“HENRY V” — ALL GONE NOW
I’m so far out in left field with this one that I can’t even see the stadium from where I am now. Still, here goes.
So much critical space has been taken up with questions about Henry V himself — Who or what was he? Did Shakespeare like him or did he not? — that something possibly rather important has been put so far aside that it would be beyond consideration in any discussion of how this play came to be.
It was a technical, artistic challenge for its author. Well, I suppose all of them were really, but with this one he presented it rather nakedly. This is how the play begins:
Chorus
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
This is unlike any other play in the canon. Henry IV, Part 2 does open with a kind of prologue, delivered by Rumor, which tells us where we are in the story and sets up where we’re going to go in Part 2. It sticks to the story however — not the staging of it. In every other play Shakespeare “takes you” somewhere else, puts you there and tells a story: France, or the “seacoast of Bohemia,” or Italy, or Greece, or Rome and Ancient Egypt. He does not, however, tell you that he’s doing that; it’s understood. That’s the function of the theatre. Here, though, he apparently wants you never to forget it. Through the play Chorus will return to remind you, time and again, that this is a story being told, by actors, in a theatre.
Shakespeare is showing off in a fashion, but he does it so well that the audience can only gratefully applaud. However, you can only really see this when you see it as a play, in a theatre, with living actors. The theatre invites, instructs, strengthens and enriches the imagination — the imaginative power — as books do. Films rarely appeal to the imagination. You need Agincourt? You got it. You need “proud hoofs?” You got ’em. Films started it and television, somewhat to our sorrow, has made it accessible 24 hours a day.
Art, by its very nature, encourages imaginative thought, and educated imagination is needed now more than it ever was. “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.”
Henry V, at this time is best known through one or both of the two films — Olivier’s and Branagh’s. Both were handsomely done. Olivier’s I credit with lighting a flame for me, as an actor — especially in the plays of Shakespeare — that remains unextinguished. I saw it again recently, after many years, and admired it afresh.
Each of the films provides something important. Olivier’s appeared in 1943 in reponse to the German onslaught to bolster the courage of the British people, and it surely did that. It also came the closest of the two films to presenting it as it was originally meant to do. The film begins in the Globe in Shakespeare’s day — the trumpeted announcement of the performance, the entrance of the crowd and the stir and excitement of the actors backstage preparing. Olivier is there — he also directed it — about to give one of the finest performances of his long career.
Chorus, in his Elizabethan finery steps out onto the small open stage and the play begins. The Prologue concluded, we go to the inner above where Felix Aylmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Robert Helpmann as the Bishop of Ely — actors playing their parts — are laying plans to encourage war with France. Soon enough we will actually be there. So the film goes back and forth from the confinement of the theatre to, in time, the open battle ground of Agincourt. Imagination no longer needed.
Branagh’s telling of the story requires no imagination at all. It’s strength lies in the way it is spoken. I think I shall never hear the opening prologue better done than Derek Jacobi’s reading of those familiar lines. Indeed, the whole film, as something to hear, was magnificently confident and clear. It was alive, and that, in itself, is worth the price of admission. Still, again, imagination is not called on.
If there is little or nothing to imagine the audience cannot take its intended place in the story that Shakespeare has to tell. It’s how he wrote it. He needed all of us imagining — and each of us would be imagining differently, though all of us would be. . . There. The battle done, a treaty is drawn up, the dead carried away, and a royal marriage arranged. The actors are applauded, the stage is emptied and Chorus appears for the last time — alone:
“Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England: Fortune made his sword;
By which the world’s best garden be achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown’d King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed:
Which oft our stage hath shown; and, for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.”
Applause. Crowd sounds as the theatre is gradually emptied. Silence.
All gone now. But we were part of it. We were there. We will remember. It was only actors on a stage, but aren’t we all?
