Staging Shakespeare's History Plays in 1984: A Tale of Three Henrys

Abstract

Any modern interpreter, whether critic, teacher, editor, or theatre professional, must confront what Leontes terms this wide gap of time' that separates us from the age of Shakespeare. Such a gap may be signaled by something as simple as the changed meaning in a single word (presently in Othello, V.ii.52, or turtle in Paulina's last speech).2 More often the gaps run much deeper and are linked to basic (and often unperceived) disparities between our beliefs and assumptions (e.g., about politics, religion, marriage, authority, and theatrical conventions) and those prevalent in Shakespeare's time. Today's interpreter of Hamlet, Prince Hal, or Isabella can easily forget that his or her conclusions are based upon the signals to be found in Elizabethan playscripts written to be performed by Elizabethan actors in an Elizabethan playhouse in front of an Elizabethan audience. Those playscripts survive (sometimes in questionable condition), but the original actors, playhouses, and spectators, as Prospero predicted, have faded into thin air, leaving not a rack behind. Any interpreter of Shakespeare's plays is therefore faced with a four-part equation in which one part is rooted in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century but the other three