Shakespeare, the Queen's Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History

SHAKESPEARE, THE QUEEN’S MEN, AND THE ELIZABETHAN PERFORMANCE OF HISTORY

The Elizabethan history play was one of the most prevalent dramatic genres of the 1590s, and so was a major contribution to Elizabethan historical culture. The genre has been well served by critical studies that emphasize politics and ideology; however, there has been less interest in the way history is interrogated as an idea in these plays. Drawing in period-sensitive ways on the exciting field of contemporary performance theory, this study looks at the Shakespearean history play from a fresh angle, by first analyzing the foundational work of the Queen’s Men, the playing company that invented the popular history play. Through innovative readings of their plays The Famous Victories of Henry V and The True Tragedy of Richard III, before moving on to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry V, this book investigates how the Queen’s Men’s self-consciousness about performance helped to shape Shakespeare’s dramatic and historical imagination. Brian Walsh is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Yale University. He has been the recipient of awards from the American Society for Theater Research and the National Endowment for the Arts. His essays have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, Performing Arts Journal, and Theatre Journal, and he has authored book and theatre reviews in Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, and Sixteenth-Century Journal.

SHAKESPEARE, THE QUEEN’S MEN, AND THE ELIZABETHAN PERFORMANCE OF HISTORY BRIAN WALSH

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521766920 © Brian Walsh 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-0-521-76692-0 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page vi

Introduction

1

1 Dialogues with the dead: history, performance, and Elizabethan theater

10

2 Theatrical time and historical time: the temporality of the past in The Famous Victories of Henry V

48

3 Figuring history: Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III

74

4 “Unkind division”: the double absence of performing history in 1 Henry VI

108

5 Richard III and Theatrum Historiae

139

6

Henry V and the extra-theatrical historical imagination

178

Conclusion: traces of Henry/traces of history

214 221 235

Bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgments

The teaching, scholarship, and mentorship of Emily Bartels have been formative influences on my academic career. I can’t thank her enough for her wisdom and encouragement. I am grateful also to Elin Diamond and Ron Levao for their valuable input on earlier phases of this project. For various acts of friendship, collegiality, and intellectual support I am thankful to Bill Carroll, Julian Koslow, Zack Lesser, Carol Thomas Neely, Lori Newcomb, Curtis Perry, Nicole Rice, Jim Siemon, Holger Schott Syme, Elliott Visconsi, and Chris Warley. I owe special thanks to Leslie Brisman, David Scott Kastan, Lawrence Manley, David Quint, and Joseph Roach who each gave me important feedback on individual chapters of this work. Sarah Stanton of Cambridge University Press (CUP) and two anonymous CUP readers deserve credit for helping me to turn a rough manuscript into a book. I am grateful also to Rebecca Jones at CUP for her generous assistance and to Liz O’Donnell for her copy-editing. Earlier drafts of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 have been published in Theatre Journal (vol. 59, no. 1, 2007), Andrew Griffin, Helen M. Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme (eds.), Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing (Ashgate 2009) and Shakespeare Quarterly (vol. 55, no. 2, 2004) respectively. I thank the appropriate editors and publishers for permission to incorporate that material here. My research has benefited from the support of the A. Whitney Griswold Research Fund of Yale University, and a subvention from the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale paid for the cover image and offset some production costs. I want to devote a final grateful sentence to Erin Murphy, whose intellect inspires me and whose companionship makes my life feel fun and full of possibility.

vi

Introduction

“Longing on a large scale is what makes history.” Don DeLillo, Underworld

In his 1589 treatise The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham diagnosed the limited ability of humans to perceive history. The past, according to Puttenham, is that which “we are not able […] to attaine to the knowledge of, by any of our sences.”1 History is defined by its inalienable absence. It exists only in forms of textual or pictorial representation, such as prose works, poetry, and illustrations, or in embodied acts such as storytelling and theatrical playing. In sixteenth-century England, these forms flourished as varying responses to a heightened awareness of the absence of history, an awareness that the intellectual ambitions of the Renaissance precipitated. Of all the forms of history, performance alone supplies a pretense of sensual contact with the vanished past through the bodies that move and speak on stage. The history plays that I consider in this book, from the repertory of the Queen’s Men and by Shakespeare, grew out of a vibrant Elizabethan historical culture, and they in turn helped to shape a new historical outlook. These works suggest a distinctive consciousness of history, one that understands the generation and production of historical narratives as driven by a sense of longing for contact with the past, a desire that is doomed from the start to remain unfulfilled. The historical consciousness I see at work on the late-sixteenth-century stage thus comprehends the pleasures of history as rooted in a dialectic of presence and absence, for the performance of history provides an experience of “pastness” that is necessarily ephemeral. Theatrical performance in this era formally enacts history as a communally created phenomenon that exists only insofar as it is continually produced. Early modern dramatic historiography has elicited a steady outpouring of criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While the insights of this criticism have varied greatly, the set of questions asked has been fairly consistent. Even as the New Historicists became ascendant in the 1980s and 1

2

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men

1990s and challenged many assumptions and conclusions about the genre that were put forth by mid-twentieth-century scholars, the center of gravity for work on the history play has remained the political arena.2 With few exceptions, scholars have tended to focus on the genre’s topical relevance for Elizabethan and Jacobean questions of national identity, kingly authority, and the interpellation of subjects.3 This focus has yielded a number of persuasive links between theatrical representation, the domestic and international expansion of state power, and the everyday operation of Elizabeth’s and James’s governments. But while such scholarship – the old and the new – has done much to illuminate the ideological connotations of dramatic historiography, we have not fully accounted for the pleasure such plays offer and the range of the intellectual power they exert, especially in regards to the concept of history itself. It is, then, the dramatic exploration of the idea of history in this period, rather than of the topicality of history, that occupies me here. By and large, this book is not the place to look for analyses of how plays negotiate the “politics of history” in the Renaissance, a topic that has been well served by countless books and articles. While I do address such concerns in places here, such as my consideration in Chapter 4 of genealogies of authority in 1 Henry VI, and while I am aware that is impossible ever to separate the political from the historical, this study is ultimately attuned more to early modern approaches to history as a cultural phenomenon than as an ideological battleground. By examining a repertory of pre-Shakespearean history plays by the Queen’s Men and by drawing on a body of work I bring together here under the omnibus term “performance theory,” I hope to open up the critical conversation about the Shakespearean history play and thus to expand our sense of what made these plays popular and desirable dramatic commodities as well as vital expressions of Elizabethan historical consciousness. My main claim in this book is twofold: first, I argue that each of the plays I examine here, through language and staging cues, demystifies historical representation by connecting it conceptually to the artifice of theatrical performance; and, second, I argue that this demystification is not the undermining of historical culture but its positive condition. By highlighting how these plays about the English past implicate historical knowledge in aesthetics and representation, I claim that the plays I discuss evince a historical consciousness in which the conceptual status of the past is defined by its embeddedness in the present tense of cultural production. Performance is a transient form. As a theater critic recently remarked, “one cannot step twice into the same show.”4 This homage to Heraclitus’ insight about change and time – you can’t step into the same river twice – is an apt

Introduction

3

way to initiate this study, for it is, I will suggest throughout, precisely the existence of a play in time that makes it such an intellectually provocative and aesthetically compelling medium for exploring the notion of history. Much of the performance theory that informs this book, then, is concerned with the fact that performances disappear. This insistence on the evaporation of stage-playing will dominate the first few chapters. However, there is another strand of thinking about performance as a phenomenon of perpetual “becoming” that I see Shakespeare begin to explore in Richard III and, later, in Henry V. Audiences to Elizabethan history plays could experience performance, and the ways of thinking that performance can inspire, in both these ways: not only as that which vanishes but also as that which might, like old Hamlet’s Ghost, vanish and reappear.5 The majority of this book deals with Shakespeare. In addition to being the most prolific dramatic historiographer of his age, Shakespeare is the playerplaywright who is most interested in exploring the relationship between drama and historical sensibilities in this era. My initial route into analyzing his historical plays runs through the earlier work of the Queen’s Men playing company. I choose to attend to the Queen’s Men for two reasons. First is the simple fact of priority. They were the first players to stage the English past in the popular theaters, and so a serious consideration of the Shakespearean history play must take their foundational contributions into account. Second, this company influenced the historical and theatrical imagination of Shakespeare in ways that have yet to be appreciated. They developed a set of dramaturgical strategies to highlight the compelling theater that emerges when plays examine the status of history and historical knowledge, and thus blazed a trail that Shakespeare followed and augmented as he honed his craft and earned his early fame by trafficking in the past. I have chosen in this study to concentrate on two anonymously authored works from the repertory of the Queen’s Men, The Famous Victories of Henry V and The True Tragedy of Richard III; and from there to move on to readings of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry, VI Richard III, and Henry V. It is deliberate that all of these works are from the Elizabethan era. The commercial theaters developed in London in the 1570s, and it was still a relatively novel form of cultural production throughout the two decades that followed. I am most interested in thinking about the history play in relation to this novelty. The theatrical self-consciousness that is a topos of early modern plays derives in part from awareness of their “newness.” The late sixteenth century is a particularly exciting moment in which to assess the impact of performing history on early modern English historical consciousness. Plays from this time reverberate with the sense that they are emerging from an innovative

4

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men

technology for depicting and in some sense creating the past. The total number of history plays I have selected from this time period is small, and this is also deliberate. Such focus allows me room for detailed close readings. I have aimed to provide a depth of analysis of particular works in each chapter that I hope will yield more insight into early modern theatrical and historical culture than an attempt at “coverage” of the Shakespeare canon or of the entire field of the Elizabethan history play would be able to provide. In Chapter 1, I contextualize the notions of history and theatrical performance in the early modern period. Here I deliver an outline of Elizabethan “historical culture” in relation to the key term “historical consciousness.” I turn next to an exposition of my methodology in this book. My work brings techniques of formal criticism that assume the vitality of dramatic poetry together with insights gleaned from investigating theoretical and practical aspects of performance. I will discuss in this chapter how I adapt postmodern theories of performance in ways that are sensitive to the specificity of the early modern period. I then provide an overview of the Queen’s Men and their approach to performing history and begin to suggest how they shaped Shakespeare’s own historical imaginings. I begin my examination of the repertory of the Queen’s Men in Chapter 2 by looking at their important play The Famous Victories of Henry V. I am particularly interested in the presence in it of the company’s most famous player, the great clown Richard Tarlton. I argue that in mounting this and other plays on history that draw much of their power from the present-tense centered presence of clowns such as Tarlton, the Queen’s Men make awareness of history as an absence, as precisely what’s not present in the presence of theater, a central aspect of the experience of their plays and the consciousness of history they promote. In the following chapter, I offer one of the first fulllength, substantive analyses of The True Tragedy of Richard III, a play that has elicited surprisingly little critical attention. I examine the appearance of three unusual speech-prefixes in this play: “Truth,” “Poetry,” and “Report.” These are quasi-allegorical characters in The True Tragedy of Richard III whose very presence unsettles the play’s other attempts at historical mimesis. I connect Truth, Poetry, and Report as they appear in this play to Elizabethan discourses of history and literary production seen in Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poetry and Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. The specific dialogue in which these figures engage in The True Tragedy of Richard III implicates the telling of history in aesthetic strategies and stylized forms of repetition. I move from here to a consideration of Shakespeare. He expanded on the Queen’s Men’s use of theatrical technology in his own explorations of the

Introduction

5

aesthetic and intellectual pleasures the history play can offer. Heminges and Condell list ten titles under the rubric “Histories” in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. From that field I have chosen three – 1 Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry V – that each represent a novel meditation on the relationship between performance and historical consciousness: in the case of 1 Henry VI about continuity; in the case of Richard III about visual memory; and in the case of Henry V about the sense of the historicity of the world outside the theater that a stage play can create. A study of these particular works also showcases a spectrum of Shakespeare’s engagements with the genre in the 1590s, a spectrum that both highlights the development of his compositional strategies and underlines his increasingly radical anatomization of questions of dramatic and historical presence. Chapter 4 looks at 1 Henry VI, one of his earliest ventures in the genre. In 1 Henry VI, history emerges as akin to performance: shadowy, transient, and existing only through the collective will of those who produce and receive it. I focus on how genealogy is examined in this play. Shakespeare explores the implications of theatrical presence for historical representation by juxtaposing broken political succession with broken continuity in historical narratives. Here we see Shakespeare develop poetic and dramaturgical strategies geared to exposing the failures of both theater and history to produce continuity, a failure that in fact opens space for the imaginative faculties of audiences and thus contributes to the pleasure of the play. I turn in Chapter 5 to the pivotal work Richard III. Here Shakespeare aligns historical and dramatic representation to the point of creating a new form of historical consciousness in which the historical imagination becomes populated with theatrical bodies. This play is often read in terms of its “theatricality.” I argue that the term “theatricality” is too loosely applied to this play to mean, in the broadest possible sense, that the play participates in the ancient theater–world analogy. I consider theatricality, or theatrical self-consciousness, as something specific to theatrical practice rather than as a vague term that can make legible every aspect of social and political life. I argue that in Richard III this stage-specific theatricality works to disrupt the traditional binary between written and oral historiography by explicitly introducing theatrical performance as a form of historical representation that is distinct from both of those modes. Through a detailed analysis of the “ghost” scene, I argue that in this play Shakespeare refines the age-old theatrum mundi trope by developing a more particular analogy between his aesthetic form – theater – and the historical imagination, a notion I call theatrum historiae. The theatrum historiae trope, I argue, is when history

6

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men

is understood according to the structures and dynamics of theater. An examination of the “afterlife” of the figure of Richard III as mediated by Shakespeare’s depiction of him helps me further develop this concept and begin assessing the long-term impact of the Elizabethan history play on Anglo-American historical consciousness. I then move to a reading of Henry V, perhaps the Elizabethan history play that has been most extensively examined in the past thirty years or so. Here I hope to cultivate some fresh insights from the well-trod ground of the Chorus’s pervasive meta-theatricality. I first consider the possibility that Shakespeare drew his inspiration for the prologue and other speeches by the Chorus from Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, a wild and fantastic mess of a play. If this is so, it shows us the extent to which Shakespeare considered the representation of history to be as challenging for audiences to comprehend as it is for writers and performers to produce. (This line of thinking also helps to resolve the controversy over the dating of the Chorus’s speeches, for it establishes 1600, the publication date of Old Fortunatus, as the most likely date by which the part of the Chorus was established in performances of Henry V, despite the fact that it does not appear in print until 1623.) The remainder of this chapter is devoted to an explication of the ways that the Chorus, which initially seems to fix audience historical understanding within the walls of the playhouse, in fact makes progressive gestures toward the ways that original audiences of the play could use knowledge gained within the “wooden O” to understand the environment outside it – early modern London – as itself a space that was full of triggers to the historical imagination. In a brief conclusion, I reflect on how elements of the historical consciousness that is inaugurated on the Elizabethan stage can be seen in contemporary phenomena that combine discourses of performance and history like the “new” Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Finally, it is worth noting now that, throughout this book, by “audience” I refer to original live audiences of Elizabethan productions. Obviously, I am aware that it is impossible for a twenty-first-century critic to speak on behalf of early modern playgoers and that the play texts I examine are never the same thing as the performances they seek to record. We will always do well to remember Lukas Erne’s sound admonishment that “the plays that have come down do not give us access to the plays as they were performed, only to how they were printed.”6 We might also do well, though, to consider a sentiment from Umberto Eco: “When originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original.”7 While the texts that have come down to us may be dim reflections of fugitive performances, for the overwhelming majority of early

Introduction

7

modern plays, the surviving texts are all we have to go on for information about their staging. As Jeremy Lopez has recently observed about early modern theater studies, “given the state of the documentary evidence in the field, there is a point at which imagination must take over where evidence leaves off,” a comment that could describe the act of performing history as well as it describes acts of Shakespeare criticism.8 Elizabethan playwrights, performers, and playgoers recognized the past as absent but, for intellectual stimulation and aesthetic satisfaction, they sought imaginative contact with it anyway. Perhaps my motives and procedures are akin to theirs. Despite our manifest inability to access original performances, I am not ready to abandon the consideration of live performance and its implications in this period altogether. Keeping both Erne’s skepticism and Eco’s playful logic in mind, my goal is to hypothesize about, with as much rigor as possible, a range of potential audience responses to the traces of performance that lurk within those texts, the “last copies” of the performances that took place on the early modern stage.9 not es 1. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 39. For a modern historian’s reflection on this concept, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Make the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 3), where Gaddis writes that the “past […] is something we can never have. For by the time we’ve become aware of what has happened it’s already inaccessible to us.” 2. The works that fall under this description date back over sixty years and are too numerous to cite here adequately. Even the very selective list that follows makes for a cumbersome note. Not every book cited here is solely concerned with the history play but each contains at least a significant section or chapter devoted to examples of the genre: E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s English History Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1946); Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1947); M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare’s History Plays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1962); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 210–231; Graham Holderness, Shakespeare’s History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Metheun, 1986); Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,

8

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men 1988); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Louis Adrian Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and Michael Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). The most significant book-length discussion of the Elizabethan history play in the past twenty years, in my opinion, is Rackin’s Stages of History, which, among other contributions, brings into focus the overlooked issues of class and gender that are central to the Shakespearean history play. In an important precedent for my aims, Rackin also cites concepts of anachronism and temporality as driving forces of the history play’s affect. But while her book alerts us to such issues, the study remains within the prevailing tradition of considering these plays in mainly “political” terms. The essay collection Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre, ed. John W. Velz (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1996) is one example of an attempt to come at the genre from different angles, as are the chapters on the history play in Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982). One recent precedent for my book is Benjamin Griffin’s Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama 1385–1600 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001). Griffin, too, expresses a desire to move beyond strictly political readings of the genre to see history plays as “experiences in theatre and time” (2001: xiii), a useful way to describe my own approach here. Aleksandra Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” Theatre Journal, 57, 84 (2005): 83–95. The comparison between the reappearance of the Ghost in Hamlet and theatrical performance in general is one of theater theorist Herbert Blau’s favorite and, indeed, most ingenious, insights. See, for one iteration of it in his work, “Set Me Where You Stand: Revising the Abyss,” New Literary History, 29, 254 (1998): 247–272. Lukas Erne, “Shakespeare for Readers,” in Diana Henderson (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares 3 (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 93. On this point, see also Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 19–20. The Umberto Eco quotation is taken from Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1989), p. 127. The context of this line in Eco’s novel is infused with fakery and irony to be sure, but it expresses

Introduction

9

a profound, perhaps often suppressed, necessity in historical and literary studies. 8. Jeremy Lopez, “Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 20, 188–89 (2007), 187–203. 9. On the notion of “performance as a kind of prehistory of scripted drama,” see Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks’ fascinating work Theatre/Archaeology (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 13.

chapter 1

Dialogues with the dead: history, performance, and Elizabethan theater

In the A-text of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the Emperor Charles V asks Faust to “raise” for him “Alexander the Great” and his “beauteous paramour.” The Emperor explains his request as a deep longing for the past: “It grieves my soul I never saw the man.”1 Marlowe’s play gives voice to feelings of loss that permeate the historical culture of sixteenth-century England, where a heightened sensitivity emerged to the break between the past and the present or to what Andrew Escobedo has called the temporal “caesura” of historical distance. As Escobedo argues, sixteenth-century English culture evinces a “hankering after a knowledge of its origins […] yet nonetheless [is] predicated on its isolation from these origins.”2 I wish in this study to examine how theatrical performance contributed to and expanded on that historical outlook. The pages that follow provide a historical framework and a theoretical model for understanding how staging the past inflected historical consciousness in late-sixteenth-century England. I will start with a three-part overview of the historical culture of the Elizabethan era, looking at its conceptual roots in the Italian Renaissance, its variety and increasingly self-reflexive nature, and its implication in notions of rupture, in particular the rupture of the Reformation. The historical consciousness of this culture, I will contend, is shaped by a need for history and an awareness that the past only exists when it is produced through potentially ephemeral human efforts. I then consider how, within the period’s theatrical culture, there emerges a related outlook on performance: it is something which is desired and which is ultimately subject to disappearance. Recent performance theorists have written extensively on some of the very issues that I claim are central to Elizabethan theorizations of performance, such as the temporality of drama and the status of the body in performance. I discuss these critics who have helped to shape my method of reading plays and show how their work can be adapted to illuminate aspects of early modern theater. I close with two final sections devoted to an overview of the creative minds and bodies behind the particular plays I study in this 10

Dialogues with the dead

11

book – the players and playwrights of the Queen’s Men playing company and Shakespeare and his companies – and how they stage provocative confrontations between the theatrical and historical culture of their time. My argument in this chapter is that through a reexamination of the history play in relation to Elizabethan historical culture, we can appreciate how the genre, through its formal engagement with the past, anatomizes and addresses the sense of isolation and loss the Emperor in Faustus expresses. Further, I want to suggest that, in part due to this theatrical engagement, those interested in the past in sixteenth-century England began to realize that history is not a naturally occurring form of knowledge. It cannot exist autonomously. It must be produced. History plays offered a uniquely powerful forum in which to observe this production unfold. The playhouse setting underlined the extent to which all historical thinking is rooted in forms of mental invention. By examining English historical culture through the performance of history, we can see that plays from the Elizabethan theater employed the techniques unique to the stage to stimulate the capacity to imagine history and, simultaneously, to stimulate reflection on history as always a species of imagination. history, historical culture, historical consciousness Petrarch and the Elizabethans Roland Barthes observes that “History […] is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it – and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History.”3 Like George Puttenham and the Emperor in Faustus, Barthes identifies exclusion as the starting point for historical consciousness. This notion has a long pedigree, one of many lines of thought we can trace to Francesco Petrarca.4 The awareness that he is necessarily excluded from ancient Roman civilization haunts Petrarch, so much so that an impulse to contact and converse with the dead of antiquity runs throughout his work.5 This impulse is apparent in his series of letters to classical authors. Petrarch indulges in anachronism in corresponding – an act that implies contemporaneousness – to long-dead writers, as though he were unable to distinguish between his own time and theirs. But he makes clear he is aware of this apparent temporal misunderstanding. As he says of his first letter to Cicero, “I wrote to him as to a friend of my own years and time, regardless of the ages which separated us.”6 The letters to antique people provide a revealing

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window into Petrarch’s historical sensibility: he exhibits his complex sensitivity to historical difference by being self-consciously anachronistic. Petrarch depicts the past in general as past and as unrecoverable. A recurring theme of the letters is that linear time produces gaps and ruptures between eras. He continually laments the mutilated or, worse yet, lost works of his heroes which have disappeared in these temporal crevasses, aware that he possesses only stray fragments that have survived. The anxiety over what the present age lacks of the former moves beyond the material realm to an expression of a more emotional, perhaps even spiritual sense of lack. He writes in his letter to Livy: “I should wish (if it were permitted from on high) either that I had been born in thine age or thou in ours; in the latter case our age itself, and in the former I personally should have been the better for it.”7 A sense of loss spurs the production of the letters. The activity of writing them provides fantasies of contact and thus some measure of compensation. To write to dead men indicates a state of mind marked by a “consciousness of doubleness,”8 a consciousness that for Petrarch reaches its highest pitch in his closing remarks to Homer: “I have spoken at great length as if thou wert present. Emerging now from these very vivid flights of the imagination, I realize how very far removed thou art, and I fear lest it may be annoying to thee to read so lengthy a letter in the dim light of the lower world.”9 The illusion of his ability to reach Homer is, in the end, too much to sustain. Petrarch recognizes that his letters to classical authors are fanciful encounters with the past. But even as he openly acknowledges this, as he reveals the fiction of the possibility of contact on which the letters are based, there is still the final gesture to sustain that fiction: he jokingly imagines Homer trying to read in the darkened lower world. As “vivid flights of the imagination,” Petrarch’s writing shows how much creative work goes into producing a relationship with the past. The letters highlight the importance of aesthetics to his sense of history. For, while Petrarch’s letters were an intellectual exercise, he also makes clear they are pleasurable acts. As he states at one point, “I derive great enjoyment from speaking with you, O illustrious characters of antiquity.”10 Speaking with the dead is mentally stimulating and socially significant in numerous ways. But, at a core level, it is done because it is also fun. The Petrarchan historical outlook, then, is predicated on an understanding that the writing of history involves a pleasing, imaginative encounter between the past and the present that breaks the plane of temporality underwriting what we might now call a Newtonian sense of linear time. Since this encounter cannot happen in fact, it must always in some sense happen in fiction. For Petrarch, this consciousness is fueled by the pleasures of a sort of temporal tease he performs on

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himself and his readers, as he constantly articulates the desire to have contact with a past he is all too aware is inexorably vanished. “And his readers” is an important point to emphasize. In carefully arranging and publishing his letters to classical authors, Petrarch makes clear his wish for an audience to the confrontation with the absent past that the letters depict. He seeks to make contemplating history a group project. By invoking Petrarch here, at the start of a book about the Shakespearean history play, I do not want to overstate a direct connection between the quattrocento and late-Elizabethan popular theater. Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists may have regarded Petrarch more as a pathetic sonneteer worth mocking, as in the acid comments of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, than as an intellectual role model. But the habits of thought Petrarch evinces were part of the humanistic culture that circulated in England in the sixteenth century.11 The desire to communicate with the past, the fantasy that it could speak back to him, and the immediate acknowledgment that it could not, plus the wish to involve an audience in the whole process, are aspects of Petrarch’s sense of the past that relate in particular to the Elizabethan performance of history. The historical consciousness we can see in Elizabethan history plays is a product of the Petrarchan sensibility as it was mediated by English historical culture and by the conventions of the new commercial theaters. Shakespeare and others harnessed the potential of dramaturgy and dramatic poetry to respond to widespread feelings of historical loss with the power of aesthetic experience: an experience that revels in imaginative gestures toward a past that is always out of reach but that promises the possibility that such enjoyable experiences can be continually recreated through the collective will to have a past. Ideas of history Before proceeding to outline how drama helped to reshape the historical outlook of Elizabethan England, it is worthwhile here to pause over two phrases I have been employing: “historical culture” and “historical consciousness.” I take the first from D. R. Woolf, one of the most important current scholars of early modern English historical thinking and practice. Woolf states that, “a historical culture consists of habits of thought, languages, and media of communication, and patterns of social convention that embrace elite and popular, narrative and non-narrative modes of discourse.” He elaborates: Above all, the notions of the past developed within any historical culture are not simply abstract ideas, recorded for the benefit of subsequent generations […]

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rather, they are part of the mental and verbal specie of the society that uses them, passing among contemporaries through speech, writing, and other means of communication.12

For Woolf, such concepts are not static or monolithic. There can be considerable variation of effort within any given example of a historical culture, as, we will see, was certainly the case in early modern England. My use of the term “historical culture” is meant always to reflect the copiousness of historical activity in this period. The term “historical consciousness,” like “historical culture,” did not exist in Elizabethan England, but it too describes a concept that was extant. “Historical consciousness” is used by modern historians and philosophers of history in a number of ways. One loose sense of it means simple awareness of the past as different from the present. A more particular sense assumes such difference and proceeds to a critical sensibility toward narratives of history; that is, it acknowledges the past as distinct and removed from the present and thinks about how we measure and assess this distinction.13 Hans-Georg Gadamer crystallizes this latter idea when he writes of historical consciousness as “the full awareness of the historicity of everything present and the relativity of all opinions.” Gadamer defines modern historical consciousness by a new “reflexivity” in historical thinking, a sensibility that recognizes the “relative” nature of historical narratives; that is, one that acknowledges the difficulties of finding absolute truth among the many particular perspectives that might make up the historical archive. Early modern historical thinkers in England, committed as they were to various partisan causes, did not fully embody the ideals Gadamer wishes for in the modern historian, who he believes possesses an inspiring “openness to and talent for understanding the past […] within its own genetic context” rather than only from the perspective of “our acquired values and truths.”14 But we do see in sixteenth-century England an emerging sensitivity to the implications of variety among historical source materials and the need to sift through them in a critical fashion. This awareness did not defeat the impulse to engage and explore the past. Rather, it spurred the search for strategies to deal with the potentially corrosive effects of an unreflective historical Pyrrhonism that could be brought on by the disorientating impact of recognizing the “relativity” of opinions. One such strategy is precisely the “mode of reflection” Gadamer imputes to historical consciousness.15 Generally speaking, historical culture is about practice, and historical consciousness is about theory. While the two are mutually sustaining and energizing, theory normally follows practice.

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Sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century England saw an intense flowering of historical endeavor with a variety of forms, genres, and foci: from the development of the medieval chronicle in the massive printed works of Fabyan, Grafton, Hall, and Holinshed to the innovative chorographical efforts of Camden; from the poetic histories encapsulated in The Mirror for Magistrates, Daniel’s Civil Wars, and Drayton’s Poly-Olbion to the sensational prose of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; from the res gestae approach of Bacon’s history of Henry VII to the citizen-oriented and “local” work of Stow’s Survey of London or Richard Johnson’s Nine Worthies of London. One by-product of this flurry of activity was a new interest in theoretical reflection about the very nature of history and historical work, a trend both in England and on the Continent. Anthony Grafton has recently discussed the Europe-wide phenomenon of the artes historicae in the sixteenth century, a burst of historical meditation exemplified by the 1579 publication in Basle of an anthology of such works, Artis historicae penus, edited by Johannes Wolf. These works indicate the increasingly widespread level of self-consciousness in the Renaissance about the practical and conceptual complexities of “doing” history. Grafton remarks that “the artes historicae […] not only offered space for many kinds of reflection, but also stimulated it.”16 The “metahistorical” zeitgeist that provoked the publication of Artis historicae penus in 1579 had already had an impact in England where, in 1574, Thomas Blundeville published The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories, a work that, while being wholly adapted from Italian sources, was technically the first English ars historica. The way that practice can stimulate theory is better exemplified in the first truly novel statement of historical method to emerge in England, William Camden’s preface to Britannia, a work first published in 1586. This thick volume presented an in-depth, county-by-county consideration of British “antiquity,” especially its discernible Roman inheritance. Camden’s sense of the past was steeped in appreciation for its material remains. This penchant for physical evidence did grow out of the Continental context. For instance, as Leonard Barkan has shown, postPetrarchan classicists in the Italian Renaissance took particular interest in the exhumation of long-buried statues as these humanists came to a more “historically contingent account of antiquity.”17 The science of archeology as we now know it did not exist then, but something like the practice of it is burgeoning in these acts of digging, and something like the concept of it is incipient in the discourses that surround what is found in the earth. The proto-archeology that Barkan sees in Italy has its English analogues in the work of Camden and others who searched across the country for ruins and

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other artifacts of the Roman era in Britain. But Camden is a vigorous and original English thinker about history as an intellectual phenomenon and a practical exercise. His engagement in antiquarian activity spurred him to think about how historiography comes into being. First, Camden stakes a claim in his note to the reader of Britannia for the importance of primary research: I have beene diligent in the Records of this Realme. I have looked into most Libraries, Registers, and memorials of Churches, Cities, and Corporations, I have poored upon many an old Rowle, and Evidence: and produced their testimonie (as beyond all exception) when the cause required, in their very owne words.

He complements this insistence on the historian as collector of data with a frank acknowledgment that the historian must also engage in informed interpretive work, as he makes clear in his justification of “conjecture.” Camden compares conjectures to mechanisms used to draw truth out of the fabled bottomless well of Democritus and writes that, “For the edge of our understanding is so blunt that we are of necessity enforced to prosecute many matters in all professions conjecturally.”18 Camden’s most recent biographer has said of these lines that, “contrary to the usual characterization of Camden as not theoretically inclined, the preface [to Britannia] propounds a carefully developed epistemology that informs his historical method […] he moves through affirmative steps toward the material basis for positing conjectures or assertions.”19 Camden had spent years collecting materials, learning obscure languages and dialects, and corresponding with men throughout England as he compiled his massive, generic hybrid Britannia. His note to his readers indicates that this experience gave him insight into some of the profound questions that writing a history from the ground up provokes. As we can see in Camden’s preface, then, the historical culture of this period created a historical consciousness that was increasingly self-reflexive. Participants in this culture were beginning to approach the root meaning of the word “history” as it derives from ancient Greek: a mode of “inquiry.”20 One common denominator amid the variety of inquiries that I mentioned above was the often-explicit agreement among even historians of very different stripes that history held obvious value. There was one prominent counter-voice, though, and its emergence too must be seen as part of the new impulse to think critically about the nature of historical knowledge. Sir Philip Sidney famously questioned the very possibility of history in the lateElizabethan era when he referred with scorn to the historian “laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other

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histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay.”21 If Sidney’s devaluing of history, with its classical roots in Aristotle’s Poetics, represents a minority opinion in the English Renaissance, he nonetheless articulates a strain of skepticism that exists at the margins of, perhaps even haunts and in various ways stimulates, historical ventures in the period.22 That the sixteenth century saw a mushrooming of historical materials in the face of such nagging doubts testifies to the strength of the desire that drove the production of historical knowledge. This desire eludes precise definitions. History was routinely ascribed didactic power, despite Sidney’s arguments to the contrary. In one telling and representative formulation, reiterated ad infinitum, history is “moral philosophy clothed in examples.”23 This discourse on history, standard throughout the sixteenth century, derived from ancient thinkers, in particular Cicero, who regarded the past as a storehouse of moral exempla that lend “guidance to human existence” (magistra vitae).24 In much of the historical writing of the early modern period, authors preface their texts with some comment on the usefulness of history for their potential readers. Holinshed, for instance, notes that moral edification of the reader is the “end (as I take it) chronicles and histories ought cheefelie to be written.”25 It is odd that, despite the ostensible truth of the ancient, preceptive notion that history is moral instruction, writers felt the continual need to iterate this and to justify the production of historical work. While such declarations may be mere nods to convention, they also indicate an anxiety in Elizabethan historical culture that the “use value” of history was not selfevident after all. The range of what constituted historical content indicates a broad, multifaceted interest in the past, while the considerable production of these works indicates the commercial currency of history. This point – that history was, if nothing else, vendible – complicates, I believe, the temptation to take the Ciceronian justification of history at face value, or at least as the end of the story in terms of assessing the prevalence of historical interests and activities in this era. No matter how much history might have been sincerely understood as “good for you,” its potential to deliver less-easily defined forms of satisfaction in response to feelings of loss and disconnectedness cannot be underestimated in any effort to investigate the boom in historical activity in the period. Puttenham is again instructive here. He elaborates on his words quoted in the Introduction about the inaccessible nature of history by affirming that it is nonetheless worth striving to obtain, saying that there is “no one thing in the world with more delectation reviving our spirits then to behold as it were in a glasse the lively image of our deare forefathers.”26 It is on the stage, where another

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form of history – the history play – emerged in the 1580s, where some version of a “lively image” of the past can be most strikingly achieved. The history play was vendible, for it met the desire for the kind of “lively” sense of the past of which Puttenham speaks; and, as we will see, it both fits into and expands the historical culture and consciousness of the period. Reformation, rupture, and the stage Scholars have noted an increasing awareness of anachronism as a defining feature of these inquiries in Renaissance culture.27 Most famously, Lorenzo Valla and the other Continental humanists who discovered the infamous forgery of the Donation of Constantine perceived the language of that document as temporally out of place, thus signaling its break from the period in which it was supposedly drafted. This discovery helped to highlight markers of historical specificity that are evident in language, in objects, in institutional practices and elsewhere, and this produced a greater awareness of, even an imperative to discover, the particular historicity of things, from everyday objects and customs to whole peoples and “nations.” Such insights of humanist culture helped prepare the way for a greater awareness of historical change and the resulting lacunae and fissures created by time that so preoccupied Petrarch. It is the Reformation that indelibly impressed this awareness on latesixteenth-century English historical culture. The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries is a crystallization of the increasingly organized efforts in England to track changes that had occurred over time, and one of their members noted the key place the break with Rome had in this project, writing that “when the Pope’s authority was abolished out of England […] special care [was] had of the search of ancient Books and antiquities for manifestation unto the world of these usurpations of the pope.”28 As this quotation indicates, faith and worship, powerful organizing principles of both everyday life and common understandings of the cosmos as a whole, were now framed by a sense of the Church as a temporal, historical institution. A sense of rupture – here, of the Catholic Church’s turn away from the mission of the original, “true” Church – became fundamental to historical work.29 John Foxe is perhaps the preeminent exemplar of this movement. His magisterial Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563 and reissued several times over the next thirty years, details the ways in which the Roman Church broke faith with the original Christians, alienating the modern Christian community from its ancient beginnings. In this view, the mission of the new English Church was to reconnect with the pure origins of Christianity that Rome had abandoned.

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The Reformation was not the first significant moment of rupture in English history, of course. Nor did it produce the first modes of thinking centered on rupture. But the break from Rome had an enormity of impact, a degree of polarization, and a coincidence with the explosion of print culture and the consequent broader circulation of ideas, that was unprecedented and that helped to reorient and popularize arguments over discontinuity as a centerpiece of historical thinking. As “media of communication” and “mental and verbal specie” of the times, Elizabethan history plays are practical examples of Woolf’s historical culture. History plays add to the multiplicity of historical representation in this era, and they contribute in formal and thematic ways to the conception of history as rupture. The generic distinction “history play” derives from the First Folio’s designation of select plays as “Histories.” While many other plays from the period not normally included in this group do represent the past, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and King Lear, to the anonymously authored Arden of Faversham and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, the Folio category proposes a much more narrow definition of history: plays about the medieval English monarchy, a description that extends beyond Shakespeare’s canon to include works by Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, and others. This Folio designation reflects the consciousness of history I have been arguing results from post-Reformation historical culture. These plays are, almost without exception, centered in some way on contested kingship and crises of succession; that is, on interruptions and threats to continuity at the level of national leadership and the forms of national community centered on particular ruling figures and houses. Such thinking about history is certainly present in plays that do not pursue credibly documented national histories but, rather, meditate on the present and the past more generally, like Hamlet or, for that matter, The Tempest. But my interest here is on how plays of the period intervene in Elizabethan historical culture, and I find the stakes of that intervention to be higher and the yields of analysis more revealing in plays that cover what would broadly have been accepted as the “real” English past. Aspects of such plays were certainly calculated as direct, topical responses to events of the 1590s, and, as I noted in the Introduction, these aspects have been fruitfully explored in many works of criticism in the past several decades. But as plays that have been widely received in terms of what one critic calls “ideological ambivalence,” they are almost always impossible to associate definitively with any one agenda.30 Their emphasis on troubled succession can perhaps be more productively connected to this historical culture of rupture rather than to specifics of partisan Elizabethan politics.

