Shakespeare's History Research Articles

Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 by Marianne Montgomery (review)

Reviewed by: Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 by Marianne Montgomery Peter Kirwan (bio) Marianne Montgomery . Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xii + 150. $89.95. The variety of spoken languages other than English preserved in the early modern dramatic corpus poses a series of questions for the critic, few of which have straightforward answers. A stage direction such as "The Lady speakes in Welsh" in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV gives no instruction for the precise words to be spoken, the duration of the speech, or its tone. It implies that accurate Welsh is to be spoken, but this accuracy is left to be determined by the speaker/reader/ auditor, as is the form—verse or prose. The direction itself can be read either as an instruction to a Welsh speaker to ad-lib appropriately, or as indicating the intended effect on an audience. The editor, meanwhile, is faced with the dilemma of presenting substantial speech acts without dialogue. How can the unscripted language maintain a presence in the printed text without being implicitly deprioritized alongside the English dialogue already substituting for and translating the Welsh? Marianne Montgomery's new volume takes as its subject the multiple significations of foreign languages on the early modern London stage. Within a focused thirty-year period, Montgomery ambitiously attends to both the theatrical significance of spoken languages for early audiences, and the implications for an understanding of London's conception of the "foreign." Across chapters predominantly dealing with French, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin, she teases out the complexities of the meanings presented by the staging of these languages, which go far beyond markers of national identity. Montgomery's thesis may be summed up thus: the instances of staged non-English languages "offer audiences a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that does not simply reinforce difference in audible terms but instead complicates distinctions between self and other as unknown languages are made comprehensible" (4). Thus, it is not the specific accuracy of the language used that is the priority, but the ways in which it is made sense of for/by the early modern audience. The process of decodification, in Montgomery's argument, is itself the point, drawing attention to the "ethics of exchange" (20) in an increasingly globalized world. Rather than attempt systematically to cover all the implications of language as an exchange system, Montgomery uses each of the languages with a major early modern stage presence to tackle a different set of issues. She treats French and Welsh as gendered in Shakespeare's history plays, and makes an association between conquered female figures and subjugated nations/languages. Dutch, in a range of city comedies, signifies a language of commerce and mercantilism that places London at the center of European trade. Spanish is read as a racialized discourse that comes to stand as its own generic marker within a range of [End Page 138] dramas. Finally, Latin signifies religious and authoritarian knowledge, its use in comedies particularly pointing to layers of social stratification that distinguish aspects of society from one another, while at the same time satirizing the artificial distinctions drawn. Drawing on William Camden and John Speed's contemporary descriptions of Welsh invaders in France marrying native women and cutting out their tongues "lest their children should corrupt their language with their mothers' tongues" (21), Montgomery argues that the conquered female body poses a threat to the conqueror's linguistic victory, offering as examples Henry V's strategic linguistic interplay with Katherine and the presence of the Welshwoman in 1 Henry IV (whom Montgomery carefully avoids describing as either Glendower's daughter or Mortimer's wife) at the point of the contestation of land boundaries. In the latter case, it is the performance of Welshness that is the purpose (though Montgomery does not explore the possibility that the lack of content may indicate space left for a Welsh-speaking actor to insert meaningful lines), whereas in the French-speaking scenes a plurality of meanings is opened up for audiences whose fluency may vary. However, "[n]either can be fully taken as Other" (47), and...

The Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook

Geoffrey le Baker's chronicle covers the reigns of Edward II and Edward III up to the English victory at Poitiers. It starts in a low key, copying an earlier chronicle, but by the end of Edward II's reign he offers a much more vivid account. His description of Edward II's last days is partly based on the eyewitness account of his patron, Sir Thomas de la More, who was present at one critical interview. Baker's story of Edward's death, like many other details from his chronicle, was picked up by Tudor historians, particularly by Holinshed, who was the source for Shakespeare's history plays. The reign of Edward III is dominated, not by Edward III himself, but by Baker's real hero, Edward prince of Wales. His bravery aged 16 at Crecy is presented as a prelude to his victory at Poitiers, a battle which Baker is able to describe in great detail, apparently from what he was told by the prince's commanders. It is a rarity among medieval battles, because - in sharp contrast to the total anarchy at Crecy - the prince and his staff were able to see the enemy's manoeuvres. Throughout the chronicle there are sharply defined vignettes which stay in the mind - the killing of the Scottish champion on Halidon Hill, the drowning of Sir Edward Bohun, the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk as prisoners carried in a cart, the death of Sir Walter Selby and his two sons, the bravery of Sir Thomas Dagworth against a cobbler's son, the duel between Otho and the duke of Lancaster, John Dancaster and the lewd washerwoman. Baker writes in a complex Latin which even scholars find problematic, and David Preest's new translation will be widely welcomed by anyone interested in the fourteenth century. There are extensive notes and an introduction by Richard Barber.

