Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad (review)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Shakespeare's history plays do not travel—that they do not "travel," both in the literal sense of being stay-at-homes set mainly on the British Isles and in the wine taster's figurative sense of losing their flavor when consumed abroad. Dennis Kennedy, as author of Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performances (1993) and one of the major authorities in the field, reacknowledges this truth in the foreword to the present collection of essays: the histories, he observes, "have held relatively little interest for readers and audiences further afield" (2), and he quotes in support the Flemish writer Tom Lanoye's remark that to Belgian audiences Richmond and Kent mean very little apart from being well-known cigarette brands (3; also 191, 245). Lanoye is, with Luk Perceval, the co-creator of Ten Oorlog ("To War," 1997), the biggest splash that Shakespeare's history plays have made outside England in recent years. To quote him here is, of course, a willfully self-defeating move in the argument. It is precisely to contest the widespread view that Shakespeare's histories are impenetrable, uninteresting, and useless to theater makers and audiences abroad that this collection of thirteen wide-ranging and far-reaching essays has been compiled by Dutch Shakespearean Ton Hoenselaars, a specialist in transcultural literary negotiations such as translation, adaptation, and mutual intercultural perceptions and representations.

The anthology rides the crest of an enthusiasm that arose with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. This political sea change first allowed Shakespeareans from Eastern and Western Europe to extensively compare notes on what had been done with, and to, Shakespeare in their various national cultures across a traumatic history of totalitarian regimes, wars, and genocides. The dialogue has triggered a number of international conferences and essay collections, and some of the main participants in this dialogue have also contributed to the present anthology. However, Hoenselaars and his team writing from or about some dozen countries go beyond the "Shakespeare in the New Europe" project in at least three crucial ways. (1) They focus on one genre where the stakes are particularly high—the history play, whose resistible rise from the nineteenth century onward to massive presence on present-day foreign stages is documented in representative examples. (2) They consider cultural differences not only as "differences between" cultures—between England and Continental Europe, for instance—but also as "differences within," here within Great Britain and its various constructions of Englishness, Welshness, Irishness, or Scottishness as analyzed by Andrew Murphy and Lisa Hopkins. (3) They try to go beyond the European nexus, not only tracing the route from the Avon to Avignon and its theater festival, where in 1999 Henry V triumphed the first time ever in France (see the essays by Jean-Michel Déprats and by Dominique Goy-Blanquet), but also extending the histories' trajectory—although only in one single move of anti-Eurocentric political correctness—as far as Japan, for which Daniel Gallimore sketches their fairly brief but interesting history. (The United States features only in occasional side glances, one of the stranger omissions in this admittedly selective account.)

The story that emerges from this concerted effort is that Shakespeare's histories in general were translated later and arrived later on foreign stages than his tragedies and comedies, often pioneered by Richard III (for its compelling protagonist) and Henry IV (for Falstaff, compelling in quite different ways), and that the notion of Shakespeare's histories as constituting one vast cycle of plays (see Edward Burns's essay), which could be and should be staged as such, took hold on the Continent earlier than in England. Franz von Dingelstedt's 1864 Weimar production led the way in this movement, which culminated in the 1960s in Leopold Lindtberg's Vienna Königsdramen (1964), John Barton and Peter Hall's Wars of the...