Henry V as a Royal Entry

Abstract

Shakespeare's unusual use of five choruses in Henry V, a play featuring the king's quest for legitimacy, points to a ceremonial structure reproducing that of the royal entry, a reading invited by the triumph depicted in the chorus to act V. The play revisits Richard Mulcaster's account of the coronation entry of Elizabeth in 1559, in what is the fully dramatized form of a civic show. The use of pageantry both formalizes a symbolically fit model for the genre of the history play and serves as a backdrop for Shakespeare's reflection on ceremony, in which the king's companions provide a carnivalesque antipageant.

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