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  • Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad
  • Rachel Wifall
Ton Hoenselaars , ed. Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiv + 288 pp. index. illus. bibl. $80. ISBN: 0–521–82902–X.

Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad begins with a very engaging foreword by Dennis Kennedy, in which he foregrounds the major points that will be made in different ways throughout the text. While he points out that Shakespeare's chronicles deal with the decline of medieval polity and the rise of the nation state in early modern Europe, he rightly points out that their specificity to English history and their "labyrinthine" plots have made them not always accessible or appealing to everyone — even the English. From this point he discusses various attempts which have been made to make these plays speak to various audiences — from linking them into a cycle or dramatic series, to appropriating their themes to the concerns of other specific times and places, to the more recent "globalization" of these plays, removing their historical specificity and allowing them to speak across cultures.

In his introduction, editor Ton Hoenselaars provides a brief historical survey of the reception of the histories, both in England and abroad. He notes how the final decades of the twentieth century witnessed a radical interrogation of the idea of a "powerful homogenized British Shakespeare," ushering in new perspectives on regional and foreign concerns within and about Shakespeare. The book then goes on to investigate both the native and foreign academic traditions, devoting, as Hoenselaars states, "special attention to the less familiar foreign traditions." The editor hopes that "[b]y presenting the British and foreign traditions side by side, it becomes possible to identify not only traditions of 'foreign' histories beyond the English Channel, but also within the 'native' preoccupation with the genre, in post-devolution Britain" (10). [End Page 1048]

Part 1, "Alienating Histories," incorporates articles addressing the concerns of non-English nationalities — three of which are depicted as "other" within the histories themselves. Andrew Murphy writes of England's Nine Years' War with Ireland (1594–1603), noting English identification of Ireland as "wild" and "other," despite the interrelatedness of the two lands. His study leads him and us "to question just exactly how history is constructed . . . and to consider the question of where exactly the boundaries between the 'domestic' and the 'foreign' can be drawn" (56). Lisa Hopkins then examines "Welshness" in relation to English identity in Shakespeare's histories, noting that Wales, "more foreign than England and less foreign than Ireland," serves the purpose of a comic counterpart to England and an image of a legendary and mythical British past (60). Jean-Michel Déprats discusses the difficult task of adapting and translating Henry V for the French stage, an arguably nationalistic and jingoistic English play in which the French are the villains — and the conquest. Finally, Daniel Gallimore writes of Japanese translations and adaptations of Shakespeare's histories, in the face of tremendous cultural and historical differences.

In part 2, "The Appropriated Past," Mariangela Tempera comments onItalian adoptions of Shakespeare's histories for local cultural and political purposes. James N. Loehlin discusses Brecht's "rediscovery" of Henry VI for purposes of Cold War commentary and his influence on later twentieth-century productions of the history plays in Europe. Edward Burns addresses the notion of joining the chronicles into cycles, arguing that such a notion of English history was invented by the Folio editors, who worked under the assumption that the plays were not dealing with "myth" (like the "tragedies"), but with recorded facts which could be related chronologically. Finally, Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova narrate an account of the histories, "a rich source of old texts to be reshaped for modern use" (186), as adapted to the stage in Bulgaria.

Part 3, "Stage Adaptations of the Histories," moves from Richard III in post-Hitlerian Austria and Richard II in post-Francoist Spain, to a long tradition of French response to world politics and a multilingual Belgian condensation and rewriting of both tetralogies. This discussion...

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