Archaism, the “Middle Age” and the Morality Play in Shakespearean Drama

This essay explores the use of outmoded forms in the Shakespearean history play, examining the reanimation of the morality play and its implications for our thinking about periodization and the temporality of language. Focusing on the play-within-the-play in Sir Thomas More, it argues that paying close attention to the uses of theatrical archaism can provide us with a new perspective on Shakespeare and his collaborators' engagement with the past. In doing so, the essay engages with an important strand of recent criticism in the Humanities, which has focused on temporality and, above all, ambiguities and tensions in the ways in which time is conceptualized by artists and theorists.

JONATHAN BALDO. Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England.

In this insightful study, Jonathan Baldo proposes that Shakespeare’s ‘second tetralogy’ is defined by its concern with memory and, more importantly, forgetting. In contrast to the ‘first tetralogy’, where the capacity to erase memories threatens national aspirations, Shakespeare’s later history plays show that forgetting plays a key role in creating national identity. Baldo sees the struggle to produce a stable understanding of English nationhood as a concern of Shakespeare’s that intensifies in the plays written after Richard II; this supplants the older dynastic understanding of the realm which informed his earlier historical drama. However, in a post-Reformation context, the national past was deeply contested. The counter-memories of various communities (Catholics, ‘church-papists’, Puritans) ensured that the values that constituted the nation were kept under constant scrutiny and debate. Shakespeare’s plays address this area of conflict in Elizabethan culture and they are each characterized by ‘internal memory wars’ in which ‘various forces strive to produce a more uniform perception of the past’ (p. 4).

Shakespeare’s Itinerant Soldiers and Foreign Wars: The Elizabethan Crisis of Debt in the Economy of Hal’s England

In middle of 1590s, Shakespeare wrote several plays reflecting on social, moral, and economic problems of debt. Perhaps most obvious of these plays is The Merchant of Venice, in which main plot revolves around an unpaid and relative social and moral standings of man holding and man owing it. However, in Henriad Shakespeare also focuses intently on stresses produced by system of and credit, particularly through behavior and language associated with Falstaffin Henry IV plays. At end of 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare's epilogue employs financial metaphor to beseech audience for good will toward play:I meant indeed to pay you with this, which if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promis'd you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and (as most debtors do) promise you infinitely; and so I kneel down before you-but indeed, to pray for Queen. If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs? And yet that were but light payment, to out of your debt. (10-20)The convenient first step into jig that typically followed plays attempts to dance out of historical controversy stemming from unfavorable representation of Sir John Oldcastle (later renamed Falstaff) in original Henry IV play.1 However, ending also foregrounds concern with monetary that has been running through both of Henry IV plays, chiefly in two veins: material images of particularly gravitate around Falstaff, and metaphorical uses of imagery are associated with monarchy.The motivation for Shakespeare to feature so prominently in these several plays written over such short span of his career merits critical attention. 2 Although Richard II expresses concern with costs of wars in Ireland and with parasitical effect on national economy of certain courtiers, debts incurred in Richard II are largely political and moral.3 However, as economic challenges deepened in Shakespeare's England in mid-1590s, Shakespeare's history plays added more complex economic layers and metaphors, including introduction of Falstaff's monetary debts, penury of king's soldiers, legal maneuverings to resolve credit disputes, and an implicit political debate over responsibility for and poverty within nation. Shakespeare develops this economic motif across two Henry IV plays, and also carries over this concern into Henry V, tying plays together and generating sustained dialogue about how figures in political and historical concerns of as well as how it is significant for Elizabethan society in 1590s.This is not first article to comment on financial motif in Henry IV plays-debts, purses, and promises of money run throughout plays, and critics have long taken note. H.R. Coursen, for one, has remarked upon metaphorical debts in political world of plays: Indebtedness, robbery, promises to pay and failures to pay, devaluation-commodity-are measurements of Bolingbroke's kingdom (109). Among recent critics, Jesse Lander observes the admittedly obtrusive language of credit and debt (137) in 1 Henry IV in conjunction with counterfeiting of coins and king's image, and Nina Levine has even more pointedly connected sixteenth-century material and social contexts of commerce and credit with depictions of Prince Hal and Falstaffin both Henry IV plays. Levine's account, in particular, makes strong case for reading credit and exchange activities in as parallel to monarchical discourses on power, and community of credit that she describes is compelling and strongly rooted in recent scholarship on material culture. However, while Levine observes in passing way in which instances of credit and exchanges in plays supply a resonant point of reference for world outside play (414), she offers scant account of specific historical conditions of 1590s England beyond broadly conceived community of credit that provides foundation of her interpretation. …

Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant EnglandLiturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.

