Shakespeare's Serial History Plays (review)

Reviews229 Nicholas Grene. Shakespeare's Serial History Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 278, illustrated. $60. Nicholas Greneskillfullyaccomplisheswhathe setsouttodo: to reread Shakespeare's English histories in light ofboth their Elizabethan origins and later theatrical versions ofthem. He interweavestheatrical and performance evidence with analysis of critical problems in order to lay out the case for a self-consciousness in Shakespeare's writing theHenryVI-RichardIIIand RichardII-Henry Vsequences as two distinct series. This wide-ranging, exploratoryapproach eschews a heavyhanded thesis. So far, so good. But this decision also carrieswith it limitations and liabilities. The discrete insightsdo not always add up to a satisfactoryor convincing conclusion. In a word, Grene suggests that the first sequence ofplays, Henry VIRichardIII , works much better as a seriesthan does the later group. This will not come as news to most serious students of these plays. Grene, devoting three chapters to each sequence, focuses on such topics as war, emergence of character, curses and prophecies, retrospection, hybrid histories , and change and identity. But he begins by exploring the chronicle accounts to understand fully what Shakespeare did with them and how they do and do not point in the direction of constructing a series. I find particularly appealing the idea that Shakespeare also tapped into the momentary vogue of two-part plays. Grene argues: "the fashion for history plays may have arisen as much in response to the market dynamics of the theatre as to the political atmosphere of England in the aftermath of the Armada" (9). That is to say: "Shakespeare in the early 1590s saw the market possibilities that had opened out from the enormous success ofthe two-part Tamburlaine" (11). This beguiling and certainly plausible idea cannot be proven, but it counters the Tillyardian idea of a grand design born of a desire to represent providential history. Shakespeare's response to the chronicle material also suggests to Grene that the first sequencewas"thusplanned as an interlockingserieswith a narrative rhythm building across the parts rather than in the individual plays. What is more, they would almost certainly have been performed as a series in the 1590s" (23). The Richard II-Henry Vsequence does not offer evidence ofsuch a plan. While these history plays do not disappear from the stage from the seventeenth century to the middle ofthe nineteenth, they disappear as a series—part ofGrene's focus in chapter 2, which examines the theatrical record. The idea of the plays as a performance series received newlife in Weimar in 1864 when Franz Dingelstedt, director of the Weimar Theatre, in April of that tercentenary year produced the full cycle from RichardIIto RichardIII(34). England waited until early twentieth century for such a revival, which came at Stratford under the 230Comparative Drama direction ofF. R.Benson, first in 1901 and more fully in 1906."The Birmingham Repertory Theatre productions ofthe three parts ofHenry VIin 1951-3 ... first definitively proved that those plays were playable, and made a special impact when played in sequence" (39). A major development came in the famous John Barton-Peter Hall collaboration that produced The Wars ofthe Roses, which compressed the three parts ofHenry VJinto two.As Grene wittilyobserves:"The Warofthe Roses represented, in manyways, the series ofplays Shakespeare would have written if he had had the benefit ofreading Tillyard's Shakespeare History Plays" (45). Finding it an enormous success in 1963, the RSC revived it in 1964 and added the RichardII-Henry Vsequence. The BBC did its ownAnAgeofKings in the early 1960s, making use ofthe Birmingham Rep experience. Adrian Noble adapted the plays in the late 1980s into the RSC production of Plantagenets, differing from"its RSC predecessors ... in its use ofvisual display" (55). Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington collaborated to produce their own Warsofthe Roses for the English Shakespeare Company, having a "polemic adversarial political stance" (57). Finally, the RSC produced the two sequences as their millennium project, spread over the 2000-01 seasons. Foreign war and civil war govern the Henry VI-Richard III series in which Shakespeare"imagines war as a succession ofdifferent types ofwar with equivalendyvarying emotions: glory, horror, pity, triumph" (67). Shakespeare's approach produces an "organic interrelationship between the several forms of war that follow in...