The Talbot Remains: Historical Drama and the Performative Archive

Abstract

This essay engages recent developments in performance theory to rethink dominant literary-critical claims about the frustrated nostalgia of Shakespeare's history plays. Rebecca Schneider's work on the temporality of historical reenactment and Barbara Hodgdon's recent study of the performative nature of theatre archives have challenged long-held truisms about historical and performative loss. Drawing on their insights and on discussions of the archive and repertoire by Diana Taylor and Jacques Derrida, the essay explores how the real, original, or living referent of a history play is inextricable from its performative production. It concentrates on two incidents from Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI : Talbot's scene before the Countess of Auvergne (2.3) and the exchange between Lucy and Joan over Talbot's dead body (4.7). Phyllis Rackin's seminal reading of 1 Henry VI in Stages of History describes a true, original Talbot who resides in the historical record and cannot be satisfyingly reproduced by theatrical simulacra. This essay challenges such influential readings by describing the mutual imbrication of performative and archival history. Revisiting conventional assumptions about the relationship between history and performance complicates the very distinction between an authoritative, archived notion of the past and its performative reiteration via live bodies. Disruptions to the binary distinction between history and performance precede any individual stage production or imagined audience. They are embedded in the history play itself, a form that exposes the cooperation of archival and performative evidence to construct the past in the dramatic present.