How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (33 page)

And let us, ciphers to this great account
,

On your imaginary forces work
.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies
,

Whose high uprearèd 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’ th’ receiving earth
,

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

Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times
,

Turning th’ accomplishment of many years

Into an hourglass; 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
.

(
Henry V
, Prologue to Act I)

O
ne aspect of Shakespeare’s genius resides in the fact that he rarely, if ever, repeated himself. He was always coming up with new solutions to age-old problems, new ways of beginning plays, ending plays, creating new subject matter, and tackling new themes.

Just look at the comedies alone.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, one of the early comedies, is filled with profusions of exquisite, intricate love poetry, then ends with the death of the heroine’s father, thereby adding a somber note to the final scene. Meanwhile,
The Taming of the Shrew
, written in the same period, uses a rough, vernacular style to tell the story of a misogynist who meets his match amid episodes of knockabout comedy and mistaken identity. In
Much Ado About Nothing
we have a pair of witty, jaded lovers, as well as a dark-hearted villain caught by the local constabulary;
As You Like It
contains rival brothers, romantic shepherds, a court jester, and a lion; and in
Cymbeline
Shakespeare creates a fairy tale princess, an evil stepmother, two princes raised in a cave, and the beheading of a villainous suitor. On and on it goes. In each play Shakespeare sets himself a new challenge, and his invention simply never flags.

In
Henry V
, which was written in 1599 (at about the same time as
As You Like It
, and just before
Hamlet
), Shakespeare does something new yet again: He starts each of the five acts with an actor (called the Chorus) speaking directly to the audience as a sort of narrator who sets the scene. Four of these Prologues function as narrative links between acts. The Prologue to Act I, however, is entirely different. It has very little to do with
the play
Henry V
but everything in the world to do with Theater with a capital
T
.

In the Prologue to Act I, the Chorus says, in essence, that he needs great inspiration to make his play convincing to the audience since it does not
actually
take place on the fields of France, there are not
actually
thousands of soldiers in view, and the play does not
actually
span the many years that it pretends to. He reminds us that we’re in a theater and that we must use
our imaginations
.

That’s what this Prologue is about, and that, in essence, is what the works of Shakespeare are about.

The Mystery of the Theater

One of the mysteries of literature is how simple words on a page can get us thinking about our humanity across time and space: how a story written in the sixteenth century can be as inspiring and relevant as if it were written yesterday. Similarly, one of the mysteries of the theater is how words spoken on a stage can transport us to other worlds, convincing us that we are partaking of other lives playing out in front of us, all the while knowing that those lives are being portrayed by actors. Like language itself, theater is always operating on two levels:

1. the level where we are convinced we are seeing what the play says we’re seeing, like a battle on a field in France, and

2. the level where we know full well that we are in a room called a theater watching five actors pretending to be a whole army.

The Act I Prologue is meant to remind us of this two-level mystery.

In the 1950s, the playwright and novelist J. B. Priestley wrote an essay in which he recounted the experience of taking his children to the theater. He noticed that when they were very young, they sat in their seats
and looked around, very aware that they were in this strange room called a theater. But “a year or two later these same children may be a wonderful audience.”

What has happened? They have arrived at dramatic experience. And … we can say that this experience has for them an unusual intensity … difficult to recapture in later life, just because they are fully and eagerly responsive on both our necessary levels. For they are rapturously concerned with the characters and action of the piece being presented, but at the same time they are more intensely conscious than adults are of not being physically involved in the scene.… So two wonderful things are happening at once; and I cannot help feeling that it is the child surviving in us who makes us fully responsive to the Theatre.

I was recently rereading
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and I was delighted to see Shakespeare making exactly the same point five years before he wrote
Henry V
. In Act V of the
Dream
, as the Mechanicals are putting on their play
Pyramus and Thisbe
, Hippolyta remarks that
This is the silliest stuff that I ever heard
. Theseus replies:

The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amends them
.

He’s saying that even the best actors can only be shadows of the characters they’re portraying; and the worst actors are no worse, as long as our
imagination
takes over and makes them real in our minds. So this profound view of the theater—and of life—was on Shakespeare’s mind well before he wrote his great Prologue to
Henry V
.

Learning the Speech: The First Half

O, for a muse of fire that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention!

The Chorus begins by invoking a
muse
, a goddess of artistic inspiration. In Greek mythology, there were nine Muses, one each for comedy, tragedy, dance,
etc.
They were thought to inspire great thoughts that would spur on artistic creation. Here the Chorus cries out
O, for a muse of fire
. He wants inspiration that will rise up as powerfully as
fire
and ascend to the
heaven
of
invention
.

A
kingdom
for a stage
,

princes
to act
,

And
monarchs

to behold the swelling scene!

[A list, a list!]

The Chorus not only wants a
muse of fire
to inspire him. He also wants a real kingdom, real princes, and real monarchs to be part of his play. If he had such a muse, such a stage, and such actors, he could present a grander vision of history.

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself
,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels
,

Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire

Crouch for employment
.

In Roman mythology, Mars was the god of war. And if King Henry did assume the port of Mars—that is, climb up to the door of war—he would have three formidable qualities at his heels, three of the external manifestations of war: famine, sword, and fire. He would be in charge of these qualities, as if they were
hounds
on their leashes, crouching next to him, waiting for their
employment
.

Art Project

If your children like art, have them try to draw or paint King Henry V assuming the port of Mars with three hounds leashed in at his heels. If I had any drawing talent at all, I’d be the first one in line with my pad and
pencil. Shakespeare has created an image here that is so palpable and clear that who in the world wouldn’t want to paint it? I’ve trolled the Internet looking for just such an image by an established artist, and surprisingly, I couldn’t find one to show you.

Aside

One subject that we haven’t touched on yet is the representation of scenes from Shakespeare in the history of art. As you can imagine, many great artists have used Shakespeare’s plays as their inspiration. One of my own favorites is Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), who painted in a number of subject areas but became renowned for his Shakespeare paintings. Here is one of his most famous, of Titania and Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Titania and Bottom
by Henry Fuseli
(photo credit 29.1)

In the Bibliography, I’ve listed a good source by Jane Martineau for looking at Shakespeare in art. It’s a wonderful subject for your children to pursue.
And if any of them are good painters, Henry at the port of Mars is clearly a subject that could make them famous.

Back to the Speech

But pardon, gentles all
,

The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object
.

The Chorus now asks pardon for his actors (
unraisèd spirits
) who have dared to portray so great an object as the story of Henry V on
this unworthy scaffold
—this stage, which is nothing but a wooden structure: “Gentle audience, please pardon our actors who dare to play this great story on this unworthy stage.”

Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France?

I love this image: A
cockpit
is a round area where cockfights were staged in Shakespeare’s day. He’s comparing his theater, the Globe, with a cockpit, since both were round (or essentially round; in fact, the Globe was multisided).

He elaborates on this roundness two lines later. Note: The word
casques
means “helmets”; and Agincourt is the town where a famous battle against the French took place.

Or may we cram