<i>Timothy Rosendale</i>, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England<i>Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England</i>. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.

Holinshed's Nation: Ideals, Memory and Practical Policy in the Chronicles. By IGOR DJORDJEVIC.

Holinshed's Nationconsiders Rafael Holinshed'sChronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577 and 1587) as a serious and intentional exercise in historiography whose agenda appears in its rhetorical strategies. This study confines itself to the portion of the Chronicles for the years 1377–1485 (those of Shakespeare's history plays) and focuses on how the Chronicles offer a ‘mirror for policy’ through three principle tropes — chivalry, politic monarchy, and the ‘commonwealth ideal’. While these tropes occur throughout the 1377–1485 narrative, the predominant ideal shifts from chivalry to commonwealth over time. After an initial chapter spent wrestling with preceding studies of the Chronicles, critical and historiographic theory, and the textual complications presented by the two editions, Igor Djordjevic divides his study into three sections. The first focuses on the reign of Richard II and Richard's failure to achieve the chivalric ideal; the second on the Hundred Years' War (principally on Henry V) and the definition of English national character through ‘heroic, chivalric and honour paradigms’ (p. 140) associated with English chivalry as opposed to ‘French faintheartedness’ (p. 144). It also introduces the ideal of the politic ruler. The third considers how, during the Wars of the Roses, ‘the political discourse of the factions vying for power is dominated by the rhetorical formulae of “commonwealth” and “France”’ (p. 169). During this time ‘all actors on the political stage continually claim that the chivalric conduct to the governing, noble estate, and the defence (or reconquest, after 1453) of France are a public good for all the estates of the English commonwealth’ (p. 169).

“A woman's hide”: The presentation of female characters in Michael Boyd's The Histories

In 2006–2008 Michael Boyd staged the octology of Shakespeare's history plays. These plays are famous for the relative absence of women and Boyd's cycle amply illustrated this: out of 264 performed roles only 31 were female, requiring only five actresses in a company of 34 players. A negative approach to women in the history plays is evident both in the texts and criticism of the plays to date. The women of the first tetralogy are powerful, violent figures whose behaviour at times borders on the monstrous; in contrast, the women of the second tetralogy are not military, political or monstrous but are marginalized and dismissed as either silent crying queens or low whores. However, this approach to women in the history plays is insufficient when thinking about Boyd's productions. Although superficially strikingly different, the presentation of women through the octology can be seen as a single unfolding development. This article demonstrates that when read in chronological order of events, the presentation of women is a development of strength, from voiceless oppression in Richard II to anguished agency in Richard III, rather than a descent to disenfranchisement.

Shakespeare's philosopher king: reading The tragedy of King Lear

This title digs into Shakespeare's darkest, most-important play. Tragedy of King Lear precedes Cymbeline, King of Britain, as the earliest of Shakespeare's English history plays in the sense that it represents a primordial age when the 'sceptered isle' of 'England' was hardly yet even clearly differentiated from 'Britain'. The decay and fall of the world is visible, i.e., is originally conceivable as a subject, only from a vantage that is in some sense not itself limited to error or fault. This resolution cannot be a thesis that is merely proved from outside but a vantage that emerges in a careful reading of the 1623 folio from the beginning that is alert both to the whole of Shakespeare's corpus and its cultural context. The reading shows Tragedy of King Lear to be a broadly Thomistic portrayal of the problem and reality of kingship, in which there emerges an increasingly explicit and profound - and entirely unsentimental - Christianity that seems as much Augustinian as Thomistic.

Taking the Bard to the bush: Environmental Shakespeares in Australia

Much Shakespearean stage history and performance analysis focuses on productions staged in indoor spaces, but since the nineteenth century outdoor productions have become increasingly popular around the world, and they provide some interestingly varied modes of interaction with the worlds constructed through Shakespeare's verse and prose. Whereas conventional theatre buildings tend to isolate the performance event from the physical and social world outside, open-air productions cannot be cocooned from the places in which they are staged and inevitably perceptions of the locale become an integral part of the performance experience. Audiences at an open-air production experience the ambiguities of simultaneously responding to the imagined locations suggested by Shakespeare's poetry and prose, the production's attempts to represent those locations through lighting, costumes, properties and scenery and also, crucially, to the particular characteristics of the space chosen for performance and the sense of place associated with it. In Australia the distance between Shakespearean settings and local space is glaringly conspicuous, yet in recent years many companies have attempted to mount productions in unusual locations, beyond the familiar spaces of city parks and gardens. Focusing on the work of Victorian company, Ozact, this paper considers the emergence of environmental Shakespeare in Australia and its search for synergies between place and play.

