“Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen” (Henry V). The Chorus enters and ends the play, explaining that the events on the stage were mightier than could be actually portrayed. Henry and Katharine did produce a son, Henry the Sixth, whose story is told in other plays. The epilogue is written in the form of a sonnet and distinguishes the speaker Chorus from the playwright.
The Epilogue, like Pistol’s news from home that his wife Nell has died, strikes an unexpectedly somber note: it reminds us that Henry and Catherine’s son did not, in fact, do what they had hoped by uniting the two kingdoms. Henry V, though the ideal king, was not influential in a historical sense—he looks to overturn history, but instead history overturns him. As always, the Chorus points out the difference between a play about a brief period in English history, within which Henry V is a highly successful protagonist of potentially dubious moral character, and the full scope of that history, a context within which Henry proved largely ineffective.
The Epilogue points out the ultimate futility of all this pomp, manipulation, and warfare, since Henry VI will lose France, “Which oft our stage hath shown”. So “The sense of history as progressive is replaced by the sense of history as cyclical”. At best, for Shakespeare, “his essential, his persistent, his heartfelt theme” is included in the leaving of a kingdom to a son. Henry V died on August 31, 1422. He was thirty-five years old and he had reigned not quite ten years. Ironically, the mad King of France outlived him, so that Henry V never succeeded to the throne he had won. He died “probably of a fever complicated with stomach trouble, and, according to one account, after infernal visitations and acute pangs of conscience”
The Chorus in the Epilogue simply reminds the audience once again that the stage has not been adequate for the subject matter, but then no stage could be large enough for an adequate presentation of the man who is the ideal king, the mirror of all Christian kings.
