700 lines cut and others added by the filmmakers.

I am not quarrelling over violations of some presumed sanctity of the play's text, let alone of a text with a single fixed meaning. I share the interest in the text as an interest in the history of social uses of—in this case—dramatic material, uses without exception historically and socially specific. And I also believe that texts cannot be reduced to successive inscriptions during the course of history, but that accounts of the moment of the original production of a text, although rightly no longer privileged, are far from irrelevant.¹¹Henry V is so pertinent to that kind of historical ap-proach because it is not only, like all art, ideological in the sense of generally being part of the process of social consciousness. This text is rather special among Shakespeare's works in parading, or even flaunting, the ideology—in the narrower sense of the term—represented in it. This is the major function of 1.2, with the state's top dignitaries engaged in ideological preparation for the war against France. Thus the scene offers a rich choice of official thinking, culminating, first, in Canterbury's famous legalistic dispensation, and, second and even closer to the heart of authority, in the same speaker's no less renowned sermon on the commonwealth of the honey-bees, the lesson of which had been so well rehearsed by Shakespeare's audience in a lifetime of church attendance.

Although it would now be probably harder than it used to be to find romantic believers in Shakespeare's unqualified acceptance of the doctrine of Order and Degree and absolute ideological Obedience, the actual aesthetic significance of the dramatist's inclusion of such weighty contemporary ideological material is still widely underrated. Canterbury's disappearance from the play after that scene may tell us that he has done the job assigned to him within the plot, but certainly not that the rest of the play is unconcerned with ideology. On the contrary, concern with the consequences of, and the historical problems inherent in, the doctrine placed so obtrusively in the text, and all it stands for, is central to the play as a whole.

That this concern was felt to be disturbing or at least irritating may be inferred from 'The apparent modesty of its early success'¹² in striking contrast to much later exhilarating celebrations of the hero and hence of the play. A look at what the very first social uses of the text have to tell us can be quite revealing, even allowing for its somewhat hypothetical character. For if we do not confine ourselves to considering only the practical side of the genesis of the First Quarto of 1600 as 'A cut form of the play used by the company for a reduced cast on tour in the provinces',¹³ but also, as the editor of the new Oxford edition suggests and as I think we should, the ideological quality of those cuts, we can indeed see that nearly all 'difficulty in the way of an unambiguous patriotic interpretation of Henry and his war'¹⁴ have been removed: all references to the Church's mixed motives for, and its financial support of, the war; to Henry's personal responsibility for Falstaff's fate; to motives beyond bribery for the conspiracy against Henry; to Henry's 'savage ultimatum' and the devastation wreaked by him on France; MacMorris and some of the choruses.¹⁵ In other words, it was not only that the touring company had to make shift with its casting. Profiting from the experience of the play's original performances, we may assume, they also saw to it that technically necessary textual reductions were employed to make the text less recalcitrant to meeting the conventional audience expectations of a dashing hero confirming their own superiority.

That recalcitrance is not restricted to isolated passages but deeply structures the text as a whole. To give at least an indication of this, I shall isolate the character of the Chorus as a means which, although behaving in a deceptively epic way as a character, can be shown, I believe, to have an essential dramatic function within the context of the work. This consists in playing with the audience's conventional expectations in a number of intricate ways. The Chorus titillates those expectations nurtured by the illustrious 'gentles all' (Prologue, 11. 8, 11) in the abjectly decried 'cockpit', but raised also by previous triumphs prepared by Shakespeare's 'Rough and all-unable pen' (Epilogue, 1. 1) for 'This unworthy scaffold' (Prologue, 1. 10) which are then fulfilled grudgingly or not at all. The Chorus as Prologue promises battle scenes the grandeur of which the audience will have to use their 'Imaginary forces' (Prologue, 1. 18) to enjoy properly, while the gentles remember very well previous battles—Bosworth Field, Angiers, Shrewsbury—'Which oft our stage hath shown' (Epilogue, 1. 13) so magnificently. The Chorus conjures up, or deplores the absence of, a super-cinemascopic verisimilitude the humble author and his platform stage never dreamt of supplying, or indeed had any need of.

