Shakespeare in Production: King Henry V (review)

This is the seventh volume to appear in Cambridge University Press's Shakespeare in Production series, and most readers will by now be familiar with its use of the texts of the New Cambridge edition alongside extensive introductions to the performance history of the play and footnotes throughout the text on theatrical history's treatment of particular scenes or moments. It is an important and useful series, and Emma Smith has provided a welcome addition to it. Anyone who has attempted to write about theater performance knows, however, what a word-hungry enterprise trying to describe what happens onstage can be, so that, with many dozens of productions to choose from when creating a footnote to a particular moment, editors cannot avoid being arbitrarily selective. Users of their editions are thus absolutely at the mercy of editorial choice and inclination in what they are offered. Since the introductions attempt a comprehensive overview and the footnotes to the texts must, by the very nature of the format, necessarily eschew the comprehensive, the built-in discrepancy can occasionally leave the user feeling short-changed and frustrated: "That production sounded very interesting in the introduction; why doesn't the editor tell me what it did here—and here?"

Emma Smith's edition of Henry V inevitably shares the merits, and the frustrations, of other volumes in the series. The inescapable requirement of using the New Cambridge text puts her in a slight difficulty in the pre-Agincourt French scenes, where Bourbon is given the role assigned to the Dauphin in all the productions she is analyzing. Her introduction (somewhat shorter than those of most of her predecessors) doesn't need to pretend to be covering productions worldwide, for apart from a couple of productions in Germany and France and a handful in the United States and Canada, the performance history of Henry V has been a peculiarly English affair—and an affair, she demonstrates clearly, that has almost always been closely connected with the contemporary political situation, from the initial performance during the Irish wars of 1599, through the play's first significant revivals during mid-eighteenth-century conflicts and the profound change in attitudes to it after the First World War, down to the Olivier film at the end of the Second World War, and thence to the immediately post-Falklands production by Adrian Noble (with Kenneth Branagh in the title role) that preceded the second major cinematic version of the play. (It is no coincidence that, as I write this review in April 2003, with Britain and the United States involved in an overseas military enterprise of questionable international legality, the British National Theatre is in rehearsal for its first production of Henry V.)

Smith's introduction is well researched and well documented, the narrative sensibly divided, the relationships between performances of the play and the contemporary political situation constantly but economically kept in view, and the writing unpretentious and clear. The coverage is, on the whole, even-handed—if one accepts that the two major films deserve much more space than any of the stage productions—but it is disappointing in a book with a 2002 imprint that important productions at Stratford, Ontario, in 2001 and (as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's millennium-histories project) at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2000, though they make it to the list of "Significant Productions," are not once mentioned in introduction or in footnotes.

That list of over fifty significant productions produces the meager total of only twelve illustrations. This series is stingily illustrated, and its usefulness and visual appeal would be much enhanced by a more generous allocation of pictures. Nor is the quality of reproduction uniformly good: mid-gray on pale gray, seen through mist, is too often the impression; the playbills on page 27 are so small that much of them remains illegible even...