ABSTRACT
Henry V opens with a sense of place, followed almost at once by a gesture of displacement. Both are ineluctably products of the theatre: of histrionics. Unlike film, its performative cousin, the theatre holds in productive tension a sense of the immediacy and immanence of this place, on the one hand-of the “here, now” that binds audience and actor in the act of performance-and a desire to move beyond that arena-to the “then, there” of representation that it seeks to embody, on the other. Henry V is built upon this tension-between place and displacement-in its opening Chorus. The incorrigible presentness of the deictic speech act, reiterated in the rooted utterances “this unworthy scaffold” and “this wooden O” (Henry V, 10 and 13),1 is paradoxically the condition of possibility of the transcendent, communal imagination of the theatre’s represented world: “so great an object” (11) is conveyed only partially by the extension, beyond the boundaries of the stage, of the “vasty fields of France” (12).
