ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Henry V, the Chorus acknowledges the inevitable distance that separates his heroic historical subject from its representation in the playhouse:1
O for a Muse of fire… A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Henry, like himself…
(Prologue: 1-5) One of the reasons Henry cannot be “like himself” is that the audience in the playhouse was not composed of monarchs. For although the subjects of Shakespeare’s English histories were medieval kings and noblemen contending for the possession and defense of the crown, most members of the audiences for whom those plays were performed came from places considerably lower in the social hierarchy. Staging medieval history as the stories of successive monarchs constructed a historical precedent for the Tudor and Stuart project of extending monarchial power. Read in the order in which they appeared in the First Folio, the plays delineate a genealogical history of royal succession, interrupted by the deposition of Richard II, and finally restored in the accession of Henry VII and the birth of Elizabeth I. If the plays are read in the order in which they were first performed on the sixteenth-century stage, however, they tell a much more complicated story, shaped by the cultural pressures and contradictions of the changing world in which they were produced. The predicaments faced by Shakespeare’s kings, and the steps they take to confront them, now appear to be shaped as much by the predicaments of the ordinary
men in Shakespeare’s audience as they were by the historical records that Shakespeare found in his chronicle sources.
