"Unkind Division": The Double Absence of Performing History in 1 Henry VI

Sixteenth-century apologists for the popular theater, including Thomas Heywood and Thomas Nashe, praised the staging of English history on the grounds that it edified spectators by "reviving" the past. This essay shows how one of Shakespeare's early history plays challenges such didactic uses of the past and explores history and performance as fraught, mutually destabilizing concepts. This joint destabilization emerges most clearly in the rhetoric of succession, the topic with which all of Shakespeare's history plays inevitably engage. Through a careful analysis of 1 Henry VI, Brian Walsh links narratives of broken political, biological, and cultural succession with the failure to sustain historical representation in performance. According to Walsh, the play stages a confrontation with the past's elusiveness that is both troubling and teeming with possibility. Enacting history onstage thus becomes a means through which participants in the theatrical event can lay claim to a sense of the past not by reviving what is unrecoverable but by creating something new at the moment of performance.