Yet Sit and See: on the Choruses in Shakespeare’s 'Henry V'

Whenever I think about Henry V, I think about Monmouth /Trefynwy, the Welsh border town where Henry was born and where (long ago) I used to teach. It’s a play I encountered first at the age of eleven, in the worst of all possible ways: reading it clumsily round the class. Four years later I ‘did’ it for O level, and watched the Laurence Olivier film; twenty years on, I took a coachload of my own pupils to see to see Kenneth Branagh playing Henry at Stratford in 1984. That was from Monmouth; there, too, I directed Henry V as a junior school play. I wanted to see if children aged 11-13 couldn’t get much more from the play by acting, rather than from just reading it round the class. Of course they could, and did: two of the boys, for whom this was their first real experience of acting, went on to become professional actors.

We acted in the round. My Chorus of a dozen young children were on-stage all the time, sitting around the edge of the circle and sometimes jumping up to be cheering crowds waving the troops off from Southampton or soldiers on the watch – ‘watch’ a key word in the play – the night before battle. Sometimes they spoke in unison, sometimes alone; at others, a small cluster of voices highlighted one phrase then passed it on to be added to by another cluster. Sometimes they moved as they spoke and perhaps they mimed, suiting the action to the word; at others they were still, letting words alone do the travelling and the audience do the thinking:

For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping ‘o’er time,

Turning th’accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass.

 

An hour-glass doesn’t just measure time; it turns it upside down, making past present, the old time new again. Through all the Choruses – and none of Shakespeare’s plays has more Choruses than this – run the words ‘imagination’, ‘imagine’, ‘imagined’: if our mind’s eye can’t see what the words and actions the players are trying to convey, we might as well leave the theatre right now. Life is too short: momentum is everything. Act 3’s Chorus begins:

 

Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies

In motion of no less celerity

Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen ….

 

‘Suppose … Behold …Follow, follow! … Behold …Suppose’:  these repeated words, stretched out across twenty-five lines, turn the whole of Act 3’s Chorus into an extended chiasmus, an hour-glass of words that turn back on themselves while the sands of time keep running.

 

But the Chorus of Act 4 (my Chorus – I learned it at prep school and still have it by heart) is different. It is the longest of them all and, by contrast with the excited pace of the earlier choruses, here time has slowed almost to a standstill:

 

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the poring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

 

‘Entertain conjecture’ – it’s impossible to say these two trisyllabic words quickly: their wide-open vowel sounds demand each syllable be given its full weight. Nowhere else in any of the Choruses do two such long-drawn-out words sit side by side, almost defying scansion. Together the invite us to conjecture/conjure in our mind’s eye this moment in the middle of a long night when sound and sight are almost indiscernible. On the one hand these two senses are personified as creatures creeping and peering over the terrain of the next day’s battle  – a landscape of carnage being engendered in the ‘foul womb of night’; on the other, they are fused into a single thick miasma that has seeped everywhere over the earth and ‘fills’ the great upturned porridge pot that both encloses and embodies the universe. 

 

In the next eleven lines, the ‘hum of either army’ and the ‘secret whispers of each other’s watch’ at first suggest a sense of balance: fire answers fire and steed threatens steed; likewise the armourers’ ‘busy hammers’ strike a ‘dreadful note of preparation’ from both camps. But now the cocks crow, the church bell tolls, and the Chorus pans from army to army. The French are ‘[over]confident and overlusty’: they impatiently ‘chide the cripple tardy-gaited night’ for limping ‘so tediously away’. The ‘poor condemned English’, by contrast, have nothing to do but wait ‘patiently’, like sacrificial animals ruminating on the fate in store for them. No one could call this ragtag of an army overconfident and over-lusty: half-starved and ill-equipped, they already appear to the moon looking down at them as just ‘so many horrid ghosts’.

 

Then Harry appears:

O now, who will behold

The royal captain of this ruined band

Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent?

 

The alliteration of (first) ‘royal’ and ‘ruined’ neatly contrasts the apparently hopeless state of the soldiers with the optimism of their king, a man with no time for the darkness of (second) the ‘weary and all-watchèd night’. Once again the hour-glass is turned on its head and the deadly darkness that had filled ‘the wide vessel of the universe’ is briskly replaced by ‘A largess universal like the sun’.  Harry’s gift for ‘thawing cold fear’ among the soldiers makes him seem godlike. Those wretches who were ‘pining and pale before’, now feel the warm glow of confidence that contact with the king creates. It used to be believed some illnesses might be cured if only the sufferer could be touched by a king, the Royal Touch relieving the King’s Evil (scrofula), for instance. Shakespeare’s ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ taps into this superstition. It’s also the Chorus’s final glimpse of the battlefield on the night before battle. After this, all he can do is apologise to the audience for what’s coming next: as acted, the battle will be no better than a ‘brawl ridiculous’:

 

Yet sit and see,

Minding true things by what their mockeries be.

 

Listen -watch -imagine.

 

Adrian Barlow

 

Illustrations: (i) A poster advertising the new museum at Agincourt (Azincourt, en France)’’

(ii) the discreet French memorial on a corner of the battlefield. The rough-hewn granite stele contains a simple cross, the one word ‘Azincourt’ and the date 1415. The small stone at its side speaks of ‘courage and faithfulness’ a lesson ‘to be remembered always.’ Photographs © the author.

 

 

I have written about Henry V once before, in Bottom, Thou art Translated – into Korean.