Shakespeare's history cycle in performance: Actor and audience perspectives

Abstract

This article is concerned with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) performances of Shakespeare's history plays as a sequence in regnal order as part of the Complete Works season of 2006, and previous such serializations. Surveying the problems of coherence when the plays are unified into an artistic singularity, the article pays particular attention to the ways that actors playing the same characters in different plays (that is, playing “through-casting”) approach their work. Drawing on an interview with Geoffrey Streatfeild (Prince Hal in the RSC production), the article weighs up the critical and performative gains and losses that follow from putting the history plays together in this way.