Abstract
Shakespeare’s history plays have been attracting more and more of their fair share of scholarly attention in recent years, but less often than comedies and tragedies are the histories discussed critically from a theatrical perspective. Enlightening studies of their dramaturgical strengths and weaknesses do, of course, exist, but consideration of their technical achievement is far outweighed by examinations of their topical politics, theological issues, world pictures, and ideas of kingship — all most carefully placed against the historical background of Elizabethan England in the 1590s. We can know them as embodiments of Renaissance ideas of political morality, as mirrors of Elizabethan policy, as essays upon the relationship of family and state, as meditations upon the king’s two bodies, as rituals of the ethic of order, as warnings against rebellion, as dramatic treatises about the Tudor myth, as inquiries into the concept of divine providence, as formal developments of the chronicle and morality play, as explorations of the historian’s art. We can know their sources and analyze the playwright’s manipulation of events and personages, memorize genealogical charts, and map out the battles. And we can do much more to know the history plays as plays.
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Notes
This point has often been made, particularly in response to the adaptation of the methods of New Criticism to the drama. See, for example, John Russell Brown’s “Theatre Research and the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962), reprinted in his Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969 [1966]), 237–52.
A number of interesting discussions of the role of the Shakespearean director would take us further into the question but away from our plays. But see Richard David’s brief comments on the director as cook in his Shakespeare in the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 13–16, and John Russell Brown’s Free Shakespeare (London: Metheun, 1974).
So David Daniell remarks, near the conclusion of a long review: “Having watched these three plays several times, I am not aware of the ‘Tudor myth’ at all, nor of any Providential process ….” See “Opening up the text: Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays in performance,” in Drama and Society, ed. James Redmond. Themes in Drama, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 274.
Warren, “Comedies and Histories at Stratford, 1977,” Shakespeare Survey, 31 (1978), 150; Daniell, “Opening up the text,” 274.
The Shakespeare Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 8.
Roberts, “Shakespeare in Washington, D. C.,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979), 196; Dennis Bartolomeusz, “Shakespeare in Sydney and Melbourne,” ibid., 267.
“On Producing Henry VI,”Shakespeare Survey, 6 (1953), 50.
“Shakespeare, the Twentieth Century, and ‘Behaviorism,’” Shakespeare Survey, 20 (1967), 139.
Irving Wardle’s review in The Times, 13 July 1977, quoted in Ralph Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 80–1. Berry’s discussion of recent productions of Henry V provides a good example of the value of production-centered criticism — and of its limitations.
Shakespeare’s Plays Today (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970), 43.
“King Henry VI, Part 2: Notes During Production,” Theatre Annual, 13 (1955), 45–6.
Stephen Greenblatt has labelled this new direction in the study of the English Literary Renaissance “the new historicism.” See his “Introduction” to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 3–6, for a discussion of its challenges to traditional literary interpretation. Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) is a central text in an increasingly influential approach to reading the politics of Elizabethan writers. Two recent collections of essays offer helpful examples of how to assess the ideology of literary texts: Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985) and Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). See also Sinfield’s “Power and Ideology: An Outline Theory and Sidney’s Arcadia,”ELH, 52 (1985), 259–77, for a provocative approach to uniting theory and interpretation. Edward Pechter has attempted to assess its importance and to evaluate its assumptions and presumptions in “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA, 102 (May 1987), 292–303.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries were clearly aware of the subversive qualities of the stage. See M. C. Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common Player (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and especially Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios, 7 (1980), 51–74. See the following section of this chapter for a more thorough discussion.
See, for example, Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (London: Methuen, 1964 [San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1947] and F. O. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1967).
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943) and Shakespeare’s History Plays (New York: Collier Books, 1962 [London: Chatto and Windus, 1944]).
For example, Andrew S., Cairncross, ed., King Henry VI, Part I, Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1962), xli; Alvin Kernan in The Revels History of Drama in English. Volume III: 1576–1613 (London: Methuen, 1975), 264; Gareth Lloyd Evans, The Upstart Crow: An Introduction of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: J. W. Dent, 1982), 1–3.
“The literature of the Elizabethan Age, as a matter of course, reflected this class structure as frequently and as innocently as our literature reflects that of the twentieth century,” writes David L. Stevenson, “Introduction” to The Elizabethan Age, ed. Stevenson (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1966), 16.
See, for example, the recent collection of re-evaluations, The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
Keith Wrightson has strongly presented the case for decentering the history of the period; he concludes that “The impact of social change in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England presents itself to the historian as a series of localized social dramas.” English Society: 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 222.
For a concise statement of Henry VII’s strategy, see the discussion by Lacey Baldwin Smith in his This Realm of England: 1399–1688, Fourth Edition (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1983), 93–7.
