English History Play Research Articles

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen Rajiv Thind Ellinghausen, Laurie, ed., Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), New York, The Modern Language Association of America, 2017; paperback; pp. x, 249; R.R.P. US $24.00; ISBN 9781603293006. Every year William Shakespeare–related scholarship generates articles and books at a pace too dizzying even for specialists. This volume, devoted to a specific sub-genre—English history plays—features thirty-one contributors who have taught the plays in diverse colleges and universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. With such a cornucopia of opinions, how merciful of the editor Laurie Ellinghausen to devote the first thirty pages of the book to give us an overview of the field. This is by far the most informative and readable section of the book, in which Ellinghausen reviews all major critical editions and multimedia adaptations of the plays available in the great Shakespeare marketplace. I do wish, however, that the book had made it abundantly clear that Shakespeare's English history plays are not necessarily a good way to learn about English history. There is much to be said about how the plays have distorted history to perpetuate the official state and church propaganda, as scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, David Kastan, Leonard Tennenhouse, and David Womersley have reminded us. Ellinghausen herself claims that the plays show us how 'commoners, and the working classes also challenge official narratives of history' and goes on to cite 'Jack Cade's rebellion' as one of the instances (p. 14). But as Richard Helgerson has shown in his acclaimed Forms of Nationhood (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI also ridicules the supposedly revolutionary working classes as populist fools and buffoons. Glenn Odom offers a useful survey of primary sources that Shakespeare draws upon in his history plays. M. G. Aune mentions how students can be encouraged to compare King John with various primary sources (available online) to assess Shakespeare's dramatic choices. William A. Oram and Howard Nenner review Shakespeare's political contexts to analyse the character of Richard III. Jonathan Hart focuses on political rhetoric in various history plays. Mary Janell Metzger reads Montaigne to interpret Richard III as a sceptical text. David J. Baker focuses on British cartography and ethnic diversity. Barbara Sebek studies how the plays imagine the world beyond Britain to develop a global consciousness. Phyllis Rackin offers illuminating analyses of various female characters. Maya Mathur relies on film and television adaptations to teach the Henry IV plays. Ruben Espinosa draws attention to non-English strangers in Henry V. Like many other contributors in this collection Hugh Macrae Richmond writes about using [End Page 301] internet sources to teach Shakespeare. Some contentions aside, the book is a rich pedagogical resource. Rajiv Thind The University of Queensland & University of Canterbury Copyright © 2020 Rajiv Thind