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The history plays by Shakespeare, and the history plays by others who influenced Shakespeare, which I examine in this study contribute to Elizabethan historical culture their cultivation of a historical consciousness that centers on a key dialectic: they enact historicity as a sense of discontinuity and all the while reflect on the strategies through which historical representation, particularly corporeal representation, addresses that discontinuity. As Grafton demonstrates, the sixteenth century was a time of extraordinary self-reflection about the nature of history. In England, much of the most interesting meditations on history as a concept were done in the theater. Shakespeare and writers for the Queen’s Men used theatrical form to reveal the early modern desire for the past and to put that desire under scrutiny. In this, they, too, approached the root meaning of history as a mode of “inquiry.” In his study of the exhumation of statues in Renaissance Italy, Barkan connects the work of literally delving into the earth in search of the past to an “unearthing of aesthetic consciousness.”31 The proto-archeology of a figure like Camden in England no doubt also stimulated the “aesthetic consciousness” of Shakespeare and other playwrights interested in history. They developed a kind of imaginary archeology for the theater. “Imaginary” because their work did not involve the examination of unearthed objects on stage. Rather, they trafficked in pretending to animate unearthed figures from the past. As Shakespeare put it most powerfully, only a “muse of fire” could provide the real presence of those figures. Short of that, theater depends upon a creative faculty for fantasy of and conjecture about the past that, as Camden admitted, is present in the historian’s work as well. It is here, then, that we can begin to see how the historical consciousness and historical culture of the early modern period shared practical and philosophical aspects with the work of theater. A sense of history that is intertwined with a sense of theatrical production has continued to animate ways of thinking about the past, both in artistic and intellectual contexts. The late-twentieth-century playwright Heiner Müller, for instance, turns to metaphors of exhumation and stage conversation to express his desire to rebel against the limits of time and place that restrict the creative imagination interested in the past. He describes his own dramatic aspirations this way: “we have to dig up the dead again and again […] one has to accept the presence of the dead as dialogue partners.”32 Scholars of Shakespearean drama are probably more familiar with Stephen Greenblatt’s statement of the literary critic’s sympathy with this act: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”33 Meanwhile, Dominick LaCapra, in his examination of the discourses of history and historians, has

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said that a “distinctive issue in historiography” is “the relationship between documentary reconstruction of, and dialogue with, the past.”34 In all of these instances, from artist to literary critic to historian, we see a Petrarchan move not merely to initiate but also to reflect self-consciously, on communion with the dead. This move is not defeated by frank realization that such a thing is not possible. We see rather how speaking to, and for, the dead becomes the starting point to the intellectual and aesthetic project we call history, a project that has from before Shakespeare’s time until our own seemed worth the troubling doubts its pursuit entails.35 It is a key premise of this book that it is worth this trouble because, on a very basic level, Petrarch was right: imagining history is immensely pleasurable. As Petrarch found, this is true in spite of, or, perhaps, because of, the past’s simultaneous capacity to entice and resist dialogue. Knowing that the dead cannot speak back makes clear, as Greenblatt realizes, that the voices from the past that we “hear” are in some sense our own. On stage, the present-tense origin of these voices is heightened in a way it cannot be in literary, historical or archeological ventures. Performance of the past is a dialogue with the dead that is produced through real-time, embodied acts of ventriloquism. Late-sixteenth-century dramatists of history enacted the artificiality of the venture, as well as the joy of it. For it is the thrill of embodied action that draws audiences to the theater. This and at least one other particular insight brought them back to history plays, one that is ultimately flattering to those who attend: history has no being unless people produce it and other people consume it. In other words, the theatrical experience of the past taught early modern audiences that history needs us as much as we need it. “lively bodies”: perspectives on performance, now and then History plays, through their very existence as works that unfold in the performative present, highlight and help to inculcate a sense of historicity, or, to use T. S. Eliot’s useful phrase, of “the pastness of the past.”36 Dramatic histories thereby reflect on, even “theorize,” the concept of history itself.37 This theorization is driven by the very “liveness” that defines theater as a form. Puttenham saw the desire for the past as a longing to encounter “the lively image of our deare forefathers.” Theater traffics precisely in the “lively image,” for liveness is the ontological condition of theater. Liveness is indeed the key to theatrical affect. When Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, for instance, first sees his daughter Lavinia after she has

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been raped and mutilated, he admonishes his son, Lucius, for squeamishly averting his eyes: “Faint-hearted boy,” he cries, “arise and look upon her!”38 Titus’s charge blends stoic resolve with an insistence on recognizing the horribly maimed Lavinia as still present and, indeed, still human. In a larger sense, this moment makes the point the play as a whole emphasizes again and again through its series of sensational, grotesque spectacles: the theater, true to its etymological roots, is a “seeing place.”39 What it offers is what must be looked upon by those who enter. In the same scene from Titus Andronicus, Titus specifies his reaction to Lavinia’s physical presence. He differentiates the more powerful spectacle of witnessing her body in the flesh from other ways it could be represented: “Had I but seen thy picture in this plight / It would have madded me; what shall I do / Now I behold thy lively body so?” (III.i.103–105, emphasis added). It is not merely the visual encounter that so incites him. It is the lively encounter with her fleshly presence. These lines compactly summarize the appeal of theater itself. Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s early plays, and he would continue to explore the corporeal center of the audience–performer spectatorial dynamic it broaches throughout his career. His and his contemporary playwrights’ exploration of this dynamic on the Elizabethan stage takes on special resonance in plays about the English past. The visual in the theater primarily involves not static images but the breathing, “lively” bodies of the actors on stage. It is this forced intimacy with the body of the performer in real time – “arise and look upon her!”– that distinguishes theatrical performance as a vehicle for history from other forms such as prose and poetry. The most perceptive recent attempt to historicize the word and concept “performance” as they existed in early modern England is Mary Thomas Crane’s article “What Was Performance?”40 The term could convey a range of meanings. As Crane shows, our sense of performance as regards to what happens when actors speak their lines and move around on stage was not standard in the sixteenth century. A range of words, from “play” to the less familiar “exercise” were used to describe the act of making theater. Crane notes that “perform” in this period had the primary meaning “to carry through to completion; to complete, finish, perfect” and that “the theatrical sense of ‘perform’” grows out of the sense of the word meaning “to do, go through, or execute formally or solemnly (a duty, a public function, ceremony, or rite, a piece of music, a play, etc.).”41 Thus, while the word “performance” itself was current in Elizabethan English, the sense of the term as meaning primarily the doing of aesthetic acts was not. As an academic buzzword, “performance” has in the past two decades or so become equally polyvalent. It is a heavily encumbered, sometimes contested,

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often confusing term. In the most well-meaning critical ventures, the word “performance” runs amok among a host of disciplines and is increasingly used to describe every conceivable human action and endeavor. If architecture, sculpture, novels, poetry, fashion, sex, scholarship, teaching – indeed, the “practice of everyday life” – are all instances of performance, performance ceases to have any distinct meaning.42 It is, merely, co-extensive with being and behaving. It is important then, to clarify what I mean by it and why I think it useful to draw on current work in this field. “Playing” might serve as a more historically situated label, and I use it occasionally as a loose synonym. But performance is, I think, more expressive of the range of what occurs on stage during a play. It can refer to the simultaneous use of a host of theatrical tools – speech, stage action, use of props and stage space, etc.– to produce simultaneous sensory, emotional, and intellectual affect for audiences. While I do use “performance” as something of an umbrella term in this study, then, I want to limit its significance to the theater and specific aspects of stage work that happen there. This is not an attempt to claim the word as the sole property of theater studies or to deny the considerable power it can have in the hands of anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural critics at large. As we will see below, I have been influenced by some examples of such work. Rather, I merely want to make clear at the outset that the primary meaning of performance in this book is aesthetic stage performance, not social performance broadly defined. The term will express the facts and implications of how playwrights and performers harness the materials of the dramatic medium in stage-specific contexts. Such an approach for me combines practical theater analysis with a more philosophical inquiry into the nature of theater. Like Bert States, I am interested in “a form of critical description that is phenomenological in the sense that it focuses on the activity of theater making itself out of its essential materials: speech, sound, movement, scenery, [and] text.”43 I want to stress especially the importance of the combination of the first four things in that list with the last, because I will be concerned throughout with the language of history and performance in the plays I study. In this I owe a debt to the work of Harry Berger who, in Imaginary Audition and elsewhere, has shown how fruitless it is to examine dramatic language or stage action in isolation from each other. In a useful precedent for my work, Berger shows that is possible to revive “standard features of armchair practice [i.e. literary criticism] while maintaining a fairly strict focus on the drama of theatrical and interlocutionary relations” in approaches to early modern theater works.44 By drawing on some modern writers and thinkers who are not concerned with the Shakespearean stage as is Berger, though, I realize that I run the risk

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of presenting either an anachronistic or an avowedly “presentist” critical practice in my readings of Elizabethan plays. But my goal is to demonstrate that there is much in postmodern performance theory that addresses general conditions of drama that developed, and were recognized at the time as developing, in the late Elizabethan era, the age of the professionalization of Western theater. For performance theory as it relates to history is not only the description of analytical tools I bring to bear on plays here. It is also the description of a set of ideas and problems operating in the plays themselves and in Elizabethan discourses on theater more generally; ideas and problems that, as the chapters that follow will show, the plays broach and work through in the course of producing the past. The field of postmodern performance studies is fertile ground for a flowering of methods to interrogate the relationship between performance and the past. One avenue for thinking about this relationship is emphasis on the time of theater. Some scholars have argued for a special relationship between history and drama based on this crucial formal element of theater, what David Scott Kastan calls its “radical temporality.”45 Recognizing the temporality and experiential nature of plays is a reminder of their own historicity, as things that take place in time. Elin Diamond identifies the importance, and crystallizes the complexity, of the temporality of performance for current work in the field when she calls it a “doing and a thing done,” an action in the present that is immediately an action of the past.46 Peggy Phelan and Herbert Blau have each in various ways explored the temporality of drama as a doing and a thing done by recognizing it as a crucial factor in understanding the complex presence of theater. Phelan writes on the “ontology of performance” that “performance’s only life is in the present […] performance’s being […] becomes itself through disappearance.”47 Diana Taylor has usefully tweaked this idea by adding that performance “disappears only to hover,” a view that is influenced by Derrida’s concept of “hauntology,” to which I will return in Chapter 5 in my discussion of Richard III.48 For now, we can note that the notion of vexed presence due to temporality has been given especially intricate consideration in the prolific work of Blau. He writes that “there is always displacement at work in the form of its [performance’s] vanishing. The drama itself is an extended meditation on the idea that whatever it is we’re perceiving has already passed us by.”49 Moving toward a consideration of the practical factors that impinge on this sensation of “vanishing,” Blau writes elsewhere: No seeming self-denial on the part of an actor, no pretense of immediacy, however momentarily powerful or time-effacing, can amplify the privileged instant, for it is

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only for the instant timeless – and once again the theater suffuses the truth with its presence, the only presence which is there. It is then that we realize that approval has been, in our very assent to the transgression of performance, institutionalized, historicized, on borrowed time.50

Blau’s understanding of performance time as “borrowed time,” which he goes on to describe as “amortized,” for it is a kind of debt that cannot be repaid, returns us to the novel mode of theatrical performance introduced on the early modern stage. Elizabethan plays in the new professional outdoor theaters took place in the time of the working day, and to view a play meant, for many, the literal interruption of their own workday. While the class-heterogeneity of the spectators makes this untenable as a broad generalization, it is fair to say that even those not necessarily involved in trades subject to workday regimens were (perhaps unknowingly) living in a world increasingly defined by the rhythms and patterns of the proto-modern workday. It is important to keep in mind here that the borrowing of time is done by both the actors and the playgoers. “Borrowing time” from life to produce or attend a play about the past is an apt way to describe the temporal complexity of historical knowledge. The existence of history is dependent on time borrowed from the present, both to produce it on stage and to experience it from the pit or the galleries (a condition I will elaborate further in Chapter 2). The “eventness” of theater, then, underlines the unique temporality of drama. It invariably highlights also the status of the body, as Shakespeare emphasizes in the scene from Titus discussed above. Phelan writes that “performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies.”51 Joseph Roach reminds us of one radical implication of this reality effect: living bodies die. Hence, according to Roach, performance is a form of “surrogation,” the “doomed search for originals [through] continuously auditioning stand-ins.”52 Roach’s concept of surrogation is one that is especially relevant to the study of the history play. As we will see again and again in the chapters that follow, the plays themselves often highlight the fact that surrogation – the substitution of the early modern player for the long-dead, historical figure – is what is happening before the eyes of the audience. The human body cannot encompass itself and a historical referent. And, of course, it is subject to its own inevitable dissolution and passing. Yet Blau acknowledges the human imperfection of the actor’s body as the productive starting point, rather than the limitation, of theater. He writes that the primary architectural space of the theater is and has always been the body of the actor, subject as it is to the dematerializing power of the gaze that dissolves all space

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into itself. It is, of course, a transient architecture with a breathing skin, subject at any instant to the corrosions of time.53

Part of the power of theater, according to Blau, lies in the fact that in performance, in the simplest biological sense, real time is passing, and therefore the actor is actually dying before us. To watch the reenactment of history, then, is to watch actors literally spending their lives in constructing the past. The present gives life to the past through a practical, physical expenditure. The past could not exist without this effort, just as it cannot exist without someone to receive that effort. In the late sixteenth century, Sidney noted, as part of his critique of what he saw as overly loose dramatic conventions, that “place and time” are the “two necessary companions of all corporal actions.”54 This is a nod to the biological reality Blau describes: the living, breathing, blood-filled, “corporeal” bodies at the center point of theater. That the unique embodiment of the players in any give performance of history is also a form of surrogation, or replacement of the historical figures signified, points to the “re-doing” at the heart of theatrical activity. In his recent book Performing History, Freddie Rokem, although not directly concerned with the Renaissance stage, has relevantly addressed the status of the actor in the face of the temporal gap between the now of the theater and the then of history by suggesting the actor in a history play is a “witness of the historical event.” He writes: “the actors serve as a connecting link between the historical past and the ‘fictional’ performed here and now” of the theater.55 While Rokem is clear that history plays announce themselves as “re-doings,” I think his formulation of the actor as witness is still too suggestive of continuity between the past and the present. For it is the status of history as the report of witnesses that dramatic historiography denies. Since Herodotus, the “gold standard” of historical discourse has been the autopsy, the eyewitness report.56 When theater purports to reenact the past, the eyewitness report that might underlie the script is repressed. The actual reporting witness is absent, and the report itself is mediated by player stand-ins who mouth usually invented words removed from their original context. If anything, it is audiences who are called on to imagine themselves as witnesses, albeit consciously belated ones. The living, breathing body on stage disrupts rather than effects continuity and thus highlights how the temporality of drama forces audiences into awareness that the actual past is always irrecoverable and so there is always the need for conscious – and constant – acts of performance for it to exist. If it is the present that animates the past, it always does so with an awareness of repetition, or the “consciousness of doubleness,” a perception

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of distance between the self and behavior in performance. This consciousness in professional theater describes that of the audience as well as of the performers. The result of this collective doubleness is a productive flexibility in experiences of performance. This doubleness opens interstices in which to think critically about the concept of the past. Victor Turner, in a classic formulation describing the liminal status of performance, writes that activities such as play-acting allow people to “think about how they think in propositions that are not in cultural codes but about them.”57 History is a powerful cultural code through which a given society structures the symbolic order governing the lived reality of its members. Adapting Turner’s notion that a play can be a means to defamiliarize cultural codes, we can say that stage performance was, for Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights, an opportunity to think about the notion of historical consciousness – indeed, to use theater to interrupt, trouble, contemplate and even help to create it. The temporality, the physicality, and the double consciousness of performance are key aspects of the theatrical event, and they have been ingeniously elaborated on in the work I have been discussing here. Aspects of these current ideas were also recognized as key elements of theater in the Elizabethan era. The temporality of drama, for instance, was then considered a defining element of its ontology. The next chapter will explore this issue more fully, as I will say more about the new theater industry in relation to Elizabethan discourses of time. For now, we can note that early modern discourses on theater that make an issue of its temporality explore the paradox of performance as both an intensely material presence and an evaporating and elusive practice. Crane argues that the range of words used to describe performances of plays shows that the “ontological status of performance” was uncertain and included the sense that performance was a material act that could produce material effects, along with the sense that it was a “vain,” non-productive act.58 It is precisely this dialectic that, I think, defines the condition of theatrical playing for Elizabethans. When Shakespeare famously refers to the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, he calls the audience’s attention to the temporal pressure under which the play will unfold. The live event of a play is at once exciting and frustrating for audiences, for it is not only full of affect and significance but is also moving toward completion and disappearance. In the period, the word “shadow” is used at times to describe both players and the act of playing itself.59 Playing in this comparison is associated with the insubstantial and fleeting. When Shakespeare, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, likens performance in theaters to dreaming,

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he calls attention to its imaginative mystery as well as its evanescence, its capacity to be there and then not there. Theater happens, and leaves only scant material and memorial traces to mark that it happened. What we see most vividly in looking at certain parts of Henslowe’s Diary is that the theater of this era was a diurnal enterprise. Plays were enacted and completed only to be enacted again, in successive days or in revival after several months or even years. The new professional theater further draws out the dialectic between presence and absence inherent to performance – its being here, and then not here, and then here again – through its existence in the context of a daily business venture.60 If the temporality of drama heightens awareness of the player’s body, what many vocal critics of the Elizabethan theater found in these bodies was highly disturbing. The anti-theatricalists who found so much to condemn in the theater as a morally corrupting force were especially vicious towards the players themselves. While their outlook is warped by their animosity, the terms of their rhetoric can be telling for allowing us a sense of how early modern players were perceived. Players are referred to in the period as “mimick apes,” and elsewhere as “Apish actors.”61 As a kind of secondary action, performance was figured as parasitical on writing, with the player a mere “puppet.” Perhaps most troubling was the recognition of playing as feigning and, thus, the player’s body itself as dubious. Stephen Gosson in 1582 declared “In Stage Playes […] for a meane person to take upon him the title of a prince with counterfeit port, and traine, is by outwarde signs to shewe them selves otherwise then they are, and so with in the compasse of a lye.”62 Another theater critic in 1615 described the player as “A daily Counterfeit.”63 In such critiques, we can see a familiar anxiety over the difficulty of distinguishing between the inner and outer person, just as we see the player created as a kind of villainous cipher, a mere “puppet.” However, if actors are clearly understood to be “daily Counterfeit[s]” who, the observer can tell, “shewe themselves otherwise then they are,” we also see how the player’s body inspires a kind of double vision in the eye of the spectator. As Thomas Heywood asserts about one notorious aspect of playing in the period, the transvestite boy actor, “who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing they are but to represent a lady, at such a tyme appointed?”64 Heywood blunts some aspect of the anti-theatrical critique; it is no shocking or damaging revelation to announce the actors to be liars about who they are when on stage, because this is obviously part of the theatrical contract between players and playgoers. Looking at theatrical bodies sharpens the ability to think critically because it accustoms audiences to penetrate basic theatrical – and perhaps other, more complex imaginative – fictions.

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Such a double vision recalls art critic Michael Fried’s famous distinction between theatricality and what he calls “absorption.” According to Fried, absorption is achieved in painting when the represented figures appear as if unaware of being watched. In contrast to this is the theatrical element in paintings, where figures seem to turn toward the spectator, and selfconsciously display themselves as objects to be seen and admired.65 These concepts, which derive from the experience of looking at static paintings, cannot be translated directly to the dynamic bodies of the Shakespearean stage. But, broadly speaking, they represent extremes of the possibilities of spectator perception that can be usefully interrogated in relation to the Elizabethan player–playgoer relationship. In the case of Elizabethan theater works, we might say that theatricality and absorption are rarely if ever either/or propositions. Anthony B. Dawson recognizes this when he diagnoses the inevitable failure of theatrical illusion in early modern playing. He argues, “there seems […] to be a constant oscillation between two different and opposing constructions of the theater (and the theatrical body), on the one hand as mediated, self-conscious, metatheatrical, and on the other as immediate and present.” The Renaissance player, he suggests, reflects “a delicate poise between passionate engagement and awareness of fiction.”66 Dawson’s flexible, nuanced model of the playgoer’s perception of the actor is ultimately a richer guide to early modern performance than the absolute positions exemplified by “absorption” or “theatricality.” The player is always exposed as “variable,” a perception available to all but only a problem, it would seem, to the anti-theatrical writers and not to the playgoers who continued to flock to the theaters. Theater helped to inculcate certain complex habits of perception about the nature of performance and, perhaps, about the nature of the concepts, like history, enacted there. In thinking about, as States puts it, the phenomenology of performance, we can see the complex perspective on the past that performing history made possible. On stage, a being claims to be one thing and can be indulged as such by audiences even as he is actually known to be another. Likewise, the historical imagination inculcated in the theater can create a sense of an affective connection to the past that is actually always known to be the projection of a desire for such a connection. This self-consciousness about theatrical production is tied to the self-consciousness about history that was part of late-sixteenth-century historical culture. The popularity of historical works and the diversity of historical genres in the sixteenth century show that the contemplation of rupture and historical distance at this moment provided a kind of fulfillment that lies in the overlapping territory between

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the aesthetic and the intellectual. History was recognized as a desired but absent thing. Performance provided a powerful but fleeting (re)enactment of the past. The meeting of history and performance on stage revealed that both were forms of communal production, that both were an expression of collective will and effort, and that both, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, continually satisfied and aroused a desire for more in those who appreciated their charms. The plays I examine in this book will each showcase and draw forth some implications of the relationship between the stage and the past: they each foreground the temporality of drama and the implications of live bodies acting as surrogates for historical beings; they each inspire the “delicate poise” between engagement and awareness that Dawson describes. The first group of plays I look at comes from the repertory of the Queen’s Men; the second, from Shakespeare. I will turn now in the final two sections of this chapter to a discussion of how plays from both of these groups employ theater to question the status of history as a concept and a phenomenon. First, I will discuss the Queen’s Men. This company’s career is not as widely known as Shakespeare’s, so in the section that follows I will provide a more general overview of the troupe in the course of my assessment of their approach to historical performances. I will then turn to a brief analysis of some ways that this approach influenced Shakespeare’s own way of thinking about performing history.

the queen’s men: the company and their repertory Paul Dean and Benjamin Griffin have each noted the erroneous tendency among some critics to assume that Shakespeare’s version of the history play developed ex nihilo. Griffin looks back to medieval saint plays as one native dramatic form that helps give the Elizabethan genre its shape. Closer to my interests here, Dean argues that a variety of plays from the 1580s, including some by the Queen’s Men, may have fashioned Shakespeare’s early conception of the dramatic past.67 Indeed, the repertory of the Queen’s Men is a vital site to examine how the form, as developed by Shakespeare, took its initial shapes. This repertory can be credited with providing narrative models for six Shakespeare plays, all with claims on the past: Richard III, from The True Tragedy of Richard III; King John, from The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England; 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V, from The Famous Victories of Henry V; and King Lear from King Leir.68

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Who, then, were the Queen’s Men, and what about their now obscure repertory of plays struck such a chord with the greatest dramatist of the early modern stage? To date, the definitive work on the Queen’s Men is Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s landmark book The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (1998). McMillin and MacLean describe how this company was composed of the leading professional players of the late 1570s and early 1580s, who were brought together in 1583 by Elizabeth’s minister Sir Francis Walsingham and Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels. According to McMillin and MacLean, the Queen’s Men were essentially an “all-star troupe” formed for a definite political purpose. The company was consolidated under royal authority to “perform useful fictions” on behalf of the Government, such as the airing of anti-Spanish sentiments in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London and anti-Catholic propaganda in The Troublesome Reign of John.69 This may have been the original intent in the decision to put this company together. Many of the plays do bear undeniable traces of such political work. Yet, taken as a whole, the repertory of the Queen’s Men can hardly be reduced to a coherent political or even theological agenda. The company’s initial interest in history may have been driven by Ciceronian principles about the didactic powers of history. However, the company’s actual plays work to complicate the use of history to promote stable political messages. What might seem didactic in design becomes dialectical in performance. This, I believe, is because of the meeting of the company’s style with its content. By self-consciously performing history, the Queen’s Men open it up to a kind of philosophical and practical scrutiny that helps to promote a critical historical consciousness. The content of the Queen’s Men repertory shows a persistent interest in the past. One of the key claims McMillin and MacLean put forward is that the Queen’s Men invented the genre we now call the history play.70 The Famous Victories of Henry V, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and The Troublesome Reign of John depict the medieval English monarchy and so fit easily into the genre of the history play as first defined by Heminges and Condell in 1623. The historical work of the troupe extends even beyond the most obvious examples of these king-centered plays. Along with those titles, McMillin and MacLean place six other plays in the company’s canon: Clyomon and Clamydes, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, Selimus, King Leir, and The Old Wives Tale. These plays are a diverse lot but each in some way or another represents a notion of “pastness.” For instance, the prologue to Clyomon and Clamydes adopts the language of the chronicles and other works of historiography as it promises to provide “famous facts.”71 In actuality, the play provides none, but, like The Old Wives Tale, it evokes a kind of mythic, chivalric past.

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Selimus, Robert Greene’s imitation of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, moves outside English history to tell a story taken from chronicles of the Ottoman Empire of an early sixteenth-century Turkish emperor. The prologue to Selimus states that No fained toy nor forged Tragedie, Gentles we here present unto your view, But a most lamentable historie Which this last age acknowledgeth for true.72

Greene emphasizes that his play is not “fained” or “forged,” a bid for it to be taken seriously as having truth claims on the past. Also, the play is characterized as presenting a story from “this last age”: after assuring audiences it is not feigned, the prologue to Selimus does the additional work of assuring audiences it is set in the past. That sense is reinforced on the title page of the 1594 quarto of Selimus, which tells us that the eponymous figure is “sometime Emperor of the Turkes and grandfather to him that now raigneth,” a rhetorical gesture that uses vertical family relations to historicize the play in relation to the present Turkish emperor. King Leir, meanwhile, tells a tale adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain – a contested but still vital source of historical knowledge in the late sixteenth century – about an ancient British king who is written about in Holinshed and other chronicles. The quasi-allegorical The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London is set in a near-contemporary London, but it includes a representation of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and thus reflects back on a recent, and in many ways defining, historical event in the lives of latesixteenth-century playgoers. The plays, then, differ in obvious ways in the extent to which they conform to the traditional sense of the history play, but each in some sense makes an effort to define itself as set in the past. The Queen’s Men were formed “primarily for touring,” a way to put the players and the ideas they promulgated “in circulation.”73 The company also frequently performed in and around London and at court, but they always maintained an itinerant identity, as can be seen by the fact that, even when they performed in London, they did not become affiliated with any particular theater there.74 This transience may explain why so many plays performed by the Queen’s Men include various kinds of “framing devices.” This occurs sometimes at the start of a play, as in the prologues to Clyomon and Clamydes, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London and Selimus; sometimes it occurs throughout the course of a play in the form of asides or other moments that recall older dramatic conventions of interaction with spectators, as in The Old Wives Tale. Such gestures might be especially

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important for a company that is oriented primarily toward touring, simply because constant movement means the likelihood of unfamiliar playing spaces and new audiences, an atmosphere in which the company may have felt more of a need to focus audience attention than a company that performs virtually everyday at a “home” theater to audiences used to the conventions of a diurnal theater industry. The commitment of the Queen’s Men to touring would also have meant that the group was frequently performing in non-purpose-built theaters. The players needed to do extra work to help transform the inns, halls, or village greens in which they put on their plays into imaginative spaces of dramatic play. Insofar as the company did attempt to promote Elizabeth’s social and religious-political agenda, both in London and around the country, the group could use theatrical conventions like inductions, asides, and direct address to the audience as a means to engage playgoers more or less directly and to attempt to influence their reception of key moments or aspects of the plays. This can be seen most explicitly in “prophetic” speeches that anticipate and celebrate the Tudor ascendancy, as in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The True Tragedy of Richard III. The Queen’s Men were known for their “adaptability” and were “remarkably quick-witted and resourceful in mounting their performances.”75 As seen in their reliance on framing devices, they were also fundamentally audience aware. Their style of playing was aimed at keeping a line of communication between the players and audiences open so that at any moment one might expect an aside, a direct address, or some form of broad, physical comedy that could, for an instant at least, transform the experience from the presentation of a self-contained dramatic fiction to something more like what we might call a vaudeville-style show. One explanation of the slow decline of the company in the 1590s is that a shift in stage conventions occurred in this decade. Plays began to concentrate more on the creation of autonomous, fictive worlds which audiences could observe but which offered fewer lines of connection between the players and the playgoers.76 The transformation of the clown figure is a key element in this shift. The Queen’s Men boasted a number of clowns, including the famous Richard Tarlton. Tarlton was particularly noted for the physicality of his performances and for his extempore genius. He is reputed to have frequently engaged in improvisatory contests of wit with audience members, one extreme example of how the Queen’s Men tended to engage and involve audiences in their performances.77 Andrew Gurr proposes that the style Tarlton made famous was on the wane by the time of his death in 1588: “Tarlton’s kind of audience, drawn by his fame and united by comedy into intimacy with the players, did

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not long outlast the 1580s.”78 This shift is emblematized by Hamlet’s speech to the players, where he calls for a more tightly controlled, author-centered theater in favor of an open-ended, actor-centered playing culture. McMillin and MacLean argue that because the Queen’s Men continued to favor the latter, and more importantly because they lacked writers who could keep up with Marlowe and later Shakespeare, “print-culture and the Queen’s Men were not a good match.”79 At the height of their popularity, the Queen’s Men were peculiarly creatures of the stage. One common motif in the Queen’s Men repertory that demonstrates this is the penchant for audience address, often by clowns. For one example, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London features a scene in which a page and a clown named Simplicity engage in a singing contest. After each has sung, the page asks his two friends to name the winner. Simplicity replies “Tush, your copesmetés shal not iudge: friend, what say you, which of vs sings best?” The stage direction here reads “to one of the auditory.”80 Looking for an impartial opinion, Simplicity has appealed directly to the playgoers to judge the contest. We see here and will see elsewhere in this company’s repertory a recurring dialogue between figures on stage and the audience, gestures that promote a sense of collective involvement in the production of the plays, a crucial dynamic in the larger production of historical culture in which the plays participate. In the course of bringing stories from the English past into the theater, the Queen’s Men affirm Puttenham’s description of history: they mark the stage as a space where audiences come to see representations of that which is beyond human ability to see or in anyway sense; to witness what is spatially, temporally, physically impossible to witness. They do not respond to this impossibility by vainly searching for a marvelous technology, like the magic glass in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, that would enable preternatural sight. Nor do they give themselves over to deep cynicism and mock or simply abandon the enterprise of performing the past. Rather, the Queen’s Men establish a trend wherein history cannot be staged with an eye toward content alone. In offering a prospect of history, the company kept always in view the “frames” they constructed to make this view possible. The Queen’s Men’s interest in representing the past is intertwined with its sense of the conceptual problems such representation presents. Now, the Queen’s Men most likely did not set out to pose questions about representation. But, in attempting to produce “knockabout” entertainment laced with Tudor propaganda, they discovered fundamental incongruities inherent in representing the past and thus a series of questions about the representation of history on stage. Some of these questions include: what

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special problems does playing – a kind of feigning – raise for history – a form of discourse ostensibly devoted to truth? How do the spatial-temporal aspects of stage playing affect the telling of history? What are the implications of stage embodiment in a history play for historical thought, i.e. what are the implications of the presence of physical bodies of stage players enacting figures from the past? What effect does metatheatricality have on historical representation? It is this aspect of the company, its habit of posing such questions that, I believe, made the Queen’s Men matter for Shakespeare, a theater artist who never stopped thinking about how his medium impacted the ideas he presented there. As inventors of the history play, the genre that Shakespeare used to make his reputation in the 1590s, the Queen’s Men have an obvious relevance to Shakespeare’s development and, by extension, to the development of the Elizabethan theater. In a very practical sense, Shakespeare found in the repertory of the Queen’s Men a series of convenient compositional starting places with known commercial potential. But I want to suggest that the Queen’s Men provided something more to Shakespeare than raw materials and that their relationship can be studied for more than the coincidence of subject matter, scraps of dialogue, or characterizations. In the plays of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare saw an invigorating set of problems and opportunities emerge from the conjunction of the two aspects of the company I have outlined above: their loose, audience-oriented playing style and their commitment to enacting the past. This is the root of how the Queen’s Men intervene in Elizabethan historical culture and historical consciousness through the performance of the past. They foreground the representation of the past while using the language and playing practices that continually alert audiences to the present-tense reality of their performances. In other words, they initiate a stimulating dialectic between the “pastness of the past” and the presentness of performance.

shakespeare and the concept of history Early in Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess’s novel “of Shakespeare’s love-life,” the young Shakespeare sits discontentedly in Stratford and contemplates his life. The famous company of players known as the Queen’s Men are passing through town, and their appearance has helped to implant in “WS,” as Burgess refers to Shakespeare, a “regret he could not name.” He resolves to seek the company out: Tomorrow to take those few hundred lines of pseudo-Plautus to the Queen’s Players, yawning in their inn, crapulous after their merry night but perhaps the

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less prone not to listen to the decently fashioned (though not in any fire) blank verse. He could not delay his growing up much longer, three-and-twenty, father of three.81

WS finds a place with the players and eventually makes his way to London and its burgeoning theatrical scene. We do not know whether or not Shakespeare actually broke into the theater industry as a member of the Queen’s Men playing company, as Burgess’s novel suggests and as has been asserted by some scholars. It is tempting, and, to my mind, entirely plausible, to think that this is how it really was, an argument that McMillin and MacLean tentatively endorse.82 At the least, it would explain Shakespeare’s obvious familiarity with their repertory. If he were initially enlisted as a player in the company, this could explain even more. McMillin and MacLean have argued that it was the “mighty line” of Marlowe and later Shakespeare – that is, the extraordinary verbal gifts of these and other talented poets for rival companies – that brought about the demise of the Queen’s Men, who cared more about the performance at hand than the text that might survive.83 Shakespeare’s emergence as a player-poet unites these two endeavors. For Shakespeare, a player himself, the supposed agon between an actor’s and an author’s theater must have been much more complex than has been generally acknowledged.84 As we have seen, the Queen’s Men established a fluid boundary between their performances and their audiences. Supposing Shakespeare was a player for the Queen’s Men at the outset of his career allows us to locate in this experience the beginnings of his interest in staging the past, his obsessive return to performance tropes, and the extraordinary dramatic selfconsciousness that marks his oeuvre. Shakespeare’s conception of dramatic self-consciousness is indebted to the Queen’s Men and their methods, but it is also startlingly original when compared to other statements about the nature of theater from the period, especially in relation to the performance of history. For instance, we might consider Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (c. 1612), one of the few non-hostile considerations of theater and performance from the early modern period. In it, Heywood seconds Titus Andronicus’ declaration that seeing a live body is a distinctive aesthetic experience. Heywood specifically promotes performance based on its “liveness” and embodiment, which he claims distinguishes it from other forms of expression. Life, he says can no way bee so exquisitly demonstrated, nor so lively portrayed, as by action […] A description is only a shadow, received by the eare, but not perceived by the eye; so lively portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action,

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passion, motion, or any other gesture to moove the spirits of the beholder to admiration: but to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier […]85

In this formulation, pictures and even speech – a “description” – is what is insubstantial. Reversing the axiom that it is the players who are “shadows,” Heywood claims that the presence of bodies in performance supersedes other forms of representation. For Heywood, like Titus, this discussion of the affect of performance is not purely theoretical. It is crucial to the rhetoric of Heywood’s treatise, a defense of theater, to assert that it, more than any other cultural form, can work to capture the attention of men and women. Indeed, one of the arrows in Heywood’s pro-theater quiver is an argument that links theater’s power to the telling of history, for, he argues, plays have made playgoers more aware of glorious examples from English history, an argument proffered earlier by Thomas Nashe. Plays, Heywood assures his readers, have “power to new-mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”86 As we see here, the terms of the debate on theater bear a strong resemblance to discourses on history and history writing in the early modern period. Historians continually invoked the exemplarity of history and its salutary effects. By adopting this rhetoric for his own purposes, Heywood obviously seeks to forge a link between theater and history as joint arenas of moral improvement. But, in appropriating the Ciceronian language of history as magistra vitae, he also retreats from the innovative conceptualization of performance as an embodied phenomenon that he had begun to build. A later assessment of what goes into performing the past can be found in how a Caroline-era English poet lauds Shakespeare in the prefatory material to the Second Folio (1632). This poet defines Shakespeare as a historical thinker, referring to him as a “mind reflecting ages past.” According to this writer, in terms that echo Heywood’s phenomenology of performance, Shakespeare’s form is all important in lending his histories power. For the past that “story coldly tells” can appear on stage “in […] lively colours’ just extent.” In the end, though, this eulogist is focused on Shakespeare as a sort of magician rather than on him as a man of the theater. The admirer goes on to credit Shakespeare with the ability to “raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse,” and to “enlive their pale trunks.”87 He goes deeper and deeper into the figurative realm, and invests Shakespeare with the power to raise the dead that his own creature Prospero abjures. Heywood relegates the affect of theatrical history to a narrow space of moral action. The Second Folio poet wants to praise Shakespeare as a supernatural artist, who makes real what he writes. Neither delves as deeply

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in their assessment of the history play as Shakespeare himself does. Shakespeare, at a key moment in his career, intervenes in the discussion of history, theater, and performance from a fresh angle that avoids traditional habits of thought about the probity of history or hyperbole about the creative artist. At the close of the sixteenth century, in the last of a string of plays he had written on the medieval English past, Shakespeare offers his most explicit commentary on theater as a vehicle to represent history. O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! […] But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! Since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. (Henry V. Prologue.1–4; 8–18)

Having written and probably acted in some eight history plays with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and possibly earlier companies such as the Queen’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men and Pembroke’s Men, by the time he turned to Henry V, it is not surprising that Shakespeare would finally take time to preface one of these plays with some commentary on his engagement with historical material. What seems so remarkable to me about the initial speech in Henry V is its originality as a meditation on historical representation and historical knowledge in this era. The famous prologue, the other speeches by the Chorus, along with the very presence of a Chorus figure at all, reveal Shakespeare’s interest in the theoretical questions raised by the practical elements of the performance of history. Heywood, as we have seen, specifically promotes performance based on its “liveness” and embodiment. This, he claims, distinguishes it from other forms of expression, a point he makes in order to argue for its greater moral power. Shakespeare eschews the tired issue of the exemplarity of history altogether and concentrates instead on the relation between history and the ontology – the very being – of the theater: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France?”

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Shakespeare does not go with Heywood down the path of seeing history as moral edification. He also denies the mystification of his art we see in the poem in the Second Folio. In Henry V, he is clear, for instance, that the power to raise the dead is not within the scope of the dramatic historian’s abilities. His own take on the job of performing the past is that he writes words that Elizabethan players speak, for Elizabethan audiences to make something of in their minds. History, for him, is not primarily educative, and it is certainly not necromancy. It is a lively production full of pitfalls and pleasures. The Prologue follows and expands on the example of the Queen’s Men repertory as well as the example of Camden’s “note to the reader.” In those instances, evoking history provokes some meditation on how the past is brought forth. Inspired and excited by the historical culture of the late sixteenth century, the Queen’s Men and then Shakespeare made theater a vital part of that culture. The particularities of theatrical performance and the playing conditions of the new popular theaters made sure that their contribution to that culture would be distinctive. Representing the past with lively bodies leads to a questioning of the very being of the past, for the physical dynamics of theater highlight the elusiveness of history. The Elizabethan history play, as invented by the Queen’s Men and developed by Shakespeare, thus changed the conversation on history at the end of the sixteenth century. The startling power and enduring quality of Shakespeare’s history plays in particular ensured that the performance of history would not merely expand the range of Elizabethan historical culture but would alter it as well, for these plays propose a continuing if not commonly articulated model of historical consciousness, one that is structured by the dynamics of stage performance.88 conclusion If we return now to Marlowe’s Faustus, an influential Elizabethan play that has some claim on representing history, we can see again that it affirms theater as a key site where Elizabethans sought to reflect on the status of the past. It does so in ways that tie nicely to the notion of performing history as a fictive dialogue with the dead and with Shakespeare’s own anticipatory rejection of the Second Folio poet’s assessment of the dramatic historian’s powers. The play shows the stage to be a site where dialoguing with the dead was recognized as an ideal form of contact that was perpetually sought after and perpetually elusive. The “Alexander” scene referred to earlier makes evident the tangle of desire, belief, and skepticism that underwrites the performance of history. The Emperor Charles asks Faust to “raise” “Alexander the Great” because “It grieves my soul

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I never saw the man.” The Emperor’s request to see Alexander, and Faust’s attempts to supply him, dramatize the process whereby the past is produced to meet a demand. Although Faust promises to fulfill the Emperor’s “just desire,” he adds a caveat that is potentially deflating for the Emperor and his court, as well as for theater audiences: “But it is not in my ability to present before your eyes the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes, which long since are consumed to dust.” Rather, Faust claims, he will raise “such spirits as can lively resemble Alexander and his paramour,” which, he assures, “shall sufficiently content Your Imperial Majesty.”89 Despite being a man involved in a compact with Lucifer, Faust’s admission to be unable to present Alexander is a nod to religious orthodoxy: demonic power can create illusions, not alter reality, and it certainly cannot raise the actual dead.90 The Emperor’s request exposes the limits of the doctor’s necromantic power, just as what it theoretically entails exposes the limits of any playwright’s creative power. For apart from being a theological matter, bringing forth Alexander is also a representational problem. Marlowe’s play throughout suggests Mephistopheles’ work on behalf of Faust to be analogous to the shadowy realm of representation found in poetry and, more insistently, on stage. Doctor Faustus clearly disavows the possibility of actual effects, such as historical “revival,” in each of these practices. And yet, when Doctor Faustus does eventually bring his lively spirits out to present Alexander and his paramour, the Emperor ignores the earlier warning about the illusory quality of the spectacle, responding to the sight by saying, “Sure these are no spirits, but the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes.”91 Elizabethan theatergoers may have been likewise beguiled by Faust’s tricks or by the enactments of long-dead figures afforded by history plays. But it is just as likely that they would be able to form a critical perspective on the Emperor’s response. They could view the Emperor as one who does not really believe what he is seeing to be real but who nonetheless is caught up in the momentary desire to be beguiled. That is a position with which they might identify. Certainly, audiences took enough pleasure in enactments of the past to make the history play genre successful in the 1590s. Simultaneously, though, these plays as pursued by Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men always made clear that belief in the efficacy of performing history was not sustainable. The plays I study here offer the possibility that in the early modern period audiences could take pleasure in the illusion while remaining conscious that to satisfy the “just desire” to encounter the past they needed to be committed to a communal act of secular conjuring, an act of production in the performative present. To have history at all, in other words, they needed to be committed to a theatrical imagination.

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not es 1. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 4.1.27–36. 2. Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 10. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 65. 4. Jacob Burckhardt helped to create Petrarch’s status as the prime mover in modern Western thought in his 1860 work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Basel: Schweighauser). For a survey of this view and some critiques of it, see Dolora A. Wojciehowski’s Old Masters, New Subjects: Early Modern and Poststructuralist Theories of Will (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 37–88, especially pp. 37–45. 5. For important work on this aspect of Petrarch, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). My thinking about Petrarch and the classical letters is indebted to Peter Burke’s The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969). 6. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors, ed. and trans. Mario Emilio Cosenza (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1910), p. x. 7. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors, p. 100. 8. The phrase is Richard Bauman’s, quoted in Marvin Carlson’s Performance: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 5. 9. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors, pp. 170–171. 10. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors, p. 43. 11. For a useful overview on this point, see Mary Thomas Crane’s “Early Tudor Humanism,” in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) pp. 13–26. Lawrence Rhu’s essay “Continental Influences,” in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) pp. 433–445, surveys the specific impact Continental humanism had on English drama. 12. D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500– 1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 9–10. 13. Such a difference is outlined in Peter Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 8. The term “historical consciousness” is sometimes used more or less synonymously with “collective memory.” There are good reasons for this, but I prefer to disentangle the terms insofar as the very words “historical consciousness” imply, in a way the words “collective memory” cannot, a “meta-awareness” of the processes by which such a corporate sense of the past comes about. 14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (eds.), Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, trans. Jeff L. Close (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987),

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pp. 89–90. For an elaboration of Gadamer in relation to a humanist, Renaissance historical consciousness, see David Quint’s “‘Alexander the Pig’: Shakespeare on History and Poetry,” boundary, 2 49–50 (1982): 49–67. 15. Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” p. 89. 16. Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 188. 17. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 55. See Margaret Aston’s “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973): 231– 255 for a discussion of how the presence of monastic ruins, created by the Henrician Dissolution, stimulated English historical thinking in the sixteenth century. 18. William Camden, Britain; or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London 1610), sig. 4v–5r. Britannia was originally published in Latin. For convenience, I quote here from Philemon Holland’s 1610 English translation. The translation is based on the 1607 Latin edition, but the note to the reader is essentially the same as in the 1586 Latin original. 19. Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), p. 202. 20. On the etymology of the term, see the brief discussion by David Harris Sacks at the beginning of his review essay “Imagination in History,” Shakespeare Studies, 31 (2003): 64–86 and Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: From Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. x. 21. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 30. 22. Julian Franklin, in Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), discusses Renaissance Pyrrhonist views of history, namely those of the Italian humanist Francesco Patrizi, pp. 96–101. 23. Quoted in Herschel Baker’s The Race of Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 45. 24. Cicero, De oratore, ed. H. Rackham, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 225. 25. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (New York: AMS Press Reprint, 1965), vol. II, “The Preface to the Reader.” Baldwin similarly outlines the goal of The Mirror for Magistrates: “For here, as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like hath bene punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the soner amendment. This is the chiefest ende, whye it is set furth.” William Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates: Edited from Original Texts in the Huntington Library, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), pp. 65–66. 26. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 39. 27. See, for instance, Burke’s The Renaissance Sense of the Past.

