The Arden Shakespeare King Henry VI, Part 1 (review)

The Arden Shakespeare King Henry VI, Part 1. Edited by Edward Burns. London, 2000. Pp. xiv + 345. Illus. $45.00 cloth, $11.95 paper.

In contrast to the strategy that relegates production history to the end of introductions, Burns's edition of King Henry VI, Part 1 works backwards. Rather than sequestering staging from the considerations of dating, authorship, sources, themes, and the political uses of history, Burns starts with "'Harey the vj' on stage at the Rose" and links the play's stage history to those topics. He launches his essay with Thomas Nashe's often-cited lines (from Piers Penniless his Supplication to the Devil) about Talbot and "'the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who . . . imagine they behold him fresh bleeding'" (1). In traditional editions this testimony from Nashe provides the latest possible terminus ad quem for production of Part 1, since Piers Penniless was entered in the Stationers' Register in August 1592; it also figures in the long-standing critical debate as to whether the play printed for the first time in the 1623 Folio as The first Part of Henry the Sixt may have been written on the coattails of the successes of The First Part of the Contention . . . (1594) and The true Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke (1595). Nashe has served editors as one of the three contemporary witnesses cited both for and against the possibility that all three parts were written, in orderly sequence, in the first nine months of 1592. Burns quickly sketches in these questions of dating and order of composition, taking the position that 1 Henry VI is a "prequel" (5)--detached from the other two plays and written after them--but he leaves his major arguments on these points for later. For Nashe, audience response to the actions represented onstage connected an Elizabethan audience to England's past; for Burns, Nashe becomes himself a link between past and present by providing early testimony of the collaborative process that connects stage conditions, performance history, and spectatorship. This nexus is the overarching emphasis of an edition that incorporates twentieth-century critical theory about semiotics and audience response with traditional editing concerns.

Burns's Appendix 3, "Nineteenth- and twentieth-century adaptations," provides a compendium of how the play has been variously reinterpreted, acted, and staged; but he also includes the evidence of twentieth-century productions in his introduction, where considerations of early modern staging, historical themes, and the text's presentation of characters freely mingle evidence from the past with some of the possibilities realized in modern productions. One of Burns's most provocative arguments shows still another way in which past and present are united by the stage: linking the evidence of Henslowe's diary with findings from the 1988-89 excavations at the site of the Rose Theatre, Burns suggests not only that the wide, shallow stage revealed by the excavations would have affected playing conditions and acting style (most notably the angle and energy of actors' entrances) but also that "an exploitation of the stage space's potential for multi-focus action was one of the main reasons for commissioning this highly kinetic piece" (13). Much later in his lengthy introduction, Burns comes back to the question of genesis--the authorship doubts and the controversy over whether the plays are best served by considering them a cycle. He provides a sensible review of past arguments for both single and collaborative authorship and is generous in his presentation of theories that he himself rejects. His own view is that the play was "a commissioned piece, based largely on Hall's history, written by a group of writers, among whom Shakespeare took a major part" (83). More than this he is not prepared to say--so that if his critical stance on single authorship is distinguished from Michael Hattaway's in the New Cambridge edition (1990), he demurs from the schematic arguments by which Oxford editor Gary Taylor...