In August 1600 Shakespeare's Henry V (Barnes & Noble Shakespeare) was entered in the Stationers' Register and the first quarto of the play was available for sale shortly thereafter. The year before, The Globe--the new theater that Shakespeare's acting company erected in 1599--opened. Scholars once commonly assumed that Henry V had its debut at The Globe, that it was the first play to appear on the new stage, likely in early August. The phrase "this wooden O" was read as a reference--an emphatic reference according to the nineteenth-century editor Israel Gollancz--to the new circular timber structure in which the play was being performed, though these days most people who think about such things believe that the play had appeared as early as March at The Curtain, the theater Shakespeare's company had rented while construction on The Globe was carried out: the Chorus's positive allusions to Essex's Irish campaign in the fifth act seem unlikely to have been spoken in August, given the dismal news of the general's campaign that London was hearing in July. Unless, of course, Shakespeare left the lines in for a Globe performance in attempt to renew the confidence that people felt in Essex when he had first embarked on his campaign.
Whether Henry V debuted in March or August--and scholars still tend to assume that performances of the play were given in August, perhaps with the references to Essex removed, as they were missing in the quarto edition of 1600 along with all the Chorus's parts and other speeches--may not be that important, even for those interested in the political ramifications of the play within the late Elizabethan context, that is, those who have pointed out that positive considerations of Essex's campaign were unlikely to have been introduced in August. In the end, Shakespeare gave his audience the responsibility of exercising its imagination and supplying his play with what it lacked:
Pardon, and 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. . . .
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
These lines may focus on the inability of the stage to contain two kingdoms and the acting company to reproduce armies, but their similarity to lines Shakespeare had written four years earlier about the amateur acting group in A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests that Shakespeare also understood that the audience would supply significance to the play as well, especially to a play whose ambiguity is so striking. (The question over whether Henry V should be seen as an ideal Christian king or a Machiavell will ultimately be determined by the focus of a viewer or reader.)
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus, agreeing to see the play that Bottom and his friends have prepared, even though Philostrate has warned him of its imperfections, observes:
The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing.
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake:
And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome;
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.
What is interesting here, among other things, is that Theseus assumes that the players' work, even if it is muddled, is as easy to interpret as a clerk's mangled welcome. He always already knows what things mean, as perhaps the members of Shakespeare's audience thought they did, and he can give form to nothing to make things the way they are supposed to be, just as the Chorus asks Henry V's audience to make the play what it would be if it could perfectly mirror the actions that it presents. The audience, then, may be enjoined to provide Henry V with the form that would give meaning to its elements, regardless of whether or not they are all there. Even the Chorus's patriotic comparison between Henry V and Essex could cast a negative shadow on Essex, if the ironic viewer decides to extend the comparison and cast Essex as a Machiavell, about whom Elizabeth should be concerned.
The significance of the comparison between Henry V's Chorus and Theseus as I have read it does have its problems, for Theseus is making an apology for incompetent performers, while the Chorus is discussing a play that is to be performed by the best actors the Elizabethan Age had to offer, as James Shapiro notes in A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. The similarity between the two speeches may suggest that the action of Henry V is so far above the action of other plays that even great actors are made to look like bumbling ones when they perform it and thus may also suggest that the ideal nature of Henry is impossible to see outside the imagination, which is limitless.
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