ABSTRACT
The kinds of exposition described in the previous chapter all involve a pair or group of figures who belong, however tenuously, to the same world, or order of reality, as the characters upon whom the attention of the theatre audience is ultimately to focus. Egeon, in The Comedy of Errors, is the father of the twins upon whose resemblance the central action depends; Kent, Edmund and Gloucester play leading roles in Lear's tragedy; while the soldiers on the walls of Elsinore communicate directly with Hamlet. Renaissance playwrights did not always, however, usher their audiences as directly into their play worlds as these examples suggest. A large number of Elizabethan-Jacobean dramas open with a prologue, which may outline the events that are about to be enacted (cf. Marlowe's Dr Faustus), define the author's aims and intentions (cf. Jonson's Volpone), or apologize for the deficiencies of the coming performance (cf. Lyly's Campaspe). The effect of such introductory speeches is to heighten the spectator's awareness of the theatrical representation as artifice. For a short time at least after the Prologue has made his exit, the audience remains alive to the fact that the characters who succeed him on the stage are actors in a play, and a number of dramatists actively promote this awareness by direct allusion in the Prologue's speech to the machinery of the theatre, or the inability of the actors to do justice to the writer's conceptions. Conversely, the character who speaks the prologue is detached by his superior knowledge, or critical stance, from the persons of the play proper. He does not belong to the same order of reality as they do, though he forms part of the dramatic structure which is about to unfold. Shakespeare's Henry V affords an example of this kind of prologue. The play opens, not with the discussion between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of EJy about the reformation in the character of the young king which could well have formed the play's starting point, but with a powerful introductory speech which, by its insistence upon such words as 'stage' (3), 'act' (3) and 'scene' (4), and its emphasis upon the limitations of the actors in relation to their subject (8-11), firmly
establishes what is to follow as a play - a mere shadow of 'reality':
Enter PROLOGUE O, for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention; A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, 5 Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar'd On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth 10 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 15 Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confin'd two mighty monarchies, 20 Whose high upreared 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; 25 Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i'the'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 30 Into an hour-glass: 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.