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28. Quoted in Herendeen, William Camden, p. 324. 29. See, on this point, Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially pp. 66–104. 30. The term “ideological ambivalence” comes from Larry Champion, “‘Answere to this Perillous Time’: Ideological Ambivalence in The Raigne of King Edward III and The English Chronicle Plays,” English Studies, 69 (1988): 117–129. 31. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, p. 6. 32. Quoted in Jonathan Kalb’s The Theater of Heiner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 15. 33. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1. For a powerful elaboration of these ideas in an attempt to bring archeology and literary studies into conversation, see Philip Schwyzer’s Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 2–24. 34. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 27. 35. Hayden White, to whom LaCapra is in part responding in the quotation above, is a pioneering figure in the reexamination of the aesthetic strategies of historiography. See his signal works Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 36. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” originally published in 1919, quoted here from Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), p. 38. 37. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 13. 38. Titus Andronicus, III.i.65. All subsequent citations from Shakespeare in this book will appear parenthetically in the text and are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn., G. Blakemore Evans et al. (eds.) (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997). 39. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 37, calls it a “beholding place.” 40. Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?” Criticism, 43 (2002): 169–187. 41. Crane, “What Was Performance?” pp. 172–173. 42. Or, as Diana Taylor puts it, “Thus one of the problems in using performance, and its misleading cognates performative and performativity, comes from the extraordinarily broad range of behaviors it covers.” Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 6. On this point, see also the editors’ essay “Theatricality: An Introduction,” in Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (eds.), Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–39. 43. Bert States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), p. 1.

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44. Harry Berger, Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989), p. 45. See also Berger’s development of this technique in his brilliant analysis of Falstaff in “The Prince’s Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of Speech-Prefixity,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 49 (1998): 40–73. 45. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, p. 3. See also Tom F. Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and Griffin, Playing the Past. 46. Elin Diamond, “Introduction,” in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 1. 47. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146. 48. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 144. 49. Herbert Blau, Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 123. 50. Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 170. 51. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 148. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., in Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), notes, “it is through the actor’s corporeal presence under the spectator’s gaze that the dramatic text actualizes itself in the field of performance” (p. 1). 52. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 3. 53. Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 50. 54. Sidney, The Defense of Poetry, p. 65. 55. Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000), pp. 9, 13. Paola Pugliatti, in Shakespeare the Historian (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), speaks of Shakespeare’s audiences as “eye-witnesses” (p. 71). 56. Karen Bassi, “The Somatics of the Past: Helen and the Body of Tragedy,” in Mark Franko and Annette Richards (eds.), Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), p. 14. 57. Quoted in Carlson, Performance, p. 23. 58. Crane, “What Was Performance?” pp. 171, 173, 174. 59. See, for instance, Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, speaking of the men who perform “Pyramus and Thisby”: “The best in this kind [i.e actors] are but shadows” and, in the same play, Puck’s closing, metatheatrical speech, where he uses the term as a form of self-definition: “If we shadows have offended …” (V.i.211–212; 423). 60. On the particular dynamic of the absence and presence of the body in historical representation, see Bassi, “The Somatics of the Past: Helen and the Body of Tragedy,” p. 15.

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61. From The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1602) and John Davies’ Microcosmos (1603), quoted in Meredith Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 38 and 41. 62. Quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923) vol. IV, p. 217. 63. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 255. 64. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 252. 65. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 116–147, for a statement of this theory, and Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diederot (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980) for a more extensive elaboration of this concept. 66. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 26, 37. 67. Paul Dean, “Shakespeare’s Henry VI Trilogy and Elizabethan ‘Romance’ Histories: The Origins of a Genre,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982): 34–48. Griffin, in Playing the Past, productively de-emphasizes the importance of the chronicle sources in order to pay more attention to “a different contextual apparatus […] other plays” (p. xiii). See pp. 22–45 on the saint plays. One could also, of course, look back in the sixteenth century to John Bale’s King Johan, but my focus is on the popular history play produced in the context of the commercial theaters of the late Elizabethan era. See also David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 1–7, on the importance of the dramatic tradition at large to the origins of the Shakespearean history play. 68. The dates of composition and original performance for nearly all the plays in the Queen’s Men repertory are uncertain. It has therefore been possible for some scholars to complicate the traditionally accepted notion that the works of the Queen’s Men preceded the plays Shakespeare wrote on related topics. My larger thesis here proceeds from the assumption that the Queen’s Men influenced Shakespeare. I thus take the traditional view that their plays on English history had priority. I follow the chronology first suggested by Chambers and since endorsed by McMillin and MacLean for the dating of the plays in Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 69. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 28. 70. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 33 and passim. 71. Clyomon and Clamydes, ed. W. W. Greg (New York: AMS Press, 1985), prologue.10. 72. Robert Greene, Selimus, ed. W. Bang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), TLN (through line number) 1–4.

46 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. xv, 5. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 6. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 83. On this point, see Ann Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). Tarlton’s reputation for extemporal wit is noted in many places, including Edwin Nungezer’s entry on him in A Dictionary of Actors (New York: Greenwood Publishers, 1968), pp. 347–365. The posthumously published collection Tarlton’s Jests records various instances of his back and forth with audience members, under headings such as “How Tarlton and one in the gallery fell out.” One of the “jests” states “it was his custome for to sing extempore of theames given him,” in J. O. Halliwell (ed.), Tarlton’s Jests (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint Ltd, 1966), p. 27. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 132. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 85. Robert Wilson, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, ed. John S. Farmer (New York: AMS Press, 1970), sig. C1v. Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 73, 75. See McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. 160–166, for a brief survey of critics who have espoused this view, including their own thesis that Shakespeare may have been a player and as well as a kind of apprentice playwright in the company, admitting, though, that the evidence for this is “circumstantial and indirect” (p. 167). See McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. 166–167. Meredith Skura’s fascinating study Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing is still the best attempt to think through Shakespeare’s dual status as player-poet. See also Nora Johnson’s study The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), which looks at the complexity of the actor-author persona in mostly non-Shakespearean examples from the period but which includes a speculative riff on Shakespeare as a concluding chapter (pp. 152–167). Here, Johnson notes that Shakespeare was remarkably silent about his career as an actor, as he, unlike some of his contemporaries, never “cultivated a star persona” (p. 163). Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, pp. 250–251. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 251. “On Worthy Master Shakespeare and His Poems,” by “I. M. S,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London: 1632), sig. 3r. On this poem and what it says about early responses to the history play, see Griffin, Playing the Past, pp. 9–11, as well as David Scott Kastan, “Shakespeare and English History,” in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 167.

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88. R. G. Collingwood is the most important modern historian to speak of his discipline in theater-inflected terms. He famously described the work of the historian as “reenactment.” See his The Idea of History: With Lectures 1926– 1928, ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) as well as William H. Dray’s study of Collingwood, History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1995). 89. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 4.1.27–69. The version of this same incident in the B-text published in 1616 de-emphasizes the sense of melancholy the Emperor suffers because of his distance from his great kingly forebears. The B-text, though, does resonate in important ways with my interests in this essay: it makes the “dumb show” more elaborate as a mini-history play, including a fight between Alexander and the Persian King Darius. The B-text also uses language that is associated with discourses of performance in the era, as Faustus is careful to explain of the historical figures he conjures: “These are but shadows, not substantial.” 90. On this as a point of Thomist theology, see David Hawkes, “Faust among the Witches: Towards an Ethics of Representation,” section 16, in Early Modern Culture, 4 (2004). 91. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 4.1.68–69.

chapter 2

Theatrical time and historical time: the temporality of the past in The Famous Victories of Henry V About midway through Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, a play staged by the Queen’s Men and set largely in Oxford and the English countryside in the thirteenth century, the clown Rafe calls attention to a time and place much closer to the performance at hand. He speaks of sailing a ship of fools “with a fair wind to the Bankside in Southwark,” the location of the Rose Theater where Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was likely staged originally.1 The playgoers and players are wryly figured as a community of idiots who spend their time following a disreputable pursuit in a disreputable suburb. Rafe seems to be saying to the assembled crowd: “We’re all in this together.” The “this” is the event of theater itself, and in the particular case of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, it is a temporally complex event. The play is named for the famed thirteenth-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon and features King Henry III as well as his son, the future Edward I. In other words, it is set in the historical past. And yet, as Rafe’s remarks about the “place of the stage” make clear, it is being performed at the edge of Elizabethan London. The dialectic of the “now” of theater and the “then” of the past is made, for a moment, explicitly clear, and it is no accident that a clown is responsible. Clowning with history is a signature move of the Queen’s Men, a move that highlights the temporality and artifice of historical knowledge. This is most evident in the company’s performance of the anonymously authored The Famous Victories of Henry V, first put on sometime in the 1580s. The Famous Victories of Henry V is generally regarded as the first English history play to be performed on the popular stage. It has been recognized for demonstrating the commercial viability of the past as subject material in the competitive milieu of the Elizabethan theatrical world, as well as for its influence on Shakespeare’s plays 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV and Henry V. The Famous Victories of Henry V has been so overshadowed by these later works that its innovative presentation of the relationship between historical representation and theatrical form has gone unnoticed. The play 48

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reflects changing notions of temporality in the sixteenth century that impinged on historiography and theater. My analysis aligns The Famous Victories of Henry V with these shifts by focusing on the character Derick, played by the famous Elizabethan clown Richard Tarlton. Through his clowning, The Famous Victories of Henry V emphasizes the physical presence of performance and works to stimulate audience consciousness of the theatrical event in enacting history. Tarlton reveals that the history play is a real-time engagement with the past and thereby suggests the material process of theatrical performance to be analogous to the work of producing historical knowledge. The genre of the history play as conceived in The Famous Victories of Henry V explores two key challenges that were articulated in the early modern era to the desire to have a past: an epistemological challenge, or the problem of how to know history, and a representational challenge, or the problem of how to show history. The Famous Victories of Henry V responds to these intellectual and ontological crises of historicism by suggesting theatrical performance as a paradigm for a new historical consciousness. This response is best seen in how the play figures the relation between theatrical time and historical time. The concept of history and historical consciousness itself are both presented in The Famous Victories of Henry V as variegated productions that, like all plays, are continually “under construction” as they are continually dissolving.2 historical time and theatrical time in sixteenth-century england Early modern author and playgoer Thomas Nashe described the spectacle of Lord Talbot’s death in Shakespeare’s play 1 Henry VI (c. 1592) as one where “ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times)” amid their “teares […] imagine they behold him [Talbot] fresh bleeding.”3 Nashe points to the affective power of being present in the theater for this sight – it elicits tears – as well as to the fact that this scene was presented on multiple occasions. Other early modern discourses on theatre similarly explore performance as both an intense moment of material presence and as a repeatable practice. Many discourses focus more on this repeatability as a kind of transience, thereby characterizing theater as a presence that is always evaporating. This sense of theatrical temporality is linked to innovations in technology and in the consciousness of history in the early modern period that emphasize an awareness of the passing of time in everyday life. Throughout the sixteenth century, “the moment by moment annihilation of the present” came to be understood as the “measure of reality.”4

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Reinhart Koselleck claims that in the Renaissance, “there occurs a temporalization of history.”5 In another formulation, Ricardo Quinones distinguishes the Renaissance sense of time with that which preceded it this way: “The Middle Ages tended to value the ongoing rhythms in which man participated; the Renaissance, the continuities that he himself effected.”6 Both Koselleck and Quinones oppose a God-centered universe and a humancentered universe – in other words, an ontology that measures time in relation to the divine versus one that measures time in and on secular terms. To propose that the former views were utterly or neatly supplanted by the latter views in the early modern period would be inaccurate. There was a considerable ebbing and flowing in conceptions of time. Indeed, one fascinating aspect of historical discourses in this period is the often-slippery attempts to accommodate these seemingly exclusive views when interpreting the past. But a persistent movement toward acceptance of a “temporalization of history,” a move into what might be called historical time, is undeniably evident and is a major component of new perspectives on historiography in the Renaissance.7 It is a movement toward a sense of the world where, in the Newtonian formulation that would eventually take root, time flows “without relation to anything external.”8 As one historian has noted, in the Renaissance, “The tempo of life was increased. Only now was formulated the new interpretation of time which saw it as a value, as something of utility.”9 This experience of time began to become central to how people understood their relation to the world. The introduction of clocks to urban communities is an important point in this transition. For much of the medieval period, people in urban areas “relied on a system of time proclaimed by church bells,” while by the late sixteenth century public clocks were commonplace in western Europe, helping to create a situation in which “hours were of central significance to city dwellers, whom buying and selling had already initiated into the vogue of quantification.”10 The first public clocks in London date to the late 1300s.11 According to Alfred W. Crosby, the town clock taught citizens that “invisible, inaudible, seamless time was composed of quanta.”12 “The clock,” writes Crosby, “provided Westerners with a new way of imagining – of meta-imagining.”13 One provocative form of “meta-imagining” was indeed the imagination of history. To imagine history at this moment increasingly meant to understood it as flowing along a linear – but not necessarily determined – plane. At the same time, to think historically necessarily involved breaking that linear plane. If time is a strictly linear progression that moves “without relation to anything external,” then to write, act, speak or generally “do” history becomes an attempt to turn back the clock and to peer into the, in Prospero’s words,

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“dark backward and abysm of time” (The Tempest, I.ii.50). As I will discuss more below, thinking historically means deferring, in a complex way, the present moment to attend to the past. Throughout the early modern period, this new concept of time was increasingly institutionalized and even commodified. Quinones’ study of time in the Renaissance proceeds from recognition of the economic implications of the temporalization of history: “Precisely the society to develop this new time sense,” Quinones writes, “was the growing commercial, capitalistic, and urban culture of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.”14 Michael D. Bristol helps to position the popular stage within this emergent economy: “What was novel and perhaps threatening or disruptive about the commercial theaters could not have been the simple fact of theatricality itself. What the theaters were able to accomplish was the transformation of otherwise familiar performance practices into merchandise.”15 In the course of turning performance into merchandise, the newly professionalized, commercial theater became time-sensitive in new ways. As was the case in all other businesses, theater proprietors were acutely aware of time as money, seen in the haste with which Philip Henslowe seems to have demanded his playwrights provide him with a steady stream of new material. But the theater was time-sensitive also insofar as its product took place in time. Time was in fact the boundary of theater. Plays of the period commonly gesture toward time limits in presenting plays, often emphasizing a fear of becoming tedious. A greater practical issue, though, was daylight. Visitors to the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London can today take in an evening of outdoor theater, thanks to artificial lighting, but this was not an option in the outdoor theaters of the early modern period. Theater was subject to the same constraints as most other professions. As one historian notes, work regulations issued by authorities across western Europe in the later Renaissance “consistently stipulate the full period of daylight as the standard measure of daily work,” and that “working time was determined in part by daylight.”16 That theater was a professional practice that took place during the regular workday was of course a source of the traditional hostility toward it by city authorities and moralists. In one typical fulmination against theater, Geoffrey Fenton writes, “Players […] corrupt good moralities by wanton shewes and playes: they ought not to be suffered to prophane the Sabboth day in such sportes, and much lesse to lose time on the dayes of trauayle [travail].”17 The theater industry had a unique temporal existence within early modern London’s economy. It is itself governed by the laws of the market, but its

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vitality rests in part on its ability to distract and disrupt the progress of other businesses. The theater sought to lure people away from their own professional commitments. As Bristol notes, the mimetic impulse in England did not appear ex nihilo with the opening of the Theatre in 1576. But in the predominant English ludic traditions that came before, performance existed in itinerant, courtly or festival contexts. The last of these is best seen in the medieval mystery plays, put on by townspeople during particular religious seasons, for the most part using makeshift or impermanent playing spaces. The new theater scene that emerged in London in the late Elizabethan period provided purpose-built playhouses and almost daily opportunities for theater. Unlike in, for instance, the medieval mystery pageants, where virtually an entire community suspended normal activities to attend and put on the shows, in the new professional theaters performance existed simultaneously with the normal traffic of the city. For playgoers with direct involvement in the new market economy, time spent in the theater was money in two ways: the price of admission and the loss of time devoted toward increasing their own wages and business revenues. The theater’s existence in time has philosophical as well as economic implications. The recognition of the temporality of playing is an important component of the early modern experience of performance. Fenton voices a common complaint about plays when he points out that they are time consuming, causing spectators “to lose time on the dayes of trauayle,” and later speaking of all the wickedness that transpires in “those twoo or three howres that those plays endure.”18 George Whetstone makes reference to the “three howers” of a stage play, hours that, in the words of yet another pamphlet, equals “time […] so shamefully mispent.”19 In Kinde-Hartes Dreame (1592), Henry Chettle presents the recently deceased theatrical star Richard Tarlton, who muses on some aspects of the theater business. Tarlton notes that to see a play, a man must “spende his two-pence on them in an after-noone,” and explains that “while Playes are used, halfe the day is by most youthes that have libertie spent uppon them.”20 In plays about the past, the temporality of drama works to highlight history as experiential. That is, to perform history is to produce an experience of pastness in the present. This last point qualifies my earlier statement that to think historically involves a turning back or deferral of the present, for what I am describing is a highly mediated, even fictitious, form of turning and deferral. To perform history is to consume time in pursuit of the past, rather than to stop the flow of time forward or momentarily to suspend its passing. Conceptually, representing history in this scheme can never achieve the ideal of a Wellesian time machine: it cannot allow us to go back in time

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to visit the past. It is not a diachronic reversal. Rather, it is a synchronic phenomenon, where the past emerges within the present. Producing and receiving historical knowledge can thus be understood as supplemental to the present, existing only insofar as the present attends to it. I want to emphasize how this understanding of performance inflects historical consciousness. The evanescence of the theatrical event, its status as taking place in time, allows us to speak of “theatrical time,” that is, a heightened sense of time passing because the nature of a play is, to adapt Chettle’s words, to “use up” an afternoon. To represent history under the auspices of this time invites spectators to understand the idea of history as similarly transient and dependent on the type of willful engagement evident in the work of theatrical production in order to be intelligible. Theatrical time is a time of the “now” that infuses plays about history with the sense of a temporal dialectic between the present of the signification and the past of the signified. To speak of theatrical “now time” resonates with Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit, but the now time of theater does not obtain in Benjamin’s messianic sense. Less mystically, theatrical time indicates a spatiotemporal site where the implications of this past–present dialectic for historical consciousness can pass through, to borrow a favorite term of Brecht’s, the Spass, or “fun,” of playing.21 And that thought is a fitting transition to a discussion of clowns. clowning with history in shakespeare and the queen’s men Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson, John Singer, John Lanham: the Queen’s Men company was well stocked with clowns, and this abundance of comic actors was a chief contributor to the audience-oriented style of the group. The clown specializes in audience address and slapstick. As Meredith Skura notes, “the [Elizabethan] Clown was the player closest to the nonmimetic roots of theater in ritual celebrations, popular pastimes, and folk tradition.”22 His words and antics thus call attention to the players’ and the playgoers’ shared, present-tense moment. There has been some significant discussion of the presence of clown roles in Shakespeare’s history plays. Richard Helgerson and David Scott Kastan, for instance, have proposed very different views on the banishment of Falstaff at the end of 2 Henry IV. According to Helgerson, Shakespeare invidiously aligns the unlicensed practices of the clown and other popular dramatic aspects of theater with the unruly, rebellious energy of the crowd, an impulse toward popular revolt that must be put down by proper authority. Helgerson’s ingenious

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larger argument is that there is symmetry between the formal strategy and the political ideology of the Shakespearean history play. As the plays endorse absolutist forms of rule, they also work toward the exclusion of the popular, unscripted element in theater.23 The legitimate authority of the state and of the author are linked and celebrated through Falstaff’s banishment. In response, Kastan has cannily pointed out that the theatrical conventions of the epilogue to 2 Henry IV perhaps allow Falstaff to come back into view and get the last word after all. The clown Will Kemp, who has long been presumed to have played Falstaff, was the best dancer of Shakespeare’s company and might logically have delivered the epilogue, which is delivered as a lead-in to a jig. Through the traditional jig, Kemp, at this point ambiguously himself and the fat knight, is thus able to send playgoers off with a song and dance. The audience could be left with the sense that Falstaff’s rebellious energy has not been fully expunged or muted by the author or by the monarchial strategies the new King Henry V pursues.24 This debate is useful for thinking about the political implications of the clown in historical representation, but it does not account for the more fundamental question about the relation between the clown and historical representation itself. Phyllis Rackin, also speaking about the Shakespearean history play, addresses this issue directly in Stages of History, where she seizes on the inherent anachronism that traditional clowns produce through their tendency to be topical and to engage in contemporary colloquialisms. In her extremely useful formulation, such anachronism in history plays creates a kind of “alienation effect” which reminds audiences of the “mediation implicit in the bodies of the actors.”25 The implications of the clown’s presence for the status of historical representation in the Queen’s Men repertory have not been so well explored. Falstaff is common to the analyses of Helgerson and Kastan, while Pistol is a key figure for Rackin. There is a difference, though, between those figures and the clown figures that thrived in the plays of the Queen’s Men. The Shakespearean roles, I submit, would not have registered as clowns in quite the same way as Bullithrumble, Miles, Rafe, and Derick – the figures I explore below – would have. Shakespeare’s clowns bear obvious resemblances to the older clown tradition to be sure. But even in the short space of time that separates the flourishing of the Queen’s Men and the rise of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and during the period in the 1590s when their careers overlapped, the clown figure was undergoing a profound change. In an intriguing account of this shift, Joseph Allen Bryant has suggested that Shakespeare scripted Falstaff to resemble the improvisatory wit of Richard Tarlton, the chief clown of the Queen’s Men.26 In part, this argument

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anticipates Helgerson’s notion that Shakespeare reins in the clown in service of an author’s theater. But Bryant’s point is helpful also in understanding a more basic fact. The clowns of these pre-Shakespearean plays simply have less written for them to say. They are thus less established than Falstaff, or even Pistol, as actual characters with particular functions that are integral to the plots of the plays. The Queen’s Men clown is central to audience experience of the play but not to following its narrative action. Certainly none are given as much stage time or psychological complexity as Falstaff. To adopt Skura’s description, Rafe and his ilk are much closer to the roots of the popular traditions of theater than Falstaff and his. The clowns of the Queen’s Men repertory do, like Falstaff and Pistol, fit Rackin’s argument that their inherent anachronism interrupts the representation of the pastness of the past. But, I will argue here, these older clowns inflict a more radical disruption on the historical distance their plays purport to establish, a disruption that helps cultivate a uniquely theatrical consciousness of the past. In Selimus, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and, most extensively, The Famous Victories of Henry V, the company made use of its clown figures to bring to the surface the live element of theater, thus making evident that history in performance is “bodied forth” in the present through the laboring of professional players. The clown, in these works, makes audiences conscious of the fact that the very performance of a play is a means of marking the passage of time, and, specifically, of marking out the distance between the representation on stage and the past that is being represented. For instance, Robert Greene’s Selimus is set in the Ottoman Empire of the fifteenth century. The play includes frequent reference to exotic locales such as “The mightie Empire of great Trebisond” (222), “Samandria, / Bordring on Bulgrade of Hungaria” (507–508), “Barbaria” (556), “old Bizantium” (563), “desart Caucasus” (1236), “faire Natolia” (1304), and “Dimoticum”(1678), as well as to exotic peoples of the Far East, from the “warlike Persians” (1849) to the “Aegyptians” (1852) to the “valiant Mammalukes” (1853), and, finally, to monsters such as “the Anthropomphagi” (1420) and the “Crocodilus” (1854). These names suggest a spatially and temporally distant world of the unfamiliar. Greene seeks to achieve this sense of the unfamiliar by imitating the geographic breadth represented in the Tamburlaine plays. Selimus draws directly on those works, through the audacious self-assertion of Selimus, who is an even bolder blasphemer than Tamburlaine, and through his comparable cruelty: he orders that a noble soldier has his eyes put out and his hands cut off on stage.27 Immersed in this world, playgoers attending a performance of Selimus in the late 1580s may have been taken aback when, more than halfway through the play, following a pathetic scene where a

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group of misused old men die miserably, the stage direction tells us of the entrance of “Bullithrumble, the shepheard running in hast, and laughing to himselfe” (1875). It may not have been surprising to see a humorous figure emerge at this moment per se, especially for audiences accustomed to the work of the Queen’s Men. And, if we take Richard Jones’s note to readers of the 1592 quarto of Tamburlaine seriously, audiences familiar with that work may indeed have expected that an imitation play would, too, include some of the “fond and frivolous gestures” Jones claims were left out of the print edition of Marlowe’s plays. What is odd about Bullithrumble is his apparent Englishness amidst the eastern locales of Selimus. In a play populated by Muslims and Jews, he proclaims himself “a christian” who hopes to escape danger with the plea that he must “goe forward in my catechisme” (1961– 1962). He references the “criss crosse row” or famed ABC horn book of Renaissance English education and shows himself conversant in the cant of the Elizabethan underworld as he suspects that an approaching character is “some cousoning conicatching crosbiter” (104, 1950). But Bullithrumble’s verbal pièce de résistance is surely his expression of relief upon escaping from Selimus and his men: “Go with you quoth he, marrie that had bene the way to preferment, downe Holburne up Tiburne: well ile keep my best joint from the strappado as well as I can hereafter” (2081–2083). Bullithrumble invokes a familiar landscape in which early modern playgoers existed, likening capture by Selimus to being brought “downe Holburne” river to “Tiburne,” a wellknown place of execution in sixteenth-century London. Apart from the macabre humor audiences might see in the mutilations and other atrocities committed by Selimus, Bullithrumble, in his brief appearance as recorded in the printed text, provides the only real laughs of the play. Cutting against the spectacle of violence, betrayal, and blasphemy, Bullithrumble provides a short window of pleasantry. He delivers a witty song and some stock jokes about his shrewish wife, and, in the pointed reference to him running across the stage, is connected to the clown tradition that emerged from Vice figures such as Subtle Shift in another, much older Queen’s Men play, Clyomon and Clamydes, where Shift enters with a bit of physical play: “Here let him [Shift] slip unto the Stage backwards, as though he had puld his leg out of the mire, one boote off, and rise up to run in againe” (ii.118).28 Such lightening of an otherwise dark play might alone justify Bullithrumble’s presence. But placing this clown from the contemporary English theatrical scene in fifteenth-century Asia does some noteworthy historical work as well. If we recall Rackin’s argument about the alienation effect of anachronism in history plays, we can appreciate how the

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blatant anachronism of Bullithrumble’s presence in Selimus represents a shredding of the careful fabric of exoticism the play has constructed to that point. Bullithrumble is familiar, a species of the here and now of the Elizabethan theater. Selimus thus balances its enactment of pastness with a ringing reminder of the presentness of theater. In Rafe’s line about the “Bankside in Southwark” we have seen Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay affirm the temporality of theater. This affirmation is even more explicit in one of the play’s best-known scenes, this one featuring the other clown of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Miles. Miles serves as assistant to the scholar-magician Friar Bacon. When Bacon is forced by exhaustion to at last sleep, he charges Miles to watch over his prize work, the fantastical “Brazen Head,” an invention that the Friar hopes will become animate and speak. Miles watches the head and employs a series of physical gags as he struggles to keep himself awake. At one point, for instance, he dangerously rests his body on his halberd point. From the moment Bacon leaves Miles in charge and falls asleep to the moment when Bacon awakes takes up less than a full page of text in modern editions of the play. Yet, the stage directions open up an undefined time gap in performance. Miles’s antics to keep awake can dilate the scene significantly, as was demonstrated at a recent performance of the play in Toronto where the scene lasted several minutes.29 The Brazen Head punctuates Miles’s clowning when, suddenly and cryptically, it pronounces, “Time is,” “Time was,” and “Time is past,” before being broken up by a mysterious hand (11.54, 64, 73). These statements remind audiences that the potentially frivolous physical activity on stage has been coeval to the passage of time. The head’s simple words make the audience aware of the potentially profound fact that any stage play, through its very enactment, is an expenditure of time. While moments like these in Selimus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are broadly representative of the company’s work, no play in the Queen’s Men canon meditates on temporality as it relates to historical representation as sharply as The Famous Victories of Henry V. much “ado” about history in the famous victories of henry v Most scholars agree that The Famous Victories of Henry V is the first popular play on English history, but its authorship and precise composition date are uncertain. Evidence I will discuss below indicates that the latest it could have premiered on the London stage is 1587.30 But the play was not licensed for publication until 1594, and the earliest extant version is from 1598.

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Its popularity in the early modern period was likely due to aspects of its performance – namely clowning – that largely evade the version of the play that the belated quarto captures. Generations of scholars have found the text too haphazard and too lacking in poetic sophistication to take seriously as anything more than a source Shakespeare plundered for some base metals he could transmute to gold in his own Henry IV and Henry V plays. Reconsidering The Famous Victories of Henry V here might not do much to recuperate its literary reputation. Focusing on the traces of the performance it does represent, though, with an emphasis on its investigation of theatrical form as a mode of historical consciousness, can crystallize how the inaugural Elizabethan history play’s clown-centered aesthetic inflects thinking about the past. The performance of Tarlton as Derick is the center of my reading of the play, but we can start by noting other ways in which The Famous Victories of Henry V depicts temporal movement. The play charts the alteration of the Prince of Wales from mischievous youth to warrior king. The progress of this plot involves an expenditure of theatrical time that demonstrates how prior happenings – some represented in the play, others merely alluded to – are given shape as historical knowledge only at a growing distance from the original event. In the opening scene of the play, the Prince asks his companions, after a highway robbery, “But tell, me sirs, think you not that it was a villainous part of me to rob my father’s receivers?”31 The Prince asks the question with a tone of self-deprecation, as if to say, “I’m a scoundrel for what I’ve just done, aren’t I?” One attendant replies, “Why no, my lord, it was but a trick of youth” (1.7–10). The Prince responds to his lackey’s softening of his own characterization by agreeing, “Thou sayest true” (1.11) and thus refigures his own interpretation of how his past actions define him. The Prince is the future Henry V, a model for Christian kings according to popular English history. The Famous Victories of Henry V depicts the progression of how the youthful exploits of the Prince emerge and modulate into a story with a transmissible meaning – that the seemingly wild actions of youth can be necessary practical training for kingship – and thus posits that the meaning of the past is itself something that evolves over time. The Prince in the opening scene moves from understanding his thieving as “villainous” to regarding it as a “trick of youth.” His father, King Henry IV, and his lords likewise reassess their interpretation of the Prince’s wasted years. The King had once been convinced that after his death England would fall to “ruin and decay,” a dark presentiment that was shared by the King’s advisors and friends (5.67). But, as he is on the verge of dying, the King pronounces: “Now trust me, my lords, I fear not but my son will be as

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warlike and victorious a prince as ever reigned in England,” to which his nobles respond, “His former life shows no less” (8.62–65). Given that the Prince has yet to offer any evidence that this might be so, the Court’s revisionist confidence appears to originate more in a desire to stay in line with the official discourse of the dying King and less from a sincere belief that the Prince’s riotous days do indeed signal great things. Historical knowledge is neither immanent nor embedded in historical action but, rather, is created, even negotiated, as time lengthens from the original event. The play likewise depicts the Prince’s own historical consciousness as something that dawns gradually. The old King speaks regretfully of his guilt for having usurped the throne. Passing his crown to his son, he warns, “God knows, my son, how hardly I came by it [the crown], and how hardly I have maintained it.” The Prince’s reply indicates an awareness only of the present moment: “Howsoever you came by it, I know not; but now I have it from you, and from you I will keep it” (8.56–59). The Prince is free of the guilt of usurpation against King Richard II that so haunts his father – innocent, in other words, of the knowledge of the process by which he came to be heir to the English throne. An awareness of the genealogy of his kingship emerges later in the play when, as King Henry V, he makes a claim to the French throne based on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s advice: “Your right to the French crown of France came by your great-grandmother, Isabel, wife to King Edward the third, and sister to Charles, the French King. Now, if the French King deny it, as likely enough he will, then must you take your sword in hand and conquer the right” (9.53–57). The Prince initially claims to live in an eternal present, where the only thing he understands about the monarchy is that he is king when his father dies. It is with his father’s impending death that the Prince can proclaim he is “born new again” (7.37). This rebirth entails an eventual intellectual movement into the past, as he transitions from seeing history as blank slate – “Howsoever you came by it, I know not” – to history as knowledge that enables, even demands, action in the present: “you must take your sword in hand and conquer the right.” In these moments, The Famous Victories of Henry V depicts history as rhetoric that is generated and shaped over the course of time. This representation of history as a retroactive verbal construct is inflected by forms of theatrical presentation that further emphasize theater as an experience of time. In one instance, awareness of time passing as palpable is emblematized by the stage property of a cloak or gown that has the needles used in making it still hanging from it. The Prince wears this strange costume as he awaits word of his father’s death.32 When the Prince’s friend Oldcastle asks him, “Will you go to the court with that cloak so full of needles?” he replies,

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“Cloak, eyelet-holes, needles, and all was of mine own devising; and therefore will I wear it,” as, he explains, “a sign that I stand upon thorns till the crown be on my head” (5.36–38, 40–41). Anticipating the more recent expression “on pins and needles,” the Prince’s words and costume liken a heightened awareness of the passing of time – for him, awareness of the wait to assume the kingship – to something that can be felt. Watching a play outdoors in early modern London, first in the summer heat of an afternoon, then as the day wears on and the temperature cools, or, during colder times of year, could likewise provide a physical and therefore heightened sensation of temporality for audiences. But it is the figure of Derick as played by Richard Tarlton who most insistently makes audiences of The Famous Victories of Henry V aware that performance is a measure of the passing of time. One of the preeminent theatrical celebrities of the late-Elizabethan period, Tarlton was so well known after his death that he could still merit mention on stage. In the Queen’s Men’s play, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, the character Simplicity has among his ballads a picture of Tarlton for sale. As he informs his on- and off-stage auditors, “if thou knewest not him [Tarlton], thou knewest no body.”33 His performance style inspired Gabriel Harvey to coin the term “Tarltonizing” to describe a brand of “extemporizing.”34 Tarlton was particularly noted for the physicality of his performances and for his extempore genius. More so than in Selimus or even Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, clowning with the past is a prominent aspect in The Famous Victories of Henry V. Tarlton played the rustic carrier turned cobbler Derick in The Famous Victories of Henry V, and, despite the quarto’s inability to depict the full extent of his role, Derick does have some stand-out moments in the text, including moments that are preserved in one of the great anecdotes of the Elizabethan theater. Tarlton’s Jests (c. 1594), a book detailing the legends of Tarlton’s career, which was published after his 1588 death, records Tarlton in this specific role. The book tells the following story under the heading “An excellent jest of Tarlton suddenly spoken” which, the narrator assures us, “to this day I have heard […] commended”:35 At the Bull at Bishop’s Gate was a play of Henry the fifth, wherein the judge was to take a box on the ear; and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himself, ever forward to please, took upon him to play the same judge, beside his own part of the clown. And Knell, then playing Henry the fifth, hit Tarlton a sound box indeed, which made the people laugh the more because it was he [Tarlton]. But anon the judge goes in and immediately Tarlton in his clown’s clothes comes out and asks the actors what news. ‘O,’ saith one, ‘hadst thou been here, thou shouldst have seen Prince Henry hit the judge a terrible box on the ear.’ ‘What, man,’ saith

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Tarlton, ‘strike a judge! […] and it could not be but terrible to the judge, when the report so terrifies me, that methinks the blow remains still on my cheek, that it burns again.’ The people laugh at this mightily.36

On one level, this anecdote speaks to Tarlton’s recognizable status on stage. As the author notes, when the clown takes on the persona of the judge and is struck, “the people laugh more because it was he.” It perhaps speaks further to a capacity of at least some spectators to maintain awareness of other players as well, as the reporter of this “jest” specifies William Knell as the actor playing Henry V (it is Knell’s death in June 1587 that establishes that date as a terminus ante quem for performance of the play). Tarlton may have had the effect of reminding audiences that those with whom he shared the stage were also people merely taking on parts. But, most importantly for my purposes, the anecdote establishes that Tarlton created a metatheatrical effect through his performance in this play, by which he was able to connect directly with audiences even from within the potentially distancing frame of historical representation. It is true that the “jest” refers to a single performance. But, rather than it being a trace of a unique event, I see this as merely one recorded instance of what could easily have happened in every performance of The Famous Victories of Henry V: Tarlton drawing on his own celebrity as a means of highlighting the play’s status as a play for comic effect. Indeed, as the author of the anecdote goes on to say of the joke, “but no marvell, for he had many of these.”37 Not surprisingly, this anecdote from Tarlton’s Jests points to the most memorable scene featuring Derick in The Famous Victories of Henry V. In this scene, Derick the carrier has been robbed by Cutbert Cutter, a servant and friend of the Prince. The beginning of this scene features a historicizing moment. The Chief Justice’s clerk announces that the robbery in question took place on “the twentieth day of May last past, in the fourteenth year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord, King Henry the Fourth” (IV.18–20). The clerk specifies this past moment as a means to set forth the putative time of the acts taking place on stage. But Tarlton’s presence and antics render this historicizing gesture ineffectual. As the “excellent jest” at “the Bull” reveals, and as we will see upon examining the scene itself, he does so by addressing the audience and drawing attention to his own persona as star comic player through his “Tarltonizing” with his companion, John. The Prince comes before the Lord Chief Justice in order to save his robbing companion from punishment. He immediately upbraids the Chief Justice for proceeding with the trial of Cutbert at all: “Why, my lord, this is my man. ’Tis marvel you knew him not long before this” (IV.37–38). In the face of the Prince’s increasingly hostile words, the Chief Justice remains

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resolute in refusing to spare the thief, announcing: “I must needs do justice” (IV.60). The conflict culminates in the Prince pronouncing of Cutbert “Then I will have him,” at which point the stage directions tell us “He [the Prince] giveth him [the Chief Justice] a box on the ear.” The Prince then threatens to beat him further (IV.69). This incident and the immediate reaction to it can tell us something about the play’s sense of representation. The Chief Justice invokes the idea explicitly, as he explains to the Prince the gravity of what he’s done: “In striking me in this place you greatly abuse me; and not me only but also your father, whose lively person here in this place I do represent. And therefore to teach you what prerogatives mean, I commit you to the Fleet [prison] until we have spoken with your father” (IV.78–82). The Chief Justice pronounces his status as a stand-in for the absent King and thus invokes the concept of political substitution. Along with its participation in political theory, the language of the “lively person” he uses also resonates with theatrical substitution. There, in a reverse of the Chief Justice’s formulation, it is the “lively” body of the player who represents an absent being. In history plays, this means the actor who is a present-tense, living and breathing stand-in for a missing historical personage. The Chief Justice’s sentence against the Prince precipitates a lively act of representation – which is truly a re-presentation – from Tarlton. The Prince is hauled off to jail, and all clear the stage except for Derick and his friend John Cobbler, who have been watching the trial. They are amazed by what they’ve seen. In a direct address to the audience, Derick exclaims “’Zounds, masters, here’s ado when princes must go to prison!” He then addresses his companion: “Why, John, didst ever see the like?” Their ensuing dialogue is worth quoting at length: john: O Derick, trust me, I never saw the like! derick: Why, John, thou may’st see what princes be in choler. A judge a box on the ear! I’ll tell thee, John, O John, I would not have done it for twenty shillings. john: No, nor I. There had been no way but one with us – we should have been hanged. derick: ’Faith, John, I’ll tell thee what; thou shalt be my Lord Chief Justice, and thou shalt sit in the chair; and I’ll be the young prince, and hit thee a box on the ear; and then thou shalt say, ‘To teach you what prerogatives mean, I commit you to the Fleet.’ john: Come on; I’ll be your judge! But thou shalt not hit me hard? derick: No, no. (IV.87–100)

As John takes the Chief Justice’s chair, the two men reenact the event they just witnessed. They begin with a simple back and forth about the details of the case before they approach the real broil:

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derick: Shall I not have my man? Say ‘No’ and you dare! How say you? Shall I not have my man? john: No, marry, you shall not! derick: Shall I not, John? john: No, Derick. derick: Why, then, take you that [Boxes his ear.] till more come! ’Zounds, shall I not have him? (IV.106–112)

John repeats the response of the Chief Justice to the Prince, while Derick begins to depart from the “script”: john: Well, I am content to take this at your hand. But, I pray you, who am I? derick: Who art thou? ’Zounds, dost not know thyself? john: No. derick: Now away, simple fellow. Why, man, thou art John the Cobbler. john: No, I am my Lord Chief Justice of England. derick: Oh, John, mass, thou sayst true, thou art indeed. (IV.113–119)

John then delivers the sentence of sending the Prince to the Fleet, and Derick, adding more threats and insults than the Prince did at this point, exits, only to immediately reappear and end the playlet: Oh, John, come, come out of thy chair. Why, what a clown wert thou to let me hit thee a box on the ear! And now thou seest they will not take me to the Fleet. I think that thou art one of these worenday [weekday] clowns. (IV.123–126)

This scene is a key moment in which the play calls attention to itself as a reflection on the project of history telling.38 The men are so shocked by what they’ve seen they turn to play-acting as a means to understand it. Very quickly into their charade, the roles they assume begin to break down, though. Derick addresses John as John, and John in turn addresses Derick by name as they depart almost immediately from their fictionalized identities as the Prince and the Lord Chief Justice (IV.109–110). This breakdown becomes even more explicit when it threatens to end the act. John echoes the words of the Chief Justice, who had asked the Prince “Who am I?” (IV.75). Derick confuses John by deflecting the question back at him “Dost not know thyself?” Derick is quick to supply the answer when John says “No”: “Why, man, thou art John the Cobbler.” John recovers his part and insists on his identity as Chief Justice, prompting Derick to fall back into the playlet as well, allowing John to pronounce his sentence and send the Prince to the Fleet before Derick returns to upbraid John for allowing himself to be hit as part of the act at all. John and Derick’s attempts to reenact the trial of Cutbert reveal both the pleasures and problems involved in performing the past. Reenacting the

