Shakespeare’s Muse of Fire

Abstract

In 1599 both Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker debuted works with choruses that evoked muses and enjoined audiences to augment the limits of theatre with their power of imagination.1 Sometime in the spring or early summer, Shakespeare’s Chorus sighed onstage for ‘a muse of fire that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention’ and create ‘a kingdom for a stage’.2 Addressing the audience directly, the Chorus directs that they allow the actors to ‘cram/Within this wooden O the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt’.3 And at Christmastime, Dekker’s prologue to Old Fortunatus informed playgoers that ‘this small Circumference must stand/For the imagined Sur-face of much land’ and begged ‘your thoughts to help poore Art’.4 The conceit is unusual and unlike any earlier dramatic prologues: both Dekker and Shakespeare set the stage, so to speak, by drawing attention to theatre’s status as mimetic art. The timeline of, and relationship between, these two plays has been well debated.5 Their opening choruses are too alike to be coincidental productions of a particular moment in time; but their chronology is complicated by the fact that the 1600 quarto of Henry V left out all the Chorus’s lines. The current prevailing view, argued in earlier issues of this journal by James Bednarz, is that—despite the later publishing date—Shakespeare was likely Dekker’s source.6 The investigation may close there, with this inventive explosion of mimesis as further evidence of Shakespeare’s ‘imaginary puissance’ (to borrow a phrase out of context from Henry V’s Chorus).7 However, a case can be made for a little-studied volume of poetry and poetic theory by King James VI/I, titled Essayes of a Prentise and published in Scotland in 1584, as a potential and unexplored source for Shakespeare’s (and/or Dekker’s) Chorus. In the short sonnet sequence that opens the volume, James repeats a rhetorical plea for assistance with his verses’ mimetic aspirations that, paradoxically, draws attention to its status as art in much the same fashion that the more well-known choruses do.