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen Marina J. Bergenstock Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays. Edited by Laurie Ellinghausen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2017. Pp. 249 + illus. $24.00, paper. Google the term “Teaching Shakespeare” and among the top hits will be: “How to Teach Shakespeare so Your Students Won’t Hate It,” “Teaching Shakespeare the Fun Way,” “How to Teach Shakespeare and Make It Understandable for Your Students,” and “Using Humor to Teach Shakespeare.” If this search is any indication, it seems clear that instructors want (or are required to) include Shakespeare in their curriculum, but how to do it in a way that engages students is not always evident. That’s where Laurie Ellinghausen’s Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays comes in. In this book, Ellinghausen has assembled a selection of excellent essays that collectively provide a thorough and innovative guide to bringing Shakespeare’s history plays to life in the modern classroom. The book is broken up into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” provides instructors with resources for primary texts, performance, many branches of critical tradition based on the instructor’s interests, and digital resources. Part 2, “Approaches,” presents nearly thirty essays that provide exciting new material that is informative and accessible for everyone from a novice teacher to even the most seasoned instructor of Shakespeare, covering everything from the geography of the still-emerging Britain of Shakespeare’s time to land use, political power, ecological stewardship, and visualizing stagecraft. In Rebecca Ann Bach’s essay “Queering Richard II: Teaching Love, Sex, and Gender Historically,” the author takes us through an example close read of the text with a class. Bach points out that, in recent years, so much has changed in the United States in regards to gender and sexuality that students must take care not to make one-to-one comparisons in our modern thinking with what people in England thought four hundred years ago. In Lisa Siefker Bailey’s essay “Hustling Masculinity: Teaching 1 Henry IV with My Own Private Idaho,” the reader learns about the experiences Bailey’s students have had putting these two works in conversation with each other. Bailey notes that confronting the issues presented to them in Shakespeare’s text and Gus Van Sant’s movie emboldens students to engage in challenging dialogues. When asked about the challenges this particular aspect of Shakespeare’s canon poses for students, one respondent talked about the fact that, when it comes to the comedies, students seem to come in with relatively positive ideas about them and “with tragedies, students seem to come to class knowing they [End Page 239] are important and that they will be good” (24). However, with the history plays, students come in not understanding them or wanting to read them. Shakespeare’s history plays were written in a particular political and religious context that isn’t generally taught to students in the twenty-first century. Also, the issues don’t just begin and end there. It’s not difficult to see why students would be frustrated, with so many kinds of history at work in Shakespeare’s plays including (but not limited to) “medieval fabulae, urban history, chronicle history, classical allusion, and typological biblical history” (24). The essays compiled by Ellinghausen provide readers with specific approaches, relevant topic expansion, and additional resources. Moreover, the book is laid out in a way that is both intuitive and user-friendly. Each essay offers unique perspectives and arguments that contribute to the reader’s sense of security and possibility. Using each essay as a jumping-off point leaves readers easily able to imagine additional activities and topics for exploration on their own. Hugh Macrae Richmond’s essay, “Teaching Shakespeare’s Histories Using the Internet,” provides a remarkably clear and concrete path to using the internet in tandem with the history plays. In “Teaching Shakespeare’s History Plays in the Composition Classroom,” by Diane K. Jakacki, the reader is presented with specific examples of assignments and even evaluation from Jakacki’s own classroom. With this essay in particular, it’s easy to see how an instructor can...

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen Dominick Grace Laurie Ellinghausen, ed. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays. mla, 2017. 249 pp. $24.00. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays, edited by Laurie Ellinghausen and featuring almost thirty short essays, as well as a short but useful introductory section that identifies helpful resources, adds another valuable volume to the mla Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. The series is designed to address works, traditions, or authors "widely taught at the undergraduate level," and it is "intended to serve specialists as well as nonspecialists" ("mla Book Series"). Consequently, this is not a resource designed to provide detailed close readings or an overview of the most recent scholarship on the history plays; [End Page 132] although some chapters may offer new insights into the plays, even for experienced teachers, the main function of this book is to provide an array of suggestions for teaching. The focus, therefore, tends to be more on matters of pedagogy and practical classroom work (for example, suggested exercise or assignments, or research strategies—including many very interesting suggestions for the use of electronic resources) than on direct engagement with the texts of the plays themselves. Teachers of Shakespeare looking for ways to vary or modify their teaching practice will find much to consider here. One of the most valuable things about this collection is that it covers the full range of the plays traditionally grouped under the "history" heading: the Henry plays (all of them, including Henry VIII), the Richard plays, and King John. Perhaps the relatively recent consensus that Edward III is also Shakespeare's explains its omission here, although it has been included in The Riverside Shakespeare (identified along with the Norton as one of the two most popular editions among those surveyed while compiling this project) for quite some time and is available as part of the full Norton package (digital only)—or perhaps it is simply taught so infrequently that no contributor to this volume has used it in class. Its exclusion is a minor weakness, at best, as I doubt that the target audience of undergraduate teachers of Shakespeare are likely to select it for classroom use anyway. Somewhat less helpful for that target audience is the fact that the index does not include the plays themselves, so one cannot do a quick check to find all the places in the book where the play or plays one is interested in might be considered. While many chapter titles do identify which plays the author has used, many do not. Since many readers of this book may be interested in suggestions for only one or two plays, they are put in the position of having to read the whole book, or at least scan the chapters, to find potentially useful material, which makes the book somewhat less user-friendly than it might be. Nevertheless, this is a useful book, both for the experienced teacher of Shakespeare's history plays and the teacher beginning to develop curriculum. Newer teachers will benefit especially from the opening section, "Part One: Materials," which offers a digestible summary of valuable resources, from brief comments on which editions of Shakespeare are most used, through short sections on language, sources, other useful primary texts, recommended secondary readings, the critical traditions surrounding the plays, performance history, and digital resources. These are brief introductions, not exhaustive, so they provide teachers with good starting points [End Page 133] without being overwhelming; they leave readers who interested in a particular approach to dig more deeply on their own. More generally useful is "Part Two: Approaches," itself subdivided into sections focusing on "Primary Sources," "Political, Intellectual, and International Contexts," "Theory and Criticism," "Gender," "Teaching through Research, Writing, and Performance," "Contemporary Media," "Classroom Contexts," and, finally, a short guide to internet resources by Hugh Macrae Richmond, creator of the Shakespeare-focused website Shakespeare's Staging. As these section titles indicate, the book lends itself to a variety of approaches, so individual users will find some sections more useful than others. Lynne Bruckner's chapter, for instance, "Richard II: Presentism, Pedagogy, Ecocriticism," in the theory and...

Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty. Kristin M. S. Bezio. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. x + 228 pp. $104.95.

Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty. Kristin M. S. Bezio. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. x + 228 pp. $104.95. - Volume 70 Issue 4

Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty by Kirstin M. S. Bezio

Reviewed by: Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty by Kirstin M. S. Bezio Meg Pearson Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty. By Kirstin M. S. Bezio. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015; pp. 238. Kirsten Bezio’s book argues that the Renaissance stage participated intensely in the debate over sovereignty via the history play. Limiting its scope somewhat by addressing only chronicle plays set in the UK that “focus primarily on governance and sovereignty; and whose interest in history is didactic and actively political,” the book addresses dramas ranging in critical popularity, from Shakespeare’s Henry V to Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda, resulting in a satisfying survey of the subgenre (1). A substantial introduction presents the origins of monarchy and defines what Bezio terms the “sovereign–subject compact” in the centuries leading up to the Wars of the Roses. The author shows that prior to the Magna Carta and indeed before the Norman Conquest, the ancient Britons practiced kingship based on mutual obligation: the king was responsible for upholding the written statutes of the law and the more traditional common law, and the people were responsible for their obedience to that law, as well as remaining capable of judging and even rejecting the behavior of their king as needed. Bezio’s characterization of both the explicit limits on the monarchy and the ancientness of those limits changes the conversation regarding the perception of monarchy in pre-Tudor times. In this light, for example, the strict absolutist discourse that emerges under the Stuart kings becomes particularly alien within the context of an English tradition of the sovereign–subject compact. The book covers the period from 1400 to 1642 and the closure of the public theatres. The chapters, which are arranged chronologically and cover different periods, all contain a brief overview of the royal history of the period under consideration, followed by discussions and analyses of the history plays printed or performed during that time frame, and finishing with a summary of the arguments considered in the chapter. The first chapter covers the long period from 1400 to 1558 to explore the repercussions of the Wars of the Roses on perceptions of the monarchy. Henry VII asserted greater sovereign autonomy than his predecessors, but the role of the barons in tearing the nation apart in the prior conflict made the notion of a limited Parliament and peerage more attractive, particularly to the middle and lower classes. Bezio describes how Henry VII and his canny son bolstered their providential kingships through the theatrical, particularly pageants and progresses. The chapter suggests, although not entirely persuasively, that Henry VII originated the use of drama “not only for political ends on behalf of the crown, but as a way for the populace to participate in political discourse” (32). The following chapters cover the relationship of theatricality and the monarchy under the rise and reign of Elizabeth I to argue that the early public stage, and history plays in particular, represents a shift toward using the theatre as propaganda—a charge that may be somewhat overstated. Chapter 3 offers access to several rarely studied early history plays, such as The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1587), The Scottish History of James IV (1587), and The True Tragedy of Richard III (1588), and Bezio groups these plays, along with Edmund Ironsides, together for their “focus on the English tradition of limited monarchy as the sovereign ideal” (65). Specifically, she convincingly presents The True Tragedy, with its crowning of Richmond by election, as offering a solution to the problem of succession that troubled the English during the later years of Elizabeth’s reign. These succession anxieties occupy the frame of chapter 4 in which Bezio delves into her richest vein of material, for this period finds over forty English history plays registered or produced, a number of which staged a limited monarchy surrounded by councilors, peers, and commoners, particularly Shakespeare’s Henriad and King John. In the concentrated chapter that follows it, “The Queen’s Councilors: Censorship, Courtly Silence, and the Secrets of the Succession (1600...

Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity by Ralf Hertel

Ralf Hertel. Staging Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix + 271. $149.95. In Staging Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity, Ralf Hertel argues that early modern English drama helped to shape the collective and develop the nation as imagined community well before became a factual nation-state (23). Englishness, he asserts, considered as something brought forth by spectators who participate theatre event by becoming eye witnesses of sorts of staged and who engage Englishness displayed theatrically (1). While Hertel, a Professor of English Literature and Culture at University of Hamburg, Germany, acknowledges that he is no historian (28), he also usefully summarizes historical debate about national identity and when it emerges. This political background is essential for understanding his book's contribution to field. As Hertel emphasizes throughout introduction, this study is focused on imagination of a national community, not on a nation which already has a fully functional political, legal or jurisdictional infrastructure (21). Although book fails to engage with much current scholarship, it demonstrates a reasonable connection between historical drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and idea of early modern English national identity. The introduction outlines historical theories of nationalism; explores contested meanings of terms such as nation, nation-building, and national consciousness; and presents debates surrounding concept and emergence of English national identity. The body of book comprises five parts, each titled for what Hertel calls widely accepted components shaping of national consciousness: Religion, Class, and Gender (28). Each part consists of two chapters: a discussion of theoretical perspectives and early modern English historical and political contexts, and a case study that applies these perspectives and contexts to interpret a late-Elizabethan English history play. Four of plays are Shakespearean: Henry IV Part 1, Richard III, King John, and Henry VI Part 2; fifth is Marlowe's Edward 11. The book also includes fourteen figures, through which author locates plays in context of non-fictional texts ... and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits) (1). A bibliography and index follow conclusion. Part 1, Territory, analyzes England's transformation from a territory into a homeland, or a site of historical, and historic, events (35). Hertel emphasizes the rise of cartography from late 1570s onwards (38) and corresponding late-sixteenth-century development of chorography, both of which, he states, facilitated England's transformation into a homeland. He shows how Saxton, Camden, and Drayton incorporated images of people into their maps to illustrate English people's connection to land (45), and how narrative aspect of early modern chorography similarly inserted people into places (47). The author then interprets effects of cartographic revolution Henry IV Part 1 (49). Hertel demonstrates that this centrifugal play (58), with scenes ... [set] all over England (64), places territory of on stage various ways, from play's wide range of English settings to its broad spectrum of English characters, many of whose names evoke geography of (66-68). In Part 2, History, Hertel builds upon his claims part 1 by arguing that transforming space into national territory and terrain into homeland involves charging topography with historical significance, providing expanse of land with a past, and adding a temporal dimension to spatial one (77). These two chapters focus upon constructed nature of history and historical drama. …

The Life and Death of Jack Straw and The Tragical Reign of Selimus: A Note on some Verbal and Thematic Parallels

