The Chorus in Henry V

Henry V is unusual among Shakespeare's plays for having a chorus figure which punctuates the action by marking the beginning of each act. The chorus's speech in the play can be divided into two types: Those which attend to the play as a play, those which are reminding us that what we're watching is theatre and those which describe and manage our view of Henry. I'm going to use it to set up the flavour of both these functions. Okay so this is the prologue to the play. It gives the play a marked epic structure unlike for example the part chorus we get in Romeo and Juliet or the narrator figure we get in Troilus and Cressida or in Pericles. So