The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History by Barbara Hodgdon

Abstract

REVIEWS Barbara Hodgdon. The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii + 309. $39.50. Endings are historians' most conspicuous fictions. At the close, more than anywhere else in their narratives, they tip their hands. Herbert Butterfield witheringly characterized as "Whig interpretations" any histories with happy endings, regardless of the historian's particular political affiliation. Renaissance historians, Shakespeare and the chroniclers of his sources among them, could choose between two major modes of structuring the past. One, looking back over the bloody period of the Wars of the Roses, could see this as a punitive interlude, brought to a close with the miraculous accession of the Tudors; the other, grimly cyclical rather than providential and teleological, could see the power struggles of the past endlessly repeated in the present. Most often, both Shakespeare and his sources blended these two ways of seeing. Nowhere is the result of this blending more regenerative, Barbara Hodgdon proposes in The End Crowns All, than in the closing moments of Shakespeare's history plays. Closure in drama is both more decisive (plays must end) and more tangential (audiences continue to ponder what they saw long after the spectacle's close) than the leisurely summings-up of historical narratives. Hodgdon focuses in this intricate book upon Shakespeare's histories both as playtexts (scripts for performance) and as performance texts (well-documented productions, most of which she has herself seen more than once). The playtexts themselves often provide divergent endings, as she demonstrates through careful comparison of Quarto and Folio versions of the Henry VI plays. The productions she selects for discussion diverge, too, in their readings of the playtexts, as some directors stick closely to a Quarto or Folio (or to a modern composite edition) and others, like John Barton, run the modern editors one better by compiling alternatives, conflating variants, and even contributing lines and scenes of their own. Hodgon surveys the almost infinite variety possible in the moments of the close. Like Philip McGuire, to whose Speechless Dialect she is indebted for much of her methodology, she proposes a kind of dramatic analysis that relates to ordinary literary analysis of plays as quantum mechanics relates to classical Newtonian physics. McGuire found an enormous potential for variability in the "open silences" in Shakespeare's plays, where characters on stage are present and their responses are of vital importance to the play but where the playtext gives no hint as to what those responses must necessarily be. Hodgdon finds extraordinarily rich potential in the closes of the history plays, both in their inconclusive status as playtexts and in their multifarious incarnations as productions. 73 74Comparative Drama She realizes that, in the present climate of critical opinion, to raise the flag of stage-oriented criticism is to challenge Harry Berger's dismissal of that kind of criticism as reductive, time-bound, and local. "By assuming that the theater cannot perform a critique of its own mimetic processes," she argues, "Berger's post-Lacanian methodology slips strangely into a pre-Brechtian phase where it is both theoretically and practically impossible for either a staged representation or its spectators to perform such deconstructive moves." On the contrary, Hodgdon points out, no cultural practice, not even theatrical performance, "achieves absolute 'coercive power' " over its audience; rather, "the production and framing of meaning are constantly open to negotiation and renegotiation, including critique and resistance" (p. 16). It is in these processes of negotiation and renegotiation, as they occur in the playtexts themselves, in subsequent critical discussions of the texts, and in selected performance texts that Hodgdon is primarily interested. "The single constant in this fluid exchange of texts and methodologies of historical discovery is the figure of the ruler," Hodgdon states (p. 12); "closure in the history play constitutes a territory that generates and seeks to legitimize new kings, operating as a magnification mirror for the values and ideology of absolutism as well as for the incoherence of those beliefs" (p. 13). The multitude of different endings possible for each play reflects the multiplicity of each play's engagement of the pivotal issue of sovereignty. Hodgdon begins her study with King John...