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incident allows them to reflect on it, while also affording them the thrill of assuming aristocratic identities and of participating in the transgression of the Prince’s indecorous strike. John even gets to sit in the seat of power. In the course of their play, though, Derick disrupts the mimetic moment in which he and John are engaging and, by so doing, mirrors how the larger mimetic framework of the play as a representation of the past cannot be sustained. Derick’s mischievous play within the playlet denies the frame of representation both he and the play at large have set up. This is part of the clown’s crowd-pleasing “prerogatives,” the performance practices that work to undermine mimesis of the past. The general metatheatricality of the clown is amplified in The Famous Victories of Henry V by virtue of Tarlton’s own fame. The best-known player of his era, Tarlton’s own persona, or at least the public comic persona he cultivated, could always spill over into his putative stage roles. Chief among the prerogatives in Tarlton’s arsenal was his extempore witticisms, exchanges with audience members on given themes, or spontaneous reactions to perceived insults from playgoers, instances of which are recorded in Tarlton’s Jests. As one critic notes, “It seems likely that there was often tension between Tarlton’s known identity as clown and the fictive role he played in a production.”39 The unique power of Tarlton’s physical presence is attested by audience accounts from the period that he could provoke uproarious laughter by just peeking out from behind a door or screen on stage and making a comic face.40 Audience awareness of Tarlton thus puts a peculiar frame around the representation of the past the play purports through presenting the story of Henry V’s youth and kingly exploits. Tarlton’s outsize persona continually reminds audiences that the play is all an act, the way Tarlton’s Derick does in the specific moment of the playlet with John the Cobbler. In his study of the Elizabethan clown, David Wiles compares the clown to another fixture of the early English dramatic tradition: “while the Vice exists in a moral/philosophical dimension, the clown exists in a social dimension.”41 The “social dimension” in which Derick exists is that of the Elizabethan theatrical milieu. This mode of playing is recalled in Richard Brome’s Caroline play The Antipodes (c. 1638), where a Lord admonishes a comic player for being too much like old clowns from Tarlton’s era. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Brome’s Letoy, a “Phantasticke Lord,” is wary of theatrical self-indulgence. Letoy gives direction to a troupe of players set to perform in his house, and specifically admonishes the clown: You, sir, are incorrigible, and Take license to yourself to add unto

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Your parts your own free fancy, and sometimes To alter or diminish what the writer With care and skill compos’d; and when you are To speak to your coactors in the scene, You hold interlocutions with the audients.42

When the clown protests that his antics are drawn from theatrical convention, Letoy assures him that the time when such forms of clowning flourished, the “days of Tarlton and Kemp,” has long passed.43 From a distance of some fifty years, The Antipodes historicizes Tarltonizing as part of the Elizabethan stage. Letoy also hints at how this style could itself be a means of historicizing. For, as Wiles’s statement above suggests, Tarltonizing, despite its carnivalesque revelry, is not ahistorical. Regardless of its potentially anarchic qualities, it does not deny history or create a suspended, festive moment that is outside time. Rather, it makes the sense of being in the present while being at the theater more palpable, especially when the comic player holds “interlocutions with the audients.” Tarlton establishes and maintains the “social dimension” in his verbal gestures toward the playgoers, as when, after striking the Chief Justice, he addresses the audience directly with “’Zounds, masters, here’s ado when princes must go to prison!” By aligning himself here with the majority of non-aristocratic playgoers in relation to “Princes” like the future King Henry V, Tarlton invites the audience to join him in recognizing how far the play is from their shared sense of present reality. The term “ado” itself calls attention to what happens on stage as a set of actions. The physical force of Tarlton’s presence further keeps the audience grounded in an awareness of the present moment of the performance. Traces of the physicality of Tarlton’s performance can be seen throughout the play. For instance, as he is being conscripted for the war in France, Derick brawls with John’s wife after he attempts to steal her pot lid to use as a shield in battle. Stage directions in this scene include “She beateth him with her pot-lid;” “Here he shakes her;” and “She beateth him” (X.18–22). Such directions are hints of what were no doubt moments when, as in the “jest” reported above, the audience laughed “mightily.” The play here relies on Tarlton’s ability to engage in physical humor, a primal form of comedy that, too, heightens the sense of the theater as taking place in the shared present tense. Its physicality reminds audiences of the actual, vulnerable body – a fleshiness that they share – abusing itself, abusing others, and being abused on stage. Another important moment of audience address occurs later in the play during the climactic war against the French. Derick appears on the battlefield and fools a French soldier into giving him his sword through a

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ridiculous swindle. While the Frenchman cowers, Derick, now in possession of the sword, according to the stage direction, “turns his back” to the man, perhaps to face the playgoers directly. The solider then runs away from him, and Derick, left alone, confides to the audience “What, is he gone? Mass, I am glad of it; for if he had stayed, I was afraid he would have stirred again and then I should have been spilt” (XVII.17–18). He later confides in John that he has earned the honorific title the “bloody solider” through a special trick: “Every day when I went into the field I would take a straw and thrust it into my nose and make my nose bleed” (XIX.15–16). The battlefield on which Derick commits these acts is one of the most famous in all English history. King Henry himself consecrates it as the site of a great event when he names it after a nearby castle: “I will that this be forever called the Battle of Agincourt” (XV.35), where English “swords are almost drunk with French blood” (XV.1–2), and where this “honourable victory” (XV.10) has signified God’s favor to England (XV.10–11). Henry delivers ready-made historical knowledge to the audience when he titles the battle and interprets its providential meaning. But Agincourt is represented not as only a distant, static diorama of English prowess and national destiny. It is simultaneously an arena in which Tarlton can run amok. As Greene in Selimus does with Bullithrumble, the author of The Famous Victories of Henry V looses a creature from the time and place of the Elizabethan stage into a foreign venue from the distant past. Here he engages in foolery and speaks to the audience: in other words, he displays the tools of the theatrical clown. Derick’s words and actions dilute, perhaps even negate, Henry’s heady, proto-nationalist rhetoric. But alongside this political parody, Tarlton as Derick ensures that the historical event known as Agincourt, in many respects the centerpiece of the past that the play seeks to represent, cannot be separated from the theatrical process that brings it forth on stage. Agincourt, Tarlton’s presence insists, is a historical event and, as such, is irretrievable. It can only be re-presented through the event of a history play put on by actors. Realizing that the past on stage is a contemporary production helps to activate in audiences an impulse to behold the history represented as the work of performance, and thus dependent on, to take Shakespeare’s phrase from his own play about Henry V, the “working-house of thought” to have any impact.44 The performance of Tarlton as Derick and other different but related techniques and moments embed The Famous Victories of Henry V in the temporality of the professional theater by maintaining audience awareness of the play’s status as laborious aesthetic event. This fact might be evident in the peculiar label Derick applies to John. He calls him a “worenday

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clown,” which the play’s most recent editors gloss as meaning “weekday.”45 If this gloss is accurate, as weekday/work-a-day clowns, Derick/Tarlton and John are marked as professional players, recognizable to the audience as a part of the working theater industry. As “Tarltonizing” alerts us throughout the play, the set-in-the-past historical time The Famous Victories of Henry V enacts is enfolded in the “worenday” theatrical time – the unfolding present time – in which the performance proceeds. the world of the living and the world of the dead Tarlton’s performance is itself expiring as it happens. It is thus coeval with the spatial-temporal particularity of the late-sixteenth-century stage space. This is the space of professional drama, where time is “borrowed” from everyday life.46 The clowns make a deliberate decision to borrow time from the present in order to perform the past when, for instance, they act out the trial moment they witnessed. In this way, their playlet is a figure for the performance of history in The Famous Victories of Henry V itself and in the plays of the Queen’s Men repertory at large. Those in the audience of such plays can work their imaginations through a fantasy of access to the past that is, as Rackin reminds us, mediated by the performing players.47 Tarlton’s performance is a historicizing element of The Famous Victories of Henry V, in that it establishes the play’s own historicity in the Elizabethan theater through its existence in the “social” dimension of the clown tradition. Herbert Blau concisely formulates the relation of performance to precession when he writes that, “It is only in terms of the living that we imagine the world of the dead.”48 This is a compelling reminder about the temporality of the history play, for the “terms of the living” in performance unfold in the performative present, that which is necessarily other from the performed past. Blau’s formulation becomes especially poignant for The Famous Victories of Henry V when, late in the play, Derick describes his contact with the bodies of the dead French soldiers he comes across. The stage directions have Derick enter his final scene “with his girdle full of shoes” (XIX.1). He explains to John “And I have got some shoes; for I’ll tell thee what I did. When they [Frenchmen] were dead I would go take off all their shoes” (XIX.29–30). The image of Derick scavenging the battlefield and stealing the shoes off corpses, the final battlefield image evoked in The Famous Victories of Henry V, parodies the English invasion of France as a brutal act of theft. It is also a reminder that the performance of history of which the shoe-stealing is a part is itself a kind of appropriation from the dead, in and on the “terms of the

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living.” The Famous Victories of Henry V stages this appropriation as simultaneously a playful, pointed, and purposeful manipulation of the materials of the past as they are capriciously plucked from the world of the dead and made to serve the needs of the present in the “real time” unfolding of a play. In a recent study of the development of the history play in sixteenthcentury England, Benjamin Griffin has argued that The Famous Victories of Henry V straddles the broad, cultural shift from festive time to historical time. He argues that while The Famous Victories of Henry V is part of “London’s [modern] dramatic economy,” the play “draws its idea of human existence in time from the rural calendar.” Griffin’s analysis makes use of the carnival structure of the Prince’s trajectory from anarchic indulgence to controlled temperance in seeing the change as signaling a move from “May-game to Lenten-stuff.” This reading is dependent on his expurgation of Tarlton from the play. He concentrates wholly on the Prince’s “reformation,” feeling that “the sub-plots are negligible.”49 In this Griffin agrees with other critics of the play, such as Irving Ribner, who was thinking of the Derick scenes when he wrote of The Famous Victories of Henry V “as drama the play is formless and incoherent and, in general, worthless.”50 What Griffin, Ribner, and others miss by ignoring or denigrating the significance of Tarlton’s presence in The Famous Victories of Henry V is the importance of the clown’s historicizing presence. This presence contributes to the play’s past–present dialectic and, thus, to the way the play defines history as always a production of the present. Formally, The Famous Victories of Henry V demonstrates that the enactment of history, showing the past, must unfold in the present-tense of theatrical time and so asserts that the historical time of the history play is an institutionalized construct produced in and on theatrical terms. As narrative, as a model for knowing history, The Famous Victories of Henry V demonstrates how the interpretation and production of the past as a story develops as a condition of the passing of time. The formal and narrative elements of the play I have been discussing in sum present a perspective on the past in which historical knowledge is cut from a similar cloth as theatrical practice. It can thus be viewed as, like theater, a continually changing human artifact. The past that performance makes in The Famous Victories of Henry V exists in a temporal space that is “borrowed.” It is carved out of the present through popular dramatic techniques. Performers in this play make room in the present not only to create and cultivate particular historical narratives, but also, more importantly, to create and cultivate a general consciousness of how those narratives are generated. That such narratives exist in the ephemeral context of a play shows how the wider concept of the past is likewise elusive and precarious.

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The anecdote from the Bull Theater places Tarlton in the role of Derick in The Famous Victories of Henry V, but whether he played Bullithrumble and Rafe or Miles remains unknown. Surely, if Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Selimus were first put on before 1588, the year of Tarlton’s death, he would have taken a prominent role in them. At least one credible argument has ascribed the role of Miles in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay to him.51 The cadences of Bullithrumble’s language, and his specific complaints about his abusive wife, could link that character to Derick and thus to Tarlton, but such internal evidence alone is not convincing. Even so, there is a consistency in how these parts function in their respective plays. It is possible to generalize about their implications for historical representation, in the theater and, perhaps, even more broadly in early modern culture. The clowns disrupt the historicizing work the plays otherwise do. That disruption is a desired element of the theater of the Queen’s Men, for it infuses historical representation with entertainment value. The clown, say McMillin and MacLean, is “funny the minute he is seen, and he builds his role by visual gags and routines.”52 Of course, the Queen’s Men clowns talk, too, especially the extemporizing Tarlton, and, taken together, their words and actions have an immediate impact on audiences. They, in a sense, make over-identification with the particular plots of their plays impossible, and they shatter the illusion of pastness altogether. They deny that they exist on a different plane than the audience and thus work against efforts made elsewhere in the plays to establish temporal or spatial remove from the time and place of the performance. The clowns’ mediation between the imagined past and the performative present emblematizes theater as a labor-intensive effort. And they help to show that history, like theater, can only exist through deliberate acts of representation. Unlike theater, though, with its stage and script and props and players, history has no actual being. The Famous Victories of Henry V posits history as a form of cultural production that can have being only insofar as it is continually produced and disseminated through an effort like playing, when a Derick and a John choose to act it out. History plays by the Queen’s Men offer the phenomenon of performance – a transient process dependent on willful labor and imagination that unfolds under constant temporal pressure – as one way to address the ontological quandary of how to feel connected to history in the context of a linear concept of time. The Queen’s Men were the first theater professionals in the Elizabethan era to confront the conceptual issues, problems, and questions for historiography that are raised specifically by performing history. Chief among those is the question of how to represent historical distance. The plays show

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efforts to do so. The reading of the date of the trial in The Famous Victories of Henry V or the appearance of friars and references to entering the nunnery in the post-Reformation Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are among them. But Greene, along with the author of The Famous Victories of Henry V and the company actors as a whole, recognized that theater, as a form, is not suited to sustaining historical mimesis. Rather than striving to cover this over, they capitalize on theatrical form to make awareness of history as an absence, as precisely what’s not present in the dynamics of theater, a central aspect of the experience of their plays and the consciousness of history they promote. notes 1. Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. J. A. Lavin (London: Ernest Benn, 1969), vii.70–71. See Lavin, introduction to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, p. xiii on the Rose as the site of the play’s performance. 2. This phrase comes from Elin Diamond, who writes that the past is “always under construction” (emphasis in original). “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama,” Modern Drama, 44, 5 (2001): 3–14. 3. Quoted, with my emphasis, from Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. F. P. Wilson based on Ronald B. McKerrow’s edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), vol. I, p. 212. 4. The first phrase comes from Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, p. 5. The second phrase alludes to the title of Alfred W. Crosby’s study The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 5. 6. Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 17. 7. On historical time, see also Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, pp. 10–11. 8. The quotation from Newton can be found in Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, ed. Florian Cajori (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1934), p. 6. 9. Alfred Von Martin, from Sociology of the Renaissance, quoted in Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, p. 7. 10. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, pp. 33, 76. 11. See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996). According to Dohrn-van Rossum, the first public clock was installed c. 1366–1369 by Edward III in the Palace of Westminster. See pp. 131–135 for a chronology of European public clock installations in the fourteenth century. 12. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, p. 85.

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13. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, p. 83. 14. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, p. 4. 15. Michael D. Bristol, “Theater and Popular Culture,” in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 247. 16. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, pp. 292–293. 17. Quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 195, emphasis added. Similar complaints are a convention of the anti-theatrical polemic; see Jean Howard’s The Stage and Social Struggle in Early-Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) pp. 23–27. Jonas Barish quotes a letter that dates from the eighteenth century that, while being too late to serve as evidence for my claims about Elizabethan theater, is interesting in its precise wording on this score. In the anonymous epistle to the Lord Mayor of London, the author complains of the corrupting effects of theater on the populace, in part because it is a “Diversion that interferes with their work, and breaks in upon their Hours of Labour.” The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), p. 241. 18. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 195. 19. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 201; vol. IV, p. 202. 20. Henry Chettle, Kind-Hartes Dreame, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), pp. 39, 40. 21. On Jetztzeit (“now time”), see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 263–266. For an important elaboration of Benjamin’s Jetztzeit and the temporalities of performance, see Elin Diamond’s assertion in Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 181) that for Benjamin “the past becomes readable only through the present image that transforms it.” Bertolt Brecht scatters the word Spass (“fun”) throughout his writings on theater as a vital component to theater’s potential as a vehicle for social commentary and change; see Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), p. 9n. 22. Meredith Skura, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing, p. 58. 23. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 193–245. On the tension between clowns and playwrights, see also Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially pp. 18–28. 24. Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, pp. 145–147. See also Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama, pp. 21–23 and 154–155, who argues that there is little hard evidence to support the widely held theory that Shakespeare and Kempe had fallen out over an actor’s vs. author’s theater debate. 25. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, p. 94. See pp. 86–145 for her full discussion of anachronism.

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26. Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr., “Shakespeare’s Falstaff and the Mantle of Dick Tarlton,” Studies in Philology, 51 (1954): 149–162. 27. On Selimus in relation to Tamburlaine, see Daniel Vitkus, ed. Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 18–23. 28. McMillin and MacLean point out how important moving across the stage this way seems to have been for clowns. See McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. 128–129. 29. The production was part of the conference “Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men” held in Toronto in October 2006. The performance that I saw, directed by Peter Cockett and featuring Alon Nashman as Miles, took place on October 28. 30. Bernard M. Ward proposes the play was composed as early as the 1570s. See “The Famous Victories of Henry V: Its Place in Elizabethan Dramatic Literature,” The Review of English Studies, 4 (1928): 270–294. I think the mid-1580s more likely. One potential complication to this is the possibility that the 1598 quarto could represent a memorial reconstruction of a revived production from the 1590s. The anecdote recorded from the Bull, though, suggests that the 1598 quarto offers at least a rough approximation of what the Queen’s Men performed with Tarlton in the 1580s. 31. The Oldcastle Controversy: Sir John Oldcastle, Part I and the Famous Victories of Henry V, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). All quotations from The Famous Victories of Henry V are taken from this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 32. See Corbin and Sedge, footnote 36 on this costume in The Oldcastle Controversy, p. 164. 33. Wilson, The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, sig. C1v. 34. On Tarlton’s fame, see Alexandra Halasz, “‘So Beloved that Men Use His Picture for Their Signs’: Richard Tarlton and the Uses of Sixteenth-Century Celebrity,” Shakespeare Studies, 23 (1995): 19–38. The words “Tarltonizing” and “extemporizing” appear in 1592 in the “Second Letter” of Gabriel Harvey’s Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets, Especially Touching Robert Greene and Other Parties by Him Abused, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Bodley Head Ltd., 1922), p. 19. See also Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, p. 126. 35. Quoted in Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, p. 131. 36. Modern spelling version of this anecdote quoted in Corbin and Sedge, The Oldcastle Controversy, pp. 26–27. 37. Halliwell, Tarlton’s Jests, p. 25. 38. Louise Nichols and Larry Champion each read this scene as a parody of Henry V’s eventual glorification as the ideal English king. See Louise Nichols, “‘My name was known before I came’: The Heroic Identity of the Prince in The Famous Victories of Henry V,” in Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (eds.), Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 154–175; and Larry Champion, “The Noise of Threatening Drum”: Dramatic

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Strategy and Political Ideology in Shakespeare and the English Chronicle Plays (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 17–27, especially p. 22. 39. Nichols, “My name was known before I came,” p. 163. On this point, see also Richard Levin, “Tarlton in The Famous History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999): 84–98 (pp. 88–89), and Skura, Shakespeare the Actor, pp. 58–59. Robert Weimann discusses this aspect of popular clown figures in the appendix to his Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. and trans. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), “Laughing with the Audience,” pp. 253–260. 40. See, for instance, verse by Henry Peacham quoted in Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, p. 129. 41. David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 23. Emphasis added. 42. Richard Brome, The Antipodes, ed. Anna Haaker (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), II.ii.39–45. Richard Helgerson discusses these lines during his arguments about clown figures in history plays in Forms of Nationhood, p. 241. 43. Brome, The Antipodes, II.ii.48. 44. Henry V (V.Chorus.22–23). 45. Corbin and Sedge, The Oldcastle Controversy, p. 162, n125. 46. On theatrical time as “borrowed” time, see Blau, The Eye of Prey, p. 170. 47. Rackin, Stages of History, p. 94. 48. Blau, The Eye of Prey, p. 174. 49. Griffin, Playing the Past, pp. 58, 59, 62, 59. 50. Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), p. 69. 51. See Levin, above, on Tarlton in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. 52. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 128.

chapter 3

Figuring history: Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III

In his 1605 treatise The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon considers a major concern of Renaissance culture, the question of how those in the present seek to know and in some sense feel connected to the past: Infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished […] It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, no, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but leese [lose, cause the loss] of the life and truth. But the images of men’s wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages.1

In this formulation, people like Cyrus and Alexander die, their “copies” decay, while other structures such as “temples, castles, cities” crumble and fade, thus cutting those in the present off from the physical past. Yet, Bacon sees potential for continuity as well. The past can “generate” still, working on the minds of people in the present. In an elaborate simile he goes on to write that “men’s wits and knowledges,” like a ship, “pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other.”2 Bacon is confident that such knowledge, presumably that which allows us to know who Cyrus and the rest are in the first place, can survive through textual inscriptions, “in books.” And yet this claim contradicts his pragmatics of loss. Books are physical objects and thus, logically, would be subject to the same forces of disintegration as bodies, pictures, statues, or even whole cities. What then are the dynamics of the “perpetual renovation” that allows the past to speak to “succeeding ages?” If we consider for a moment that by books he might mean something more like practices of cultural memory, of which books are just one example, we could say that he is positing willful, creative, even physical activity as the necessary conduit between the past and the present. 74

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One of Bacon’s specific examples of continuity helps to make this case: “have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter?”3 Bacon’s notion of the perfect preservation of Homer’s work might have seemed naive to Italian humanists who bemoaned the imperfect state of the classical texts they so admired, not to mention to modern literary critics steeped in studies of textual instability. But the choice of Homer, whose “originals” were spoken rather than written, is suggestive. Bacon chooses for his model of what is not lost that which was remembered through verbal mnemonics, transmitted orally before audiences, and eventually copied, recopied, and printed. The Homeric poems survive through performative acts of repetition. And, as Bacon’s own near-epic simile of the ship makes evident, the adept use of figurative language is itself an efficacious means to keep ideas alive and in circulation. While his confidence in the immortality of books is only superficially inconsistent, Bacon’s rhetoric does deconstruct at another point. He claims that “men’s wits,” as collected and transmitted through practices such as writing, actively work on the minds of people removed by thousands of years. The claim is contradictory because it ascribes agency to the past and denies the active labor that is actually involved in the process of its transmission: “[men’s wits and knowledges] […] generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages.” To extend his own ship simile, it’s as much as saying a boat can conduct commerce without a crew. But connections between past and present are not on autopilot. They are produced. Bacon’s words mystify the fact of this production. The force of the Queen’s Men’s approach to drama, in which, so often, history is “personated,” lies in part in its insistence on the human effort involved in feeling connected to the past, efforts we saw in the consideration of The Famous Victories of Henry V and other plays above.4 Contrary to Bacon’s mystified portrait of historical continuity, the Queen’s Men broadcast a consciousness of history that foregrounds questions about the being of the past as part and parcel of historical culture. Their plays propose that enjoying any sense of connectedness to the past entails reflection on how the connection is forged.5 As we have seen, the clown was a convenient tool with which to open up space for such contemplation. In this chapter, I will explore the variety of the Queen’s Men’s engagement with history by looking at techniques other than clowning in the anonymously authored The True Tragedy of Richard III.6 The play explores how historical knowledge is animated and sustained by tensions between accurate description and

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creativity that inhere in forms of communication. The True Tragedy of Richard III acknowledges the potential crisis for historical knowledge to which Bacon is sensitive when he speaks of decay and loss and then affirms explicitly that history is kept alive nonetheless because it is an aesthetic project that is dependent on acts of repetition. The True Tragedy of Richard III frames its examination of such issues around three characters with unusual speech prefixes: “Truth,” “Poetry,” and “Report.” These prefixes will serve as the organizing points of my analysis here. I will interrogate the dramatic characters they represent in particular scenes in the play, as well as the concepts and practices the terms themselves suggest. For the three terms resonate beyond the confines of the play and, in fact, have some specific connections to two treatises from the late Elizabethan period that engage with relevant subjects such as representation, language, and history: Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poetry and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. As the brief consideration of a passage from The Advancement of Learning reveals, The True Tragedy of Richard III is engaged with a number of larger questions about the historical culture of the late Elizabethan era, including the aesthetics, the truth, the morality, and the textuality of history. Bacon prefaces the words quoted above by noting “that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come.”7 Bacon distinguishes between what is possible for humankind to think, and what is possible for us to achieve physically. Such a distinction has obvious relevance to the performance of history, a physical practice to realize an impossible ideal: the presence of the actual past. The True Tragedy of Richard III is noteworthy precisely because it meditates on how, in the face of this gap between what can be thought and what can be accomplished, human creative power translates our desire for the past, and our ability to imagine it, into acts of history-making. induction to history The True Tragedy of Richard III was published in a quarto edition in 1594, with a title-page ascription to the Queen’s Men. The absence of a clown figure prominent enough to be recorded in the text of the play might indicate that it was first put on by the Queen’s Men after Richard Tarlton’s death in 1588, although this is not certain.8 The True Tragedy of Richard III has since elicited little sustained critical attention. Scholars tend to focus either on its possible relation to Shakespeare’s Richard III or on its textual problems.9 As is the case with the text of The Famous Victories of

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Henry V, the quarto of The True Tragedy of Richard III has been roundly denounced as defective by many critics and editors. Some have suggested its publication was a hasty, careless effort to cobble together an old Richard Gloucester play in order to profit from the popularity of Shakespeare’s Richard III.10 It is true that the quarto contains many oddities, chief among them inconsistencies of versification. Whatever the cause, and despite the perhaps “corrupt” state of the text, the play is worth examining closely. Its most unusual features, those that spark questions of historical representation, cannot be written off merely as marks of textual pollution. The bulk of The True Tragedy of Richard III is devoted to a whirlwind depiction of the rise and fall of the notorious Richard III. This king had been infamously depicted as the epitome of the bloodthirsty Machiavel and hypocritical tyrant in a series of notable works in the sixteenth century. This trend was initiated by Thomas More, whose influential account was reprinted almost verbatim in chronicles such as Hall, Grafton, and, later, Holinshed. The portrait of Richard in The Mirror for Magistrates added to this growing legend, as did Thomas Legge’s 1579 academic play Richardus Tertius, which could not have had the wide reach the printed sources did (it was not published until 1844) but which may have enjoyed a decent circulation in manuscript.11 Certainly, Legge himself was known well enough to merit mention alongside Shakespeare in Mere’s Palladis Tamia. The author of The True Tragedy of Richard III seized on the obvious potential of the material, seeing the birth of the House of Tudor, as well as the various conflicts the story contains – between political rivals, familial factions, individuals and the State, and even individuals and their consciences – as a sturdy basis for drama. The “thickness” of the Richard III discourse by the end of the sixteenth century, the result of the fact that it had been well told so many times already, was prominent in the minds of those who wrote and performed The True Tragedy of Richard III. The play seems concerned to account for the transference of the story from the familiar venue of the printed book and, perhaps, the academic stage, to the place of the popular stage. Rather than simply beginning with the action, or even employing a traditional prologue to set the scene, the play opens with an induction, here a strange, intellectually and practically self-conscious framing device. Two concepts relevant to the form and content of history plays are embodied as characters, Truth and Poetry. Their dialogue starts off the play and ends up doing the job a traditional prologue might have done: their talk turns up some names and dates relevant to the ensuing action. But along the way, this utilitarian function is complemented with a meditation on the philosophical and practical implications of performing the past.

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The True Tragedy of Richard III opens with this stage direction: “Enters Truth and Poetrie. To them the Ghoast of George Duke of Clarence.” The first lines of the play belong to the ghost, who cries out in Latin for blood and revenge and then quickly exits. Truth and Poetry defer dealing with this apparition until well into their conversation. The two figures instead greet each other by name: poetrie . Truth well met truth . Thankes Poetrie.

(1–2)

Truth later speaks of showing “her pageant,” an undeveloped hint that the player represents Truth as female.12 Beyond this, it is not clear whether or how the players may have presented these beings through costume, prosthetic, or props. McMillin and MacLean have argued that the Queen’s Men practiced what they call “literalism of the theatre,” whereby the “real language of showmanship is objective and visual.”13 Indeed, when Truth and Poetry do turn their attention to the ghost of Clarence, they point out that he dropped a shield as he passed over the stage that bears the Latin words about revenge he spoke. Given this tendency to say and show, it is tempting to speculate that theatrical codes were employed to make it obvious to audiences that, before they speak, these figures represent Truth and Poetry. A laurel or a lyre are objects that might be sufficiently associated with poetry to work as an emblematic prop; likewise, a large book and writing implements could announce “truth,” if Truth here is meant to be synonymous with Clio, the muse of history, of whom there was an extant tradition in painting (“History” appears elsewhere with its own emblems: in the induction to the anonymous Warning for Fair Women, c. 1598, History bears martial signs like a drum). The Iconologia of Cesare Ripa (published in Rome in 1593 but not published in England until the eighteenth century) is an example of one contemporary resource that describes potentially relevant ways to visualize “Poesia” and “Verita.”14 Truth self-identifies here as female, and the characterization might also draw on the veritas filia temporis motif. “Truth is the daughter of time,” a recurring trope in the sixteenth century, was often deployed in the context of religious polemic and was embodied in royal and civic pageants in celebration of both Mary and Elizabeth in the 1550s. Perhaps the Queen’s Men drew on the example of those shows to convey an image of Truth.15 Of course, such possibilities must remain conjectural. The dialogue provided by the text does specify that the characters call each other “Truth” and “Poetry,” so perhaps there was no visual complement employed to stress the point further. But given the company style, emblematic costume or props

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for these figures is a legitimate possibility, and it would be an instance of the Queen’s Men emphasizing their self-awareness in performing history at a new, more literal level. But with or without employment of theatrical literalism, the audience here is immediately presented with a metadramatic, allegorical measure as the play’s induction to history. The author here is presenting a theatrical version of the prosopopoeia trope – that is, the art of giving voice to abstract imaginary, dead or otherwise absent entities – a matter to which I will return below. The two figures begin by exchanging pleasantries before moving to more pointed questions about the complex knot of truth, poetry, and theater: poetrie. truth. poet. truth.

poe. truth.

Truth well met. Thankes Poetrie, what makes thou upon a stage? Shadowes. Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes, Therefore depart and give Truth leave To shew her pageant. Why will truth be a Player? No, but Tragedia like for to present A Tragedie in England done but late.

(7–15)

The conversation then shifts to the back story of the Wars of the Roses, as Truth tells how Henry VI was deposed by the House of York, whose leader, Richard, Duke of York, soon “breathed his latest breath, / Leaving behind three branches of that line, / Three sonnes: the first was Edward, now the King, / George of Clarence, and Richard Glosters Duke” (32–37). This move into an articulation of lineal descent plunges us into a more familiar mode of historical exposition, but it cannot obscure the oddness of the initial exchange between Truth and Poetry. G. K. Hunter has shown how other inductions from Elizabethan drama likewise “raise the generic question,” so in this we can say that The True Tragedy of Richard III is part of a larger trend; depending on how early it was originally performed, it may have even inaugurated it.16 But what we see here is more than an induction alone. The author of The True Tragedy of Richard III moves quickly through a series of theatrical “opening” gestures at the start of this play creating a “medley” effect for the play’s first scene.17 There is the Senecan convention, most certainly filtered through Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, of the vengeful ghost who inaugurates the action with a cry of “vendicta” [sic]; the prologue-like exposition of the key actions and developments that precede the story about to be acted, which includes a chronicle-style genealogy; and, in a variation of the single player delivering a

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prologue, there is the induction in which, through conversation, quasiallegorical figures ready the audience for some of the broad, thematic problems that the performance of the play itself will entail. This jumble of staging maneuvers is perhaps an index of the author’s clumsiness, a reading that would justify the play’s many detractors. Or, it may be a deliberate, canny attempt to match form with content. The play features a chaotic opening to the story of a havoc-wreaking king. In any case, the author does seem to signal a belief that this play cannot simply begin in the middle of the action but rather requires some sort of framing device. Here, the device calls attention to aspects of the theatrical tradition, such as the induction, the prologue, and the wailing ghost, foregrounding the specificity of theatrical techniques to this telling of history. The players connect with the audience through a dialogue that stimulates reflection on the act of playing itself: “what makes thou upon a stage?” Poetry broaches the limits of theatrical representation when, in response to Truth’s question “what makes thou upon a stage,” Poetry is quick to answer “shadowes.” A synonym for players in some early modern theatrical discourses, “shadow” is a metaphorical description of theater itself, one that highlights the insubstantial, fleeting, ephemeral, and also dubious nature of performance. The word is used again later at a decisive moment in the play, this time as a verb, to convey a fear of being rendered impotent and ineffectual, as Richard contemplates the possibility that his young nephew will be king now that Edward IV has died: “Have I removed such logs out of my sight as my brother Clarence / And king Henry the sixt, to suffer a child to shadow me?” (369–370); and later Richard again uses the term to mean something that is fundamentally weak and empty as he responds to news that an enemy is arming against him: “Tush, a shadow without a substance, and a feare without a cause” (467–468). Truth likewise understands the word as indicating a debilitating state of lack, saying to Poetry, “Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes.” Truth sees Poetry’s shadows as insufficient for Truth’s agenda of “reviv[ing] the hearts of drooping minds” in the audience (16). Truth even dismisses Poetry from the stage altogether in order to take possession of the story and to tell it alone: “Therefore depart and give Truth leave / To shew her pageant.” Truth recognizes the stage as a space to transmit information and sees the emptiness and presumably false nature of Poetry as something which needs to be expunged. In The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, McMillin and MacLean read this opening as an indication that Truth here “takes the leadership of playing away from Poetry”; indeed, in their reading, the Queen’s Men show a consistent belief that truth is “plainer and more honest than poetry.”18 They write:

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The business of [Queen’s Men] plays is to gain an edge over those who trade in alluring images for their own sake – i.e. “Poetry.” It is to display the plain, unvarnished substance of history in a form appealing to all the people […] There is no question but that these plays are a campaign to give legitimacy to a Protestant drive for substantial truth and plain speech.19

However, I believe that The True Tragedy of Richard III represents the relation between Truth and Poetry in a more complicated way than McMillin and MacLean acknowledge. Truth attempts to take the leadership of playing, but whether this happens is left ambiguous, as we will see, and even if it does happen, this still creates its own set of problems. The key difficulty with the assertion that Truth will supplant poetry, here on the stage, is identified immediately by Poetry: “Will Truth be a player?” Poetry recognizes the incongruity of the real, of “Truth” being disseminated in a place dedicated to play. In other words, Poetry articulates the essential paradox of Truth speaking on stage, for the setting immediately transforms Truth into a player. It is at this point that Truth launches into a twenty-line exposition of the Wars of the Roses, one that does include some attempt to create a “plain,” straightforward explication that even draws on the authority of the chronicle tradition: Richard Plantagenet of the House of Yorke, Claiming the Crowne by warres, not by dissent Had as the Chronicles make manifest, In the two and twentith yeare of Henry the sixth By act of Parliament intailed to him The Crowne and titles to that dignitie

(19–24)

But Truth has made clear that the play will not consist of a narrated tale in the style of the chronicles invoked here. Truth has asked Poetry to depart and make way for Truth’s “pageant,” a word Truth uses again at the end of the scene and which had a current usage in this period as a fictive display on a stage. Even in denying Poetry’s charge that it is incongruous for Truth to become a player, Truth invokes theatrical language to describe her intentions: “Tragedia like” Truth will “present a Tragedy.” The promise to “adde bodies” to the shadows Poetry makes on stage further implicates Truth in the materiality of theatrical playing. To call on bodies is inevitably to call attention to the living, breathing bodies of the people on stage. These were players whose appearance here is not a unique embodiment but one instance of a professional, diurnal commitment wherein they take on a host of different roles – including the possibility of multiple roles within a single play – some based on historical figures, some not.