In a series of studies, Anthony Giddens has presented a very provocative theory of social action. His examination of this pattern of dominance/resources/transformative capacity applies this model of power as relational to social theory in general and in no way links it with the Elizabethan or even the early modern period. See Giddens’ Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). I here acknowledge my indebtedness to this and other works by Giddens, whose theories I have freely adapted.
The treatise was The Discoverie of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French mariage, if the Lord forbid not the banes by letting her majestie see the sin and punishment thereof. Sinfield comments on the Stubbs case, and a fuller analysis of The Gaping Gulf is in Wallace T. MacCaffrey’s Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 255–62.
Camden’s work is most conveniently sampled in the selections edited by Wallace MacCaffrey, The History of Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). The quotation is from 138–9.
Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 33. For comment upon Stubbs and Sidney, see Sinfield, “Power and Ideology,” 259–60, 274–5.
This incident remains somewhat obscure, alluded to briefly by M. C. Bradbrook in The Rise of the Common Player (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 255 and 313 n. 6. See also D. Cressy, “Binding the Nation: the Bonds of Association, 1584 and 1696,” in Tudor Rule and Revolution, ed. D. J. Ruth and J. W. McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 217–26. Christopher Haigh writes that “Its conception and organization show an astonishing lack of confidence in the mechanisms of government and in the breadth of support which the regime enjoyed” and concludes that “The realities of the Elizabethan polity had been laid bare.” In his “Introduction” to The Reign of Elizabeth I, 17.
“All the conventions of a highly formalized court asserted the unique and lofty authority of the monarch and the submissive role of the subject. Yet these conventions barely served to veil the unceasing and often bitter struggle between royal and conciliar wills,” writes Wallace T. MacCaffrey. “Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,” in Elizabethan Government and Society, ed. S. T. Bindoff, Joel Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 97.
For the images of Elizabeth, see Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) and Roy C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).
Quoted in J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), II, 119.
In his History of Richard III, ed. R. S. Sylvester, The Complete Works of Sir Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), III, 80.
The most thorough treatment of Elizabethan efforts to regulate the theater is Glynne Wickham’s in his Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660. 2 vols in 3 parts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959–72), II, pt. 2, 54–149. Notes below will refer to these volumes as Wickham, EES.
The interrelationship of patronage and letters in Elizabethan and Jacobean England has been shown to be much more complex than previously thought, as scholars have demonstrated that even the language of poetry was influenced by court politics and personalities and by an intricate configuration of elements which more often suggest a maze than a system. In any case, the intentions varied with the sponsoring Court or regional aristocrat, and seldom is artistic patronage free from the larger maze of political patronage. For recent perspectives, see the essays in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), especially Arthur F. Marotti’s “John Donne and the Rewards of Patronage” and Leonard Tennenhouse’s “Sir Walter Ralegh and the Literature of Clientage.”
Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions. Facsimile edition (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972), sigs. C5, G6–G7.
For the post-Reformation attitudes toward images and its influence on Elizabethan poetics, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, esp. 188–91; John Siemon, Shakespeare’s Iconoclasm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Michael O’Connell, “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Antitheatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater,” ELH, 52 (1985), 279–310.
For the apparel given by noblemen to their servants, who in turn sold it to the players (where could servants wear such finery?), see Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 167. For incidents of the sale of clerical vestments, see Wickham, EES, II, part 1, 38–9.
See David Bevington’s helpful comments about the interrelationships of costume, spectators’ interpretive expectations, the morality plays’ didacticism, and the later drama’s “putting theatrical entertainment and illusion ahead of certainty of meaning”; in Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 35–40.
On the survival and transformation of such villains as the Vice and Sedycyon in Shakespeare’s plays, see Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), esp. 120–60.
The phrase is Roy C. Strong’s in Splendor at Court (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), Chapter 1.
The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman E. McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 122. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt also discusses this passage but draws different conclusions.
On the audience’s commanding “celebrations of royal power and assertions of aristocratic community,” see Stephen Orgel’s The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), Chapter 1, 1–36, esp. 5–7.
See Alvin B. Kernan, “Shakespeare’s Stage Audiences: The Playwright’s Reflections and Control of Audience Response,” in Shakespeare’s Craft: Eight Lectures, ed. Philip H. Highfill (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 113–37. Kernan examines five plays within plays for what they tell us about Shakespeare’s “theatrical epistemology.”
My discussion in these paragraphs is indebted to Bernard Beckerman’s “Historic and Iconic Time in Late Tudor Drama,” in Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, eds. Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer. Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1981 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 37–44.
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Watson, D.G. (1990). Theatre, History, Politics. In: Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11035-3_1
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