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...editorial, and critical. The political context of 1599 was so charged, with the Irish campaign under way and with the order of the Privy Council against histories, that only a heavily cut version of the play was presumably allowed into print in 1600, from which all the choruses along with all mention of Essex, Ireland, and Scotland were excised. (1) The full text was restored in the 1623 Folio, but with a division of acts and scenes that blurred whatever design the choruses might carry. For all we know, it was not until Samuel Johnson decided that they were a reliable indication of the act structure of the play that they were regarded as the convenient starting point of each act. (2) The choruses thus appeared from the outset as unsettling and unsettled fragments. Later, their very rationale became a critical riddle:
Chorus figures and presenters are quite common in the plays of the 1570s and 1580s, but, as the skill of the dramatists improved, this device ... began to disappear. Drama became a complete form when the various tatters of older forms--allegorical figures, prologues, inductions, choruses and so forth were digested by the play proper ... It is odd, therefore, that Shakespeare who had already written many plays without resort to these old-fashioned devices, should employ a formal chorus in the play which brings to a close his preoccupation with the history of England. (3)
It is certainly difficult to account for the use of an outdated dramatic form as the chief structuring device of an otherwise groundbreaking play, unless one hypothesizes that the choruses do not originate in the familiar device of the prologue but in an altogether different, possibly nondramatic, form. Substantiating this requires the reader to "make imaginary puissance" and, "jumping o'er times" and distances, be briefly transported to London, Blackheath, and Rome (Prologue. 25, 29).
On 15 January 1558/9, the day preceding her coronation, Elizabeth rode in an open litter from the Tower of London to the Palace of Westminster, along Fenchurch Street and across Gracious Street to Cornhill, then along Cheapside into Fleet Street through Ludgate and past Temple Bar. She was shown on her way five allegorical pageants devised by the citizens of London, illustrating the functions of, and hopes in, the new queen. The occasion was duly recorded by Henry Machyn in his diary; by the Venetian ambassador, Il Schifanoya, in a letter dated 23 January 1558/9; and by Richard Mulcaster, in a tract commissioned by the London Corporation, published within nine days of the royal entry. Reprinted in 1559 and 1604, the tract made its way into the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed. (4) The ceremony became stage material after the queen's death, providing the opening dumb show of Thomas Dekker's Whore of Babylon and the closing pageant of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I.
The final chorus of Shakespeare's Henry V shows the king's return to England after Agincourt. He moves from "the English beach," where a cheering crowd of "men, with wives, and boys" greet him, to "Blackheath," where the mayor used to meet a returning sovereign for a show of welcome (V.Chorus. 9, 10, 16). The audience of the Globe is called on to make King Henry's procession into a triumph a l'antique, turning the mayor and his aldermen into "the senators of th'antique Rome" on their way to "fetch their conquering Caesar in" (V.Chorus. 26, 28). (5) The sovereign, however, abruptly puts the Roman triumph under erasure, relinquishing "full trophy, signal and ostent / Quite from himself to God" (V.Chorus. 21-2). Reallocating the preserves of God and warrior, Harry rewrites his victory as the sign of his legitimacy. With the fault of his father washed clean in the blood of Agincourt, he returns to England a king in his own right, symbolically crowned anew. A coronation entry fades in as the Roman triumph fades out. This, with hindsight, turns Harry's ride through France into a structural equivalent of the ride of the English sovereigns from the Tower to Westminster and transforms the whole play into the formal progress of a king.
Let the scene be now transported to Rome. On the inner sides of the piers of the Arch of Titus spanning the Via Sacra are two eroded relief panels, presenting the emperor's triumphal procession after the capture of Jerusalem. The north panel shows Titus standing on his chariot; the south panel, his men carrying the spoils of war. A Roman triumph is being represented on the very site where such events occurred, as the victor would ride along the Sacred Way through the Forum toward the Capitol. The architectural mise en abyme is analogous to what is textually worked out in the play's final chorus, in which the narrative of an anticipated pageant crowns and rehearses the king's progress through the play and offers a key to the reading of the text.
Starting from these premises, I wish to suggest that, however "devoid of pageantic spectacle" Henry V may be, its structure is pageantic. (6) It is informed throughout by the royal entry, an apposite genre to feature a king's progress toward a legitimized crown. The dramatist's rationale for tapping the vein of royal display is both formal and political. Turning processional drama into stage drama on a global scale, and moving on from previous experiments with pageants-within-a-play, he formalizes the chorus as the textual equivalent of a triumphal arch. (7) Furthermore, the use of the ceremonial procession as a structural device reinforces the political focus of the play, providing an adequate backcloth for its representation and subversion of the cultural and political transactions at work in ceremony.
In a pioneering study, E. K. Chambers has traced the influence of miracle plays and moralities on civic processions. These developed into and alongside entertainments, masks, and plays, so complex were the "action and reaction of one form of show upon another." (8) The interaction of pageantry and drama is readily understandable at a time when dramatic fictions, carnival, and civic displays had the streets as their natural stage, before permanent playhouses became a regular feature. This may have influenced Leone de' Sommi's suggestive--albeit misguided--proposition about the urban origin of drama, tracing the word scene to the Hebrew scehona, an equivalent of the Italian contrada. (9) Art historian Andre Chastel recalls that drama only slowly developed a space of its own over the period: "The festive has no specific place allocated to it, but unfolds in the day-to-day space of the city--street, square, or cortile--simply transformed by some scenery or other." (10) Glynne Wickham notes the stage potential of urban features such as castellated gates, conduits, and market crosses, which could be transformed into platform stages for the various pageants offered to the state visitor as he rode through the city. (11)
The urban backcloth helped fashion the familiar transaction between drama and the city in sixteenth-century Europe, a transaction in which the town was a stage and the stage figured an ideal commonwealth. These "wonderfull spectacles," which enabled the ruler to put his or her power on display, were also integrating moments when society projected an ideal image of itself. (12) Conversely, the state was mirrored in the architecture of the playhouse--circular galleries around a central stage. Early modern accounts of London playhouses rarely fail to identify their connection with the Roman amphitheater, a civic place if ever there was one. A political program governed the frons scenae, whether it was designed in the manner of a Tudor hall screen or replicated the facades of the triumphal arches erected for the royal entry. (13)
Shedding Foucauldian light on this portion of the history of forms, new historicism has explored the interaction of politics and drama, adumbrated in Mulcaster's celebrated statement that "if a man would saie well, he could not better tearme the citie of London that time, than a stage, wherein was shewed the wonderfull spectacle of a noble hearted princesse towards hir most loving people." (14) Henry V is emblematic of such interaction, registering in its imagery, discourse, and structure. The image that audiences are to conjure up of Harry's "brave fleet / With silken streamers" leaving Southampton (III.Chorus. 5-6) derives from their memories of civic shows, the streets of the city decked with silks and gold brocades: "do but think / You ... behold / A city on th'inconstant billows dancing / For so appears this fleet majestical" (III.Chorus. 13-6; emphasis added). Epic lists--"Harry the...
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