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Following Truth’s first set of lines that set the scene for the play, Poetry ceases to be interested in whether Truth can be a player and instead prompts Truth to fill in some remaining details, including the identification of the shrieking Ghost as Clarence. After a second extended exposition, this time involving a more specific and personal description of the Duke of Gloucester’s infamous physicality – “ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed” – Truth closes out this opening scene with an appeal to the playgoers: “Thus, gentles, excuse the length by the matter, / And here begins Truthes Pageant” (70–72). Truth’s verbal gesture – “gentles” – prevents the induction from being a self-contained exchange among “characters.” Rather, it makes evident that this opening has been calculated to involve the audience in the enterprise of historical representation. Truth makes a final pitch for the importance of its discourse. The “matter” should be sufficient to keep the audience’s attention: “excuse the length by the matter.” Truth does not bear any of the normal markers of a clown figure but, nonetheless, claims the clown’s prerogative to address directly the “gentles” of the audience, as well as, in the Tarlton tradition, to make an explicit issue of the play as an expenditure of time: “excuse the length.” But, of course, the fundamental problem identified by Poetry – “will Truth be a player?” – remains unresolved. Truth had initially asked Poetry to depart and leave the stage, but even that request is disingenuous, for Truth has said before it would “add” to what Poetry produces, implying it would complement rather than supersede Poetry. Indeed, at the close of the scene, Truth says “Poetrie / Wend with me,” at which point they exit together, and the scene shifts to the deathbed of King Edward IV. We are left with uncertainty about the relationship between Truth and Poetry. It appears that Truth, rather than “tak[ing] the leadership of playing away from Poetry,” acknowledges a need to rely on or otherwise align with Poetry in order to present the story of Richard III on stage. It might be helpful at this point to consider George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale, another play by the Queen’s Men. That play begins with a set of characters telling and listening to a story. This telling is interrupted when the figures of the story themselves come forth to enact the tale. Madge, the old wife, starts her tale talking of a man who turns into a bear every night when she stops suddenly: “Gods me bones! Who comes here?” According to the stage directions, at this moment “Enter the Two Brothers,” characters in another part of the tale that she has already introduced. One auditor, the page Frolic, recognizes what is happening: “Soft, gammer, here some come to tell your tale for you,” while his companion Fantastic suggests, “Let them alone; let us hear what they will say.”20 The frame is thus broken into by the

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tale, as Madge’s narrative is supplanted by its physical embodiment. At various points throughout the remainder of the play, Madge, Frolic, and Fantastic discuss the actions they observe, with Madge still serving as somewhat of an authority figure, clarifying obscure exchanges and assuring her guests that these figures do indeed correspond to the components of the tale she had begun to tell. Likewise, the “characters” that Truth invokes as part of this conversation with Poetry soon supplant Truth and Poetry: King Edward, his wife and children, the wrangling nobles, as well as Richard, who does not speak in his first scene but who the stage direction makes clear is present. While Truth mentions the chronicles, it is an embodiment of history, not a mere recitation of dates and events, that takes center stage. The link between the style of these two plays is significant for reassessing McMillin and MacLean’s assertions quoted above, especially the notion that “The business of [Queen’s Men] plays is to gain an edge over those who trade in alluring images for their own sake – i.e. ‘Poetry.’” Surely, The Old Wives Tale is a play that, at least in part, celebrates human creative power itself; it revels in the “allure” of images and stories more than message-driven content or clear pro-Tudor or Protestant lessons. The fact that The True Tragedy of Richard III shares a version of its opening gambit, wherein a narrated set of events is overtaken by embodiment of those events, indicates that, although it is a play about history, it is implicated in similar representational strategies as The Old Wives Tale: strategies that exhibit, promote, and take pleasure in the unique aesthetic experience of embodied narration. This opening scene of The True Tragedy of Richard III encapsulates some of the key questions raised by the performance of history. Chiefly, the scene seems to ask, can content that is presented on the popular stage by professional players be classified as “Truth”? Or does theatrical form relegate any “matter” put forth on stage to the status of poetic “shadowes”? Is the affect achieved by “shadowes” that are part of “Truth’s Pageant” fundamentally different from the affect achieved by ordinary stage plays? Truth and Poetry raise and then defer fully responding to these difficult questions in this scene. The figures disappear at this point, not to return, although presumably the players who took those parts had other roles in The True Tragedy of Richard III, thus revealing that “Truth” itself has indeed become a player; or, more precisely, that Truth has, in fact, been a player all along. Hunter argues that the induction to The True Tragedy of Richard III amounts to an admission that “the end (truth) can hardly be achieved without a shaping process which disengages it from the particulars it contains.”21 Poetry, the “shaping process” here, can be related to “art” in

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other generically self-conscious inductions of this era. As in The Old Wives Tale, what initially seems to be usurpation at the start of The True Tragedy of Richard III – there embodiment of narrative, here, Truth of Poetry – turns out instead to be the acknowledgment of codependence. It amounts, as the opening gesture of this play about the past, to the marriage of history and aesthetics. forms of address, forms of history Truth made two verbal gestures toward the audience in the references to “gentles” (61, 70). It remains to determine how this opening discussion positions the “gentles” of the audience in relation to the play. In my view, the exchange between Truth and Poetry is deliberately unresolved; it is, in other words, a way of opening this play up to audience scrutiny. Just as Truth and Poetry “wend” from the stage uncertain how they relate, so too the playgoers remain uncertain and are thus prompted to keep this question in mind as the play unfolds. While the “frame” figures of Truth and Poetry do not reappear, the play does consistently make verbal gestures that are meant to keep audiences actively thinking about questions the play raises. In one instance of direct address, the host of an inn offers his own comments to the audience after Richard’s Page has bullied him into complicity with Richard’s plan to murder an enemy under the host’s own roof: “A maisters, maisters, what a troublesome vocation am I crept into, you thinke we that be In-keepers get all the world, but I thinke I shall get a faire halter to my necke” (581–583). With the call to “masters” (along with “gentles” a common cue that the player has shifted into audience address), the host confronts the playgoers by imputing to them a false perception of the world. In essence, he says, “you think it’s like this, but really, it’s like that,” a challenge to playgoers to consider his ethical dilemma in relation to King Richard’s rise to power. Richard’s unnamed Page is another character who addresses the audience at several points. His type of address varies throughout. At one moment, he invites the audience, even more explicitly than the host, to employ its interpretive power, soliciting the audience to draw its own conclusions about Richard: “I see my Lord [Richard] is fully resolved to climbe, but how hee climbes ile leave that to your judgements” (475–476, emphasis added). The Page elsewhere fulfills a more informative, chorus-like function, filling in details crucial to the course of the play. For instance, he tells how “Doctor Shaw hath pleased my Lord [Richard], that preached at Paules Crosse yesterday, that proved the two Princes to be bastards,” and how

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“Whereupon in the after noone came down my Lord Mayor and the Aldermen to Baynard’s Castle, and offered my Lord the whole estate upon him, and offered to make him King, which he refused” (908–913). These lines invite audiences to evaluate Richard’s tactics, with an emphasis on how he achieves power through his manipulation of language and spectacle: Shaw’s sermon and the public display at Baynard’s Castle. The Page also shows some personal apprehensiveness about Richard’s methods: “He hath made but a wrong match, for blood is a threatener and will have revenge. He makes hauocke of all to bring his purpose to passe” (900–903). Despite this brief pang of conscience, the Page remains loyal to Richard, even going so far as to feel compassion for him once the King begins to descend into a state of paranoid misery: “Where shall I find a place to sigh my fill, / And waile the griefe of our sore troubled King?” (1769–1770). The Page delivers two versions of a response toward Richard. He gives the audience alternate choices against which to formulate their own response to the title figure and, by extension, the play itself. The True Tragedy of Richard III prompts its audience to think about ethical issues the play raises. Further, it prompts its audience to think about theater as a particular form of historical representation. We saw this already in the induction. We see it also in the moments featuring the Page and the Innkeeper. These figures speak from, to employ Robert Weimann’s terms, the downstage platea, the playing space that exists nearer to the audience than the upstage locus of representation. The platea is where mimetic fictions become porous.22 Like the clowns of other Queen’s Men plays, the platea figures here break the temporal frame of the history play in which they appear and point to the where and when of the performance.23 Elsewhere in the play, other forms of historical expression are mentioned, a move that highlights the varieties of historical culture in Elizabethan England and further isolates drama as a unique form. For instance, the chronicle tradition is explicitly invoked three times in The True Tragedy of Richard III. The first, as we have seen, comes in the induction: “Richard Plantagenet of the House of Yorke, / Claiming the Crowne by warres, not by dissent / Had as the Chronicles make manifest …” Truth aligns this spoken discourse on the Wars of the Roses with the chronicles. Here, the gesture toward the chronicles seems a way to claim authority, as if to reassure Poetry and the playgoers that the information being presented has an unimpeachable basis outside the theater. The chronicles in this instance are a yardstick with which to measure other discourses of history. This sense shifts in the other uses, though. The first shift is subtle. One of Richard’s enemies, the Earl Rivers, calls upon the chronicles when he is

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accused of treason by Richard and his allies. Rivers asserts “The Chronicles I record, talk of my fidelitie [and] of my progeny / Wher, as in a glas, y[ou] maist behold thy ancestors [and] their trechery” (621–622). On the surface, Rivers draws on the “Chronicles” for their factual value: they vindicate his ancestors. But his wording opens up questions of historical partiality: the “Chronicles I record” (emphasis added) can simply mean “the historical record I have read or am now recalling.” But the personal pronoun, and the ambiguous use of “record,” also hints at a more circular kind of logic, as though Rivers himself has written a history that slanders Richard’s family and promotes his own. The polyvalence of the phrase drains some credibility from Rivers’ reference to the chronicles. In this use, the appeal to the chronicles seems less like tapping into a resource that underwrites a shared present reality and more like a transparent rhetorical strategy for selfjustification. The third reference is interesting for our purposes and dramatically chilling in and of itself. It comes in conjunction with the horrific murder of the two princes in the Tower. After the murderers have killed the princes onstage, one of them, Forrest, assures Richard’s henchman Tyrell that the bodies have been well disposed of: “I have conveyed them to the staires foote among a heape of stones, and anon ile carry them where they shall be no more found againe, nor all the cronicles shall nere make mention what shall become of them” (1322–1325). On one level, this works as a bit of macabre, dramatic irony. Hiding the bodies cannot hide the guilt of those who committed the act. Forrest’s name, along with his partners in the act and Tyrell himself, are all named in More, and therefore in the relevant sections of Hall and Holinshed that derive from More, as well as in the play. But on another level we see here a participant in a historical event promising an act that will elude the historical record. He will hide the bodies so that the fate of the boys will remain a mystery. In this ambition, Forrest is successful. More’s narrative, as it was reproduced in Hall, tells us that the bodies were indeed buried “at the stayre foote, metely deepe in the grounde under a heap of stones” just as Forrest says they would be initially. But, as More tells us, they were eventually exhumed and buried “in such a place secretely.” This burial was performed by a man who died shortly after, so that “the verey trueth could never yet be very wel and perfightly knowen.”24 Forrest speaks of how he effectively thwarts the chronicles and renders the story they tell partial. The chronicle tradition, then, is invoked explicitly in the play on multiple occasions but, with each successive mention, it becomes more equivocal. Chronicles are introduced in Truth’s initial attempt to secure authority, a move that implies plays must be in some

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sense parasitical upon the chronicles.25 But the last word on them is Forrest’s mocking defiance of their ability to record the full truth. Likewise, of course, the play itself does not posit the princes’ final resting spot, a matter that is still under debate by historians (professional and, to a greater extent, amateur).26 It remains a lacuna in The True Tragedy of Richard III as it is in the historical record. Both the chronicle and performance are exposed as imperfect records of historical events. They may bring us to the boundary of a full disclosure of the past, but from there we are ultimately prohibited from passing over into complete knowledge. That history comes down to us only in part is shown in another instance where The True Tragedy of Richard III invokes another form employed to represent the past: poetry, or, more specifically, a kind of historical ballad. Lodowicke is introduced early in the play as a man indebted to King Edward’s mistress, Jane Shore. He later encounters her begging on the street after she has fallen into hardship and public disgrace. He refuses aid on the grounds that doing so would be dangerous to himself: “I cannot deny but my lands she restored me, but shall I by releving of her hurt my selfe, no: for straight proclamation is made that none shall succour her” (1073–1075). But Lodowicke does not merely refuse to assist. He feels compelled to produce some scornful description of her situation: “I will shun her company and get me to my chamber, and there set downe in heroicall verse, the shameful end of a Kings Concubin” (1077–1079). Lodowicke’s intended work, in form and content, recalls The Mirror for Magistrates. This popular collection, starting with the 1563 edition, included a poem about Jane Shore that almost certainly was a source for the depiction of her in The True Tragedy of Richard III. Whether or not audiences of The True Tragedy of Richard III would have recognized the play in front of them as drawing on that work is not knowable. But when Lodowicke mentions writing a poem about Shore with a clear moral agenda – “the shameful end of a Kings Concubin” – it may have registered with many audience members as a direct reference to The Mirror for Magistrates. This poetic, explicitly moralistic work went through several editions in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Shore of The True Tragedy of Richard III even invokes the trope of that collection’s title when she laments “now shall Shore’s wife be a mirrour and looking glasse, / to all her enemies” (256–257). The play acknowledges the existence of alternate forms that work to imagine the past: chronicles, poems, and, through the performance itself, theater. The True Tragedy of Richard III does not privilege itself or either of these other forms. Indeed, all are exposed as limited. The play instead makes audiences aware of a variegated historical culture that works through

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repetition. A humanist narrative such as More’s History of Richard III informs the chronicles; the chronicles inform a poetry collection such as The Mirror for Magistrates; and both inform a theatrical work such as The True Tragedy of Richard III. The implication of understanding history as repetition that comes through is that repetition brings variation. This is explored most directly through the figure of “Report.” Report first arrives on the heels of the play’s climactic battle and, through his very brief appearance, allows The True Tragedy of Richard III to comment further on how performance interacts with historical knowledge. the figure of report When Lodowicke abandons his benefactor Jane Shore in her time of need, opting instead to rush home and compose a poem slandering her, he gives a morally reprehensible model of the historian who will put the actions of the world into a discourse warped by his own agenda. We see a different model of the historian near the end of the play, one who, rather than fleeing to tell a deliberately partial version of events, goes to the scene to investigate and request an impartial version. Late in The True Tragedy of Richard III, immediately after the King has been killed by the Earl of Richmond on Bosworth Field, two characters appear on stage. One, Richard’s Page, is by now familiar to the audience. He has been in several key scenes and has addressed the audience directly on a few occasions. The other, appearing for the first time, is identified in the text of the play by the strange speech prefix “Report” and is addressed as “Report” by the Page. As with Truth and Poetry at the start of the play, we can only speculate as to whether the identification of this figure as Report was purely verbal, or whether, in line with the Queen’s Men’s “theatrical literalism,” it involved costume or props as well. Report begins the conversation with an urgent question: “How may I know the certain true report of this victorious battell fought to day, my friend what ere thou beest, tel unto mee the true report, which part hath wonne the victorie, whether the king or no” (2003–2006). Report raises a number of crucial questions about historical representation. For instance, his arrival and queries provide a fascinating example of the essential belatedness of historical narratives. It is true that some histories are written by people who were themselves witness to the events they depict. But most often the historian, like Report, arrives late at the scene, and must work backward through the testimony of others. The True Tragedy of Richard III at this moment posits a gap between the events of the past and the representation of those events, a reminder of the gap between the present performance and the signified past.

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Most obviously, he points to the importance of ascertaining truth – “the certain true report” – as the goal of the “reporter” of historical events. Methodologically, Report seeks out, in the classical tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, an eyewitness to aid him in making a record of these events. But, as Report realizes, the search for truth entails confronting the possibility that the perspectives of individual witnesses can be distorted by their own partiality. Hence, he emphasizes that he wants to hear “the true report” from the Page, “what ere thou beest,” i.e. whatever side he is on. The Page delivers a “briefe discourse” that shows a mind already at work in crafting a narrative out of the death of King Richard. This narrative is made vivid through classical allusions. Richard arrived on the battlefield “mounted on horseback, with as high resolve as fierce Achillis mongst the sturdie Greekes” (2018–2019). The Page’s description also gestures toward offering an intelligible tactical cause for Richmond’s victory. Due to the length of the battle, King Richard eventually grew “faint, which Richmond straight perceived, and presently did sound a fresh alarme.” The Page further adds his interpretation of the King’s own motivation and mindset. Despite Richmond’s evident advantage as the battle dragged on, “worthie Richard […] did never flie, but followed honour to the gates of death” (2026–2027). The True Tragedy of Richard III provides audiences with a fantasy of access to the decisive event at Bosworth: Richmond kills Richard on stage. The play then shows a process by which one partial witness to the fight, Richard’s loyal Page, creates an account of the entire battle for a latecomer whose name signifies he will go on to “report” the events of the battle to others. With this episode, the author of The True Tragedy of Richard III has chosen to allegorize the historian through the figure of Report. The Page feeds Report with information but, in doing so, relies on literary allusion (“Achillis”) and metaphor (“the gates of death”) to convey his “briefe discourse.” Even in the immediate aftermath of the event, materials the historian collects have already been given a particular, rhetorical shape, including the use of figurative language. In other words, the Page’s “truth” cannot be spoken without “poetry.” In a commonsense interpretation, the Report speech prefix is simply a synonym for messenger. But “messenger” is employed elsewhere in the text. The choice of the odd tag “Report” at this moment seems deliberate. In his 1900 book Richard III Up to Shakespeare, George B. Churchill provides some speculation about this figure. He connects Report back to the figure of Rumour in another Queen’s Men play, Clyomon and Clamydes, as well as forward to Rumour in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV. But Report’s insistence on accuracy seems to me to distinguish him from the uncertainties associated

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with Rumour figures.27 Pressing the term’s possible Elizabethan connotations reveals an intriguing link to poetic form as a possible explanation for the use of Report as a speech prefix. “Report” is George Puttenham’s term for “the first degree” of repetition in verse, what is more commonly known as anaphora. In The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham writes, “we call the figure [anaphora] […] Report according to the Greek originall, and is when we make one word begin, and as they are wont to say, lead the daunce to many verses.” That “originall” is the Greek word “ἀναφορά” which is usually translated as “carrying back.” Puttenham evidently links this Greek term for a rhetorical figure to the English word “report” through its own Latin root, “reportare.” If we entertain that the character of Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III may be connected to this sense of the word, he becomes a corporeal subset of the opening figure that embodied poetry itself, as well as a more particular embodiment of the stylized repetition of language. On the one hand, this accords well with the notion of Report as a factbased historian who seeks the particular truth of the battle. Report will repeat exactly what he learns rather than invent material or inflect his findings with his own prejudices. On the other hand, “report” as a figure of speech is implicated in the world of rhetoric, which, as critics since the ancients have noted, is not necessarily wedded to truth. Rhetorical figures are not employed merely to convey information. As Puttenham says, figures of repetition “much alter and affect the eare and also the mynde of the hearer, and therefore [are] counted […] very brave figure[s] both with the Poets and rhetoriciens.”28 Repetition works to produce affect. If Report contains both a sense of literal repetition and of the trope anaphora, the figure encapsulates what I argued about the induction to the play. The putative “Truth” of history cannot banish “Poetry” from the scene of its telling, but, rather, is implicated in aesthetic choices and strategies characteristic of poetic language. The figure of “report” as defined by Puttenham appears prominently in a source of The True Tragedy of Richard III. It is a feature of the portrait of Jane Shore found in The Mirror for Magistrates. For instance, in the first eleven stanzas of that poem, Shore employs anaphora within six of them, as when she outlines her life through repetition of “my” within and at the beginning of lines: My life, my death, my doleful destenie, My wealth, my woe, my doing euery deale, My bitter blisse, wherein I long did dwel.

(The Mirror for Magistrates, 59–61)29

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In another verse, Shore complains that the course of her life was bent toward a miserable end from early on, when she was pressed into a forced marriage at a young age. The word “what,” as Puttenhham would say, here “leads the dance”: What loathed liues do come where loue doth lacke. What scratching breers do grow vpon such brakes, What common weales by it are brought to wracke, What [h]eauye loade is put on pacientes backe, What straunge delightes this br[a]unch of vice doth breede

(The Mirror for Magistrates, 121–125)

The trope is evident as well in one of the points of clear connection between the two works. In The True Tragedy of Richard III, Shore recalls the influence she had over her lover, the late King Edward: “for if I had spoken, he would not haue said nay. For tho he was King, yet Shores wife swayed the swoord” (1086–1088). In The Mirror for Magistrates, Shore says I gouerned him that ruled al this land: I bare the sword though he did weare the crowne, I strake the stroke that threw the mightie downe:

(The Mirror for Magistrates, 173–175)

The figure of “report” is prominent throughout The Mirror for Magistrates’ poem about Shore. It is present, too, in these specific lines about Shore wielding the “sword” of the King that impressed the author of The True Tragedy of Richard III enough that the line was adapted for use in the play. Report, or anaphora, a figure of repetition, then, was perhaps a vehicle that helped move materials from The Mirror for Magistrates to The True Tragedy of Richard III. Structural repetition can also be seen within the plot of The True Tragedy of Richard III. The two Jane Shore scenes, for instance, include a formula whereby successive figures enter and have similar conversations with Shore: in the first instance, those she has helped all pledge they will support her when the King dies; in the second scene, they each successively deny her pleas for help. The author of The True Tragedy of Richard III employs anaphora at the level of the poetic line at a key moment to produce the most significant verse passage in the play. While critics have spoken harshly about the quality of the language in The True Tragedy of Richard III – as McMillin and MacLean wittily note, some lines make one wish Poetry had never left the stage after the first scene30 – it is noteworthy that at least one sensitive auditor (or reader) remembered a line from the play for quite a long time: Shakespeare quotes The True Tragedy of Richard III in Hamlet, a play probably composed

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at least six years after the quarto of The True Tragedy of Richard III appeared and even longer after it was initially performed.31 The line in question is delivered as one in a series that features anaphora. King Richard, sick with guilt and worry before the battle, begins to imagine that nature itself joins the ghosts of his victims in seeking vengeance on him for his many crimes: The sunne by day shines hotely for revenge. The Moone by night eclipseth for revenge. The stars are turnd to Comets for revenge. The Planets chaunge their coursies for revenge. The birds sing not, but sorrow for revenge. The silly lambes sits bleating for revenge. The screeking Raven sits croking for revenge.

(1886–1892)

Apart from the repetition of “the” as the first word in each line quoted, the verse here shows another figure of repetition, epistrophe, in the repeated ending “revenge.” Hamlet, of course, combines the last line here and the one that follows in the speech (“whole heads of beasts comes bellowing for revenge”) as he orchestrates the performance of the “Mousetrap” before his uncle, crying out to the players to hurry, for “the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge” (Hamlet, III.ii.254). This is sometimes understood as Shakespeare’s burlesque of a weaker dramatist. Perhaps it is. But the fact that he recalled the lines years after they were first spoken in the theater, or even first appeared in print, says that they were memorable (memorably good or bad is another question). The words may have been memorable because this speech by Richard is a kind of climax for the play; or it may be because the lines appear as part of verbal schemes of repetition meant, as Puttenham says, to “much alter and affect the eare and also the mynde of the hearer.” Just as the conversation between Truth and Poetry brought issues of historical representation to the foreground at the start of the play, Report’s entrance brings such issues back to our attention as the play nears its finish. Report is a kind of historian. He searches for the story to deliver beyond the battlefield, and his conversation with the Page shows the audience a process by which the action they witnessed – the killing of Richard – is brought into discourse, and eventually into the historical record. This process of history being turned into language exposes how quickly ostensibly descriptive language becomes figurative and enters the realm of the literary. Fresh from the battle, the Page delivers a story about his dead master in poetic terms. Historical information makes its rounds through repetition: Report gets the story from the Page in order to go on and report it to a wider

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audience. Churchill writes that “curiously, Report is the recipient of news. His part would be somewhat justified if a hint were given that he receives news only to spread it; but there is no such hint.”32 But I see the name Report itself as precisely the “hint” that this figure is meant to gather and disseminate information. Significantly, this idea of history as repetition is reinforced and reinflected with meaning by the link between the name “report” and that term’s sense as a poetic device, a device employed in the structure and language of The Mirror for Magistrates, a key source for The True Tragedy of Richard III, and within The True Tragedy of Richard III itself. Puttenham explains, as he ends his section on the forms of repetition, that “a figure is ever used to a purpose, either of beautie or of efficacie”; figures “urg[e] affection” or “enforceth the sence.”33 History, The True Tragedy of Richard III shows, is not merely a rote form of repetition but a stylized repetition; thus, according to this play, the discourse of history is “report” in both senses. It is about reiteration, but it emerges as always already imbued with aesthetic considerations of artful language used to “urg[e] affection” or “enforceth the sence.” The emergence of Report, then, marks a return to the representational strategies from the opening scene that produced Truth and Poetry. The arrival of another strange speech tag causes us to renew the earlier consideration of how to classify all these figures: “allegorical” or “quasi-allegorical” might be as close as we can come. Yet, there is another device that is relevant. The trope prosopopoeia can perhaps explain what the author of The True Tragedy of Richard III is doing in the representation of Truth, Poetry, and Report. Prosopopoeia is giving a human persona to (or, in the strict etymological sense of the term, making a face for) the non-human. Puttenham writes that “if ye wil attribute any humane quality, as reason or speech to dobe [dumb] creatures or other insensible things, & do study (as one may say) to give the[m] a humane person, it is […] Prosopopeia.”34 Puttenham distinguishes this device, what we might now also call “personification,” from what he calls “prosopographia,” which is when the poet describes the “visage, speach and countenance of any person absent or dead.”35 A modern definition incorporates prosopographia into prosopopoeia. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, prosopopoeia is the “rhetorical device by which an imaginary, absent, or dead person is represented as speaking or acting.” John Hoskins, in an unpublished Elizabethan work that apparently circulated in manuscript called Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), likewise offers an intriguing sense whereby prosopopoeia can enliven both abstractions and dead people, writing more generally that it has the power “to animate, and give life.”36

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The author of The True Tragedy of Richard III has “animated” Truth, Poetry, Report, and, for that matter, the Ghost of Clarence, through the prerogative of the poet, or, as Puttenham says, the “maker,” to do so. Making these figures walk and talk on the same stage as King Edward IV, the young princes in the Tower, King Richard III and the future King Henry VII shows that the author of the play understood prosopopoeia as aligning the work of the poet with the work of the historian. This alignment can be realized in printed histories in which the historian invents speeches, a practice with a long tradition that was starting to come under stress in the sixteenth century.37 But it has a special resonance in performance, because here the poet – as playwrights in the period were frequently called – is dependent on the bodies of actors to achieve the animation of theatrical prosopopoeia. “Truth,” “Poetry,” and “Report” cannot truly be given a face or person until a player assumes the part. Likewise, figures from the past who appear on stage must be “dead” or “absent” by the very terms of representation itself. The dramatic poet cannot give life without the presence of the players in the theater, and this presence highlights the acts of “surrogation,” in Roach’s sense, that are necessary to perform history. Karen Bassi has written powerfully about this necessary absence as part of what she calls the “somatics of the past.” According to Bassi, “a sustaining mechanism of historical representation is the disavowal, that is, the recognition and denial, of an always absent body […] this disavowal is also embedded in the discourse of Western performance practices.”38 The disavowal of the absent body works in tandem with the avowal of the present body of the player on stage. But this body and the prosopopoeia it enacts in historical representation remain subject always to the temporality of drama. Working through Paul de Man’s claim that prosopopoeia is the “master trope of poetic discourse,” Denis Donoghue writes, in a formulation that seems infused with a sense of action and speech on stage, “The particular finesse of prosopopoeia is that it achieves the uncanny effect of making the invisible appear to be visible; it produces an hallucination, or rather an hallucinatory effect.”39 The True Tragedy of Richard III lacks the exuberant physicality of the clowns who populate so many other plays by the Queen’s Men. And yet we see in this play other ways in which the company uses the verbal and somatic technologies of theater to explore the status of history. The blatant artifice of representing an abstraction like Truth is linked to the representation of famous historical people, both species of “making the invisible appear to be visible”; both subject to the time scheme of performance that renders what is seen there impermanent and perhaps even “hallucinatory.”

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two truths Such concerns with the aesthetics of historical representation are complemented by the play’s implicit consideration of some other conceptual questions about the status of history. For instance, there is the use of history as a means of propaganda, as we saw when Lodowicke chooses to write of Shore, a woman who showed him mercy and kindness, as “shameful.” Lodowicke envisions a historical project that is explicitly moralistic: a poem that will show “the shameful end of a Kings Concubin,” a phrase that echoes copy from the title page of the 1594 quarto of The True Tragedy of Richard III published by Thomas Creede: “With a lamentable ende of Shores wife, an example for all wicked women.” This sentiment, both as it is expressed on the cover page and within the play by Lodowicke, is distinctly at odds with the completely sympathetic portrayal of Shore’s wife that actually appears in The True Tragedy of Richard III. Lodowicke and whoever prepared the title-page advertisement for the quarto were convinced that Jane Shore’s story had a clear moral implication about shameful women. That is the tone of The Mirror for Magistrates, where Shore ends her lament with these self-condemning words: Example take by mee both Mayde, and Wyfe, Beware, take heede, fall not to folly so, A Mirrour make by my great ouerthrowe: […] Beware by mee that spent so ill her dayes.

(The Mirror for Magistrates, 388–392)

Shore’s last words in The True Tragedy of Richard III, though, reveal a new twist to her story. Rather than assuming she is beyond redemption and speaking only as a “mirror” for others to use as a negative example, Shore says that “I have done open penance, and am sorie for my sinnes that are past” (1171–1172). Her last words show a faint sign of hope for her soul: “And though I have done wickedly in this world, / Into hell fire, let not my soule be hurld” (1187–1188). The author of The True Tragedy of Richard III has complicated the conventional wisdom about what Shore signifies, so that Lodowicke’s sentiments, as well as the sentiments on the title page, fail to account for the Shore actually depicted here.40 Another description of the play can be found in the entry for The True Tragedy of Richard III in the Stationer’s Register. Here, the explanation of the Shore plot has no explicit “moral.” It reads: “An enterlude, intitled the tragedie of Richard the Third, wherein is shown the deathe of Edward the

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Fourthe, with the smotheringe of the two princes in the Tower, with the lamentable end of Shore’s wife, and the contention of the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke.”41 This is almost identical to the full copy on the title page, save for its omission of the lines about Shore as an example to all “wicked women.” Given the wordiness of the description in the Register, it hardly seems that the omission of any mention of Shore’s “wickedness” was to save space. It indicates that one early response to the play’s depiction of Shore conforms to how I have suggested she is represented: as “lamentable” rather than shameful. Shore’s representation in The True Tragedy of Richard III does not merely repeat her previous representations; it is a “repetition with a difference,” a move that reveals both the instability of repetition itself as well as the instability of historical examples as a means of moral didacticism.42 The induction to The True Tragedy of Richard III implicitly offers two terms laden with significance for Renaissance culture up for examination, words that impinge on any discussion of early modern historical representation and its purported educative purposes: truth and poetry. These terms, of course, are subjected to intense scrutiny in a work possibly contemporaneous to The True Tragedy of Richard III, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poetry. Whether the author of The True Tragedy of Richard III was familiar with Sidney’s treatise is another uncertainty. The Defense of Poetry was published in 1595, a year later than The True Tragedy of Richard III was published. But, just as it can be assumed the play was on the stage much earlier, it is believed by many scholars that The Defense of Poetry circulated in manuscript long before it reached print. It is within the realm of possibility that copies of Sidney’s apology were known to players and writers associated with the Queen’s Men.43 Whether or not we can make a direct connection between The Defense of Poetry and The True Tragedy of Richard III, though, it is worth thinking through how these works might be in conversation thematically. In discussing truth, Sidney differentiates the “particular truth of things” – history in its exact details – from an exemplary, moral truth (32). The historian’s truth is rendered through a “bare Was” (36), a sterile recitation as opposed to the morally generative stimulation of poetry. The important truth for Sidney is not to be gleaned from the “particular” things that happened, for as he says in some of the treatise’s most famous lines, “history, being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness” (37–38). He derogates history as such in order to privilege the universal, moral certainties that poets invent to promote virtuous action. Some version of “Truth” is

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present both in the opening sequence and in the very title of this play: The True Tragedy of Richard III. The word as it appears within and as a description of the play appears to encompass both senses of Sidney’s truths, the factual and the moral. For instance, through the “bare Was”, Truth delivers a litany of events from the Wars of the Roses, a speech that in some particulars might provoke Sidney to charge Truth with being a “tyrant in table talk” (30). At the same time, Truth also moralizes some of these details. After carefully explaining the legal complexity of how Richard, Duke of York, had “By act of Parliament intailed to him / The Crowne and titles to that dignitie / And to his offspring lawfully begotten,” we hear that York then “made warres upon King Henry then the sixth, / And by outrage suppressed that virtuous King, / And wonne the Crowne of England to himselfe” (24–30). The Duke of York is outrageous and not content to follow the law; the slain King Henry VI is by contrast “virtuous.” Truth also makes clear, as we saw above, that there is an edifying force to its discourse. Like the exemplary poetic truths Sidney endorses, Truth has stated the story will “lift the hearts” of the playgoers. The “Truth” who walks onto the stage and speaks in the play’s first scene vacillates between Sidney’s neo-Platonic ideals and the aims of the emergent school of historiography, associated with figures such as Camden, which privileges precisely the “particular truth” that Sidney disdains. The play exemplifies and indeed enacts a moment when the notion of “truth” as it relates to historical representation itself lacks clear definition. As for the other term here, in both Sidney and The True Tragedy of Richard III, “poetry” means something like imaginative fiction as much as it means a literary verse form. In The True Tragedy of Richard III it connotes also performance itself. Poetry declares that it makes “shadows” on the stage. For Sidney, ultimately, truth and poetry are not in opposition. Properly written, poetry is a species of truth, the moral, universal truth that guides virtuous action. In The True Tragedy of Richard III, the status of truth and poetry is likewise intertwined, but, as we have seen, in a different sense. It becomes clear that Truth has become a kind of poetry by being filtered through performance. We can see in the “Report” scene how the author of The True Tragedy of Richard III fails to commit either to privileging a strictly “factual” approach to representing history or to an approach that would reshape the raw materials of history into a neat, morally perspicuous package. The Page, though Richard’s loyal servant, does not deliver to Report an account strictly biased on behalf of his master. He refers to Richmond as “worthie” and calls both sides in the battle “brave batalians” (2023). But he does

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emphasize Richard’s bravery and hence refuses to participate in the official line other characters will soon begin to disseminate about Richard’s essential depravity and Richmond’s providential victory, showing the possibility of different interpretations of Richard. The play’s closing “prophetic speeches” offer a further, intriguing example of the author’s balancing between an interest in presenting the facts of history and in presenting history as an edifying lesson. They follow quickly on the resolution of the battle of Bosworth. Richmond and Princess Elizabeth pledge their commitment to be married, the old Queen gives her blessing, and Stanley’s son George, whom Richard had threatened to kill, is returned alive to his father. Richmond delivers a speech that could end the play: Now for our marriage and our nuptial rytes, Our pleasure is they be solemnized In our Abby of Westminster, according to the ancient custom due, The two and twentieth day of August next, Set forwards then my Lords towards London straight, There to take further order for the state (2158–2163)

But instead of ending with this comic vision of impending marriage and a reordered society, the play then features four speeches that project contemporary knowledge back in time. Two unnamed messengers, Princess Elizabeth, and then the old Queen proceed to outline a monarchial genealogy that links the play to the present tense of the late Elizabethan era. Speaking immediately after Richard’s speech ends, the first messenger signals a break from the fifteenth-century setting with the same verbal gesture toward the audience that Truth used in the first scene, “Gentles”: “Thus Gentles may you heere behold, the joyning of these Houses both in one, by this brave Prince Henry the seaventh” (2164–2165). The next messenger discusses this king’s famous son, Henry VIII, and his son, Edward VI, before Princess Elizabeth gives a terse speech about Queen Mary. The final speech is an encomium on Elizabeth I delivered by the old Queen. These closing speeches of The True Tragedy of Richard III seem at times deliberately un-Sidnean. Aside from the final words about Elizabeth there is little attempt at a “poetic” genealogy that delivers a clear moral truth. Henry VII is compared to “Salomon” (2166), but the messenger who speaks of him is more at pains to set out specific details of his reign than to elaborate on that likeness: “He died when he had raigned full three and twentieth yeares eight moneths, and some odde dayes, and lies buried in Westminster” (2169–2171). The next messenger speaks of Henry VIII and concentrates

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on particular conquests: “hee [Henry VIII] wonne Turwen and Turney” (2174–2175) and later he “conquered Bullen” (2179). The words about Edward VI veer toward celebration of his work on behalf of Protestantism, but in strangely muted terms. The statement that the boy king “did restore the Gospell to his light” is balanced by the more matter-offact “He brought the English service first in use,” a phrase followed by recitation of his relevant dates: he “raigned six yeares, five monthes, [and] some odde dayes, and lieth buried in Westminster” (2183–2187). Most intriguing is the brief recapitulation of the reign of Queen Mary. Given that promoting the Protestant Elizabethan order was one of the putative reasons for which the Queen’s Men were formed, it is curious that Mary, in this post-Acts and Monuments, and probably post-Armada, play, is mentioned with no virulence – this despite her “bloody” reputation with Protestants and her marriage to the King of Spain.44 The Princess Elizabeth explains that after Edward VI’s death, “Mary did succeede, which married Philip King of Spaine, she raigned fiue years, four moneths, and some odde dayes, and is buried in Westminister” (2188–2190). Mary’s term is described in language reminiscent of Sidney’s “bare Was”: a sparse record that makes impartial note of her marriage to the Catholic King of Spain and that is most concerned with the precise length of her reign. Elizabeth I’s ascendancy, though, is spoken of in conventionally messianic terms by the old Queen, who describes “Worthie Elizabeth, a mirrour in her age, by whose wise life and civill gouerment, her country was defended from the crueltie of famine, fire, and sword, warres, fearefull messengers.” She breaks into verse, continuing: This is that Queene as writers truly say, That God had marked down to live for aye. The happie England mongst thy neighbor Iles, For peace and plentie still attends on thee: And all the fauourable Planets smiles To see thee live, in such propseritie. She is that lampe that keeps faire Englands light, And through her faith her country lives in peace: And she hath put proud Antichrist to flight, And bene the meanes that civill wars did cease. Then England kneele upon thy hairy knee And thanke that God that still provides for thee […] God grant her soule may live in heaven for aye For if her Graces dayes be brought to end, Your hope is gone, on whom did peace depend.

(2195–2207; 2221–2223)

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The speech constructs, in vague, figurative terms, an Elizabeth who is a “lampe,” who has brought “peace,” who is God’s gift to the land and its people. The moral lesson, perhaps even the moral “truth” of Elizabeth’s positive sovereignty are emphasized over the “particular” facts of her reign, the opposite of the way in which Mary is depicted. The momentum of the play’s closing encomium to the Virgin Queen leaves the audience with a strong pro-Elizabeth sentiment, and the reference to her defeat of “Antichrist” is unsubtle, anti-Catholic code. Possibly, it is even a reference to the defeat of the Armada, which would make the muted reference to Philip of Spain even more strange. In such small but significant ways, the play has avoided participating fully in the vilification of two of the biggest bogeymen of Elizabethan England: King Richard is allowed some praise from his Page, while “Bloody” Queen Mary, despite all that her religion and foreign ties entail, is given a detached description that is notably not warped by negative terms. The mention of her is not calculated to amplify the goodness of Elizabeth, or the sense of relief that Mary is dead. Queen Mary’s reign is described with no clear indication of how audiences should feel about it. In this, the play shows some resistance to the ostensible anti-Catholic purposes of the Queen’s Men, as well as to the call for the moral clarity of Poetry-as-Truth issued by Sidney. There is an uneasy attempt in these closing speeches to balance the desire for a celebration of the (nonMarian) Tudor order with some sense of responsibility to “the particular truth of things,” a phrase that aptly describes the “bare Was” of the description of Mary’s reign. The True Tragedy of Richard III deploys the Sidnean terms “truth” and “poetry” but pointedly resists aligning them in clear ways. In this closing gesture, the play plants the seed for a major aspect of the history plays that will develop on the Elizabethan stage, a moral anamorphosis that Norman Rabkin has famously described in reference to trick rabbit/duck pictures that frustrate attempts to see an object as any one thing.45 The speeches with which the play ends are noteworthy beyond their content. In terms of the dramaturgy of the scene, these speeches break from the historical era in which the play is set in order to deliver transhistorical insights. It is unclear who, besides the four speakers, occupy the stage in the final moments of The True Tragedy of Richard III. The text does not indicate any exits or a transition of any kind between Richmond’s speech and the speech of the first messenger. If we assume that is accurate and not merely an instance of an omitted exit direction for some of the cast, the stage at this moment must have been crowded. When Richmond speaks, he, Oxford,

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Stanley, the old Queen, Princess Elizabeth, two messengers, and Stanley’s son George are specifically named as present in the stage directions. The stage direction had also indicated that when Richmond, Oxford, and Stanley first enter, they are accompanied by “their traine,” which we can safely assume consists of at least two people. Thus, for the final scene, there are eight figures specifically noted as present, in addition to the ambiguous “train,” bringing the total to at least ten. McMillin and MacLean posit a cast of fourteen as the necessary minimum for the play. If that number accurately describes the number of people available for performance of this play, there could then be anywhere between ten and fourteen players present during the closing speeches about the Tudors. The messengers, the old Queen, and the Princess speak here directly to the audience, “around” the play’s ostensible setting in the time of Richard III, possibly accompanied by the whole company. This comes as close to a “communal” moment as is possible in the professional theater. Connected to earlier moments, such as the induction and the Report scene, it is a moment that demystifies its own history-making by showing it to be the work of the players on stage. Through this demystification, The True Tragedy of Richard III participates in the larger way in which the Queen’s Men promulgate a new kind of historical consciousness. The sine qua non of this new consciousness is the realization, enabled by the theatrical experience of history, that a sense of the past is always the product of a collaborative effort between those who produce and receive it.

coda: repetition and textual history One might have expected the return of the opening frame figures, Truth and Poetry, at the end of The True Tragedy of Richard III to deliver these closing words and to give the play a sense of symmetry. Instead, as we have seen, the text offers speech prefixes for two undifferentiated messengers (both given as “Mess.”), and the Queen Mother and Princess Elizabeth. McMillin and MacLean, in their conjecture about the play’s casting, suggest that the same actor played Poetry, the Page, and one of the messengers in the final scene. If this is true, one actor would have played three roles that each involved some theatrically self-conscious speeches, thus establishing that player as a medium for metatheatrical reflection on history-making throughout the play. McMillin and MacLean also assign Truth and the Queen Mother to one actor, which implies a boy actor and could affirm the femaleness of “Truth” as discussed earlier. This doubling would also have

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the effect of making this player a figure who addresses the audience at both the start and finish of the play.46 We might well be puzzled or disappointed that the text does not indicate that Truth and Poetry return at the end to deliver these closing words and give the play neat closure. This can be chalked up as another instance of a haphazard text. I want, in fact, to close this chapter with some thoughts on the sloppiness of the text of The True Tragedy of Richard III and its relation to the comments on the play I’ve offered here. As I mentioned above, the 1594 quarto has been excoriated by most critics and editors who have written on it. The assumption among many seems to be that it is a “bad quarto” of a performance. Some have even suggested that it is a memorial reconstruction of the Queen’s Men play by a print “pirate” who drew on Shakespeare’s Richard III to fill in gaps here and there. While the “piracy theory” of textual transmission has been largely discredited, it is useful for a moment to recall the term that is often employed in such theories to describe the person who shamelessly dictates the material heard in the theater to a printer, a term that we’ve considered extensively already: a “reporter.”47 In the most recent consideration of The True Tragedy of Richard III’s text, McMillin and MacLean discard the pernicious “bad quarto” theory and assert instead that the text of The True Tragedy of Richard III was in fact companyauthorized. They agree with the bad-quarto theorists, though, that its transmission was oral and, thus, subject to aural mistakes. They hypothesize that the text was constructed through dictation from actors to scribe and that the oddities of the text result from “mishearings,”48 both of prose for verse and vice versa, and for specific items such as the name “Marcus” printed for “Marques.” In either case, whether the text was produced by so-called pirates or by the company itself, it seems likely that it came to be through a process of reporting and repetition. The at-times-garbled result shows the perils of such forms of communication. If we want to think seriously about The True Tragedy of Richard III, though, this text is all we have to go on in order to try to construct some sense of what a performance of it may have looked like. This recognition is similar to the processes involved in establishing and maintaining a historical culture more generally, when scraps of incomplete, unintelligible or incoherent evidence is often all we have to go on in our attempts to make a narrative of a historical event. It is a recognition that is made self-consciously in the play, from different ends, when Poetry describes its work as shadows and when Truth realizes it cannot add bodies to such shadows without “wending” with the potentially falsifying work of Poetry. In the end, we can return to a final consideration of the three terms that have animated this reading of The True Tragedy of Richard III: Truth,

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Poetry, and Report. “Truth,” which seemed to want to take over sole possession of the stage, is, I believe, attenuated by the other two terms. For although all these terms are given “prosopopoetic” embodiments in the play, there is a crucial difference among them. Truth is only an abstraction; poetry and report can be practices. In the final analysis, history cannot be a synonym for Truth. History only ever exists in practice, the “perpetual renovation” of which Bacon speaks. History is dependent on acts of repetition, and, as the actions within the play and the text of the play itself make evident, repetition, like all human practices, is imperfect. Such acts do produce the frames of reference – the chronicles, poems, and plays – through which we can glimpse, albeit darkly, the faded “pictures” of the past for which we long to have contact. In addition to its place in The Arte of English Poesie, the term “report” can be found in one more record from the late 1580s that we noted earlier: the Stationer’s Register. An entry from August 15, 1586, reads, “A tragical Report of King Richard the Third, a Ballad.” No such “ballad” is extant. A nineteenth-century scholar once pondered this entry and noted that the word “ballad” was loose enough to sometimes refer to a play. F. G. Fleay then offered, and eventually retracted, the suggestion that this entry could refer to The True Tragedy of Richard III.49 This theory is little known because no one since Fleay has pressed it. But it is tempting to keep this speculation alive for it suggests the impact that Report – the character and the concept – may have had in reception of the play. If the entry does refer to an earlier version of The True Tragedy of Richard III, Report’s brief appearance in the play may have impressed whoever entered the work in the Register enough that he is alluded to in the title along with King Richard. But this, like so much else within and about The True Tragedy of Richard III, is just another example of how traces of the past endlessly stimulate our imaginations and elude our desire for descriptive precision. not es 1. Francis Bacon, “The Proficiency and Advancement of Learning,” in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, reprinted from the texts and translations, with the notes and prefaces of Ellis and Spedding, ed. John M. Robertson (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 74. 2. Bacon, “The Proficiency and Advancement of Learning,” p. 74. 3. Bacon, “The Proficiency and Advancement of Learning,” p. 73. 4. Thomas Heywood uses the phrase “personated” to describe performance in his treatise An Apology For Actors (1612). Quoted in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 251.

