Dramatic Function of the Chorus in Henry the Fifth

Abstract

Shakespeare opens every act of his Henry the Fifth with chorus. This is quite unusual in his whole corpus, except Pericles. The chorus in Henry the Fifth does not merely function as a commentator on the dramatic action, but also narrates the main historical events of the play. However, in its narration and reading of main dramatic events, it is very selective in order to foreground Henry's heroic achievements as a warlord. The chorus emphasizes its limit of re-presentation of Henry's heroism on the stage. By admitting the physical insufficiency of the stage to contain the epic grandeur of a history play, the chorus appeals to the audience's sympathetic imagination to make up its limits. The heroic sublime is a Shakespearean strategy to make his audience participate in the critical appreciation of English historical events. Shakespeare's stage is a cauldron into which he puts 'the materials of English chronicles and historical narratives and reshuffles them to his dramatic plot. This Shakespearean re-forming of English history is analogous to the audience's creative and critical re-experience of their past. The chorus in the play incessantly tries to set up Henry as the national hero similar to William the Conqueror. In this sense the chorus stands in for the royalist view of English history. However, the discrepancy between the chorus's narration and dramatic action on the stage shows its partiality and even its distortion of historical significance. The traditional interpretation of the chorus's function was to equate it with Shakespeare the historian in his conservative support of the Tudor myth. This reading is proved wrong in the paper. The chorus ironically cancels and self-consumes its heroic image of Henry by appealing directly to the audience's imagination. The chorus always frustrates the expectations of the tantalized audience: the latter rather experiences painful bodily presence and national disunity disrupting a single and unified nation proclaimed by the chorus. The selective partiality of the chorus in the narration is implicitly juxtaposed with the historiography as a narrative emplotment. The audience experiences history as a story on the stage. Shakespeare's re-presentation of history is both re-forming and re-reading of it at once. He is sceptical and subversive of the Tudor myth, since he puts the whole English history of his dramatization in a hermeneutical circle which makes it refract and reflect itself.