The Chorus thus theatricalizes the whole problem of representation on the Elizabethan stage, only to use what is in effect a brilliant defence of Shakespeare's non-naturalistic aesthetic to lead the audience into assuming, from their previous experience and expectation, that they know very well what they can expect to see happening on the stage. In a puzzling way, they are both confirmed in this—as far as the manner of representation is concerned—and disappointed, concerning the matter of representation. Thus, for instance, while the 'Muse of fire', the 'casques' and the 'proud hoofs' of Agincourt are invoked by the Prologue, in contrast to previous history plays this one does not show us a single actual battle scene. The only scene set during the battle has the cowardly and greedy clown Pistol taking an equally scared Frenchman prisoner, a parody of heroic combat.

We are gradually made aware, by the way the Chorus operates, that he cannot be relied upon to be always talking of what is actually represented on the stage. On somewhat closer scrutiny, he does not seem to be operating innocently 'As a peculiar feature, connecting and explaining the action as it proceeds' at all, as he was thought to do by Charles Kean¹⁶ and a majority, it seems, of scholars since. In fact, the Chorus seems quite far from 'describing and connecting the quick succession of events, the rapid changes of locality; and the elucidating passages which might otherwise appear confused or incongruous . . . '¹⁷ We are made to stumble on such incongruity, created rather than elucidated by the Chorus, when the very first dialogue opens, and when after the Prologue's eulogy the very first line deals, not with patriotism, as we've been promised by the Prologue, but with ecclesiastic financial transactions, something nowhere hinted at in the Chorus. Equally, we certainly do not see the French 'Shake in their fear', even though evidently they should, and our expectations of seeing 'This grace of kings' (2, Chorus, 11. 14, 28) foil the heinous attempt on his life by the conspirators, whose sole motive he says is money (although 'crowns'—'crowns imperial, crowns and coronets' are given prominence as 'Promis'd' to Harry's 'English Mercuries' earlier on in the same Chorus; II, Chorus, ll. 7-11), our expectations are at least delayed because we are first introduced to the down-and-out Cheapside gang. About these, however, and the common soldiers so prominent in the play, the Chorus is conspicuously silent. They are mentioned only once, collectively, 'Mean and gentle all', presumably flattered as joint recipients of 'A little touch of Harry in the night' (4, Chorus, 11. 45, 47), obviously for propaganda purposes. Again, contradicting 4, Chorus's announcement of a forth-going Harry 'Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent' visiting and cheering up 'All his host' (ll. 30-33), Harry is actually shown as rather isolated throughout all the acts except the last. At least in the Folio text he does not approach the soldiers. They approach him, and what follows is the long, tortuous discussion, verbal fighting within his own camp taking the place of armed combat in that of the enemy. In the Quarto text, the dialogue has been changed drastically.¹⁸ Here, Henry does approach the soldiers and speaks to them first, reversing the Folio situation and thus bringing it into line both with the Chorus and with audience expectations based on it and on Prince Hal's behaviour of yore. Just as 2, Chorus ('Honour's thought / Reigns solely in the breast of every man', 11. 3-4), 3, Chorus, also announces the splendid readiness of the whole nation to achieve heroic deeds of war ('For who is he, whose chin is but enrich'd / With one appearing hair, that will not follow / These cull'd and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?' ll. 22-4). But we are made aware of a majority back home in England safely tucked up in bed.

The function of the Chorus cannot, then, possibly be confined to the epic one of providing information. The information provided by him is, in the first place, for the most part superfluous, for we learn nothing from it about the plot, about Harry and his world that we do not learn much better from the dialogues. Since 2, Chorus eagerly tells us how the traitor scene will end, obviously the structure and meaning of the events are meant to be more important than their mere course (the verdicts had been drawn up before the trial in any case).

This interpretative dimension of the Chorus has been appreciated both on the stage, for example by Mrs Kean's representation of the Chorus as Clio, the muse of history, but operating typically as 'The presiding charm'¹⁹ of the play; and in Eamon Grennan's description a few years ago of the Chorus as a commissioned historiographer who shows his royal subject making history.²⁰ But if he is a historiographer, he is characteristically not merely recording events. He is bent on presenting his subject, the king, in the most glaringly idealized colours, and his war invariably in the rosiest of tones. He is much more than a functional epic device, neutral observer and reporter. He is a deeply involved maker of ideology. And while he is intent on convincing us that Harry is achieving the great victory virtually single-handed, and that with God's assistance he is thus making history as a Great Man of History, we are made to understand, through the different components of the complete play's text, that Henry, just as his historiographer and propagandist, is actually busy creating his, Harry's, legend.

