Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

2. Performing History: East-West Palimpsests in William Shakespeare’s Second Henriad

two Performing History East-West Palimpsests in William Shakespeare’s Second Henriad I, from the orient to the drooping west, Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth. — Henry , Induction, 3–5 At the beginning of  Henry , Rumour represents himself as a global communications system that spans ‘‘orient’’ and ‘‘drooping west.’’ As in Herbert ’s ‘‘Church Militant,’’ these compass points demarcate a space conceived not just geographically—from Asia to Europe—but also temporally: Rumour operates from sunrise to sunset and, by implication, from past to future. In this speech, ‘‘orient’’ and ‘‘west’’ also circumscribe the space and time of the theatrical, providing the imaginative limits within which Rumour can ‘‘unfold / The acts commenced on this ball of earth’’—if not the aptly named Globe (built in 1599), then the stage on which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men first performed  Henry . But these compass points are not simply opposed outer limits for the play’s spatiotemporal fields of representation. Indeed, throughout Shakespeare’s second Henriad, the theatrical ‘‘unfold[ing]’’ of ‘‘acts’’ also entails a persistent palimpsesting of ‘‘orient’’ and ‘‘west’’ in both their temporal and their geographical senses. As in Herbert’s ‘‘Church Mili- Performing History 67 tant,’’ therefore, east bleeds into west and past into future, generating myriad untimely effects. Henry ’s assertion of quasi-typological relations between historical figures from different eras—particularly the Chorus’s ‘‘loving likelihood’’ that crosshatches the medieval Henry with both the classical Caesar and the Elizabethan Earl of Essex (H, 5.0.28, 30), and Fluellen’s comparison of Henry with Alexander the Great (4.3.22)—have attracted extensive commentary.1 By contrast, the Henriad’s persistent palimpsests of east and west have largely escaped critical attention. These palimpsests are most legible in the plays’ ambivalent identifications of their English characters with a string of oriental despots from antiquity to more recent times: Cambyses of Persia, Tamburlaine of Scythia, Herod of Jewry, and Amurath of Turkey. By invoking these figures, the Henriad complicates Rumour’s promise to ‘‘unfold’’ the ‘‘acts’’ of ‘‘the orient to the drooping west’’: instead the orient becomes folded into, or inscribed within, the west. This orient, however, is not the orient of historical fact or even of Elizabethan ‘‘orientalism.’’ It is more specifically the orient of the English theater: an orient of over-the-top, histrionic bodily gestures and deafening verbal delivery. The repeated allusions to oriental despots, all of whom were familiar to English theatergoers as larger-than-life stage villains, contribute to the metatheatrical quality of the Henriad in general. Of course, readers have long been attuned to the theatricality of the three plays. The tendency of critical readings since the 1980s, however, has been to subsume this theatricality within a statist politics that also provides a synchronic map of the ‘‘early modern.’’ In Stephen Greenblatt’s well-known essay on the Henriad, for example, Hal theatrically performs his power in much the same way the Elizabethan state apparatus performed its own, staging subversion so that it may be contained.2 By contrast, I shall argue that the plays’ metatheatricality —in particular, their allusions to oriental stage kings—demands a more polychronic analysis attuned to the untimely effects of actors’ bodily techniques . For the Henriad’s theatricality is not just about the theatrum politicum of the state but also about the institution of the theater itself. Or if the plays adumbrate a politics of playing, the power they seek to explain is not just that of the English monarch but equally their own. They do so with a keen self-reflexivity about styles of acting, past, present, and future: the ranting tyrants of the late medieval cycle drama, the Marlovian-era bombast popularized by Edward Alleyn and the Admiral’s Men, and an emergent, more 68 supersessions self-conscious style practiced by Shakespeare’s company. In the process, Shakespeare’s second Henriad offers what might be described as a politics of intertheatricality, where what is at stake is not just the realpolitik of the king or the destiny of the nation but also the skillful versatility, relative to both earlier and contemporary English actors, of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The performance of present versatility in relation to past histrionic styles amounts to a secular version of supersessionary time. This secular temporality , as we shall see, anticipates an influential theory of history...