The Glorious Moment: The Histories (review)

Midway through Shakespeare’s Richard II, the king returns from Ireland to greet his country with a joy so great that words won’t suffice. Richard runs his fingers through the English earth, but the tactile reunion is short-lived and his thoughts turn toward a nemesis challenging him for the throne. Having ordered the earth to grow obstacles hindering Bolingbroke’s progress, the king is reassured by Aumerle, son of the powerful Duke of York: “My father hath a power, inquire of him / And learn to make a body of a limb” (3.2.186–87). Richard is unable to capitalize on the advice and is deposed, an event that tore the body politic asunder and inspired a corpus of Shakespearean history plays chronicling the subsequent strife.

We have no indication that Shakespeare’s tetralogies were performed in sequence during the author’s lifetime. Theatrical conditions rendered a history cycle unthinkable, and the plays were written out of historical order insofar as the First Tetralogy (c. 1589––93) treats the Wars of the Roses (1455–85), events that occurred well after the rise of the House of Lancaster (1399–1422) in the Second Tetralogy (c. 1595–99). With the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), the texts came together in a historical sequence, and the twentieth century saw periodic attempts to mount the plays in order by reign. While important in furthering understanding of Shakespearean history as narrative and as genre, twentieth-century cycles were disjointed affairs that united individually conceived productions or elided (and, in some cases, ignored) the less popular Henry VI plays. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Aumerle’s advice remained unheeded: no one had united the severed limbs of Shakespearean history into a cohesive body.

To mark the dawn of a new millennium, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) presented the most complete history cycle yet: two ensembles and four directors mounted all eight plays, albeit in productions with widely divergent directorial concepts. Michael Boyd’s largely uncut First Tetralogy proved a highlight, and shortly after Boyd became the company’s artistic director in 2003, he made audacious plans to build on past success. His two-year project culminated in a pair of unique four-day events: “Staging History,” which saw the tetralogies performed in the order they were written, and “The Glorious Moment,” a presentation of the plays in a historical sequence. In the latter, the subject of this review, audiences could, for the first time, see Shakespeare’s histories produced in their entirety under a single directorial vision. Some four hundred years after an actor first uttered Aumerle’s reconstitutive advice, the limbs of Shakespearean history finally would be united.

Boyd’s singular approach allowed him to accentuate links between the histories in surprising ways. The director proved particularly adept at manifesting ideological connections via concrete means, especially in the areas of design, blocking, and casting. Boyd’s tight integration of all three areas enhanced the notion that his event performances were not eight different plays, but, rather, a single twentyfour-hour production. He imbued simple props with symbolism: the paper crown worn in jest by Hal reappeared on the head of a dying Mortimer, uncrowned heir of Richard II. A carnivalesque Cade usurped the crown in 2 Henry IV, while 3 Henry VI saw the crown bedeck young Rutland and his father, the ambitious York. Both were killed while wearing it, and its ominous appearance foreshadowed the demise of York’s grandchildren on the orders of Richard III. The paper crown thus became a visual thread linking mockery kings. Boyd’s emblematic props played out on a unit set of rusted metal dominated by a three-story tower. A spiral staircase at the tower’s core was more than an image of, and vehicle for, the rise and fall of kings: according to

Clive Wood (York) and Katy Stephens (Queen...