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5. Julian Koslow comments interestingly on this passage from Bacon in his valuable essay “Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster,” English Literary History, 73 (2006): 119–159. 6. Eric Sams insinuates that Shakespeare was in the Queen’s Men, and possibly the author of The True Tragedy of Richard III in The Real Shakespeare (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 58–59 and p. 180. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. IV, p. 44, notes that older critics have posited various dramatists, such as Kyd and Peele, as possible authors. But the question of the authorship of this play, which I pass over here, has provoked little work in the past 100 years or so. 7. Bacon, “The Proficiency and Advancement of Learning,” p. 73. 8. A post-Tarlton date is supported by Lewis Mott’s intriguing argument, in “Foreign Politics in an Old Play,” Modern Philology 19 (1921): 65–71, for a date of late 1589. Mott believes the play was performed for Elizabeth, noting that the Queen’s Men gave a court performance in December 1589 (pp. 66, 71). 9. See, for instance, J. Dover Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third 1594,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 3 (1952): 299–306. One exception to this generalization is George B. Churchill’s interpretive work on the play in Richard the Third Up to Shakespeare (Berlin: Mayer and Muller, 1900). 10. Shakespeare’s Richard III was probably on the boards by 1594. See Richard III, ed. Anthony Hammond (London: Thomas Learning, 2004) p. 83. 11. On this point, see Hammond, Richard III, p. 82. 12. The True Tragedy of Richard III, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), TLN 12, my emphasis. I have retained the edition’s original spelling in all quotations but for convenience have modernized the spelling of the play’s title throughout this essay. 13. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 128. 14. The Iconologia first appeared without illustrations. In 1603, it was published with pictures that corresponded to Ripa’s elaborate descriptions, which were themselves based on a variety of sixteenth-century emblem books that claimed to be setting forth principles derived from classical ideals. For an illustrated English edition of Iconologia that long post-dates The True Tragedy of Richard III, see the Iconologia published in London in 1709 by Benjamin Motte. In this edition, image 243 is “Poetry” and image 311 is “Verity.” On paintings of Clio, see Stuart Hampton-Reeves, “Staring at Clio: Artists, Histories, and CounterHistories,” in Dermot Cavanagh, Hampton-Reeves, and Stephen Longstaffe (eds.), Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 1–5. 15. See John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in the Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) pp. 192, 229. Interestingly enough, Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel, which seeks to vindicate Richard III of the murder of the princes, is titled The Daughter of Time (London: P Davies, 1951). At the bare minimum, the players, anticipating Brecht, could have borne signs with their names written on them.

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16. G. K. Hunter, English Drama, 1586–1642: The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 94. 17. In The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth McLean call the “medley style” a hallmark of the plays of the Queen’s Men. See p. 124 and passim. 18. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. 33, 166. 19. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 33. 20. George Peele, The Old Wives Tale, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), TLN 162–163. 21. Hunter, English Drama, 1586–1642, p. 157. 22. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, pp. 73–85. 23. This effect may be particularly striking in the case of the innkeeper scene: we know that the Queen’s Men did at times perform in inn yards. See McMillin and MacLean on the group’s various non-playhouse performance spaces. 24. For convenience, I have quoted this section from Hall’s reduction of More as it appears in Hammond, Richard III, p. 362. The story appears almost verbatim in Holinshed. 25. See D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 26–36. 26. A great deal of energy – in both scholarly and popular historical studies as well as in works of fiction, such as the novel by Josephine Tey, cited above – has been devoted to the fate of the princes. See, for instance, P. W. Hammond and W. J. White, “The Sons of Edward IV: A Re-examination of the Evidence on their Deaths and on the Bones in Westminster Abbey,” in P. W. Hammond (ed.), Loyalty, Lordship and Law (London: Allan Sutton, 1986) pp. 104–147, as well as A. J. Pollard’s Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). Alison Weir’s The Princes in the Tower (London: Bodley Head, 1992) is a popular history of the matter. Another recent popular history has made a claim for the survival of at least one of the princes: David Baldwin’s The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007) which contends that Edward died a natural death, while Richard survived and lived out his life in obscurity. 27. Churchill, Richard the Third Up to Shakespeare, p. 465. I have come across a use of “report” as a pejorative for false rumor: see John Speed, The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans, etc. (London, 1611), p. 649 in his discussion of the burial of Katherine of Valois, Henry V’s widow. 28. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 198. 29. “Shore’s Wife,” in Campbell’s edition of The Mirror for Magistrates, pp. 373–388. 30. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 33. 31. See also J. A. Symonds, Shakspere’s [sic] Predecessors in the English Drama (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1969), who writes of The True Tragedy: “In form it contains remnants of old rhyming structure, decayed verses of fourteen

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feet, and clumsy prose, pieced and patched with blank verse of very lumbering rhythm” (p. 209). 32. Churchill, Richard the Third Up to Shakespeare, p. 465. 33. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 202. 34. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 239. 35. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 238. 36. Quoted from Gavin Alexander, “Prosopopoeia,” in Sylvia Adamson, Alexander Ettenhuber, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 108. See the review by G. D. Willcock in The Modern Language Review, 32 (1937): 291–293 of a modern edition of Hoskins work for a brief discussion of its circulation in manuscript. 37. On the debate over feigned speeches, see, for example, Grafton, What Was History?, pp. 34–49. 38. On this point, see Bassi, “The Somatics of the Past”, p. 15. 39. Denis Donoghue, “Murray Krieger versus Paul De Man,” in Michael P. Clark (ed.), Revenge of the Aesthetic (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), p. 110. 40. Richard Helgerson, in his article “Weeping for Jane Shore,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 451–476, examines the sixteenth-century tradition of sympathy with this figure. Although it would bolster his argument to discuss it further, he mentions The True Tragedy only in passing in a footnote (note 18). 41. Quoted in Churchill, Richard the Third Up to Shakespeare, p. 396. 42. On “repetition with a difference,” see Joseph Roach, “Kinship, Memory and Intelligence,” in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 217–236. 43. Common players might not seem likely participants in Sidney’s literary circle, but there is at least one direct connection between Sidney and the Queen’s Men: Sidney was godfather to Richard Tarlton’s son, who was named Philip in honor of the dashing courtier-poet. McMillin and MacLean have set forth grounds for further conjecture that Sidney may have known and been known among the Queen’s Men more generally (The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. 29–30). See also Peter Thomson’s entry on Tarlton in the ODNB, ‘Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Available online at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 26971 (accessed May 18, 2009). 44. See Mott, “Foreign Politics in an Old Play,” for a topical approach to this final speech that reads the “antichrist” lines as signaling the defeat of the Armada, and thus suggests a 1589 date for the play. 45. See Norman Rabkin’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1981), as well as Champion’s “Answere to this Perillous Time”. 46. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, p. 191. I owe thanks to Alan Dessen, who, in his response to a version of this essay submitted to the “Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men” conference in Toronto in October 2006,

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challenged me to think further about issues of staging this scene, and about the possibility, discussed early in the chapter, of emblematic costume for some characters in this play. 47. This is the term used by Dover Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third 1594,” p. 304. On criticism of the “piracy” theory, see Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks” in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422. 48. McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, pp. 117–120. 49. Stationer’s Register quoted in Churchill, Richard the Third Up to Shakespeare, p. 395. On the same page, Churchill discusses Fleay and the other scholar’s comments on the entry.

chapter 4

“Unkind division”: the double absence of performing history in 1 Henry VI Shakespeare first comes into being in the records of Elizabethan theater history as a player-poet, thanks to the now famous words of Robert Greene: “there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.”1 Greene’s attack is revealing insofar as it asserts that the conjunction of the two activities – writing and playing – is startling. The style and the content of the Queen’s Men repertory were foundational to Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. We can account for this by speculating, as we did earlier, that Shakespeare joined the Queen’s Men as a player and, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, perhaps apprentice playwright. Greene wrote plays performed by the Queen’s Men, e.g., Selimus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and might have been especially miffed by the writerly pretences of one of his former “puppets.” Apart from making him a threat to the likes of Greene, Shakespeare’s unusual status as player-poet made him especially apt to appreciate the dedication of the Queen’s Men to an audience-oriented style. And, further, to understand that while the skillful manipulation of actors’ bodies was crucial to providing a good show, the skillful manipulation of language was a complement to physical performance that could exponentially expand the pleasures and the power of the theater. Through its parody of lines from the play we now call 2 Henry VI, the Greene quotation connects Shakespeare’s early notoriety specifically with the writing and playing of history. The success of his early history plays is a major component of Shakespeare’s rise to prominence. Whether Shakespeare first came to know the repertory of the Queen’s Men as an outside observer or, as seems more likely, an inside participant, their propensity to stage the past undoubtedly struck a particular chord with him and pointed him on the road to popular acclaim and financial stability. The plays of the Queen’s Men propose a historical consciousness that is itself peculiarly conscious of the effort involved in producing history. It is this insight more than any other that Shakespeare gained from the Queen’s Men repertory and that he employed as 108

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a kind of third rail to energize his early string of works devoted to the medieval English monarchy. Shakespeare seizes on the consciousness of history as a construct that is present in the work of the Queen’s Men and experiments with different ways in which this notion can be used to assess the concept of history. The results of these experiments differ from play to play, as we will see in the remainder of this book. Broadly speaking, though, we can say that Shakespeare expands the insights of the Queen’s Men to show how the performance of history does not merely reveal the conditions of historical culture but that it can also intervene in it and help shape how his audience (and audiences to come) could imaginatively and practically participate in its creation and sustenance. This chapter explores the particular instance of 1 Henry VI. Scholars often point to Thomas Nashe’s famous remarks about the dramatization of Talbot’s death in 1 Henry VI, in which Nashe claims that “ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times) […] imagine they behold him fresh bleeding” as broadly indicative of both the growing popularity of history plays and their potential to edify audiences.2 Shakespeare’s role in popularizing the history play has been well established, but the particular place of 1 Henry VI, the play to which Nashe refers, has received less consideration in the story of the history play’s development. An early reflection on its genre, 1 Henry VI takes up a thread from the repertory of the Queen’s Men and anatomizes the history play’s capacity to both meet and vex the desire to feel connected to the past. Henry VI, Part 1 proposes that to perform history in the Elizabethan popular theater is not to render the past more accessible but to stage a confrontation with history’s elusiveness that is both troubling and teeming with possibility. I consider here how history and performance are characterized in 1 Henry VI as fraught, mutually destabilizing concepts. This joint destabilization is most evident in the rhetoric of succession as it is deployed in the play. Performances of the past on the early modern stage invariably engage issues of biological, political, and cultural succession, the means by which temporal continuity is promised despite human mortality. Henry VI, Part 1 conflates disruptions in succession with the inability to sustain historical representation in performance. Both lineal succession, as a mode of organizing historical narrative, and performance, as a form of presenting the past, break down throughout the play, revealing the limits of political genealogy, in the rhetoric of power and in the staging of history, for creating historical coherence. While Henry V stands today as one of Shakespeare’s best-known history plays, and the earlier Henry VI plays among his least known, this discrepancy did not obtain in Shakespeare’s lifetime.3 Henry V closes with a sonnet

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that sketches out the demise of the victories just depicted by alluding to the Wars of the Roses and the Henry VI plays, which were popular enough in their own time to warrant the reference: “Which oft our stage hath shown” (Epilogue.13). Henry V ends by reminding audiences of what’s to come, and 1 Henry VI begins by reminding audiences of what’s already happened. At the funeral of King Henry V which opens 1 Henry VI, Gloucester recalls an idealized age when England’s Henry V “ne’er lift up his hand but conquered” (I.i.16). This sets a trend for the play, for 1 Henry VI continually diverts our attention from the past that is being enacted to a further past that is out of reach for both theater audiences and the characters onstage. The Elizabethan audiences attending performances of 1 Henry VI watched enactments of an absent history that was itself infused with nostalgia for an absent past.4 This gloomy aesthetic of longing did not deter audiences from enjoying 1 Henry VI. Philip Henslowe’s theatrical records confirm the suggestion in the Henry V Epilogue that 1 Henry VI was a commercial success.5 In addition to these business records for 1 Henry VI, there is the previously mentioned reference by Nashe to its performance. Given the paucity of materials that document contemporary response to Elizabethan plays, Nashe’s account in Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell makes this play an important site for considering issues of performance in Shakespeare. In a section devoted to an apology for the stage, Nashe emphasizes that plays took place in “open presence” and claims that theatrical engagements with history were a means of teaching virtue, asking what, besides history plays, “can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours?”6 Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell moves from this general defense of staging history to particular citation of Talbot’s end in 1 Henry VI. Nashe’s enthusiastic praise of Talbot’s valiant stage death suggests that Shakespeare’s play moved audiences by vividly “reviving” the past, showing the brave Talbot “fresh bleeding” as he dies at the hands of the French.7 The play itself, however, renders the idea of “revival” through performance highly problematic, as does Nashe’s own description if considered fully. I will return to a longer consideration of Nashe’s comments on 1 Henry VI. For now I want simply to suggest that in the practice of mounting stage histories, and in particular 1 Henry VI, this contemporary reference locates a hope for salutary revival tinctured with the sense of history from which it supposedly breaks free: the history recounted in the “worme-eaten” sources of history plays.8 This idea of history as fragmentary and threatened by, rather than conquering, oblivion is at work in both Nashe’s prose and Shakespeare’s play. Henry VI, Part 1 implicates the

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performance of history in an occluded idea of pastness and stymies the notion that performance, in “open presence,” can deliver a patriotically or epistemologically transcendent vision of, or feeling for, the past. As I will suggest here, we must look beyond traditional explanations for the history play’s appeal for a more nuanced sense of the pleasure such plays afford and the power they exercise; beyond, that is, the easy answers that they merely excite national pride or that they actually satisfy the need for historical revival. succeeding henry It is not surprising that Shakespeare began his dramatic engagement with the English past with plays set in the time of King Henry VI. This figure’s tumultuous reign is sandwiched between those of Henry V and Richard III, the title figures in the Queen’s Men plays Shakespeare knew so well. The three Henry VI plays allow Shakespeare to cover new ground that might appeal to the desire of playgoers to fill in the blanks between the Henry V and Richard III stories they had seen enacted. Superficially, then, the Henry VI plays complement the repertory of the Queen’s Men. Shakespeare thus provides a dramaturgical link between the reigns of successive kings for the theatergoers of early modern London. Practically, though, links in the chain of succession are nearly always under strain in Shakespeare’s representation of authority, irrespective of genre. The problem of succession takes on special significance in the histories because historical succession suggests the possibility of a connection between the performed past and the performative present, links, as it were, in the chain from then to now. Henry VI, Part 1 uses narratives of succession and their disruption both to suggest and frustrate notions of continuity between the present and the past. Henry VI, Part 1 is, as numerous studies have argued, a play about crumbling structures of authority and stability.9 The language of loss and the desire for some form of recuperation shapes the play. Talbot’s exclamation after one of the many shifts in momentum during the French wars – “Lost, and recovered in a day again!” (III.ii.115) – is emblematic of the play’s concern with notions of loss and recovery as organizing principles for the story it tells. The term “loss” and its cognates proliferate with a frequency that suggests loss is meant to resonate thematically. Indeed, “loss” or “lost” appear five times within just ten lines in the play’s first scene (I.i.59–68), asserting the symbolic importance of the concept from the start. But one particular moment late in the play, worthy of mention for invoking the precarious state of Henry V’s victories, is Sir William Lucy’s bitter reflection

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on the English decline, as England stands poised to lose both its possessions in France and its great hero Talbot: Sleeping neglection doth betray to loss The conquest of our scarce-cold conqueror, That ever-living man of memory, Henry the Fift. Whiles they [the English nobility] each other cross, Lives, honor, lands, and all, hurry to loss. (IV.iii.49–53)

Lucy’s dark words, framed by “loss” at the end of the first and last lines quoted, point both to the idea of loss as central to the play and to its specific connection with the figure of Henry V. The caesura that occurs after the mention of his name allows time for a pause that itself is a silent space to “hear” that loss. The “ever-living man of memory” (the phrase is itself a temporal paradox) is constructed throughout this play as what the present lacks, and, somewhat akin to the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the idea of this great king and the consequences of his death hover over and haunt the proceedings of 1 Henry VI. The sense of loss that is woven into the verbal patterns of the play begins with the disruption that Henry V’s death produces, and it coheres around the idea of pastness that he represents. The opening scene of 1 Henry VI posits memorialization as a strategy for coping with cultural disintegration. The play begins as the body of King Henry V, “too famous to live long” (I.i.6), is brought onstage in a coffin, the visible presence of a debilitating absence. As the dead King is eulogized by his advisers and family members, descriptions veer from the fantastic (“His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings” [I.i.11]) toward the sacrosanct (“He was a king blest of the King of kings” [I.i.28]) and at one point seem to run aground on the limits of language, as Gloucester proclaims: “His deeds exceed all speech” (I.i.15). This sense of limitation is not observed, however, even by Gloucester, for the praise continues until the moment the speakers descend into bickering and self-conscious predictions that even in the minor “jars” (I.i.44) at King Henry’s funeral a picture of future strife can be discerned. In the play’s first fifty lines, Henry V is sentimentalized as representing the irrecoverable past that stands in contrast to the anxious present and the sinister future. His loss, as established at the dramatic outset, is a hole, a great “O” perhaps, into which England is sinking.10 In Chapter 1, I noted that the twentieth-century playwright Heiner Müller speaks of a desire at the heart of drama to forge a “dialogue with the dead.” Bedford explicitly yearns for such a dialogue, exclaiming, “Henry the Fift, thy ghost I invocate: / Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils” (I.i.52–53). The difficulty of establishing such communication is almost

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immediately acknowledged, for Bedford’s attempted invocation is interrupted by a messenger bearing tidings of England’s military disasters in France, where English holdings “are all quite lost” (I.i.61). In an almost comical compounding of the sense of doom, two additional messengers arrive with more ill news from France. The portrait of family strife and cracked stability, coupled with the presence of nuntius figures bringing news of catastrophe lends an aura of Greek tragedy to the beginning of 1 Henry VI, particularly discernible in Bedford’s dark prophecy: Posterity, await for wretched years, When at their mothers’ moist’ned eyes babes shall suck, Our isle be made a nourish of salt tears, And none but women left to wail the dead

(I.i.48–51)

Foreboding prophecies such as Bedford’s are common in this play, and none is more pithy than one from Exeter in mid-play, as he recalls a homely formulation that neatly articulates what the opening of 1 Henry VI suggests: “Henry born at Monmouth [Henry V] should win all, / And Henry born at Windsor [Henry VI] lose all” (III.i.197–98). The play’s first scene offers a formula for disaster, as factions and the loss of effective leadership define the English nobility. Succession is one hope the play holds out but then retracts as a means of coping with the troubled present. The view of English history as a tragedy of degeneration is momentarily altered by the glimmer of hope represented in Lord Talbot. His story, relayed by the third messenger, “displaces” the death of Henry V from our attention.11 This displacement suggests some light emerging from the darkness of the French wars, for even as it describes Talbot’s capture, it asserts his heroism, a match or successor perhaps to the loss figured by the casket onstage. The first messenger invokes the absent Talbot in this early moment in the play and, in doing so, diverts attention from the present spectacle of in-fighting and toward the potential stability and historical continuity Talbot represents. If there is one constant in this play, however, it is that succession is a fraught concept. For just as King Henry V was unable to pass his merit on to his young son, so Talbot, too, fails to supply the place of the deceased Henry. While clearly the play’s putative “hero” and its moral center, Talbot is nonetheless implicated in the constant caprice of fortune that marks the play, the swing of momentum between the English and the French, summed up by Joan de Pucelle’s phrase “Turn and turn again!” (III.iii.85). Joan’s language elsewhere captures the play’s commitment to disrupting historical stability:

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Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men Assign’d am I to be the English scourge. […] Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. With Henry [V]’s death the English circle ends, Dispersed are the glories it included.

(I.ii.129–137)

Talbot himself speaks what might be an epigraph for this chaotic play, when, having been bested by Joan in a brief combat, he exclaims, “My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel” (I.v.19). Henry VI, Part 1’s vision of an unstable world is perhaps best mapped through Talbot, whose trajectory from humiliated captive to sporadically triumphant warrior to slain hero holds within it many of the play’s most prominent themes. For in Talbot, whose story culminates in an enactment of thwarted succession, we see the play reaching for some sort of stability, a point of historical continuity that appears only to vanish, like the Ghost at the start of Hamlet – “’Tis here! / ’Tis here! / ’Tis gone!” Talbot is never fully compromised by the ominous world of the play, but his heroism is slightly undermined, both in his petty refusal to be ransomed by men of lower rank (I.iv.30–33) and in the image conveyed in the Countess of Auvergne’s disdainful description of him as a “weak and writhled [wrinkled] shrimp” (II.iii.23). The play proposes him as a center for the disordered world but shows us his struggle to maintain any sense of stability or control. His status is always in doubt. He is particularly equivocal about issues of presence and public display. When describing his time as a prisoner of the French, he recalls that “in open marketplace produc’d they me / To be a public spectacle to all” (I.iv.40–41) and remembers this as the worst form of punishment he endured. To be shown publicly, to be displayed and made a spectacle by his captors is an almost unbearable torture. When Salisbury, himself a link to the glorious past, for “Henry the Fift he first train’d to the wars” (I.iv.79), is slain ignominiously by a French boy and his linstock, Talbot orders that a memorial to him be erected. But he also seeks to memorialize his comrade by publicly displaying his corpse: “Bring forth the body of old Salisbury, / And here advance it in the market-place, / The middle centure of this cursed town” (II.ii.4–6). Christopher Pye reads Talbot’s decision to exhibit Salisbury’s corpse in the marketplace as an act of critical “revision.”12 This insight reveals that shame or glory for Talbot is not inherent in public presentation but is rather a variable result conditioned by shifting contexts.

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The anamorphic view of public display seen in Talbot’s earliest scenes is indicative of Talbot’s character, which comes in and out of focus as alternately the “terror of the French” (I.iv.42), the last vestige of ancient English warrior nobility, and the hapless old general, the “weak and writhled shrimp” who in the play’s whirligig of battles is defeated and sent fleeing almost as often as he conquers. That the figure of Talbot is slippery is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his complicated, riddling wordplay with the Countess of Auvergne. The strange scene of Talbot’s meeting with the Countess has been dismissed by some critics as an unstructured intrusion of the romantic into the historical.13 Alternatively, Phyllis Rackin reads this scene in terms of its implications for the gendering of historical narrative. Women in the play, Joan and the Countess in particular, are, for Rackin, “antihistorians.”14 The Countess entices Talbot into captivity precisely in order to negate the history he has made and continues to make at the expense of French lives and property. Rackin sees in 1 Henry VI a pervasive attempt to figure female characters as “reductive” and “nominalist” in their efforts to annul the history that English men attempt to script through their actions.15 Just as prominent here is the infusion of a theatrical sensibility. The Countess lures Talbot to her castle, insults him bitterly, and claims him as her prisoner. “Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me, / For in my gallery thy picture hangs; / But now the substance shall endure the like” (III.iii.36–38). Talbot responds, “You are deceiv’d, my substance is not here” (III.iii.51). The Countess is astonished to hear him say he is not truly present: “He will be here, and yet he is not here. / How can these contrarieties agree?” (III.iii.58–59). Talbot then explains that he is but a “shadow” of himself, his real “substance” being his army (III.iii.62–63), which enters to his rescue. Talbot’s denial of presence deepens the interplay between shadow and substance that the scene brings forward. Talbot’s image, then, precedes his visit to the Countess, but even after his arrival, he is not fully there. It has been said that “disappearance [is] a phenomenological given of all performance.”16 Talbot embodies this given throughout the play. As the putative center of the fractured world the play depicts, Talbot emerges long before his death as already a ghostly figure, one whose presence and absence seem always to be almost concomitant. Emrys Jones and others have noted the theatrical language of the scenes involving the Countess or her servants, from “plot” (II.iii.4) and “acts” (II.ii.35) right down to the word shadow itself, a synonym for actor in the period.17 Jones argues that the scene offers a contrast “between the fame of the historical Talbot in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience and the ‘shape’ it assumes, reincarnated by the

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actor, in the present play.”18 This scene with the Countess enforces the play’s artificiality as a representation of the past, but it is also a comment on the performance of history that it presents. The scene’s reference to theatricality threatens the integrity of the play’s historical representation: Talbot’s insistence that he is but “Talbot’s shadow” (III.iii.46) momentarily appears as an instance of alea, an unexpected interruption of the play as mimesis, which upsets the Countess’s and the play’s coherence as an enactment of the past. Talbot’s claim that he enjoys a corporate identity is both a nod to “chivalric community” and an acknowledgment that the Talbot onstage is a product of the communal event of theater.19 Talbot and the Countess reach a strange, uneasy truce after his army storms the castle. Talbot insists that he is “not offended” by the Countess and the Countess insists that she is “honored / To feast so great a warrior in [her] house” (II.iii.76, 82). Their compromise precludes further unpleasantness between them and allows the play to continue, but it cannot wholly mend the rupture that the scene has produced. It instead suspends skepticism in favor of pursuing the, perhaps sexual, desire that is an undercurrent of the scene. In this, the truce mirrors the dynamics of performing the past. The desire to enact and to watch history ensures that the performances will continue, despite their artificiality and obvious fictiveness. Talbot’s ambiguous attitudes toward the “open market-place” and toward the play of shadows and substance indicate his fluctuating perception of his own status as an agent of history and his difficulties in being the ostensible successor to the great English “lions” of the past. When Talbot claims his army is his substance, it is difficult not to think of the words with which he berated his men shortly before: “Sheep run not half so treacherous from the wolf, / Or horse or oxen from the leopard, / As you fly from your oft-subdued slaves” (I.v.30–32). For Talbot to assert that his army is his substance when his relation to the soldiers is volatile and at times even hostile suggests his own shifting sense of self. His sense of events, “Whirled like a potter’s wheel,” alternates between an idea of mastery arising from self-control and a troubling fear that he is at the disposal of more powerful forces. “Heavens, can you suffer hell so to prevail?” (I.v.9), he cries, as his troops retreat and he engages Joan in single combat. The Countess’s incredulous question about the “here and not here” status of the man who stands before her defines how fragile is Talbot’s place as a locus of stability in the play’s world. The “contrariety” of the here and not here is, further, a figure for the ambivalent relation of the present and the past generated by 1 Henry VI. Like Talbot, the past represented here is both present and not present, shadow and substance, and, as we will see, the past

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in this play is invoked only to be shelved in favor of an indeterminate, idealized past that is always receding. Succession promises a link between generations that might seal the gaps in the flow of historical time. Talbot represents a generalized idea of succession, filling the place of Henry V, while Talbot’s son John represents a literal succession, in which the son succeeds the father. And yet the enactment of Talbot’s death announces with grim clarity that succession is precarious, for when he dies, he holds in his arms the body of his dead son: “Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave” (IV.vii.32). The scene of their demise, with both Talbot and his son refusing to flee the battle, each knowing that staying will mean death, guarantees their place in history as heroes. They privilege their historical legacy over the capacity to “be” and make more history. As their dialogue reveals, they believe that the future, absent narrative of their deeds takes priority over a continuing living presence: talbot: Upon my blessing I command thee go. john: To fight I will, but not to fly the foe. talbot: Part of thy father may be sav’d in thee. john: No part of him but will be shame in me. talbot: Thou never hadst renown, nor canst not lose it. john: Yes, your renowned name. Shall flight abuse it? talbot: Thy father’s charge shall clear thee from that stain. john: You cannot witness for me, being slain. If death be so apparent, then both fly. talbot: And leave my followers here to fight and die? My age was never tainted with such shame.

(IV.v.36–46)

Their choice to remain on the battlefield is an explicit counterpoint to this play’s version of the cowardly John Falstaff, who twice retreats from battle and leaves his fellows in danger (I.i.131–136; III.ii.104–109), for which he is publicly shamed and stripped of his honors (IV.i.13–47). The language of the exchange between Talbot and his son, however, goes beyond simply affirming that staying is the morally honorable thing to do. It raises questions of legitimacy, fame, witness, and lineal succession. Talbot insists that part of him will be preserved if his son lives, an argument that John rejects because he fears that by surviving the battle he would mar his father’s name. The painful spectacle of their conversation and eventual deaths, drawn out over two separate scenes which are virtually identical, has obvious affective potential.20 The decision that young and old Talbot make to die in battle no doubt signifies as heroic, but, I would argue, it is simultaneously

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problematic because of the cultural and political void their deaths create. Alexander Leggatt, focusing on the form of their dialogue, suggests that the rhyming heroic couplets produce “the effect not just of heightening the scene by stylizing it, but of making the Talbots seem boxed in, stymied.”21 Consistent with Leggatt’s sense of this formal effect is the terrible and inescapable paradox that the situation presents. The qualities that make Talbot and his son heroic also make it unthinkable for them to do anything that might prolong their lives for future heroic deeds.22 Father and son do offer each other ways to preserve the integrity of the family name and to promote the greater good of the commonweal through one of them escaping. John says to his father: “Your loss is great, so your regard should be; / My worth unknown, no loss is known in me. / Upon my death the French can little boast; / In yours they will, in you all hopes are lost” (IV.v.22–25). In the next scene Talbot declares: If I to-day die not with Frenchmen’s rage, To-morrow I shall die with mickle age. By me they nothing gain and if I stay, ’Tis but the short’ning of my life one day. In thee thy mother dies, our household’s name, My death’s revenge, thy youth, and England’s fame.

(IV.vi.34–39)

According to the son, the Talbot name as invested in the father is what must be preserved; his death signals that “all hopes are lost.” According to the father, the line should be preserved in the natural succession of youth. Talbot explains that he is old and ready to die, but young John holds the potential to avenge Talbot’s death and restore “England’s fame.” Both father and son offer each other compelling logical reasons why the other should flee and propose solutions to the shame that flight might confer by looking to future benefits. Namely, they each point to the maintenance of the “household’s name” and the reimposition of English rule in France, things that can occur only if one of them survives. Their resolution to die together constitutes a choice to forgo the continuity they both represent as potential successors: Talbot to Henry V and John to that generation through his father. Succession and the social stability it ensures are disrupted when father and son perish together. Their decision is figured as simultaneously heroic and questionable. It is made more ambiguous in John’s case by his more natural title to succession. His decision to die is connected to the recklessness of youth by mythological allusions to Icarus, to whom Talbot twice compares his son (IV.vi.55; IV. vii.16). This association with Icarus, a symbol for youthful inexperience and

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dangerously self-indulgent ambition, dilutes the heroism of young Talbot’s refusal to flee insurmountable odds, suggesting that a prideful stubbornness lies at the heart of his desire for a glorious death. His refusal to care for his safety and perhaps for vengeance, as Talbot suggests (IV.v.18), is at once noble and deeply troubling because it extinguishes hopes for stability and recuperation through succession. John Talbot cannot carry on his father’s tradition because he chooses to die with him, a decision that affirms he is Talbot’s son and negates his ability to use his inherited nobility for the good of the commonweal. Meanwhile, young King Henry VI has failed to inherit his father’s gift for leadership, and even the play’s putative villain, Joan de Pucelle, repudiates her lineage at the moment of her death, denying that the humble shepherd who comes to see her is her father (V.iv.21–22). The pattern of broken succession in 1 Henry VI reveals the play’s interest in exploring the problematic question of stability and historical continuity. In the end, Talbot is unable to give England victory over France, as King Henry V did at Agincourt. Talbot’s death signals the end of the English lions whose primary allegiance was supposedly to their country’s honor. Perversely, one way in which Talbot does finally replicate Henry V is in his failure to leave behind him an heir who will perpetuate the traditions of the old English nobility. More generally, the play’s mode of presenting Talbot and then his son as potential successors provides a temporary distraction from the ominous tone set in the opening scene. This strategy of distraction is attenuated by the vagaries of the scene with the Countess, undoes itself in the scene of the Talbots’ death, and thus works continually to displace audience focus, directing attention elsewhere for some link between past and present. Richard, Duke of York, might provide a counterweight to Talbot’s loss, but his own implication in a sectarian quagmire soon produces another instance where the hope of succession expires. factionalism and the rhetoric of genealogy The Talbots’ deaths are clearly linked to the factionalism that is one of the play’s most salient features. Sign and cause of England’s ruin, factionalism is also a dramatic method of introducing contested histories. The conflict between York and Somerset that prevents aid to Talbot is explicitly identified as the cause of the Talbots’ plight and complicates Talbot’s belief that “malignant and ill-boding stars” (IV.v.6) are to blame. The play posits sectarian rifts – humanly constructed “second” causes – as an alternative to providence or sorcery, also commonly invoked as the driving forces of

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human events in this play. The play’s idea of causation is in fact rooted largely in factionalism, which is enacted in the bickering at King Henry’s funeral and specifically mentioned by the first messenger in Act I, who chides the English nobility: Amongst the soldiers this is muttered, That here you maintain several factions; And whilst a field should be dispatch’d and fought, You are disputing of your generals.

(I.i.70–73)

This pattern is recognized by many figures in the play, as when Exeter adds his own reading of the factional splits: “But more, when envy breeds unkind division: / There comes the ruin, there begins confusion” (IV.i.193–194); Lucy refers to the same pattern in words quoted above – “Whiles they [the English nobility] each other cross, / Lives, honor, lands, and all hurry to loss” – seeing factionalism as directly contributing to Talbot’s death and the English demise. Sectarian rifts in the play tend to be organized around allegiances to opposing interpretations of genealogy. The repeated highlighting of factionalism is a way to broach the problem of historical continuity. Factionalism, then, produces multiple histories in 1 Henry VI, for it implies an inability to reach consensus on the meaning of lines of succession. Factionalism serves as an engine for historical inquiry, as in the opening quarrel between Gloucester and Winchester over Henry V’s relation to the church (I.i.28–44) and Plantagenet’s subsequent visit to his dying uncle Mortimer (II.v), who, we will see, delivers a history lesson worthy of a chronicler. In the famous garden scene, discourses of factionalism introduce multiple histories, a dramatic technique that forces the audience’s perspective away from what is happening onstage in search of something else that might help to explain the deficiencies of the enacted present. The scene in London’s Temple Garden (II.iv) relocates the action of the play from the battlefields of France to a more discursive realm and introduces the next generation of English nobles. In this scene, Shakespeare invents a moment of origin for the symbols of the Lancaster and York families, the red and the white rose. But as with any attempt to posit origins, this scene points backward as well as forward, asking inevitable questions of preorigins. These men are not, like the young Talbot, being “trained to the wars” but are, rather, honing their rhetorical skills and their command of genealogy. This moment in the play underscores the cultural shift implied by John Talbot’s dying with his father, as sons now prove their lineage through verbal wrangling rather than martial action. The scene revolves

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around a never-explained legal debate between Plantagenet (later York) and Somerset, a serious rift that will eventually contribute to the “civil broils” of the Wars of the Roses. As the debate over a point of law escalates, Somerset recalls the past in order to discredit Plantagenet: Was not thy father, Richard Earl of Cambridge, For treason executed in our late king’s days? And by his treason, stand’st not thou attainted, Corrupted, and exempt from ancient gentry? His trespass yet lives guilty in thy blood.

(II.iv.90–94)

Plantagenet’s pedigree, defensively adduced by Warwick a few lines earlier, links Plantagenet to perhaps the greatest lion in English history, Edward III: “His grandfather was Lionel Duke of Clarence, / Third son to the third Edward, King of England” (83–84). The evidently irrelevant legal debate then gives way to a debate over Plantagenet’s place in the lines of royal succession. This “jar” drives Plantagenet’s own interest in his past. The idea of restoration or reinstatement comes to occupy Plantagenet’s story and is in fact first suggested by his enemy Somerset: “Till thou be restor’d, thou art a yeoman” (II.iv.95). This taunt inspires him to seek out answers from his dying uncle Mortimer. In a line designed to invite a history lesson, Plantagenet declares he is “ignorant” of the course of recent English history, allowing Mortimer to hold forth: Henry the Fourth, grandfather to this king [Henry VI], Deposed his nephew Richard, Edward’s son, The first begotten and the lawful heir, Of Edward king, the third of that descent: During whose reign the Percies of the north, Finding his usurpation most unjust, Endeavor’d my advancement to the throne: The reason mov’d these warlike lords to this Was, for that (young King Richard thus remov’d, Leaving no heir begotten of his body) I was the next by birth and parentage; For by my mother I derived am From Lionel Duke of Clarence, the third son To King Edward the Third; whereas he From John of Gaunt doth bring his pedigree, Being but fourth of that heroic line. But mark: as in this haughty attempt They labored to plant the rightful heir, I lost my liberty and they their lives. Long after this, when Henry the Fift,

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(II.v.61–92)

Shakespeare was familiar with the recitation of genealogy from plays in the Queen’s Men repertory. We have seen that, in The Famous Victories of Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury helps King Henry mount his claim to the French throne with these words: “Your right to the French crown of France came by your great-grandmother, Isabel, wife to King Edward the third, and sister to Charles, the French King” (IX.53–56). We have seen, too, Truth’s recitation of the descent of Richard III in the opening of The True Tragedy of Richard III, and the series of speeches with which it concludes, in which the Tudor line is declaimed. Here, Mortimer’s history of the English monarchy from Richard II to Henry VI, with its description of his family’s disenfranchisement from the throne, helps to bring to light some relevant historical background. But more crucially, it underlines the sense of loss and the desire for recuperation at the heart of historical narration. It is Mortimer’s fondest wish that his nephew Plantagenet “might recover what was lost” (II.v.32); that is, regain the family title that was usurped by Bolingbroke. He tells him: “Thou art my heir” (II.v.96). Speaking the genealogy is his final act, as though he had held off death just long enough to pass on the family history to his nephew. Mortimer is hopeful that speaking his genealogy will lead Plantagenet to fix the broken line. Attention to precise lineal descent is held out as a saving grace, for, as Mortimer contemptuously notes, Henry IV is derived from John of Gaunt, thus “being but fourth of that heroic line” of Edward III (emphasis added). As the scion of the proper heirs to Edward III, another idealized figure of past stability, Plantagenet will presumably restore strength and virtue to the English throne and harmony to the land. Of course, nothing like harmonious balance is achieved through restoring the proper birth order for the kingship. Apart from the fact that his quest for the throne wreaks havoc on the country, as the Henry VI plays make clear, it is Plantagenet’s own son, Richard Gloucester, who will emerge as the most infamous and dangerous

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of all English kings. The chaos of the Henry VI plays in fact works to make Mortimer’s hope of stability through adherence to lineal descent ironic. A remarkable feature of Mortimer’s speech is its sheer length. Its performance involves a significant expenditure of stage time. Genealogical information written in prose, in books, can be skipped over if it fails to interest a reader, but that is not so easy an option in the theater. What would audiences have made of this moment? The speech is not in itself poetically interesting, but a skilled player could always deliver the lines in an engaging way. In Richard II, Shakespeare will later have a character insist that the words of dying men carry special force, and Mortimer is clear even before Plantagenet arrives that he is dying. It is possible to imagine that Mortimer’s speech claims audience attention as such an instance where privileged wisdom is passed on. As an alternate version of the Talbots’ dying scene, perhaps the sight of the older generation passing as the younger one comes into a consciousness of duty and lives on was a moving spectacle. But it is also possible to imagine the speech being an exercise in obfuscation and the arcane. The speech could thus have had a stultifying effect, perhaps even making audiences feel distant from the action and the players in this moment. Critics routinely assume that Canterbury’s infamous exposition of the Salique Law in Henry V, which involves a good deal of genealogical information, is meant to be dry, confusing, even comical. Is Mortimer’s speech supposed to be comical as well, or is it supposed to make sense as a driving element of the plot? Plantagenet’s own reaction to the speech is moved amazement and newfound determination: And for those wrongs, those bitter injuries, Which Somerset hath offer’d to my house: I doubt not but with honor to redress; And therefore haste I to the parliament, Either to be restored to my blood, Or make my will th’ advantage of my good.

(II.v.124–129)

But whether audiences would find a genealogy that challenges the status quo as inspiring as Plantagenet does is another question. They could easily have found it dull, or exciting but alarming. Genealogy in succession debates in the sixteenth century was inevitably partisan. Those that produced them did so to promote particular candidates, or perhaps mainly to discredit rivals. In this sense, genealogies lose force as an underlying, master historical narrative and become tools in factional arsenals. I believe Plantagenet’s awakening to a sense of family destiny would signify as a radically individualistic move, a perverted use of history to achieve personal goals. After 1571, it was illegal in

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England to openly discuss matters of Elizabeth’s succession. The publication of genealogies by figures like John Leslie in 1584 and Robert Parsons in the mid-1590s were affronts to the official Elizabethan order, for they showed just how messy and confusing family lines can be and introduced the prospect of ordinary citizens speculating on the consequences of the Queen’s death. Such narrative and visual depictions of a family tree suggest enough rival “branches” and crowded “boughs,” enough alternate “fruit” to unsettle any sense that lineal descent can be a lucid explanation of how the past leads to the present status quo.23 Critical inquiry into genealogy was a gateway to chaos. Plantagenet is “restored” by the young King Henry VI. He becomes Duke of York (III.i.168–172). York, as I will now call this character, begins his claim to the throne based on the genealogy outlined by Mortimer. This action leads to the destructive and bloody civil wars that embroiled England for much of the fifteenth century. Looming over York’s reinstatement is the dark shadow of civil wars to come. In one of the many sinister moments of planned disruption in the series of Henry VI plays, York, alone on stage in 2 Henry VI, speaks of a plan to create mayhem through deliberate misuse of family histories: I have seduc’d a headstrong Kentishman, John Cade of Ashford, To make commotion, as full well he can, Under the title of John Mortimer.

