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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales by Marisa R. Cull
  • Ronald J. Boling (bio)
Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales. By Marisa R. Cull. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 204. $99.00 cloth.

Marisa R. Cull studies “the political and theatrical life of the princedom [of Wales] during the late Tudor and early Stuart period” (10). In 1590s history plays, the many characters figured as princes of Wales suggest that the office resonated with audiences. One likely reason is that “an English prince of Wales meant secure [royal] succession” (11). These characters symbolized an ancient heroic Welsh past that playwrights sought to appropriate for England. Their chief cultural work lay in reimagining the “foundational connection between Welsh and English royal legitimacy” (12). Thus, the histories erase the rights of [End Page 375] the Welsh to their own past (chapter 2) and confer native British valor upon the English monarchy (chapter 3).

With James I’s accession, the princedom served to “incorporat[e] the history and traditions of Wales into an emergent British empire” (7). Chapter 4 considers how England’s having its first “living, breathing prince of Wales” (124) since Henry VII’s time prompted King James, Prince Henry Frederick, and contemporary dramatists to negotiate what the office and title now signified. The final chapter examines how the title lost its symbolic value and the office its political import after Prince Henry’s death. Dramatic entertainments register this decline, from masques honoring young Prince Charles to Milton’s Maske at a princeless Ludlow.

The book successfully demonstrates the princedom’s importance as a cultural and theatrical construct. Cull provides strong readings of individual plays and builds on earlier criticism. The study is, however, marred by omissions. A first occurs in the historical overview of the princedom. Welsh history gets its only paragraph—on Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native prince recognized by England (8)—in the introduction. After a royal army killed Llewelyn ap Gruffydd in 1282, Edward I conferred the title upon his firstborn son and the Prince of Wales was English thereafter. Chapter 1’s historical background begins with the Tudors. Cull cites David Powel’s Historie of Cambria (1586) as a “scathing critique of the English chronicle tradition” (35), but her description of Historie devotes two sentences to princes who preceded Llewelyn. How much or how little about Welsh princes did Elizabethan playwrights and playgoers know? Although the author proposes to “track an Anglo-Welsh relationship that was, in many ways, defined by its shared princedom” (12), the perspective is usually Anglo.

In chapter 2, Cull fashions the princedom in Richard III into a tangible entity, reinforced by strong readings of Richard II and 1 Henry IV. For King Richard, Wales “figure[s] prominently in the narrative of Richard’s ultimate downfall” (71). Yet Cull makes a passing remark that points to another lapse in her study. She notes that Richard’s descending the walls of Flint Castle (3.3) is perhaps a ritual “perversion of the investiture ceremony for the prince of Wales” (70). Despite repeated assertions that investiture “contains an intensely theatrical component [that] ties it meaningfully with … the early modern stage” (2), the book never describes these rites. It also misses a moment in Act 2, scene 4 in which Wales “speaks back.” Explaining to Salisbury why his army is dispersing, the Welsh Captain describes omens that unnerve the soldiers and then discloses that “lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change; / Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap” (2.4.11–12)—lines that glimpse an imagined Welsh society.

The analysis of how 1 Henry IV eliminates two rival princes of Wales, Mortimer and Glendower, is superb. When Mortimer is beguiled by Glendower’s exoticism and his wife’s “pretty Welsh,” Shakespeare “re-figur[es] the native Welsh seat as diminishing and emasculating” (76), because “an English heir who goes to Wales does not fall in love—he conquers” (77). And Glendower never challenges Hal’s title because the playwright simply erases him. He never encounters Hal onstage or hears him mentioned. When Hal confronts his father, “Glendower is wholly removed from the king’s catalogue of enemies” (81...

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