AT first glance The Life and Death of Jack Straw (c. 1590), an English history play which dramatizes a popular rebellion in Medieval England, does not seem to invite comparison with The Tragical Reign of Selimus (1592), a conqueror play about power struggle in the early sixteenth-century Turkish court. Despite the apparent differences in time, setting, and plot, however, both plays explore rebellion as a main theme, and a close examination will reveal that there are some intriguing parallels between them. The anonymous writer of Jack Straw presents us with a series of alternating scenes which take place among the rebellious commoners and the members of the aristocracy, emphatically drawing attention to what the rebellion means for each party. A salient stylistic feature in the play is that the word ‘unnaturall’ is repetitively used by the king and the ruling elite to describe the rebels and their actions. The word appears thirteen times in the play.1 The rebels are accused of ‘unnaturallie’ seeking ‘wreak upon their Lord’ (232), who is referred to as their ‘naturall Liege’ (237).2 They are called ‘unnaturall Rebels’ (300, 605, 1151), ‘unnaturall men’ (416) or ‘unnaturall Englishmen’ (1144), who have committed an ‘unnaturall injury’ (629) and caused ‘fowle unnaturall broyles’ (987) because they have degenerated from their ‘naturall obedience’ (1089).3

An English History Play in Spain: An Interview with Adrián Daumas, Director of the Spanish Premiere of Richard II (1998)

Adrian Daumas has directed Shakespeare in both Spain and the United States. His work with Shakespeare and other classical playwrights is characterized by an economical, but powerful visual aesthetic which functions as a bridge between the historical moment of the text and its new performance context. In the mid-1990s, following his success with Twelfth Night, Daumas directed the Spanish premiere of Richard II. Daumas's Richard II also stands in counterpoint to Shakespeare productions performed in regional languages, and those which sought to resituate the plays through the incorporation of references to local culture or the appropriation of the texts to comment on current social and political issues. In this interview Daumas discusses his desire to veer away from a conscious exploration of the play's contemporary resonances towards an interrogation of its universality and an engagement with the play's profoundly human themes and emotional content. He comments on the challenges posed by his decision to ‘respect’ the play's very singular genre and discusses the search for a corresponding classical aesthetic which would bring the poetics of tragedy to the stage. He openly re-evaluates his work on the play and reflects on the potential of Richard II to create new meanings in different geographical and historical contexts.

The End of the English History Play in Perkin Warbeck

In the early seventeenth century, history as a discipline was being constituted through a series of exclusions of historiographic practices that earlier had enjoyed widespread acceptance. Conversely, as historiography was being distinguished by its prohibitions against practices decidedly literary, literature came to be marked by disinterest. John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck appears a generation after the heyday of the English history play, and its central concern is to explore the fissures between the literary and the authentically historical. It is a history play about the end of history plays.

The Restoration English History Plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery

The two English history plays written by Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, during the first decade of the Restoration, The History of Henry the Fifth and The Black Prince, were instrumental in reviving the genre in the late seventeenth century. Although Boyle's Restoration plays have commonly been understood as inaugurating English heroic drama, this article situates them instead in an enduring tradition of seventeenth-century English history plays. Both complimentary and critical of court policy, these plays respond to the experience of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, from the early enthusiasm for war to the later disappointment with its disastrous outcome. The article aims to demonstrate how later seventeenth-century history plays, like their Elizabethan counterparts, continued to serve as vehicles for political critique and an important forum for the debate of pressing topical issues.

The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics. Edited by Henry T. Edmondson III. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000. 272p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Shakespeare's Political Realism: The English History Plays. By Tim Spiekerman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 208p. $16.95 paper.

As their scholarship indicates, Henry Edmondson and Tim Spiekerman share two basic assumptions: There exist certain enduring issues of politics, such as the nature of social justice and the legitimacy of power, and authors of fiction, drama, and poetry who write with knowledge and sensitivity about the human condition often will have something significant to say about them.

Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays by Tim Spiekerman

Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays by Tim Spiekerman

The Birth of the History Play: Saint, Sacrifice, and Reformation

The Birth of the History Play: Saint, Sacrifice, and Reformation * Benjamin Griffin (bio) If the origins of Greek tragedy are presided over by “the grotesque shadow of a goat,” the traditions of modern European drama are historically under the shadow of the Christian sacrifice. 1 In what follows I will be exploring the impact of Reformation theology and politics upon two ritual dramas: the Mass and the saint plays. The displaying and resacrifice of Christ, on the one hand, and the representation of the martyred saints, on the other, were both “dramas” based upon the re-creation of past events. The saint plays, it is now known, particularly emphasized native “British” or English history; through my reconstruction of the plays on St. Thomas Becket, I will suggest a new genealogy for the English history play. The alteration and suppression of medieval cultural forms drove their energies into new channels, creating a new form of historical drama, in which a sense of commemoration takes precedence over the sense of presence. The Protestant Reformation brought to the Mass, and specifically to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, a revolutionary change which was historicizing in conception. In the Catholic Mass, the sacrifice or oblation of Christ is understood to happen again in the consecration. This sacrifice is “present” in two senses of the word: the sacrifice happens in the present moment, and Christ’s body is present physically in the Eucharist. The Mass represents a past event, the sacrifice of Christ; yet that event is understood somehow not to be past, but rather to be perennially repeated through the efficacy of the ritual. Witnessing the resacrifice of Christ brings the spectator—I use the term because most attendants at a medieval Mass were not communicants—to a “timeless” cultural site, there to contact the presence of the dead. 2 But in Reformation England, the service for the Lord’s Supper, created mainly by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer [End Page 217] under the influence of the Continental reformers, radically altered this conception—giving official sanction to an anti-transubstantiationist current of feeling which had existed since the Lollards at least. The liturgy for the Lord’s Supper in the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, was subsequently pushed in the direction of still further reformation in the edition of 1552, the understanding of the Eucharistic service being one of the most contentious areas affected. The Elizabethan Prayer Book (1559) is based closely upon the Second Edwardine Book. 3 In the 1549 Prayer Book, the sacrifice was understood to have happened “once for all,” and at a great distance in time. By comparison to the mystically renewed sacrifice of the Roman rite, the new English service foregrounded the historical contingency of Christ’s death. The Order for the Lord’s Supper in the 1549 Book reads: “O God heauenly father, which of thy tender mercie diddest geue thine only sonne Jesu Christ to suffre death upon the crosse for our redempcion, who made there (by his one oblacion once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifyce, oblacion, and satysfaccyon, for the sinnes of the whole worlde.” 4 The parenthetical phrase stresses the discrete singularity of the historical event. Both Edwardine Books insist on the memorial character of the Eucharist: Christ “did institute, and in his holy Gospell commaund us, to celebrate a perpetuall memory of that his precious death.” 5 The sacrifice was to be commemorated, not re-created. Cranmer’s service was not Zwinglian—the Sacrament was not “merely memorial”—the memory was able to work an effectual change. This change happens, not in the Eucharist, but in the faithful believer, who involves himself in a process of thought rather than, as the Roman rite had it, in a physical association with the substance of God. Julia Houston has recently suggested that Cranmer’s reformed communion service represents an important event for English drama. 6 According to Houston, the Catholic Mass had not been a semiotically constructed experience: Christ’s presence was not “signified,” because Christ was really present; the bread and wine were not “signifiers,” because they were the body of Christ. In Cranmer’s reformed Lord’s Supper...

:The Movement towards Subversion: The English History Play from Skelton to Shakespeare

The Movement Towards Subversion explores the theme of power in the Renaissance English history play. It analyzes the growing subversion of the sociopolitical hierarchy in Renaissance drama from Skelton's Magnificence to Shakespeare's King Lear. Unlike most scholarship, this book studies the lesser-known, often neglected dramas plus some familiar 'canonical' works. These plays tell us a lot about political and religious attitudes in sixteenth-century England. Instead of discussing the plays in regard to their relationships with and influences upon Shakespearean drama, the author analyzes the plays on their own terms. This book also shows how dramatists employ medieval history in their plays to express subversive ideas about Tudor political situations.