(III.i.356–359)

York’s creature, Cade, will go on to announce his own spurious heritage, albeit one that is interrupted by the witty asides of his fellows: cade: dick: cade: dick: cade: dick: smith: cade:

My father was a Mortimer – [Aside] He was an honest man, and a good bricklayer. My mother a Plantagenet – [Aside] I knew her well, she was a midwife. My wife descended of the Lacies – [Aside] She was, indeed, a pedlar’s daughter, and sold many laces. [Aside] But now of late, not able to travel with her furr’d pack, she washes bucks here at home. Therefore am I of an honorable house. (IV.ii.39–49)

Cade claims power based on his “honorable” pedigree, and he seeks to radically upend the status quo. Even at the moment he pronounces it, his claims to family greatness are undercut by his companions. His heady rhetoric of leading a revolution for equality is quickly drowned out by his

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brutal acts of violence and the turmoil he provokes. Once again, the invocation of genealogy becomes an individualistic maneuver to achieve power. Cade’s rebellion is snuffed out easily enough, but it demonstrates how dangerously pliable genealogy can be in the hands of those inclined to attack the reigning order. This scene also demonstrates how performance can work to subvert the power of genealogy in particular ways. Here, comments that editors now call “asides” allow Cade’s fellow artisans to interject in the space between Cades’ words and to give the playgoers a series of counterpoints that deny Cade’s claims. While the net effect of this stichomythia is comic, as a moment in performance it shows how any genealogy might be subject to dispute and thus a source of instability rather than order. Cade’s recitation of genealogy is false, but it is not quite the radical other of Mortimer’s. Rather, it is its demonic double. Both are pretexts for violent bids for power. Genealogical exposition ideally promises clarity. In the Henry VI plays, it creates and deepens factional disputes and leads to chaos, just as Elizabethan authorities feared discussion of Elizabeth’s successor could lead to unrest. Plantagenet reassumes his family’s noble standing, but, as York, he fails to rise above factionalism. A reordering of the lines of succession neither resolves problems nor protects England’s stability. York’s succession fails to heal the “unkind division” threatening the world of 1 Henry VI. Intriguingly, York’s restoration also stands as a refutation of Henry V, who the play otherwise promotes as the commonly hailed hero to the entire nation. York had told his uncle, “methinks, my father’s execution [on the orders of Henry V] / Was nothing less than bloody tyranny” (II.v.99–100). This play, and those that follow, represent York as being unworthy of the noble place Henry VI gives him. The translation of Plantagenet to York is itself a moment of rupture; through it King Henry VI reverses his father’s disenfranchisement of Plantagenet’s line, and in so doing breaks faith with his own father, who to York is a “bloody” tyrant. In this, Henry VI fails to emulate the ideal his father represents and that he should emulate. Indeed, an inability for generations to recognize their familial connections in either direction in 3 Henry VI is the basis of one of the most pathetic scenes in all of Shakespeare, where, as a result of the chaos of civil war, a father unwittingly kills his son and a son unwittingly kills his father. Returning our focus to 1 Henry VI, we see that York’s failure to emerge as a stabilizing force, coupled with the death of the Talbots, prompts a continual diversion of attention in the play, a search for bedrock beneath the shifting soil. The title character cannot fulfill this role, and, as one critic

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notes, the young king’s absence from the crucial opening scene “is indicative of a political vacuum” in the play.24 The play’s other major character, Joan de Pucelle, is more than anything a figure of instability. Joan commands demons that only sometimes work for her, and she vacillates between glamorous national hero of France and conniving Vice figure. The rhetoric of genealogy that supposedly tries to establish stable leaders is represented here as a situated and self-interested form of historical knowledge and, thus, cannot stand as a bulwark against the eroding order the play depicts. “dead march” The Countess of Auvergne’s confusion over Talbot’s claim to be “here and not here” expresses the yearning for stability that characters in this play, and perhaps also audiences of this play, can never capture. Henry VI, Part 1 figures the spectacle of the past as a spinning “potter’s wheel” rather than as the kind of stable historical narrative that Gloucester attempts to deliver at Henry V’s funeral, where he recalls Henry as one who “ne’er lift up his hand but conquered.” As perhaps best exemplified by Mortimer’s history of the monarchy, which in the midst of England’s deepening conflicts directs our attention away from present urgencies, the audience’s perspective on the play is never steady. Within the play, the repeated deflections away from the time it depicts generate a sense of instability concomitant with the instability the play thematizes. This conundrum points in part to the unique temporality of history plays. As I have discussed in previous chapters, performing history proposes to disrupt the linearity of time. Within the performative present of 1 Henry VI, fractured layers of temporality emerge. There is the now of 1590s London, the palpable place in which the play is performed, and there is the then of medieval England and France, the time and places to which the play refers. Within the then of medieval England and France, the play invokes another then, that of the even more distant past to which characters in 1 Henry VI refer. From the opening evocations of Henry V to Suffolk’s final musings on ancient Greece and the Trojan wars, audiences are forced to look out and away from the time and place the play depicts. Henry VI, Part 1 ends with a victory over the French, but it is one so precarious that not even the English feel very triumphant. York predicts that the peace England offers is merely a temporary victory: “I foresee with grief / The utter loss of all the realm of France” (V.iv.111–112), while the King’s last words hardly provide comfort: “And so conduct me where, from

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company, / I may revolve and ruminate my grief ” (V.v.100–101). The King even loses control of his simple hope to meditate and reflect by using the word “revolve,” implicating his language in the whirligig imagery of the spinning “potter’s wheel” that defines the play. The gloomy ending of 1 Henry VI, with its lack of closure, denies a neat historical narrative but does suggest theatrical continuity; the play seems designed either to encourage sequels or, as some scholars have suggested, to serve as a kind of “prequel” to the other Henry VI plays.25 This observation reminds us of the play’s status as a play, a creation for the popular stage. Despite its range of reference, 1 Henry VI never quite escapes its containment on London’s South Bank. The language of 1 Henry VI circles around its own theatricality, inscribed in the play’s very first words, where Bedford employs a stage metaphor to describe the somber mood of Henry V’s funeral: “Hung be the heavens with black” (I.i.1), wordplay on the trimming of the stage for tragic plays. This sensitivity to the language of theatricality, evident as well in Talbot’s anxieties over public display, manifests in more ambiguous and sometimes more tense ways throughout the play. This is especially evident in the moments when characters problematize the prospect of performing history even as the fact of the drama itself suggests playing as a form of historical recuperation. Early on, Exeter reminds us that “Henry [V] is dead, and never shall revive” (I.i.18). Elsewhere, John Talbot remarks to his father that the dead cannot witness for – or, for that matter to – the living. In such observations, the characters express skepticism about the notion of historical revival even as they enact a play in which dead figures are revived and witnessed to by living actors. The first words of the printed playtext in the Folio, prior to the opening dialogue, are those of the stage direction, “Dead march,” referring to a solemn funeral march – probably performed by muffled drums – that helps to set the initial scene. The morbid image prompted by the phrase “Dead march” suggests an attempt at revival that is qualified by its associations with death and decay, pointing perhaps to the conceptual contradictions inherent in performing history. I alluded earlier to Thomas Nashe’s use of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI to defend the practice of staging plays. This famous Elizabethan commentary on performing history onstage as a form of revival in fact calls up the tensions of dramatic historiography. Countering the many Elizabethan anti-theatricalists, Nashe argues that plays are in fact a “rare exercise of vertue.”26 Nashe’s defense is worth returning to, in that it provides insight into the period’s discourses of theatricality and dramatic historiography with particular attention to 1 Henry VI and the curious ambivalences such discourses and this play offer.

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First, for the subiect of them [stage plays] (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant acts (that haue line long buried in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes) are reuiued, and they themselues raised from the Graue of Obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open presence: than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours?27

Nashe’s assertion that performing history serves as a rebuke to the present is a paradoxical argument to make about a play such as 1 Henry VI. As we have seen, this play condemns the present it depicts – which is the past from the perspective of playgoers – as inferior to an idealized and irrecoverable further past dominated by Henry V. Such paradoxical characterization of the relation of the performative present of history plays to the past they conjure marks Nashe’s discussion of playing history and must inform any attempt to read his remarks in relation to 1 Henry VI. Nashe’s talk about history plays reveals more than just a banal patriotic enthusiasm for historical revival. It reveals the complex function of stage plays within the social scene of early modern London. On one hand, Nashe argues that plays are valuable because they distract playgoers from more nefarious behavior. They provide “light toyes to busie […] heads withall, cast before them [audiences] as bones to gnaw vpon, which may keepe them from hauing leisure to intermeddle with higher matters.”28 In this view, plays serve a practical civic function. They control the dangerous energies of the idle, especially idle soldiers, and are mere “toyes” or “bones” to distract the populace from worse vices, such as gambling, drinking, whoring, or organized violence against city authorities. At the same time, Nashe asserts that plays serve a didactic purpose, through which both vices and virtues “are most liuely anatomiz’d” to a heuristic end.29 To the sober, business-minded charge that plays are worthless because they don’t produce anything, Nashe responds that plays have intrinsic merit as “Artes”: it is “a glorious thing […] to haue Henrie the fifth represented on the Stage.”30 History plays have entertainment value. This affirmation that plays produce valuable effects which are nonetheless immaterial makes them aberrant in the emerging market economy of late-sixteenth-century London.31 Moreover, the argument for the artistic integrity of plays is grounded by reference to Henry V, a figure who, while present in other plays of the period (notably The Famous Victories of Henry V), remains a ghostly presence in 1 Henry VI: one who is conjured but acknowledged as irrecoverable. The most widely quoted portion of Nashe’s defense of plays refers specifically to the representation of Lord Talbot’s death:

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How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding […] I will defend it against any Collian, or clubfisted Vsurer of them all, there is no immortalitie can be giuen a man on earth like vnto Playes.32

In Anthony B. Dawson’s insightful reading, Nashe’s description of Talbot’s death can be linked to the theological concept of “participation.” This concept is drawn from the notion of virtual presence in the “Anglicanstyle” celebration of the Eucharist. Just as with the presence of Christ in such celebrations, “the presence of the theatrical person is simultaneously real and unreal,” a conceptual doubleness I see here as well. Nashe argues that the enactment of Talbot’s end performs the function of moving audiences and conferring “immortalitie” on the great historical figure being represented. Nashe’s words implicate the practice of staging long-dead figures such as Talbot in a paradoxical movement between absence and presence, loss and recovery, the past and the present.33 Nashe considers audiences indispensable to the production of this moment, for it is through their tears that Talbot’s “bones” revive. This feint toward the performative present opens up space for the resignification of history through the theatrical event of performing the past. A few pages later, Nashe makes a contemporary reference that further illuminates the binaries of absence and presence, past and present: “Not Roscius nor Æsope, those admyred tragedians that haue liued euer since before Christ was borne, could euer performe more in action than famous Ned Allen.”34 Edward Alleyn, the most celebrated actor of his time, was the leading player associated with the Rose, where 1 Henry VI was first performed. There is no evidence that Alleyn played Talbot, but the role – the real main part, despite the play’s title – would almost certainly have been acted by a leading company player, someone likely to be well known to Elizabethan theater audiences.35 Nashe’s reference to Alleyn recalls his earlier words about the “Tragedian that represents his [Talbot’s] person,” calling attention to the live, and perhaps “famous,” player enacting the role onstage. In emphasizing the tragedian at work and by mentioning Alleyn, Nashe reminds us of the cult of celebrity that existed for Tarlton, Alleyn, and other popular actors in this period. The sight of a particular player might well have been as desired as the representation of a particular heroic figure.36 Desire for the past thus becomes conflated with a desire for the theater. In calling our attention to the staginess of Talbot’s death scene, Nashe suggests that,

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rather than simply recalling past glory or reviving the dead, the performance of history evokes the past but never quite transcends the temporality of the body onstage. The player displaces rather than rejuvenates the historical figure. In a move that recalls Joseph Roach’s idea of performance as a kind of “surrogation,” Henry V must remain that “ever-living man of memory,” continually reconstructed in the present by a living, breathing actor, for “Henry is dead, and never shall revive.”37 Nashe’s particular privileging of history plays invariably highlights the performative present and calls attention to the institutional context in which such plays unfold. The description of Talbot’s death conjures an iconic frieze of heroic suffering but also points to the recurring but alwaysdisappearing condition of theatrical performance. For, as Nashe goes on to say, this sight was available “seuerall times,” a stage effect produced only to be produced again, a spectacle enabled by the relative novelty of diurnal commercial theater. In popular Elizabethan theaters the representation of history took place in repertory with other kinds of plays so that the actor playing Talbot one day might play a tragic lover or a mischievous Vice figure the next. The idea of historical presence in historical representation onstage is complexly framed by the commodified repetition and variety that the new commercial theaters allowed in their evolution from older theatrical traditions. Joan’s graphic description of Talbot’s corpse, which, she says, “Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet” (IV.vii.76), calls attention to the horrifying appearance of death, however heroic, and to the fact that the invocation of history entails confronting the past in all its sometimes gruesome materiality. The morbid notion of performing the past represented by the phrase “Dead march” extends to Nashe’s description of the spectacle of Talbot’s death, in the notion that Talbot’s bones are “newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least.” Embalming in the 1590s, as now, could signify both a figurative idea of preserving something in memory and a more literal sense of preserving a body from decomposition. The first meaning certainly obtains in this instance in the patriotic hope that the performance of the past can be a testament to national heroism and, in collaboration with audiences (whose tears do the embalming), produce heightened emotional pleasures, perhaps even the terror and pity of catharsis. The second meaning simultaneously connects the idea of performing the past with a less pleasant idea of preservation, a staving off of the body’s decay, a less seemly and ultimately more grotesque illusion of revival and stability in the face of the breakdown of the fragile body.

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Nashe invokes, then, numerous associations in his polemic against the anti-theatricalists. His defense of plays is not confused, but, like the perspective of the play to which it refers, it is unstable. As critics of such early modern defenses have argued, instability may well be inherent in the form.38 Nashe’s defense is a rhetorical exercise; as such, its reliance on a range of strategies to affirm the morality of theater is not exceptional.39 The range of defenses, like so much in the debate over theatricality and so much in 1 Henry VI, is productively anamorphic. For Nashe, playing is an exercise in virtue and an expedient distraction. It suggests the productive value of performance while denying that it needs to have productive value. The practical social function of playing, its didactic value, its aesthetic integrity, and its ambiguous conjuration of some idea of historical revival indicate the difficulties of assessing what performing history onstage “does.” For Phyllis Rackin, Nashe’s words in Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell express the allure that history plays had for early modern audiences. They promised an “experience of presence.”40 Rackin reads Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell as Nashe’s effort to describe history plays as holding a “transcendent power” and as arguing that “only in dramatic performance […] can the past be preserved, the dead come to life, the absent past of historical representation return in full, living presence.”41 But, while the plays might be driven by some desire to experience presence, or for the past to come alive, Nashe acknowledges the utter impossibility of a “full, living presence” of the past in dramatic historiography. Christopher Pye suggests an alternate, more ambivalent reading of Nashe when he writes, “how equivocal Talbot’s return remains in the theatrical apologist’s account.”42 I agree with Pye’s skeptical sense of Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell. Nashe, in fact, echoes the play’s ambivalence about presence and revival, an ambivalence embedded in his paradoxical phrase “liuely anatomiz’d.” Unable to, perhaps uninterested in, providing a stable reading of what performing the past does or how it works, Nashe helps to affirm that 1 Henry VI occupies an ambiguous position between being a thing of the past and one contained in the performative present. Nashe’s words demonstrate a perhaps irresolvable tension between past and present that is endemic to historical revival. Henry VI, Part 1 troubles the idea of performance in its ambivalent attitude toward the logic of substitution and replacement which underlies playing. In one notable instance, a single English soldier frightens away the pillars of the French army – the Dauphin, Alençon, Joan, and others – simply by entering and yelling “A Talbot!” He then claims:

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(II.i.78–81)

The “cry of Talbot,” the invocation of an absent, shadowy reference, creates a moment both funny and troubling. The soldier scares off the French nobles and their champion Joan, revealing their momentary cowardice and a common English soldier’s ingenuity. But, by appropriating an absent signifier, the soldier connects himself both with the stage tradition of clever war profiteer that we saw invoked by Derick in The Famous Victories of Henry V, and with the duplicities involved in theatrical performance. The ambivalences of performance are inherent in the riddle of “contrarieties” at the heart of 1 Henry VI, the “here and not here,” the play of substance and shadows in the conversation between Talbot and the Countess. The absences of the past are met with the “absent presence” of performances, such as the soldier’s cry. When Talbot claims “My substance is not here” (II.iii.51), he simultaneously annihilates and affirms his status as an actor of and in history, at the same moment in which he annihilates and affirms the play’s larger project of reenacting the past.

transfusing history Shakespeare, following in the wake of the Queen’s Men, understands that longing for the past is necessarily mediated by the presentness of performance. This acknowledgment asserts that to perform history is a process of inquiry rather than recovery, intervention rather than recuperation. The play destabilizes the authenticity and authority of either history or performance to posit a coherent picture of “how it was,” substituting instead a popular entertainment that asserts self-consciously “how it seems, or might have been” in the space of the now. Henry VI, Part 1 makes notions of dramatic presence a figure for lineal continuity and other forms of political succession. Shakespeare thus incorporates into his play the theatrical enactment of history as absence that he inherits from the Queen’s Men, while adding a critique of genealogy as a mode of historical organization. The theorist Herbert Blau has written that “The past always needs blood donors. The theater is a means of transfusion.”43 And just as a blood transfusion creates a mixture in the receiving patient’s bloodstream, so the past that performance makes is infused with the life force of the present donors. But the “transfusion” history plays offer Talbot in the moment of his “fresh

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bleeding” appears a somewhat anemic gesture, according to my arguments here. This analysis is not meant to suggest, however, that a performanceoriented reading of 1 Henry VI must conclude simply in proclaiming the obvious fact of its failure to “really” revive the past. Nor do I want to argue that the performance of history is itself rotten or decayed because it invariably invokes such connotations. It is doubtful that 1 Henry VI became as popular as it did because audiences enjoyed feeling alienated from their past. It seems rather that the force and pleasure of performing the past onstage here lies precisely in putting in play the “contrarieties” that emerge, the perception that, despite the natural movement of time, it is an “unkind division” that separates the past from the present. The theatrical event of performing history offers a supplement to the losses it makes apparent. The players are simultaneous substitutions and additions to the enactment of pastness.44 They stand in for particular historical referents but also always exceed those referents as self-conscious figurations, playful embodiments grounded in the now of performance. The audience of a history play is always itself performing a witness function while also bearing preternatural witness from a privileged perspective, seeing the “making” of history as a process. The tragedian bleeding while the audience weeps creates the collective moment of the theatrical event, an event that, to adopt a phrase of Walter Benjamin’s, calls forward the past and “blast[s it] out of the continuum of history.”45 Performing the past might conjure a sense of emptiness, but this sense is engaged in a dialectic with the exciting plentitude that Shakespeare’s theater strives for while admitting its own imperfections. Standing over the dead Talbot, Sir William Lucy engages in a moment of fantasy. Addressing Joan and other French leaders, he exclaims, “O, were mine eyeballs into bullets turn’d, / That I in rage might shoot them at your faces!” (IV.vii.79–80). The clunky poetry of this risible expression quickly gives way to a genuinely affecting line: “O, that I could but call these dead to life!” (IV.vii.81). Lucy’s longing to revive the dead is a reminder that at its most primal level performing history is a profound expression of desire. The impulse to subject history to performance is driven by the desire to obtain a view of what is vanished, but, as 1 Henry VI again demonstrates, such performances can never shed their own embeddedness in the performative present; and the distance this embeddedness implies makes history appear, in the words of the American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, as a “great hole.”46 Reenactments of the past that seek to connect the performative present to historical precession run aground on the inexorable linearity of time. The desire of the present to address the past through performance, to

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reinhabit old subject positions, perhaps even to intervene in the stories that make up history, is, then, fundamentally asymptotic. It is a move toward intersection that always warps or deflects before the “planes of historicity” can cross.47 Henry VI, Part 1 engages a notion of performance that is “dependent […] on disguise and yet committed to demystification.”48 The potential for demystification in historical performances is enabled by the absences of history and the “dubious spectacle” of theater itself.49 Performance is a kind of negative presence. It is fleeting, and so, when over, like the past it is gone. Performance of history thus doubles the losses encountered in any attempt to gain access to the past. The past is lost and so are, eventually, the moments we devote to enacting it. Performing the past asserts the positive value of negation as a cultural-critical practice, for its revelation of absence shows that history is an ongoing project always in need of “transfusions” to have existence. Henry VI, Part 1 makes this point as emphatically and, I think, more cogently than The Famous Victories of Henry V or The True Tragedy of Richard III, surely because Shakespeare took his poetry as seriously as he took playing. Shakespeare articulates here how a critical assessment of historical culture that is derived from dramatic self-consciousness can be used to unsettle a powerful historical form such as the political genealogy. Genealogy is a way of organizing the past that vainly tries to assert continuity in the face of death, just as performing history can only surrogate the past in the present. Henry VI, Part 1, in its language and within Elizabethan discourses of performance, suggests that to perform history is not to fill in fissures of historicity, or simply to “discover” the past to be a gaping absence. Rather, the play suggests that the performative invocation of the past productively digs the great hole of historicity in the first place. This amounts to an act of imaginative archeology through which audiences must confront the “contrarieties” of thinking historically as a basis for the present and thus be conscious of just how fragile and fleeting the foundations of the present can be. notes 1. Robert Greene from Greenes, Groats-worth of wittee (1592) quoted from Evans et al. (eds.), The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1959. 2. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Svpplication to the Divell in The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. It cannot be stated with certainty that Nashe is referring to the play now known as 1 Henry VI. Nashe’s description is connected with Shakespeare’s play only through the figure of Lord Talbot and some verbal echoes of Shakespeare’s language in Nashe’s prose. However, no credible

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

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candidate other than Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI has been suggested as the inspiration for Nashe’s remarks, and for the purposes of this chapter, I assume that Nashe refers to that play. The date of 1 Henry VI is a matter of controversy. The composition and performance dates of 1 Henry VI, even in relation to the other Henry VI plays are unknown. Most scholars date the play somewhere between 1590 and 1592. For an argument for 1591 as the earliest composition date, see B. J. Sokol, “Manuscript Evidence for an Earliest Date of Henry VI, Part One,” Notes & Queries, n.s., 47 (March 2000), pp. 58–63. For an overview of dating questions, see Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995): 145–205. See also Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 16–20. Authorship of the play has likewise remained controversial. I accept the possibility that Shakespeare wrote this play in collaboration, but since the sole source for the play is the text published in the 1623 First Folio, which presumably relied on texts that were largely Shakespeare’s work, it seems probable to me that, whatever Shakespeare’s writing arrangements may have been early in his career, the text as we have it was substantially shaped by his hand and his sensibilities. For a reading that critiques this assumption of sole or main authorship, though, see Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” pp. 147–149. On the play’s shifting temporal perspective, see Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, pp. 23–24. See the numerous entries for “harey the vj,” traditionally presumed to refer to Shakespeare’s play, in Henslowe’s Diary, pp. 16–20. Most theater historians, following E. K. Chambers, interpret Henslowe’s records of the gate receipts for 1 Henry VI as high; see Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. II, p. 122. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. This is a well-established trope in criticism of the play. Here is a selective survey of works that trace the patterns of disintegration somewhat explicitly, although it is adduced in smaller ways throughout the criticism on 1 Henry VI: Tillyard, Shakespeare’s English History Plays, pp. 161–173; Philip Brockbank, “The Frame of Disorder: Henry VI,” in On Shakespeare: Jesus, Shakespeare and Karl Marx, and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 79–103; Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare’s Early Histories (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1975), pp. 1–28; Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 281–294; and Lisa Dickson, “No Rainbow Without the Sun: Visibility and Embodiment in 1 Henry VI,” Modern Language Studies, 30 (2000): 137–156. Phyllis Rackin reads not just 1 Henry VI but both Shakespeare’s tetralogies as driven by awareness of the absent King Henry V; the first looks back for him, the second looks forward to his ascension, culminating in Henry V; see Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, pp. 29–30.

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11. This point is made by Alexander Leggatt, “The Death of John Talbot,” in Velz (ed.), Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre, pp. 11–30; p. 13. 12. Christopher Pye, “The Theater, the Market, and the Subject of History,” English Literary History, 61 (1994): 501–522 (p. 513). 13. See, for instance, Marco Mincoff, “The Composition of Henry VI, Part 1,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965): 279–287, in which Mincoff refers to the Countess episode as a “pointless excrescence” (p. 279). 14. Phyllis Rackin, “Anti-Historians: Women’s Roles in Shakespeare’s Histories,” Theatre Journal, 37 (1985): 329–344. See also Rackin’s elaboration of this piece in Stages of History, pp. 151–158. 15. Rackin, Stages of History, p. 153. 16. This line is from Elin Diamond’s explication of the work of Peggy Phelan and Herbert Blau in Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater, p. 152. For more on performance and “disappearance,” see Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, pp. 146–166. 17. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 143–149. Sigurd Burckhardt points to some theatrical implications of this scene and the play at large in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), as do Rackin in Stages of History and Pye in “The Theater, the Market, and the Subject of History.” 18. Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, p. 147. 19. Berry, Patterns of Decay, p. 8. 20. E. Pearlman argues that the repetition is evidence of textual corruption, and that the scenes indicate Shakespeare’s revision process in “Shakespeare at Work: The Two Talbots,” Philological Quarterly, 75 (1996): 1–22. I read the repetition as an intentional demonstration of the Talbots’ willful decision to stay. 21. Leggatt, “The Death of John Talbot,” p. 18. 22. Relevant to my reading, David Riggs writes that here “the Talbots discover that the ideal figured by their heroic ‘name’ is too pure for sublunary existence. It can be ratified only in the very act of death.” Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories, p. 110. For another strong reading of this scene, see Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, pp. 20–23. 23. William C. Carroll, “Macbeth and the Show of Kings,” the University Lecture, delivered at Boston University, April 28, 2005, and issued in a limited edition by the Office of the Provost, Boston University, p. 5. Carroll here writes perceptively about the ways in which early modern genealogies often mystified and created confusion rather than produced clarity, noting the sheer visual complexity of genealogies produced in relation to the Elizabethan succession, such as those by Robert Parsons and John Leslie. 24. Dickson, “No Rainbow Without the Sun,” p. 138. 25. In “Shakespeare and Others” (pp. 149–153), Gary Taylor suggests that the composition and performance of 1 Henry VI postdates the other Henry VI plays; ascertaining 1 Henry VI’s exact place in the sequence of these other plays

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is not crucial to my argument. No matter the order in which they were written, they were probably all written in close proximity in the early 1590s and were each early attempts by Shakespeare to dramatize the past. All are indebted to the recent example of the work of the Queen’s Men. 26. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. 27. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. 28. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 211. 29. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 213. 30. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 213. 31. Pye looks closely at how 1 Henry VI can be read in relation to the language of markets and economy, pointing to Jean-Christophe Agnew’s incisive study Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); see Pye, “The Theater, the Market, and the Subject of History,” pp. 501–522. 32. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 212. 33. Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, p. 27. Dawson elegantly elaborates on this concept, pp. 11–37. 34. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I, p. 215. 35. On Alleyn and the roles with which he was associated, see Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors, pp. 4–11. Anthony Dawson assumes Talbot would have been played by Richard Burbage but does not elaborate on this claim, in The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England, pp. 14–15. 36. On audience expectation and desire for actors, see Lopez’s engaging essay, “Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage”. 37. Roach, Cities of the Dead, p. 3. 38. On Sidney’s defense of poetry, see, for instance, Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions; and, more generally, Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983). 39. Relevant to this point, W. B. Worthen writes: “performance is always in the present; ideologies of restoration are always rhetorical,” in “Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves,” Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999): 33–45 (p. 45). 40. Phyllis Rackin, “Temporality, Anachronism, and Presence in Shakespeare’s English Histories,” Renaissance Drama, 17 (1986): 101–123 (p. 107). See also the elaboration of this piece in Rackin’s Stages of History, pp. 86–145. 41. Rackin, Stages of History, p. 116. 42. Pye, “The Theater, The Market, and The Subject of History,” p. 518. 43. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 9. 44. I am drawing here on Jacques Derrida’s theory of the supplement, as put forth in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 144–164. In a section entitled “The Theorem and the Theater” (pp. 302–313), Derrida discusses Rousseau’s distrust of theater as grounded in its “dangerous” supplementarity. See also “The

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46.

47. 48. 49.

Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics” for an elaboration of the theory of supplementarity in relation to the philosophical, and Shakespearean, conundrum of what it means “to be,” in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Alan Bates (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 175–205. Benjamin refers to Robespierre, for whom “ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History (XIV)” in Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 263). Suzan-Lori Parks speaks of “the Great Hole of History” in her The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), pp. 157–199. I was first referred to this work by W. B. Worthen’s article “Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves.” Worthen gives an excellent reading of Parks before providing an incisive analysis of the discourses of history and authenticity surrounding the reconstruction of the Globe theater. His reading of the project, in its look at the present’s desire for an inaccessible past and its claim that the Globe reconstruction represents “an anxious performance of the past in the present,” bears on my arguments here (p. 34). This phrase is found in the title of the first chapter of Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater: Essays at the Century Turning (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 278. The phrase is from the title of the book by Blau, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000.

chapter 5

Richard III and Theatrum Historiae

When the young Prince Edward in Richard III arrives in London and is told he will be staying in the Tower, he exhibits two different kinds of historical curiosity: prince: Did Julius Caesar build that place [the Tower], my lord? buckingham: He did, my gracious lord, begin that place, Which, since, succeeding ages have reedified. prince: Is it upon record, or else reported Successively from age to age, he built it? buckingham: Upon record, my gracious lord. prince: But say, my lord, it were not register’d, Methinks the truth should live from age to age, As ’twere retail’d to all posterity, Even to the general all-ending day. (III.i.69–78)

The Prince is interested in both the facts of history (did Julius Caesar build the Tower?) and about the processes that make historical knowledge possible (how do we know whether he did?). This odd exchange is the play’s most explicit reflection on practices of historiography. In one view, it signals a critical-historical sensibility on the part of the Prince, who questions the evidence about the Tower and seeks to compare its various historical traditions.1 The conversation also opens up the pregnant topic of written versus oral histories. The Prince is initially confident that “reported,” or spoken history, is sufficient to last for all time, “even to the general all-ending day.” But as the conversation continues, he eventually affirms that it is Caesar’s “wit set down” (III.i.86), or the written narrative of his deeds, that guarantees his long-term fame. The Prince’s conclusion is supported by the evolving historical culture of early modern England, where the proliferation of print histories in the sixteenth century gradually marginalized and deauthorized oral history. The context of these lines being spoken in a play about the past prompts us to consider further where dramatic performance, an aural-visual form of representation, fits into the written / oral history binary. Richard III shows how theatrical form exceeds this binary. The play is ambivalent about the relative merits of history that is 139

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delivered through writing or through speech and offers theater as an alternative vehicle to experience narratives about the past. Richard III suggests a conceptualization of history through theater in which the past is eidetic; that is, where history is posited as a kind of visual memory.2 More specifically, it posits history as a form of visual memory that is rooted in, and thus comes to be modeled on, the experience of stage plays. Richard III contains the awareness that it is part of a series of plays that have led up to it, and a pervasive motif of its discourse on history is reference back to those previous plays. This theatrical sense of the past is most evident by the play’s end. In a scene depicting the eve of the climactic battle, Richard III features a representation of history in the form of the ghosts who appear at Bosworth Field. These figures stand for an embodied notion of the past, and, insofar as the performance of ghosts is connected in this period to a well-established convention of the popular stage, the scene conflates theatrical technique and machinery with historical knowledge. This is like something we saw in the last chapter. The Talbot of 1 Henry VI is, in Nashe’s report, intertwined with the “tragedian” who plays him. The enduring popularity and cultural impact of Richard III makes this dynamic more pronounced in this play, though. The afterlife of Richard III, both in the wake of its initial performances and in the long-term history of its reception, has been a deepening of this trend. It has become an exemplary case in which a story and figure from history are thought of in terms of their dramatic connotations. Richard III is an exemplary case, in other words, of theatrum historiae: history understood through the dynamics of theater. retailing, registering, performing Adam Fox writes that, “the principal means by which the majority of people received their knowledge about the past in early modern England was by word of mouth.”3 This was starting to change in the later sixteenth century, when, as D. R. Woolf has argued, the trend in English historical culture was to favor the written document as the basis of knowledge. The growing power and reach of books and other print materials accelerated this trend.4 It is, of course, difficult to separate oral and written history so starkly, especially insofar as historiography, in the classical traditions of Thucydides and Herodotus, often relies on spoken testimonials. Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III illustrates this difficulty. More’s text was the fount of knowledge about this king in England. More wrote The History of King Richard III in the early sixteenth century, and it was eventually reproduced in Hall, Holinshed, and the other major chronicles. However,

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while More initiated a print-culture tradition about Richard III, his work proclaims its own indebtedness to an oral tradition. The sources for his work are unknown, and it has long been speculated that he gained at least some of his information from Cardinal Morton. More served in Morton’s household as a boy, and Morton was a witness to many events of Richard’s reign. Throughout his history, More refers in general terms to information he has heard reported, such as the detail that Edward IV’s mistress Jane Shore was beautiful when she was young but that some might “have wished her somewhat higher [i.e. taller]. Thus say they that knew her in her youth.”5 The only instance in which More names a specific source of any kind in the entire work, in fact, is when he discusses a conversation he says he was told about by his own father.6 More, then, presents his text as having originated in oral testimony about the past, testimony that, through his recording of it, shaped the print histories of Richard that followed.7 As this example demonstrates, oral history is generative of written historiography. But, as print became the dominant form in which the past was circulated in the sixteenth century, the crystallization of historical knowledge in books helped create a hierarchy. Oral testimony about the past needed to be sifted through by the responsible historian, who, by putting select bits of oral history into print, validated it. As a “culture of fact” emerged in the epistemologies of both legal and historical work, the value of written documents as the evidentiary basis of knowledge about past events grew.8 To adopt the Prince’s words, this meant an increased favoring of “registering” history over “retailing” it. Indeed, critical judgments denigrating the value of oral histories began to be expressed.9 As Fox notes, chorographer John Norden responded to local traditions he heard told in the 1590s about some ruins in a Middlesex village with the maxim “olde men speake fables.”10 Richard III encourages skepticism toward oral transmission of knowledge. The play’s skepticism does not take the form of an overt rejection of the spoken word – such as “olde men speake fables” – but rather emerges through the bald insidiousness of speech as it is orchestrated by Richard. When Buckingham and Richard assure the Mayor of London that Lord Hastings was justly put to death for treason, despite a lack of hard evidence, and despite the fact that his execution was “against the form of law,” the gullible/cowardly Mayor responds, “Your Grace’s [Richard’s] words shall serve” to convince him (III.v.41, 61, emphasis added). Richard’s spoken words are taken as a guarantee of truth, even as the audience has seen his equivocation and deceptions from the start, a dramatic irony that culminates in Richard’s own self-characterization: “Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, / I moralize two meanings in one word” (III.i.82–83).

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Buckingham, assistant architect of Richard’s rise, produces a version of history to validate Richard’s claim to the throne that is to be circulated through the spoken word. At the crucial moment when he must argue for Richard’s candidacy for the throne, Buckingham promises that “I’ll play the orator.” This line is linked to his previous assertion, “Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian” (III.v.94, 5). Oration is connected here to the false and “counterfeit,” as it is again in the reference to “Doctor Shaw” (III.v.103), who does not appear in the play beyond a brief reference but whose infamous sermon promoting Richard received extensive treatment in More’s History of Richard III. In his instructions to Buckingham, Richard gives a glimpse of the content of Shaw’s sermon when he tells him to “Infer the bastardy of [King] Edward [IV]’s children” at Guildhall, as well as to suggest that Edward himself was a bastard (III.v.75). Oral transmission of history is made so suspect that not speaking is privileged momentarily in the play as a sign of Londoners’ integrity: after speaking derisively about Edward’s genealogy, Buckingham reports back that “the citizens are mum, say not a word” (III.vii.3). Richard III’s representation of writing as a technology for truth, though, is not any more positive. The written is addressed most explicitly in the brief “Scrivener” episode. The Quarto’s stage direction indicates a document as an actual prop: “Enter a Scrivener with a paper in his hand.”11 This “indictment” of Lord Hastings is “in a set hand fairly […] engrossed / That it may be to-day read o’er in Paul’s,” and is meant to be the grounds of an oral declamation of his guilt, another plan to corrupt public speech (III.vi.2–3). As the Scrivener goes on to explain, though, the indictment represents something particular about writing. The paper had been drawn up long before Hastings’ alleged crimes had been discovered. The Scrivener concludes with a sentiment that damns the document in his hand as well as those, himself included, who fail to act against the evil it promotes: “Here’s a good world the while! Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device? / Yet who’s so bold but says he sees it not?” (III.vi.10–12). The temporality of writing as a technology here exposes its abuse by Richard. The document that was supposed to reflect what really happened in the past – Hastings’ treason and its revelation and punishment – instead in draft form preceded that treason and punishment and now, in final form, is meant to legitimize and reify the phony narrative produced by Richard and his faction. Richard III does not follow the young Prince’s initial declaration about “retailing” and make claims for the authority of the oral tradition in historiography. Neither, though, does it follow his subsequent conclusion and participate in the larger trend of English historical culture in the Elizabethan era that promotes texts as a preferred medium. The play is

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ultimately doubtful about the written and the spoken as a means to communicate the truth about the past. Both retailing and registering are shown to be subject to the distortion and manipulation in which Richard specializes. There were other ways of representing history in Renaissance England. History could take a visual form in woodcuts and other illustrations, a practice with roots in medieval traditions of manuscript illumination and stained-glass windows. In his recent study, Illustrating the English Past in Early Modern England, James Knapp examines the conspicuous presence of illustration in works of history, such as Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, and the equally conspicuous dropping away of illustrations in such books, best seen in the decision of the Holinshed syndicate to publish the 1587 edition without pictures. Knapp argues that in the mid- to late 1580s there was a “change in the representational order” as illustrations were “effectively removed from the pages of history.” He goes on to say that “at the same time the imaginative representation of history by literary artists exploded in the fashion for history plays, and the emergence of the prose genre of historical fiction.”12 Knapp’s sense of a shift in the “representational order” seems right to me, but I wonder if we can pause and examine more closely where history plays fit into the story of this transition. Can history plays be aligned so easily with “the prose genre of historical fiction” as formally different from illustration? While printed texts of history plays can be said to be non-pictorial representations of history, what about the actual performance of the plays? Stage plays, like illustrations, are defined in part by their visual component. It’s not for nothing that “theater” is rooted etymologically in a word for seeing, as explained by George Puttenham: “the Greekes called [the stage] theatrum, as much to say as a beholding place.”13 As a visual mode of representation, plays, as I have noted before, are distinct from illustrations and print in the obvious sense of involving living, breathing bodies. This distinctiveness can be elucidated through reference to the story of Richard Gloucester, better known as King Richard III, in the 1563 edition of The Mirror for Magistrates. Although primarily a work of poetry, The Mirror for Magistrates includes prose links between the stories it tells in verse. According to the larger conceit of these links, the individual tragedies presented are being read aloud amid conversation and commentary by a group of friends. In the prose link that introduces the Richard poem, the speaker declares: “I have here (quoth I) king Richards tragedie.” When his companions urge him to read it, he accedes: “With a good wyll (quoth I) For the better understanding whereof, imagine that you see him tormented

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with [devils] in the diepe pit of Hell, and thence howlinge this that foloweth.”14 The Mirror for Magistrates asks readers to “imagine” two extra-textual phenomena: that they see Richard, and that they hear him howling his story. A book cannot deliver such audiovisual occurrences, but they are of course the basis of theatrical performance. It is fascinating that the prose link here emphasizes the fiction that the poem about Richard is being read aloud. The Mirror for Magistrates asks readers of a text to suppose that the verse has an existence as oral history and further that the speaker must ask the fictitious auditors to “imagine” an audiovisual, three-dimensional Richard. In this moment, writing seeks to imitate an orality that seeks to conjure an audiovisual experience.15 The Mirror for Magistrates, a form of print history, aspires at this moment to the condition of theater and its “lively” bodies.16 As a cultural form, theater resists easy classification as oral or written historiography. While its reliance on the spoken word would seem to align it with the oral – there is a cliché in theater studies that Elizabethan audiences went to “hear” as much as see a play – its three-dimensional physicality and inalienable visual aspect cannot be easily subsumed by orality. Richard III as a text went through frequent printings in Shakespeare’s own lifetime, which again aligns it with the world of print. But there was a moment when Richard III existed only in the performative present as an audiovisual phenomenon. Lukas Erne, in a variation on his previously quoted statement, correctly notes that the “Platonic idealism of performance criticism hides […] how little we know about what precisely was performed” in Shakespeare’s theater.17 While we should then be wary of making absolute claims about these performances, we must still be able to conjecture on the fact that works did have a moment on stage when they existed between manuscript and, in the case of those that were published, quarto or folio. The window for Richard III in this state is relatively small, compared, say, to that of a work such as Julius Caesar, which we know was performed in 1599 but which did not go into print until the First Folio of 1623. But in this brief window audiences of Richard III shared a temporal experience of the past unlike either oral or written representations. When the ill-fated Prince Edward wonders about the Tower of London, in a scene that has no source and serves no narrative function, Shakespeare brings questions of historical representation to the foreground. The play encourages skepticism toward the forms of history the Prince invokes: the oral and written. The work of Diana Taylor suggests another pair of terms which enable us to think beyond the confines of this binary when we

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consider the performance of history. She speaks of the differences between the “archive” and the “repertoire” in the transmission of knowledge. The archive consists of “supposedly enduring materials (i.e. texts, documents, buildings, bones)” in contrast to “the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e. spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”18 In this scheme, we can think of performance as outside the oral or the strictly textual altogether. Rather, it is part of the “repertoire,” for, as Taylor writes, “the repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being part of the transmission.”19 Importantly, though, Taylor is not interested in simply refuting a supposed epistemological primacy of the archive over the repertoire, just as in Richard III Shakespeare refuses to privilege the written over the spoken. Rather, she contends, the two exist in “a constant state of interaction.”20 As we will see, something like this can be said about the performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the historiographical traditions about this king. And, as we will also see, Taylor and other theorists of performance have begun to suggest ways of thinking about the presence of repertoire materials in ways that productively complicate the “disappearance” model of performance analysis that focuses on the transience of dramatic presence. This emphasis on disappearance has dominated some avenues of performance studies and has shaped my readings of other history plays so far in this book. But, as I hope to show here in my reading of Richard III, there is room also for thinking along with Taylor and others about the ways in which performance, understood as the repertoire interacting with the archive, can disappear and still be said to “hover.”21 citing up the (theatrical) past In contrast to its indictment of other modes of historiography, theatricalhistorical knowledge in Richard III is not overtly contaminated. In this play, we encounter a series of references to select incidents from the Wars of the Roses, most of which had been depicted by Shakespeare in the play now known as 3 Henry VI.22 Elizabethan audiences were used to watching sequential plays, such as the two parts of Tamburlaine or Kyd’s “Spanish” plays, to name some famous instances.23 Playgoers would then have been used to the idea that a later play in the sequence can be understood on its own terms and also to refer back to its predecessor(s). In the case of sequential history plays, the theatrical convention turns historical recall into recall of an earlier play as much as of historical events; indeed, the

