Shakespeare’s Tudor History: A Study of ‘Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2’ by Tom McAlindon, and: Shakespeare’s Arguments with History by Ronald Knowles (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 167 especially is concerned to make each detail count towards an understanding of each production as a whole. The questions they pose about interpretative possibilities throughout their volumes ensure that the student readers to whom the series is addressed will realize that even the very differentproductions being discussed do not exhaust all possible options. Again, in this regard, Day's volume is less successful than the other two: although some descriptions liftoffthe page, too many are leaden or too opaque to conjure up a sense of the performance, effect,or significance being described. For example, what is the difference between representing 'opposing factions with a token handful of men' and 'the convention which "pretends that only a small corner of a vast army has been able to crowd through the wings and on to the stage"' (p. 35)? How did Barton make the 'use of physical force [. . .] increasingly sophisticated' in his Wars of the Roses adaptation (p. 41)? How did Noble's 'picturepageant endorse [. . .] consumer capitalism' (p. 91)? On a more positive note, as the last question implies, Day meticulously locates each production within its wider poli? tical and cultural context; she also, despite the emphasis on Richard in her section headings, pays useful attention to the role of the women in the play. Each volume contains a very useful appendix giving relevant details about each of the productions: production team, cast list, number in company, date of press night, venues, and video and audio recordings available. Each also contains between forty and forty-three black-and-white illustrations, which are sometimes too small to be as useful as they might otherwise be. Quotations from the plays are keyed to the relevant Arden edition, to which this series will provide useful companion volumes: they give far more detail about individual productions than is possible in the Arden introductions, but they will benefit from being placed within the wider context of those introductions. Royal Holloway, University of London Christine Dymkowski Shakespeare's Tudor History: A Study of 'Henry IV, Parts i and 2'. By Tom McAlindon . Aldershot,Burlington,VT, and Singapore:Ashgate. 2002. x +225 pp. ?45ISBN 0-7546-0468-3. Shakespeare's Arguments with History. By Ronald Knowles. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. ix + 235pp. ?42.50. ISBN 0-333-97021-7. Superficially, both of these studies of Shakespeare's history plays share a common agenda in their rejection of new historicist approaches, or indeed any theoretical model, and in their return to older critical paradigms. Both critics engage in close formalist readings to elucidate Shakespeare's intentions and both appeal to specific, rather than discursive, aspects of the period's social and intellectual history. Yet, taken together, McAlindon and Knowles revive an enduring disagreement over the value of Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare's values. The former sees the dramatist as the exponent of a profound and consistent system of ethical values; the latter sees Shakespeare as committed primarily to the free critical reflection allowed by his art. In his painstaking study of 1 & 2 Henry IV, Tom McAlindon attempts to reorient critical approaches to these plays in two ways: first,by returning to the complex commentary they had evoked prior to the 1980s; secondly, by establishing Shake? speare's viewpoint as a historian. The latter serves to resituate the dramatist in the context of a post-Reformation world and, specifically, in a post-Catholic England. In his opening chapter McAlindon argues that 'postmodernist criticism'?a rather loose characterization?has simplified, disparaged, or ignored that which preceded it. In a wide-ranging survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses to Shake? speare's historical drama, he uncovers a diverse, rather than a uniform, tradition. The 168 Reviews principal figure here is the German philosopher-critic Hermann Ulrici, who in 1839 argued that Shakespeare grasped both the contradictions of a disintegrating feudal world and that the roots ofcontemporary crises derived frompast developments. Such historical insights were perfected in Henry IV, where the playwright also achieved a complex dramatic unity based on theme, analogy, and contrast. This approach underpins McAlindon's understanding of how the Tudor world determined Shakespeare's sense of the feudal past, especially the...