“Our Lives and All Are Bolingbroke’s”: Alternating Double Casting in Richard II

Contemporary productions of Shakespeare often use casting of the central role as a vital part of their marketing strategies. Audiences are attracted to the allure, for instance, of Kevin Spacey playing Richard III or Jude Law as Hamlet. These casting choices become part of the production’s spectacle and work to create a bridge between sixteenth-century texts and twenty-first-century audiences. The bodies of these famous actors become particularly doubled, recognizable both as celebrity and character. Regardless of her or his level of acting talent, it is harder for a celebrity to disappear into a role than it is for an actor unknown to spectators. Audiences not only watch as Richard schemes or as Hamlet feigns madness, but as Spacey and Law enact their characters’ choices. In these productions, casting is a particularly well-publicized production choice, helping to communicate concept, theme, or story.

Indeed, celebrity actors are only one way in which a production can draw particular attention to casting. A strategic choice regarding which actors in a large-cast play will “double” (that is, play more than one role) can create a similar amount of spectacle. This strategic use of doubling characterized the 2013 Austin, Texas, production of Richard II that I directed for the then-new company Poor Shadows of Elysium (PSOE). Although it did not use celebrities, the PSOE production drew particular attention to casting by featuring two actors—Aaron Black and Kevin Gates—who each played both King Richard and the usurping Henry Bolingbroke. An onstage coin toss following a prologue written for the production determined the casting for each performance, allowing audiences to witness the moment at which the actors learned of their roles for the evening. Although the actor playing Bolingbroke was able to leave the stage to get into costume before his first entrance, the actor cast as Richard began the play immediately, saying his first lines even before he had finished his onstage dressing process. Spectators thus watched as the actor publicly prepared to take on one of the largest roles in Shakespeare’s canon, with a line load equal to that of King Lear. The doubled relationship of Richard and Bolingbroke, inherent in both the play’s text and in my casting choices, necessitated that casting choices were as visible for Austin audiences as they may have been had we cast a celebrity in one of the central roles.

The PSOE Richard II utilized what this essay terms alternated doubling: the practice of casting actors to play two roles within the same show—on different performance nights—in order to examine the relationship between the roles. Unlike traditional doubling, alternated doubling involves two characters whom it would be impossible for a single actor to play at once. Alternated doubles rely upon audience awareness of casting, and invite spectators to draw comparisons between two distinct characters housed within the body of a single actor. In this essay, I examine the use of alternated doubling in contemporary Shakespearean casting, using the PSOE Richard II to demonstrate that the practice can work with other production elements to stage a particular thematic argument. Alternated double casting highlights thematic relationships between characters and brings focus to the actors’ bodies as agents of storytelling. In the case of Richard II, alternated double casting highlighted the mirrored relationship of Richard and Bolingbroke, as well as the temporary nature of kingship within the world of the play. The practice also facilitated an immediate and vital connection between contemporary audiences and a relatively obscure early modern text. This essay will examine in particular the audience complicity necessary to alternated doubling. To analyze this complicity, I begin with an explanation of the choice to use alternating double casting in light of historical doubling practices; then move through an analysis of doubled imagery in Richard II both onstage and in the text; and, finally, I consider further uses and implications of alternating doubling within the canon of early modern history plays.

The practice of traditional part doubling is central to Shakespearean production. Ralph Berry characterizes doubling as “basic to...