Essays: Mainly Shakespearean by Anne Barton

Reviews539 (V.i. 12-14). Again, it seems doubtful that "the aura of Medea is present throughout the play, affecting it on every level" (p. 184). The chapter on Hamlet interprets the protagonist as a character seeking to transform himself into a Hercules type hero. Though the number of classical allusions declines in the later plays, the ones that do appear "grow in power and intensity as they function as icons for dramatic action" (p. 204). Again, perhaps the basic identification is carried rather far—Horatio's "flights of angels" (V.ii.359-60) would surely call up Christian iconography in a Renaissance audience rather than "the promise of Scipio the Elder that when a hero dies his immortal soul will leave his body and fly to heaven" (p. 219). The mythological allusions in Othello are submerged—so much so that one wonders if Professor Truax is justified in associating Iago's bestial images for Othello with Jupiter's transformations (p. 232) or Desdemona's arrival in Cyprus with Venus (p. 239). Indeed, the latter description again is more Christian than Ovidian with its "divine Desdemona" (Il.i.73) and "grace of heaven" (II.i.85). To say that Cassio is transformed by Circe when Cassio himself refers to a devil (Il.iii.338) also seems unjustified as does the concluding reference to Hades when Othello's statement with its "devils," "heavenly sight," "sulphur," and "liquid fire" (V.iii.278-80) clearly refers to hell. The book gets back on track with The Winter's Tale. One wonders , however, if the appearance of the bear does transform the "seemingly tragic moment into farce" (p. 268). Nevertheless, the argument that "the metamorphosis that concludes The Winter's Tale is the transformation of artifice into reality" (p. 280) is sound. In sum. Metamorphosis in Shakespeare's Plays is a thoroughly researched book. Its one flaw, and its virtue, is that the writer has so immersed herself in her subject that Shakespeare's plays begin to seem like one vast metamorphosis. CECILE WILLIAMSON CARY Wright State University Anne Barton. Essaxs: Mainlx Shakespearean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. ? + 386. $59.95. One of the most admirable features of this collection of old and new essays by the distinguished Renaissance scholar Anne Barton is the care with which Barton has arranged her pieces. Rather than chronologically staggering her work, Barton has placed "related essays together" and thus, as her preface promises, allowed "different arguments to interact and . . . provide a sense of continuity" (p. xvi). That her chapters can so cooperatively interact, increasing our 540Comparative Drama insights in their sequential reading, is a tribute to their author's consistent clarity of thought over a thirty-year period. (The earliest essay. on Love's Labour's Lost, was first published in 1953; the two previously unpublished ones, on Shakespearean marriage and comic London , date from 1990 and 1992.) Serious students of Shakespeare are often awed by the integrity of many aspects of the playwright's imagination through his quarter-century of dramatic production, and I experienced something like this awe in relation to Barton's responses to her Renaissance subjects over a like time-span. The reader benefits from the findings of a trained vision which, having fully assimilated its insights into one area, brings its enriched perception to bear on a new or broadened field, expanding and deepening the eye's prior discoveries . For example. Barton's careful explication, in an early chapter , of the divided climax of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra assists her discussion of Ford's The Broken Heart's similar catastrophe in her book's second half; the essays, though written six years apart, develop a strikingly unified argument, yet still yield a variety of insights into two quite different plays. Elsewhere, Barton's analysis of Shakespeare's radical departure in Henry V from conventional representations of the disguised king leads easily and logically into her next chapter's argument, that Ford's Pcrkin Warbeck represented the end-point of the English history play, a form thoroughly exhausted by 1633. And late in the book, three essays written over a thirteen-year period on Renaissance and Restoration comedy merge almost seamlessly...