The Chorus in Henry V is thus, in my understanding of the play, not a later addition, but indispensable to its functioning. The Chorus is an integral part of Shakespeare's strategy not in spite of his information being unreliable, but because it is unreliable, and because what he does not tell us is more important than what he does tell us. Shakespeare thus creates a unique dramatic structure in his last history play in order to do something completely different from what he had been doing in his previous histories. The genetic context with Julius Caesar and Hamlet, which now appears anything but a non sequitur on the part of Shakespeare, can actually further our understanding of the play's relation to the other histories, in particular to Richard II. By this new structure, by emphasizing not the events but the functioning of ideology, the conspicuously ancient theatrical device is made to ask, through the means of its art, completely new and shocking questions concerning the function of the monarch himself ('O hard condition! / Twin-born with greatness'; 'Thou idol ceremony', 4.1.239-40, 246). By showing the young king not shining in the world of the Chorus' creation but living in the world of history Henry becomes a complex character. Moreover, the play's questions are addressed to problems concerning the nature of history, its motivating forces and the ideological function of its representation. The Chorus can make the Elizabethan audience aware of the political significance of these questions by highlighting the discrepancies between the orthodox historical legend perpetuated by those in power and the ideology connected with it on the one hand, and the actual movement of history on the other, and thus shows the official ideology up for what it has become: an illusion effectively used as an instrument of power.

Notes

¹ 1, Chorus, 1. 6. All references to Henry V (henceforth in the text) follow The Arden Shakespeare, edited by J. H. Walter (1954).

² Cf. Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York, 1939), p. 179. For a brief summary of divergent criticism of Henry V see my 'Tudor-Legende und Geschichtsbewegung in The Life of King Henry V: Zur Rezeptionslenkung durch den Chorus', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 122 (1986), pp. 37f, notes 2-17.

³ E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), pp. 304-314.

⁴ Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power. Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays (Evanston, 1973), p. 341.

⁵ John Wilders, The Lost Garden. A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays (1978), p. 141.

⁶ Valentina p. Komarova, 'Heinrich V und das Problem des idealen Herrschers', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 115 (1979), pp. 98-116.

⁷ W. L. Godshalk, 'Henry V's Politics of Non-Responsibility', Cahiers Elisabéthains, 17 (1980), 11.

⁸ Prior, p. 272.

⁹ Cf. Godshalk, passim.

¹⁰ Robert Egan, 'A Muse of Fire: Henry V in the Light of Tamburlaine', in Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968), p. 15. Egan does not, however, follow up his own conclusions but reduces his analysis to another opposition of the kind mentioned before, that of conqueror and human being; cf. p. 19.

¹¹ Cf. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, 'Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-text of The Tempest', in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (1985), p. 193.

¹²Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 1982), p. 12.

¹³ Walter, p. XXXV.

¹⁴ Taylor, p. 12.

¹⁵ For the details see Taylor, pp. 12, 20.

¹⁶ Charles Kean (ed.), Shakespeare's Play of 'King Henry the Fifth', Arranged for Representation at The Princess's Theatre, with Historical and Explanatory Notes. As first performed on Monday, March 28, 1859 (n.d.), p. vi.

¹⁷ John William Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A. Including a summary of The English Stage for the Last Fifty Years, and a Detailed Account of the Management of the Princess's Theatre from 1850 to 1859. 2 vols (1859), vol. 2, p. 342.

¹⁸ Cf. Taylor, p. 43.

¹⁹ Cole, vol. 2, p. 342. Also quoted by Taylor, p. 57.Kean considered the idea of casting his wife as a female Chorus, which set a trend in productions of the play in England, very frankly and practically as 'An opportunity . . . to Mrs. Charles Kean, which the play does not otherwise supply, of participating in this, the concluding revival of her husband's management' of the Princess's Theatre. See Kean, p. vi.

²⁰ Eamon Grennan, '"This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son": Henry V and the Art of History', Papers on Language and Literature, 15 (1979), 370-82.