Anne Brontë — Not the Least of Shakespeare's Sisters

This essay explores the influence of Shakespeare on Anne Brontë, and follows on from my earlier study in Shakespeare Survey 62 (see below for a full bibliographical reference). It seems clear that Anne read more Shakespeare between her work onAgnes Grey and her writing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the particular focus here. I identify two kinds of literary allusion, the 'unambiguous' and the 'submerged', and collate all nineteen references to Shakespeare in Anne's two novels made available through the major critical editions (see Table 1). To these I add nineteen more and present them through reference to Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies and sonnets. I conclude by making the case that Shakespeare was important to Anne in her final lines of poetry, and in Charlotte's own later appropriation of them.

Book Review: Christian Irony in Shakespeare's Histories

Book Review: Christian Irony in Shakespeare's Histories

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (review)

Reviewed by: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Ashland, Oregon. 10-14 March and 7-12 August 2012. Several recent studies in dance and performance scholarship have dwelt on the complexities of historical re-performance both on and off the stage. Yet, perhaps because the practice is deemed so normative, at least since the emergence of the auteur-director in late-nineteenth-century Europe, what it means to re-perform dramatic texts in theatre has not been addressed with as much focused attention. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's (OSF) 2012 season— its seventy-seventh—offered several opportunities to think through re-performance, as well as how the festival stages history in the present. The season reengaged classical Shakespearean and Greek plays and various iterations of a Chinese folktale while also commissioning new productions exploring turning points in US history. Taken together, these retakes on classic plays and past events enabled a reexamination of the limits of the state in legislating civil rights, international conflicts, family structures, and appropriate gender roles. The season offered two aesthetically distinct premieres within the "American Revolutions" commissioning project that variously engaged the 1960s civil rights movement from both federal legislative and grassroots perspectives. Robert Schenkkan's All the Way (directed by Bill Rauch) took up President Johnson's fraught struggle to pass the Civil Rights Act while retaining the nomination of the Democratic Party. Party People, devised by the hip-hop theatre collective Universes (Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and William Ruiz [aka Ninja]) and developed and directed by Liesl Tommy, reexamined the legacy of the Black Panthers and Young Lords via a multimedia spoken-word and movement-infused documentary spectacle. Temporally resituated takes on canonical Shakespeare texts included director Joseph Haj's Henry V, inspired by Vietnam War-era photos, Rob Melrose's Troilus and Cressida, in which he cast Greeks as US soldiers occupying contemporary Iraq, and Laird Williamson's Romeo and Juliet, set in 1840s Spanish California. These reengagements of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies joined Alison Carey's comic adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor (directed by Christopher Liam Moore), The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, relocated to election season in an imagined contemporary Iowa in which gay marriage is not only tolerated, but also fashionable. Together, these plays reinvestigated the costs of battle set against the struggle to negotiate familial structures. Mary Zimmerman's compelling adaptation of The White Snake (devised with the ensemble) also took Click for larger view View full resolution Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella ensemble. (Photo: Jenny Graham.) [End Page 253] Click for larger view View full resolution Lyndon Johnson (Jack Willis) and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Kenajuan Bentley) argue about voting rights (ensemble at rear: David Kelly, Daniel T. Parker, and Derrick Lee Weeden) in All the Way. (Photo: Jenny Graham.) up the issue of "appropriate" marriage. In a slot devoted to global classics, Zimmerman grounded her reimagining of this well-known Chinese fable in multiple source texts. Like the titular snake, which appeared as stick puppet, bunraku-manipulated object, and in human form, the story frequently paused to shed its skin and note different narrative trajectories, foregrounding the tale's historicity and multiplicity. The production thus made visible the interpretive tensions embedded within various versions of the tale, which follows the desires of a white snake turned to human form who falls in love with, marries, and bears the child of a young man, and which asks whether this interspecies love affair merits our disapprobation or acceptance. Perhaps the most fertile site of inquiry into re-performance, the staging of histories, and various takes on power, family structures, and appropriate gender roles was Bill Rauch's Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (MMC). Conceived in 1984 when he was a student at Harvard, Rauch had previously revised and remounted the production in 1998 at the Actor's Gang in Los Angeles and in 2002 at Yale Repertory Theatre (with codirector Tracy Young); he had also workshopped the piece for several years at OSF prior to this season's performance on the Bowmer mainstage (choreographed for the fourth time by Sabrina Peck). The 2012 production thus animated retakes on each of the core dramatic...

