Shakespeare's Serial History Plays (review)

Nicholas Grene sets out to prove, against the grain of the contemporary consensus, that the plays that have become Shakespeare's two historical "tetralogies" are precisely that: groups of plays which in the writing were linked together by deliberate design and execution and which in the early modern theater were very probably presented as integrated series. In a critical environment that has opted more generally for the unpicking of grand narratives and for the resolution of their individual elements into "petit recits," Grene seeks to reinstate the plays as a master narrative, a planned historical totality. Even more controversially, the book argues that it is the "first tetralogy" (Henry VI through Richard III) that manifestly represents a consciously planned sequence, while the second (Richard II through Henry V) developed into a series cumulatively and retrospectively: "My view of the two sequences runs exactly counter to the common perception of their evolution" (247).

Recent work on the histories has been strongly influenced by postmodern theory and textual scholarship, both of which tend to foster a deconstructionist and disintegrationist approach to these plays. But Grene does not seek to engage the argument on either of these fronts. His methodologies are those of theater history, performance analysis, and textual interpretation. All three provide him with problems as well as opportunities. The surviving data from theater history do nothing to support a case that the history plays were originally performed as sequences in the 1590s. Grene cites evidence, mostly from Henslowe's diary, to reveal a "pattern of production for other plays with more than one part" (23). The phrase "more than one" is potentially misleading: the evidence he adduces, interesting as it is, is all of two-part plays, not of tetralogies. Elsewhere, in the absence of any fresh evidence, Grene finds himself ingeniously turning over familiar data to force a new interpretation: Henslowe's "ne" may have stood for "newly licensed" rather than "new"; Robert Greene's "vpstart Crow" jibe may have castigated Shakespeare for imitating others' styles rather than for plagiarizing existing scripts; "Johannes factotum," may have meant not Jack of-all-trades but one who arrogantly constructed totalities where others were content with single plays.

Ultimately Grene's key evidence is of course the formal integration of the history cycles into the First Folio, where the plays are neatly sequenced and restored to their chronicle order. This might well have been an editorial rather than an authorial strategy and need say little or nothing about how the plays had been presented in the theaters thirty years earlier. Grene has to set aside the evidence of the earliest texts, the out-of-order First part of the Contention and Richard Duke of Yorke, publications that were far more closely involved with the play's theatrical existence, by accepting them as "reported texts"; and he has nothing to say about King John and Henry VIII, which were also included in the Folio's historical master narrative. Similarly he skips over Restoration and eighteenth-century theater history in a paragraph, since there, he says, the plays remained in vogue but disappeared from the stage "as series." He does not give adequate consideration to the alternative explanation—that the plays may not have been presented as series in the 1590s, that the fragmentation and free adaptation of the eighteenth century may have preserved some of the essential methods of the Elizabethan theater, and that the plays did not secure totality and authentic "serial" status on the stage until much later.

Instead, Grene starts his performance history with Schiller and Goethe, reading the plays in the light of nineteenth-century cultural nationalism and advocating their interpretation (both critical and theatrical) as an integrated series. Grene's book is rich in detailed reference to stage, film, and television production of the tetralogies. But all this evidence relates of course to a post-1864 account of historical integration which is fairly familiar, and tells us nothing about whether the histories were played together in...