Imagined Wing: A Close Reading of Henry V, 3.0.1-24

This essay looks closely at the Chorus’s speech which opens Act 3 of the play. While it seems like a functional piece of construction and exposition, it in fact is a tour de force of playing with the audience, undermining their perception of reality itself and, quite specifically, their perceptions of what their minds are. This almost science-fictional note in the speech is perfectly captured, it will argue in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version, in which the uses made of this speech are profoundly strange.