Prologue to Albumazar
TO say this Comedy pleas’d long ago
Is not enough to make it pass you now.
Yet, Gentlemen, your Ancestors had wit,
When few Men censur’d, and when fewer writ;
And Johnson (of those few the best) chose this
As the best Model of his Master-piece.
Subtle was got by our Albumazar,
That Alchymist by his Astrologer:
Here he was fashion’d, and we may suppose
He lik’d the fashion well who wore the Cloaths.
The scene is a marriage of France with England, a uniting of the French people with the English. Henry acts as representative of his people, contrasting the straightforward bluntness of the one country with the suavity of the other, and showing off to France all the different aspects of the English character. He himself is neither plain soldier, nor loutish farmer, nor hater of poetry, nor euphemistic rhetorician, but he has subjects who farm and fight, speak plain and stilted English. Even the stress on his appearance, which has never been joked about before, despite abundant opportunity, reflects a rugged and warlike people, a land with a forbidding climate. Having made himself the Star of England and the center of his people’s dreams, he cannot be simply a man. And it is because he loses individuality in being overtaken by his own symbol, because now England seems to speak through him whether or not he wills it to do so, that we forgive him his machinations. He is himself possessed by the diverse mortal strength that he nourished, unified, and controlled.
— Joan Webber, The Renewal of the King’s Symbolic Role: From Richard II to Henry V, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4.4 (1963)