Book Reviews: The Bowdler Shakespeare, the Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's History Plays, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640, Rhetoric, Theatre and the Arts of Design. Essays Presented to Roy Eriksen, Shakespearean Metaphysics, Representing France and the French, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economies and the Early Modem English Stage, Œuvres complètes, the Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia, the

Book Reviews: The Bowdler Shakespeare, the Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's History Plays, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640, Rhetoric, Theatre and the Arts of Design. Essays Presented to Roy Eriksen, Shakespearean Metaphysics, Representing France and the French, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economies and the Early Modem English Stage, Œuvres complètes, the Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia, the

English Renaissance drama and the specter of Spain: ethnopoetics and empire

List of Illustrations Introduction: The Specter of Spain 1. From Ethos to Ethnos 2. A Long and Lively Antithesis 3. Thomas Kyd's Tragedy of Spains 4. Marlowe Among the Machevills 5. Shakespeare's Comical History 6. Othello's Spanish Spirits: Or, Un-sainting James Afterword: A Natural Enemy Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgements

Good King Henry and the Genealogy of Shakespeare's First History Plays

While recent arguments for the saint play as a formal influence on the Shakespearean history play rely on a teleological notion of “secularization,” they may encourage us to rethink the genealogy of Shakespeare's earliest history plays, plays about the reign of Henry VI, who was venerated as a saint. In contrast to Tudor promotion of Henry as a saintly king, the popular cult–which preceded and outlived its political appropriation–celebrated Henry VI for his likeness to ordinary English men and women. This essay explores the resonance between the cult and the plays, especially how the physical and affective lives of English citizens attend the king's failure to symbolize the body politic. Religion can thus be understood as a mediating rather than a rejected term when studying the development of the history plays as a form for thinking about English community.

The Pageant of History: Nostalgia, the Tudors, and the Community Play

This paper considers the persistence of the Renaissance pageant in modern and post-modern culture, both as a recurrent metaphor for history in general and as a feature of stage, cinematic and communal representations of early modern history in particular. After examining the status of public processions in Renaissance London as conscious revivals of the Roman triumph, indebted at the same time to aspects of the medieval mystery plays, the essay examines the English historical pageants of the Edwardian and inter-war years as themselves revivals of both Renaissance pageantry and aspects of the Shakespearean history play. It looks in particular at their emphasis on the Tudor monarchs and on the ethnic origins of Englishness, identifying the fading of the pageant as a genre in the post-war years with the collapse of certain ideas about English exceptionalism and historical continuity.

Acting as an Epitaph: Performing Commemoration in the Shakespearean History Play

Acting as an Epitaph: Performing Commemoration in the Shakespearean History Play

Ecological Microcosms Envisioned in Shakespeare's RICHARD II

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKEYWORDS: ecocriticismecologymicrocosmRenaissancescience Notes 1. A brief sample of this renaissance in Shakespeare's natural history includes Simon Estok's ecological readings of Titus Andronicus, Henry IV part 2, Henry VI part 2, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale; Gabriel Egan's Green Shakespeare; and Bruce Boehrer's Shakespeare Among the Animals. 2. See, for example, Richmond (1975).

"Strike up the drum": The Use of Music in the Boyd History Cycle

This article discusses Michael Boyd's 2008 staging of Shakespeare's history cycle at the RSC, exploring the ways in which music was used and how it consistently connected, confirmed, and subverted the action on stage. Boyd's production - only the third UK staging of the eight-play cycle in the last fifty years - used music, both diegetic and exegetic, with an unprecedented degree of complexity and sophistication: as a narrative instrument to draw connections between the individual plays, an inflection of other creative choices such as doubling and use of props, and a means of commentating on the onstage action and characters. By drawing on personal observations based on four or more viewings of each individual play and three viewings of the cycle as a whole, along with interviews with cast and creative, critical reviews, literature, rehearsal drafts, production notes and the production's musical score, the article seeks to establish music's pivotal role in the conveyance of meaning throughout the eight plays. It addresses Boyd's decision to stage the plays both in order of the narrative and in the order of composition, focusing on the latter and, in doing so, identifies newly distinguishable interconnecting elements between the plays that are underpinned by their specially-composed musical score. In departing from scholarship that has focused primarily on the diegetic use of music in Shakespeare's plays, the article ultimately concentrates on the production's exegetic score, examining its role in complicating and adding layers of meaning to the individual plays and the cycle as a whole.