"The Noise of Threatening Drum": Dramatic Strategy and Political Ideology in Shakespeare and the English Chronicle Plays by Larry S. Champion

88Comparative Drama enough. As suggested earlier, the play's triumphal ending should not have been lopped off unless accompained by the scene in which Satan tries vainly to prevent that ending. Likewise, in modernizing the dialogue, Schell could also have rid the text of other distracting archaisms, including "thee" and "thou" as well as those that litter lines such as these, from one of the torturers: "We greet you well on your new jett,/ And make on you a moue" (p. 25). Even the actors seem unsure of these lines: the first is left unintelligible in performance, while the second is followed by—and is presumably explained by—the torturers saying "oo" in chorus; however, the original lines ("we grete jou wel on be newe gett/ and make on 30U a mowe") would probably best be translated as "We greet you well in the new fashion, and make a face at you" (or, both clearly and in rhyme with the rest of the stanza: "We'll greet you fashionably yet/ by grimacing at you"). An audience familar with the original or with Middle English will be baffled by the interpretation of the lines, while any other audience is likely simply to be baffled. Ultimately, then, I am not certain for whom this video has been produced. I would very much like to have seen the original stage performance , and would have found as much to admire as to criticize. However, I fear that as educational material this package adds all too little to the meager pool of resources for the medieval drama scholar. GARRETT P. J. EPP University of Alberta Larry S. Champion: "The Noise of Threatening Drum": Dramatic Strategy and Political Ideology in Shakespeare and the English Chronicle Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990. Pp. 172. $29.50. Larry Champion does in this book what has not been done for many years, indeed since the late 1950's, when Irving Ribner published The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare—that is, he considers Shakespeare's English history plays in the context of other contemporary plays about English history. This is a salutary undertaking, no matter who does it, for Shakespeare did not write in a cultural or literary vacuum. Champion's assumptions, moreover, are very different from Ribner's, and they make this book much more than a mere update of its predecessor . The influence of E. M. W. Tillyard is strong in Ribner's book, which Champion quotes at one point: "there can be no doubt that Shakespeare believed in this almost universally accepted concept of degree, and that he accepted the Tudor doctrines of absolutism and passive obedience" (p. 100). Far from subscribing to this assumption himself, Champion takes it as his principal point of opposition. He argues, in contrast, that "what Shakespeare believed" cannot be derived from the plays, because they present multiple perspectives on history and politics, in such a way as to appeal to a broad social cross-section in the Elizabethan popular theater. To be sure, Champion's task is less ambitious than Ribner's, since Champion does not discuss as many plays as Ribner, and he does not Reviews89 attempt to trace the history of the genre or to construct a theory of it. He excludes two of Shakespeare's English history plays (Richard III and Henry VIII) without explaining why, and he includes just five nonShakespearean plays: The Famous Victories of Henry V, Edward III, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and Edmund Ironside. Treating the first four of these plays in a formulaic manner, Champion discusses each in a separate chapter. In each case, he briefly summarizes issues of date and authorship (where relevant) and critical responses to the play, outlines the "traditional" view of it—i.e., the view represented by Tillyard, Ribner, M. M. Reese, and others who were influenced by Tillyard—and finally offers what he calls "a realistic ideological perspective " (p. 120), designed to "deconstruct" the "traditional" view and to reveal how someone might have seen the play who did not come to it with the ideologically idealistic blinders of social privilege, wealth, and power. The word...

Twentieth-Century English History Plays: From Shaw to Bond

Acknowledgements - Introduction: The English History Play in the Twentieth-Century - George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan - Three Plays of the 1930s: Reginald Berkeley The Lady with the Lamp, Clifford Bax The Rose without a Thorn, and Gordon Daviot Richard of Bordeaux - T.S.Eliot Murder in the Cathedral - Three Plays of the 1960s: Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons, Peter Shaffer The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and John Osborne Luther - Edward Bond Early Morning - Conclusion - Notes - Index

Shakespeare's English History Plays as Political Science Pedagogy

Shakespeare's English History Plays as Political Science Pedagogy

The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays

The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access THE LOST GARDEN: A VIEW OF SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH AND ROMAN HISTORY PLAYS , by John Wilders . London : Macmillan , 1979 ; pp. xi, 154 ; cloth £6.50: paper £295. E. A. J. HONIGMANN E. A. J. HONIGMANN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 26, Issue 6, December 1979, Pages 571–572, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/26-6-571 Published: 01 December 1979