In reading Henry V we should always remember that we are reading is a performance script, written to be spoken by actors who, at the same time, are moving, gesturing, picking up objects, weeping, shaking their fists. Some stage action is described in “stage directions”; some is suggested within the dialogue itself. We need to learn to be alert to such signals as we stage the play in our imaginations.
For example, in the first scene of Act 2, Pistol and Nym play a game in which they repeatedly challenge each other and draw and then sheathe their swords. There are almost no stage directions in the early printed text to indicate this action. Nevertheless, the dialogue often clearly indicates that swords have been drawn and then that they have been put away. Hostess Quickly’s plea to “Good Corporal Nym, show your valor, and put up your sword” announces to reader and editor alike that Nym—and, presumably, Pistol, too—has already drawn. And Pistol’s offer to shake hands with Nym—“Give me thy fist, thy forefoot to me give”—is a signal that Pistol himself, and very likely Nym as well, have put away their swords. The precise points in the dialogue at which the drawing and sheathing of swords is to take place is at the discretion of readers, as well as directors and actors, to imagine.
Of much greater significance to readers’ imaginings of the play on stage is a modern debate about the end of scene 6 in Act 4. This scene begins with a stage direction calling for the entrance of King Henry with “his train, with prisoners.” The scene ends with Henry’s order “every soldier kill his prisoners. / Give the word through. Exit.” It has been argued that this combination—the stage direction announcing the entrance of prisoners and the dialogue ordering their deaths—indicates that the prisoners be killed onstage by their captors. It has also been argued that they should not be killed onstage: that the stage direction for the English to enter with French prisoners may merely signal stage action to indicate that the English are prevailing in battle, and that Henry’s order is that the command be given through the army—not that the prisoners before him be instantly slain. This debate points up for the reader a particularly bloody alternative for imagining stage action.
Henry V is unique among Shakespeare’s plays in relentlessly keeping before its readers the tasks of the imagination. Each Chorus apologizes for the inadequacy of the stage and of mere actors to represent the scope of the action that is the play’s subject; each Chorus urges upon us the imaginative effort of conjuring up from the bare stage with its clutch of actors an immense national conflict. Thereby the Chorus confronts us with the complex operation of figuring forth to ourselves the look of the play on stage and, at the same time, the horror and, for the Chorus, the glory of the war that is the play’s subject.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Henry V. © 1995 Folger Shakespeare Library