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events of the past, I will argue here, become inextricably tied to their theatrical embodiments. Shakespeare would return to this aspect of the sequential history play format again in the later plays of the so-called “second tetralogy,” but he made his first serious attempt to exploit it in Richard III, a play so tied to its predecessors that it that could almost be called Henry VI, Part IV.24 In one of the most famous incidents from Richard III, George, Duke of Clarence, has a harrowing nightmare while imprisoned in the Tower of London. The condemned man’s dream lends insight to the specific history that pervades Richard III as it showcases a historical obsession that Clarence shares with the play at large: the repeated return to the conflicts that brought his family to power. Clarence describes how, in the dream, he and his brother Gloucester walked “upon the hatches” of a boat set for France, and “look’d toward England / And cited up a thousand heavy times, / During the wars of York and Lancaster” (I.iv.13–15). The notion of “citing up” the past that Clarence introduces here is a motif of Richard III. Articulation of historical memory is indeed common in the play, and most of the characters have an exceedingly narrow set of references to the past. As with Clarence’s dreamed conversation with Richard, the references to history are predominantly focused on a few key incidents from “the wars of York and Lancaster,” ones Shakespeare vividly depicted in 3 Henry VI: namely, the murders of the Duke of York, the Earl of Rutland, Prince Edward (Lancaster), and King Henry VI, as well as Clarence’s switches in allegiance. Reminders of these incidents are a terrifying component of the nightmare Clarence recites, as the ghosts of those he’s killed or betrayed torment him. In the dream, a wraith-like Warwick appears to accuse him of “perjury,” while Prince Edward, “a shadow like an angel,” recites the charges against the Duke: “false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence / That stabb’d me in the field by Tewkesbury” (I.iv.50; 55–56). The incidents from the past that surface in Clarence’s dream are ventilated throughout Richard III and dominate its discourse on history. This trend begins in general terms in Richard’s opening soliloquy about the wars that have just ceased and becomes more specific during the famous scene when Richard grotesquely woos Anne over the body of King Henry VI. The corpse of King Henry is a prop that stands as a visual reminder of Shakespeare’s earlier plays featuring that king and perhaps links this play with 1 Henry VI which, too, opens with the coffin of a dead monarch that serves as a reminder of loss. Demonstrating the essence of dramaturgy as the interaction of words and spectacle, Anne uses language to sensationalize that prop, claiming that the body bleeds through its wounds in the presence of

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Richard, providing evidence that affirms Richard’s guilt (I.ii.55–56). But after pointing to the metaphysical evidence of the bleeding wounds, Anne invokes eyewitness testimony to affirm Richard’s role in murdering her husband, Prince Edward: “Queen Margaret saw / Thy murd’rous falchion smoking in his blood” (95–96). Anne refers to the scene in 3 Henry VI where Richard helped to murder Edward, and audiences familiar with that play in effect share Queen Margaret’s status as eyewitness to the past moment when it was enacted. For his part, Richard makes a point in this scene of recalling the death of his brother Rutland, “when black-fac’d Clifford shook his sword at him,” as well as recalling when he heard of his own father’s death, both scenes that were also enacted in 3 Henry VI (I.ii.158, 161–167). When he exalts himself for wooing Anne after she has departed the stage, he again calls attention to the events of that earlier play, here as proof of why he is such an outrageous suitor: “Hath she forgot already that brave prince, / Edward, her lord, whom I, some three months since, / Stabb’d in my angry mood at Tewkesbury” (I.ii.239–241). In this scene, Anne and Richard call attention to incidents in the Lancaster–York conflict which Elizabethan audience members could themselves be expected to have seen on stage and recall as they are mentioned. Soon after, in a busy moment of familial in-fighting, Richard seeks moral authority in his conflict with Queen Elizabeth and her kin by pointing again to his efforts to win Edward the crown: “My pains are quite forgot” (I.iii.116). Richard is euphemistic in his elaboration of his “pains”: “I was a pack-horse in his [King Edward’s] great affairs; / A weeder-out of his proud adversaries” (I.iii.121–122). Queen Margaret is quick to elaborate on the details of his “weeding” in words heard only by the audience: “I do remember them [Richard’s actions] too well: Thou kill’dst my husband Henry in the Tower, / And Edward, my poor son, at Tewkesbury” (I.iii.117–119). Old Queen Margaret is initially seen and heard only by the audience before she is noticed by the characters on stage in this, her first scene in Richard III. She was a major figure in Shakespeare’s depiction of the Wars of the Roses and, like the body of Henry VI, on stage here becomes a strong visual link to that history and those plays in which it was presented. Her presence, both for the audience and for characters in her scenes, serves as a mote in the eye of the play’s present tense as she continually recalls the past. Richard, as depicted in 3 Henry VI, indeed, anticipates her role in Richard III when, after being dissuaded by his brothers from killing her, asks, “Why should she live, to fill the world with words?” (V.v.44). Margaret’s compelling presence, established as the player who enacts her “fills the world with words,” helps draw the play back into the past that events of 3 Henry VI depicted. Her

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memory turns obsessively on the murders of her son and husband, and in response Richard will again recall her murder of Rutland and the infamous scene from 3 Henry VI where, in Richard’s retelling, Margaret “didst crown his [the Duke of York’s] warlike brows with paper, / And with thy scorns drew’st rivers from his eyes, / And then to dry them, gav’st the Duke a clout / Steep’d in the faultless blood of pretty Rutland” (Richard III, I.iii.174–177). These and other exchanges about the deaths at famous battles such as Wakefield and Tewkesbury structure the play’s consciousness of history around the events depicted in 3 Henry VI. The persistence of those events in the language of Richard III makes this play’s own historical sensibility peculiarly theatrical. That is, to the extent that an agreed-upon past exists for characters in the world of Richard III, it is the past that has been given a vivid shape on stage. When a triumphant Richmond at the play’s end speaks of the chaotic world his victory will transform, a world where “The father rashly slaughter’d his own son, / The son, compell’d, been butcher to the sire” (V.v.25–26), he appears to be doing some generic moralizing. But alert audiences will recall that these words, too, are rooted in a specific, memorable incident of patricide and filicide dramatized in 3 Henry VI. Even the unnamed murderers sent to kill Clarence in the Tower exhibit knowledge of the past that seems mediated by 3 Henry VI. One tells Clarence, “Thou didst receive the sacrament to fight / In quarrel of the House of Lancaster.” His fellow takes up this thread and continues, “And like a traitor to the name of God / Didst break that vow, and with thy treacherous blade / Urip’st the bowels of thy sov’ereign’s son [i.e. Prince Edward, son of Henry VI]” (I.iv.202–207). This plebeian knowledge of the past extends also to some unnamed citizens, who recall the state of England “when Henry the Sixt / Was crown’d in Paris but at nine months old,” a fact alluded to elsewhere in the Henry VI plays (II.iii.16–17). By citing up 3 Henry VI as the historical past, and bringing it to mind for the many playgoers who doubtless recalled these scenes, Richard III transforms its predecessor from the status of a past play to the status of the past itself. This trend can be seen also in another curious exchange involving one of the young princes. The younger of King Edward’s two sons reveals his own historical interests in his efforts to keep up a contest of wits with his uncle Richard. Richard had teased the little Duke of York by comparing his growth spurt to that of a weed. York, speaking with his mother Queen Elizabeth and grandmother, the Duchess of York, hits on a rejoinder that alludes to Richard’s own legendary growth in the womb: “Marry (they say) my uncle grew so fast / That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old; / ’Twas

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full two years ere I could get a tooth” (II.iv.27–29). The young Duke shows an ability to make pointed use of the old tale of Richard being born with teeth. The boy’s knowledge of this story in Richard III baffles his grandmother: “I prithee, pretty York, who told thee this?” york: Grandam, his nurse. duchess: His nurse? Why she was dead ere though wast born. york: If ’twere not she, I cannot tell who told me. (II.iv.31–34)

York’s awareness of this particular legend about Richard is never explained, and it is noteworthy that Shakespeare forces the issue of the origin of his knowledge to the forefront of audience awareness by having the Duchess question him about it. This choice supports the notion that historical knowledge in the world of Richard III is indebted to what was said and done in Shakespeare’s own previous history plays, for the infantile Richard’s dental anomaly is mentioned by King Henry in 3 Henry VI. Addressing Richard moments before he is killed by him, Henry says “Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born, / To signify thou cam’st to bite the world” (V.vi.53–54). Richard quickly dispatches poor Henry, but, as if his own imagination has been inspired by the King’s words, he muses on his legendary birth, about which he has “often heard” his mother speak: “The midwife wonder’d and the women cried, / ‘O Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!’” (V.vi.70, 74–75). York claims he knows of this from a domestic and feminine sphere of oral tradition, which is the same line of transmission Richard claimed for it. York adopts the knowledge of Richard having been born with teeth that was circulated in 3 Henry VI and appropriates the means by which Richard claims to know about it: a tale handed down from an eyewitness woman. This possibility is shot down by his grandmother’s assertion that such an avenue of transmission is impossible: the nurse is dead. The existence of Richard’s premature teeth is a bit of knowledge which is uncertainly linked to oral traditions but which has a clear connection to the theatrical moment of Henry’s and Richard’s own reminiscing on the subject in 3 Henry VI. It is as though Henry’s and Richard’s words from the older play still “fill up the world” the little Duke inhabits. Those references were performed on stage, but the Duke’s awareness of them, as in the case of the murderers’ knowledge of Clarence’s past crimes, adds a different dimension to the logic of allusion in Richard III. Most of the references to 3 Henry VI in Richard III have been made by characters who had been directly involved in the actions to which they refer. The Duke’s knowledge, like that of the murderers, could be explained by a different kind of witnessing. The players who

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perform the part of the Duke and the murderers may have been on stage in other roles in 3 Henry VI. If that is the case, the knowledge these figures exhibit, especially in the case of the Duke, could function as a kind of metatheatrical joke among the players, accessible to especially alert members of the audience as well. How could the Duke know about Richard’s teeth? Perhaps a boy player played the part of Henry VI, who is notoriously effeminate in Shakespeare’s representation. And, as young York, this same boy player is able to recall the story of Richard’s premature teeth through a memory of referring to the fact while playing Henry in his death scene. Obviously this is a conjectural statement which requires that essentially the same company of actors performed both plays, a problematic assumption given the uncertain textual and stage history of these works.25 But the authorial self-referentiality of such a moment – in which Shakespeare reflects back on his own previous play and writes awareness of that play into “new” characters – can’t help but raise the possibility of theatrical selfreference. This is amplified when, as Richard III goes on, characters begin ostentatiously to recall events not only from the Henry VI plays but also from early parts of Richard III itself. This is particularly true of Richard’s victims, such as Hastings, Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan, who think back on Queen Margaret’s ability to have foreseen their deaths (i.e. III.iv.15–20; III.v.92–93). It is worth noting that not every historical memory aired in Richard III is one specifically enacted in it or in previous plays. We saw already Prince Edward thinking about an ancient, Roman Britain in his query about Julius Caesar and the Tower. Elsewhere, King Edward alludes to a time when Clarence rescued him during the battle at Tewkesbury and also lent him his own clothes to keep him warm while sleeping in a frozen field (II.i.112–118), while Richard speaks of Queen Elizabeth’s first husband dying in battle at St. Albans (I.iii.130). None of these incidents are represented in 3 Henry VI (although the death of Elizabeth’s husband is reported in that play by King Edward [see III.ii.1–2]). In most of these moments, though, Prince Edward’s questions about the Tower aside, the past which is cited up is still largely framed by the boundaries named in Clarence’s dream, when he reminisces with his brother over the time of “the wars of York and Lancaster.” The impact of my analysis of Richard III’s use of 3 Henry VI to construct the historical past is perforce restricted to audiences from the era in which these plays were first performed. After all, Richard III is now most frequently staged on its own. Modern audiences familiar with Richard III might be only dimly aware that Shakespeare wrote plays about King Henry VI. In

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fact, a potential objection to my argument here rests on the very fact that it is possible to produce a play as allusive as Richard III separate from its precursors. The references to 3 Henry VI could be said to make Richard III independent of the Henry VI plays, functioning as a sort of recap of the events that lie behind the present play’s concerns. But this idea of a selfsufficient Richard III – convenient as it is for modern dramaturges – could not have obtained in the 1590s. The allusions to 3 Henry VI surely could help playgoers who did not see that earlier play make sense of Richard III, but they more insistently activate memories of audiences that did know it. The history of Richard III is a narrative that is self-consciously constructed out of previous performances. What we now call 3 HenryVI had a complicated, still poorly understood life as a play and as a text in the early 1590s. What seems indisputable is that it resonates in Richard III as a series of vividly described memories that the characters share with audience members, for it is a play with which we can reasonably assume many audience members for Richard III would be familiar. Richard III depicts a bank of historical knowledge that emerges from the previous play about the deaths of Rutland, King Henry, his son Edward, and Clarence’s treachery, as well as the perpetuation of the anecdote about Richard’s teeth. The characters do not contest the facts of these incidents but, rather, their meaning and the rightful consequences of them. This thread of reflections on the past is spoken. But it revolves very particularly around a work from the Elizabethan stage, one whose events require sensational stage action, like the paper crown and bloody napkin flaunted during York’s murder. These reflections are thus primarily connected to the theatrical. Through this motif, Richard III aligns history with a memory of theater and, often, the visual memory of events enacted in theater, a conception that is heightened in a later scene depicting the King, his successor, and a series of ghosts on the night before Bosworth. richard, richmond, and revenants I have argued that the Queen’s Men’s history plays had a great conceptual influence on Shakespeare as he formulated his own ideas about staging the past. The True Tragedy of Richard III contains a few very particular connections to Shakespeare’s Richard III. In both plays, for instance, King Richard calls out for a horse moments before he is killed on the battlefield by Richmond. Overall, though, Shakespeare does not take much specific material from this older play for his own portrait of Richard. His best-known borrowing from The True Tragedy of Richard III, as we saw in Chapter 3, ends

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up in Hamlet. Intriguingly, Shakespeare’s Richard III is a kind of “photo negative” of The True Tragedy of Richard III in terms of events that are mentioned versus events that are performed on stage. For instance, Jane Shore is a vague figure in Shakespeare’s play, invoked as part of some bawdy quibbling in an early scene and, later, as in league with Queen Elizabeth to bewitch Richard. In The True Tragedy of Richard III, Jane Shore is a vividly realized character who appears in two significant scenes, the latter of which supplies a good deal of the work’s pathos. Meanwhile, in The True Tragedy of Richard III, there is only passing mention of Richard and Buckingham’s chicanery before the people of London at Baynard Castle, a scene of malicious deception that is a prominent piece of Richard’s enacted villainy in Shakespeare. The True Tragedy of Richard III shows the young princes murdered, an act which is merely described in Shakespeare’s play. Finally, late in The True Tragedy of Richard III, Richard expresses a sense that he is being tormented by the ghosts of his victims, a fear that culminates in that play’s one poetic set-piece about all of nature calling vengeance down on him. True to the complementary pattern of these works, Shakespeare turns this speech into a visual tour de force in Richard III when Richard is visited by a series of ghosts on the eve of the climactic battle. Shakespeare creates a fascinating instance of simultaneous staging to realize this scene. The scene builds toward a powerful moment in which both Richard and Richmond share the stage and, unaware of each other’s presence, experience a supernatural pageant that adumbrates the coming battle. Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film version of Richard III renders the set-up for this scene in distinctly cinematic terms, featuring a stunning panoramic view of Bosworth Field on the evening before the battle. The shot begins with a wide view of Richmond’s camp, dotted with fine-looking circular tents, and slowly pulls back to reveal the King’s camp and Richard’s own tent. The camera holds here, and, for a brief moment, spectators can discern an expanse between the King’s tent and that of his antagonist. Of course, no such sense of scale is possible in the theater. In the theater, this scene must deny what Olivier’s film is able to convey: a sense of spatial verisimilitude. That is, on film, it seems as if there is significant distance between the camps. Exactly how the scene was staged and this sense of distance suggested remains unclear. The First Folio (F) provides somewhat fuller stage directions than the Quartos (Q), but even taken together, the texts of the play provide only sparse direction. After Richard and Richmond have discussed battle plans with their men on different ends of the stage, they both, at some point, sleep. The first ghost, that of Prince Edward Lancaster, son to Henry VI, enters, speaks to Richard and then to Richmond. He is followed by

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Henry, who speaks to Richard and Richmond, and then Clarence, who does the same, then at once Rivers, Gray, and Vaughan, who each speak to Richard, then in unison to Richmond. The order of the ghosts diverges here in F from that in Q, perhaps reflecting a reduced company and doubling of actors in the performance Q reflects. Q at this point has the young princes enter – one of whom in Q may have also played Queen Anne, making it necessary that she not enter immediately following the Princes, while in F it is Hastings. In both, the princes speak together to Richard and Richmond, and Hastings speaks to both men. The ghosts of Queen Anne and Buckingham then enter successively, and, following the pattern, each speaks to Richard and then to Richmond. Q and F introduce the ghosts by name in the directions, e.g., in F “Enter the Ghost of Prince Edward, Sonne to Henry the Sixt,” while the words spoken by each ghost do something to identify it for audiences, e.g., “I, that was wash’d to death with fulsome wine, / Poor Clarence” (V.iii.132–133). Following Buckingham’s address to Richmond, according to F, “Richard Starts out of his dreame” (this is stated with slightly different wording in Q). It is not made clear in either text how the ghosts exit, or, indeed, at what point they do. It is possible, then, that the ghosts said their lines and then left, as would be necessary to support the conjecture about the different ordering in Q. It is also possible that in non-Q performances the ghosts each remained until Richard wakes, and then depart en masse. I have lingered over details of this scene as it appears in the texts of Richard III in order to glean some idea of how it might have been played. It is a question that has caused consternation to some editors of the text who must invent stage directions to make the complex demands of the scene legible to readers. Many aspects of how the scene could be enacted are communicated clearly in the texts, while many others can only be guessed at. For instance, it is certain from a host of verbal cues that the stage space contains some realization of two tents, which cannot in reality be any farther from each other than the length of the stage would allow and which represent in the world of the play distinct spatial areas with significant distance between them. But whether or not Richard and Richmond are inside or outside their tents when they fall asleep is unclear. In the run-up to the appearance of the ghosts, both Richard and Richmond can be seen alternately conducting some business on, presumably, opposite sides of the stage, creating the effect for audiences of a simultaneous view of separate localities. Depending on how we read some of the scene’s indications of time passing for Richard and Richmond, we may or may not also be seeing distinct temporalities.

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When the ghosts address Richard and Richmond, the fictional distance between them collapses. Whatever the relative time scheme of their separate locales, they are at this point united in a spectral, spatial-temporal moment along with the audience. Audiences at a history play always enjoy the illusion of a preternatural viewpoint; that is, such plays offer the illusion that they allow spectators to see into the past. This particular instance of simultaneous staging in Richard III amplifies the power of that preternatural vision in that it allows playgoers access to two different spaces at once within its imagined view of the past. Shakespeare uses the fantastic device of the split stage as an arena in which to introduce ghost figures who transform the play’s established pattern of disseminating history. Before this, characters refer to past people who are now absent. Now, such characters from the past materialize to tell their own stories. In order fully to appreciate the significance of these ghosts and the implications of the dramaturgy of this scene for the status of historical knowledge in the play, I want now to return for a moment to Clarence’s dream. Clarence’s recitation of his nightmare first concentrates on the rich and strange imagery of underwater wreckage but soon shifts to a vision of the classical underworld. Clarence, as we have seen, recalled that his dream began with his “citing up” unnamed episodes from the wars and ends it by being accused by the victims of his past crimes: The first that there did greet my stranger soul Was my father-in-law, renowned Warwick, Who spake aloud, ‘What scourge for perjury Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?’ And so he vanish’d. Then came wand’ring by A shadow like an angel, with bright hair Dabled in blood, and he shriek’d out aloud, ‘Clarence is come – false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury!’

(I.iv.48–56)

The dream, in Clarence’s words, contains “evidence” from the past that he then reports to his jailer (I.iv.67). Clarence’s talk about the past stands out in the play for its vivid poetry. But its content doesn’t differ substantially from the way history is cited up and fired between Richard and Margaret, for instance. Clarence claims he experienced a hellish diorama that includes figures from the past, but it is his vision alone, one that he can only relate to his jailer and to the audience through words. While the ghosts in Clarence’s dream are contained in his head, the ghosts that visit Richard and Richmond have a stage presence. Marjorie Garber, in her analysis of dream metaphors in Shakespeare, has argued that

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the difference between Clarence’s narrated dream and Richard’s enacted one is a question of representational sophistication. The Bosworth dream involves a “cumbersome apparatus” with an “aura of artificiality created by the mechanical pattern of omen fulfillment,” while Clarence’s dream is a sign of “psychological intuition” that Shakespeare would continue to hone and develop in later plays.26 Ultimately, though, as Wolfgang Clemen has said, it seems questionable whether we can label what occurs at Bosworth a “dream” at all.27 That is the specific word both Richard and Richmond use the next morning to describe their dual encounter with the spirits, and the stage directions in F and Q each use the word as they indicate that Richard awakens with a start (V.iii.212; V.iii.233).28 However, Richard and Richmond are each unaware of the full scope of their “dreams”; that is, as far as we can tell from the text, neither Richard nor Richmond realizes that each spirit that visited them was working both sides of the field. The stage direction’s use of the word “dream” could be done loosely, or as a convenient way to suggest Richard’s move from a passive to an active state. It could be using “dream” in an older sense of being a vision rather than a series of images one experiences naturally through sleep. Because both men experience and later recall the ghostly visitations, the “objective reality” of the ghosts makes it more accurate to view this moment as the representation of a supernatural phenomenon, one that is explicitly staged as such, rather than a projection of an interior experience.29 It is thus apt that it be represented in a wholly different way from Clarence’s dream, which was his interior, subjective experience and can only be recited. Interestingly, two major twentieth-century film versions of Richard III eliminate the effect of the split stage that this scene is written to produce and eliminate too Richmond’s share of the vision of the ghosts. Both Olivier’s film and Richard Loncraine’s 1995 version starring Ian McKellen show only Richard’s disturbed sleep. Olivier does show some of Richard’s victims in a ghostly form particular to cinema. They appear as superimposed, quasitransparent images that fade in and out of view, and their otherworldliness is suggested further when the words they speak are slightly out of sync with the movement of their mouths. Still, it is unclear in this version whether viewers are meant to understand them as ghosts or as a dream. In the Loncraine film, the camera shows Richard twitching in agitation in his sleep, while over the soundtrack we hear scraps and echoes of accusatory dialogue that his enemies spoke to him during the play. The fact that Richmond does not see the ghosts in these productions takes away their “objective reality.” The way the scene is shot in both films suggests the ghosts are a projection

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of Richard’s guilty conscience rather than an actual supernatural visitation. These choices by the films’ directors invest the scene with a degree of psychological realism. But such psychological realism is not suggested in the play text. The choices make the scene conducive to twentieth-century cinematic taste, but they suppress the stranger, bolder reflection on historical representation that the play calls for in the theater. Neither history as written document, nor history as spoken words, the ghosts are in some sense a visual and auditory version of the past. The stories we have heard told throughout Richard III about the deaths of Prince Edward and King Henry, for instance, materialize here as those figures return to speak for themselves. To Richard, Prince Edward says, “Think how thou stab’st me in my prime of youth / At Tewkesbury.” King Henry uses more vivid language: “When I was mortal, my anointed body / By thee was punched full of deadly holes. / Think on the Tower and me” (V.iii.120–121, 125–127). Playgoers have heard mention of these two victims, killed on stage in 3 Henry VI, throughout Richard III. At this moment, they emerge in this play with their own voices and their own supposedly mutilated bodies, demonstrating how performance gives the past a distinctive physical shape. After Henry VI and his son Prince Edward, the rest of the ghosts who appear in this scene are characters killed in Richard III itself. Audiences are more immediately familiar with them and have seen or been made aware of their deaths. Their return here does not reach back into a different play. But each still embodies the return of the past and invites a reflection backward in the temporal space of the play’s performance. The staging of the supernatural was developing in this period as an expression of a bold embrace and deliberate manipulation of theatrical techniques. As Marlowe demonstrated in Doctor Faustus, and as other necromancer plays, such as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay attest, the unique affect of theater could be heightened through the representation of the supernatural, precisely because the physical presence of theatrical performance allows for the thrilling pretense that audiences could be in the real presence of the otherworldly. The origin of ghosts in Shakespearean drama can be broadly traced to the Senecan tradition. They derive more specifically from Thomas Kyd’s use of a Senecan ghost to supervise his seminal work The Spanish Tragedy, another blockbuster play that, like Faustus, resonates throughout the late Elizabethan era as an enduring work in the imaginations of theater artists and audiences. Ghosts evidently played a part in another play that had a profound impact on Shakespeare. In 1596, Thomas Lodge alludes to the so-called “Ur-Hamlet” (which some scholars have attributed to Kyd) as he speaks of someone who “looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost

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which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge.’”30 Lodge emphasizes the vivid appearance of the theatrical ghost, describing its “pale vizard” and its stage presence as memorable enough to him, and evidently, his readers, to justify the reference. Locrine (published 1595) and Woodstock (circa 1592–1593) are two pre-Richard III plays about the English past that also feature ghost figures. The Queen’s Men presented ghosts in their repertory. In The Old Wives Tale, a benevolent ghost named Jack rewards a knight for burying his body, and, while it is not a major figure in the play, The True Tragedy of Richard III does include the ghost of Clarence who enters during the opening induction to cry “vindicta.” Stage ghosts had thus been conventional in the Elizabethan theater, and, as Stanley Wells writes, representation of ghost figures on the Elizabethan stage themselves “may have been governed by convention,” including masks or makeup to indicate paleness, or coverings to suggest the winding sheets used for burial.31 The figures of Prince Edward and those that follow him to share the stage with Richard and Richmond might have been easily associated by audiences, then, with a dramatic convention of presenting ghosts that had become standardized in previous plays. While this convention of ghostly visitations is retrograde according to Garber, for my reading, the “aura of artificiality” she notes is precisely the point. Shakespeare’s deployment of the stage ghost tradition in Richard III constitutes a reference to a form of historical representation unique to theater. This representation expands the oral/written binary of historical representation by calling attention to the theatrical as a site where history achieves embodiment. It is an embodiment that, like the supernatural itself, tantalizes audiences through the fantasy of access to the inaccessible past it provides. And, like the presentation of ghosts and other paranormal things, the stage of history gains power from the central aspect of theater, the presence of real bodies on stage and in the audience. Likewise, both are subject to the limitations of theatrical machinery, limits Lodge identifies when he sees through the representation of Hamlet’s ghost and identifies it by its mask or “vizard.” The ghosts of Richard III are a self-conscious figure for the play’s own act of representing history. Ghosts are the past in a form that can be seen as well as heard. They have a presence, but it is a presence that is somewhere between the material and the immaterial, between the materiality of the living, breathing player on stage and the ambiguous immateriality of the undead figures they represent. Ghosts serve as a presence that points to an absence.32 The performance of history is a presence on stage that simultaneously draws attention to the absence of the irrecoverable “real”

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past and the material, historical bodies being represented. Jacques Derrida’s term “hauntology” is a relevant theoretical concept that emphasizes the peculiar ontology of theater, and in particular the ontology of a type of theater dedicated to representing the past through ghost figures.33 In “hauntology,” ghosts “violate the binary categories of alive and dead, body and spirit, present and absent.”34 In Richard III, we can say also that the ghosts violate the binary of the written and the spoken in historical representation, suggesting that history can have a different kind of being through performance. In Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt observes that Shakespeare “seems to have staged ghosts […] in a spirit of self-conscious theatricality.” Ghosts, in Greenblatt’s view, are linked by Shakespeare with the “power” and “pleasure” of theater, for, like theater, they exist on the “border between fantasy and reality.”35 As Jeremy Lopez writes, Shakespeare discovered early in his career that “there is something theatrically exuberant […] about representing ghosts with indisputably corporeal actors.”36 Most important for my purposes here, Greenblatt, like Derrida, asserts that Shakespeare sees “the ghost as a figure of history,” and as a “figure of theater.”37 I have been suggesting that, conceptually, theater exists in an indeterminate space between presence and absence, just as the ghost figure does. Richard’s own words confirm this. When the ghosts have left his tent at Bosworth, Richard confides in Ratcliffe that “shadows to-night / Have strook more terror to the soul of Richard / Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers” (V.iii.216–218). Richard’s use of the theatrically charged term “shadow” broaches the subject of Richard III’s own form. Performance of history offers a three-dimensional version of the past that walks, talks, and renders the past in the unique audiovisual format Thomas Heywood describes when he speaks to the power of stage embodiment by noting that life “can no way bee so exquisitely demonstrated, nor so lively portrayed, as by action.”38 The split staging I described above is a dramaturgical strategy that heightens the novelty of this approach to the past. Shakespeare foregrounds the theatrical process through the split stage in general and, possibly, does so more specifically if players visibly rig up the tents for Richard and Richmond, as most modern editors assume when they interpolate stage directions early in the scene to this effect.39 Such action would signify how human labor transforms the stage space into imagined locales and distant temporal moments, how the historical past is made visible through action. The work of the playwright and the players to construct the stage space and to code the ghosts as ghosts for this scene emphasizes the efforts involved in theatrical spectacle and thus that making the past on stage is an act of will, of human travail. There is no “return” of the past as in the fiction of

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the ghosts visiting Bosworth through their own volition. Rather, history is something that is continually produced, as when the players, probably in makeup and sheets, that represent Prince Edward and King Henry enter the stage to enact figures from the past. The appearance of the ghosts might at first seem an instance of mneme: the past as the “popping into mind of a memory.” In fact, though, the process is more akin to anamnesis: “memory as an object of a search.”40 Cultures create and craft history, as the players create and craft the spectacle of the ghosts and the split stage on which they can appear. In Richard III, the dependence of historical consciousness on the cultural production of theater is made evident both in the reliance on a previous play for historical knowledge and on the way in which the past is given a distinctively theatrical shape in the performance of the ghost scene. The experience of the past this scene renders could only be delivered through theatrical technique and convention. The Bosworth ghost scene continues the play’s work of intertwining conceptually the theatrical and the historical. Shakespeare in this scene exploits the resources of theatrical production to expand the ways in which the past can be imagined and offers a version of the past that emphasizes historical knowledge as a particular brand of artifice. The play gives history a ghostly, indeterminate, but ultimately memorable body. providence and playing I see, then, the ghosts as exemplifying the human agency that goes into the construction of historical knowledge. The notion of agency naturally invites the question of providence and its place in this play. Some idea of the providential is integral to every major rendering of the “Richard III narrative” Shakespeare inherited. Richard III then presents the greatest challenge to Shakespeare in terms of his own authority as author of historical material. Not only is the broad outline of the story of Richard Gloucester predetermined, as is the case for all the medieval English kings Shakespeare presented, but the moral of this story was predetermined as well. To borrow Erich Auerbach’s phrase, King Richard III was a figure “fraught with background.”41 The play clearly follows its sources in depicting Richard’s famed physical deformity and the villainy such features supposedly guarantee. An even greater determining factor that Shakespeare met in his sources was the teleological narrative of the Tudor ascendancy, an ideology founded on the given that Richard was a gruesome king who necessitated his own overthrow. For Tudor partisans, the story of Richmond’s victory at Bosworth constituted a kind of national theodicy, a perspective that is evident in the materials on which Shakespeare drew for his play.

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Shakespeare’s distinctive authorial marks are all over Richard III nonetheless. This is particularly evident in the careful rhetorical patterns of the dramatic poetry that make the play a useful tool for defining various tropes and devices through example.42 And Shakespeare still does, of course, manage to put his own stamp on certain aspects of King Richard’s rise and fall. The unprecedented presence and thematic importance of old Queen Margaret is one instance of a major intervention. On a smaller level, Shakespeare adds more local color in inventing a name for Richard’s famously errant horse: “Surrey” (V.iii.64). But such things can only go so far to add conceptual intrigue to a predetermined narrative. For instance, a sense of providence saturates Richmond’s final speech, where he pronounces: O now let Richmond and Elizabeth, The true succeeders of each royal house, By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together! And let their heirs (God, if thy will be so) Enrich the time to come with smooth-fac’d peace, With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!

(V.v.29–34)

The play lacks the ambivalent endings we see in so many other history plays, such as, for instance, Richard II. Here it is clear who is the villain and who saves the nation. It is strongly implied that Richmond is the instrument of God’s will. Still, many critics of Richard III have read a tension in the play between its surface Tudor piety and a desire on Shakespeare’s part to complicate that template. Richard Wheeler, for instance, finds in Richard III a kind of Psychomachia between, on the one hand, Shakespeare’s attraction to new forms of historical thinking that emphasized human causes for the course of history and, on the other hand, his loyalty to Tudor eschatology, finding that the play pays homage to the second view while tipping its hand toward the first: “Richard III,” he writes, “establishes a rigorous inner integrity within an essentially profane system of political causality which makes the Tudor-Christian myth seem more the ornament of history than its essence.”43 Wheeler does concede that Richmond’s victory is represented as propelled by the forces of providence. But he and like-minded critics are searching to explain how a play that is officially without “moral ambiguities” can nonetheless be so compelling.44 The easiest explanation for this must surely lie in how the play’s dramaturgy inflects its sense of historical knowledge. Richard III draws much of its aesthetic power from the complex interplay between historical necessity and the aesthetics of dramatic historiography. As Garber points out, the ghosts at Bosworth speak in the language of curse

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and omen that other characters throughout the play, namely old Queen Margaret, employ. However, rather than only confirming the providential arc of the play, that the ghosts continue this ritualistic pattern of cursing in fact undermines providential certainty. The ghosts connect the expression of history as retributive justice to a burgeoning stage convention of the vengeful revenant, not to a Christian scheme of renewal. To the extent that the ghost on stage announces itself as a theatrical creation linked to other popular plays and their conventions, the providential justice the ghosts speak loses the status of transcendent truth and becomes implicated in the work of theater. The ghost’s providential pronouncements of justice are associated with the barely concealable illusion-making process of the stage.45 Richmond himself is a component in the larger theatrical mechanism of the play. He is connected to the ghosts and their providential vision through his participation in the pre-battle dream vision he shares with Richard. The player speaking the resounding final lines of the play quoted above cannot transcend his implication in the ghost scene in which he appeared, or the workings of the theater industry that the ghost scene helps to showcase. The appearance of the ghosts has helped bring this implication to the surface. The ghosts highlight the constructedness of theater and so also foreground the fact that providential theories of history are themselves human constructions. The play may ultimately be without “moral ambiguities” on the level of content. The play’s form, though, does admit ambiguities insofar as its embrace of florid theatricality in the Bosworth scene infuses the play with a strong aroma of calculated pretense, the deliberate crafting of providential surety. Even as Shakespeare represents Richard’s entrapment in a providential snare, he dilutes the authority of the historical tradition that would render Richard’s story unambiguously the story of God’s will. By exposing the imaginative labor that goes into historical representation, Shakespeare suggests that providence itself is an effect that is created to appear innate to the Richard III story. Insofar as theatrical performance foregrounds this, we can begin to see how performance on stage helps to create an alternative kind of historical consciousness to the written or the oral, one more transparent about the complicated dynamics by which history is formulated and circulated in culture.

theatrum historiae Richard III by its end accomplishes a rendering of history that is selfconscious about the formal apparatus it uses to present the past. Lady

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Anne’s initial question upon seeing Richard Gloucester early in Richard III can serve as the starting point to a summation of some implications of this self-consciousness. She demands: “What black magician conjures up this fiend?” (I.i.34). Anne’s rhetorical aim is clear enough: she establishes that Richard seems preternaturally evil. But the query bears further scrutiny. One answer to the question of Richard’s origins is the historiographic tradition that has been only glanced at in this chapter. Starting with John Rous’s description of King Richard as an unnatural being, born with teeth and shoulder-length hair, this tradition would take its most influential form in More’s history of Richard, from which most subsequent sixteenth-century chronicles derive. Another, more immediate answer to Anne’s question, “What black magician conjures up this fiend,” is Shakespeare himself or, to be precise, the combined effort of author-Shakespeare and actorRichard Burbage. There is a literary as well as theatrical lineage that intervenes between historiography and Shakespeare’s Richard III, including The Mirror for Magistrates and The True Tragedy of Richard III, not to mention a more general stage tradition to which Richard alludes when he compares himself to the “formal Vice, Iniquity.” But the Richard that confronts and seduces Anne over the corpse of Henry VI, no matter how ostensibly derivative, is, in the present moment of the play’s performance, peculiarly a creation of Shakespeare and his lead actor. The Shakespeare– Burbage dyad and the play it produced has ensured that King Richard III endures as a creature both of English history and the Elizabethan stage, with the theatrical iteration of the King constantly informing historical representations of his reign. We can look again to 3 Henry VI for the groundwork of this aspect of Richard III. At the end of this play, King Henry, oblivious to so much about the world in which he lives, has an epiphany when Richard Gloucester arrives to kill him: “What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?” (V.vi.10). The “scene,” the “acting” and the actor to whom Henry refers are not loosely metaphorical but resonate with the actual work of a player in a certain time and place, here the famed Roscius of ancient Rome. The genius of Henry’s insight is not that he diagnoses Richard as a hypocrite through the allusion to acting. Rather, this line is powerful because Henry associates Richard with the act of professional playing. The theater–world analogy in this instance is different from the broad universals upon which Jaques will expound in its best-known usage in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage.” In the reference to Roscius, the theatre–world comparison narrowly and specifically calls attention to the actual practice of professional playacting rather than to the cyclic futility or illusory quality of life.

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The theatrum mundi trope itself has roots that extend back to Plato at least.46 The comparison between life and playacting normally worked to emphasize the powerlessness of humanity as a kind of plaything of the gods. Eventually, in the Middle Ages, a homiletic tradition developed from this perspective. Theatrum mundi became a means of staying focused on the reality of the afterlife and Christian salvation rather than getting too caught up in the false and fleeting reality of the world. By the time Jaques speaks his melancholy version in Arden, the expression had become also a vehicle for a proto-nihilism that is developed further by Shakespeare in his tragic figures Macbeth and Lear. Anne Righter has traced the development of this trope in relation to the actor–audience relationship. According to Righter, as drama in the sixteenth century became increasingly detached from ritual, audiences lost the role of humanity they had previously played when attending cosmic works such as the Mystery Cycles. The increased use of expressions that relate the world to the stage in English drama in the sixteenth century, Righter argues, was a means by which playwrights and actors kept open a line of communication to involve audiences in the plays at hand and to highlight particular themes. In Righter’s reading of Richard III, the theatrum mundi trope operates as a comment on authority. For instance, we see the convention when Richard plans and executes contrived scenarios in collaboration with Buckingham in order to make it appear Richard is reluctant to become king.47 Within the play at these moments, Richard is “acting” the “part” of a humble or virtuous person. This exposure of Richard as “actorly,” according to Righter, allows audiences to recognize him as a dissembler and ultimately as an illegitimate king figure.48 This is no doubt the goal of More’s pervasive use of the theatrum mundi trope in his history of Richard III. Certainly, the embrace of the theatrical by the title character in Shakespeare’s play is a nod to that influence. But aside from the political critique the analogy provides, the “theatricality” of the play’s lead character also works to provide a good deal of the play’s entertainment value. The spectacle of Richard, a demonic vice figure, creating havoc on stage and, in his own words making the world a place in which he can “bustle” (I.i.152) is a major element of the play’s power to please.49 But when Henry invokes the topos on the verge of his death, he does so in a way that creates a legacy of Richard III in which the King is not merely akin to one who acts, i.e. not merely one who pretends to be other than he is but rather one who is defined by association with professional acting. Such professional status for actors was a feature of the new theater industry in late-sixteenth-century England, to which the nearest available

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precedent was ancient Rome. Henry bypasses simile, whereby Richard would be like an actor, for the more radical figurative trope, metaphor: Richard is Roscius. Henry’s conflation of Richard III with an actor unites Richard, a historical figure, with the archetypal professional player. Thus, a historical imagination is constructed by means of a theatrical point of reference. This produces the effect, ultimately, of linking the theatrical and the historical in phenomenological terms: the King Richard to which Shakespeare’s play gives us access is always, in fact, a surrogate for the genuine article, is always a professional actor. The legacy of Shakespeare’s Richard III has been the intensification of this association between history and theater. Within the comparison between the world and the theater, Shakespeare articulates a comparison between history and theater, a concept that might be called theatrum historiae. In Richard III, Shakespeare represents the past as becoming intelligible through the theatrical device of the ghost figure and thus associates history with the realm of the fleeting and insubstantial. We can recall here Elin Diamond’s rich statement that performance is always a “doing and a thing done.”50 Likewise, history is given temporality in the theater so that it ceases to be fodder for rhetorical declamation and takes on the imaginative dimension of a momentary materiality, as well as the more equivocal dimension of always slipping away from us as it is transmitted. Or, as noted avant-garde director Peter Sellars recently commented, “The coolest thing about theater is that when it’s over, it’s over.”51 This way of looking at plays, which is consistent with much of the analysis so far in this book, emphasizes disappearance as the fundamental element of the performance event. While this is a model of performance analysis that I find to be useful in assessing the impact of live playing, some theorists have begun to challenge it as an absolute in ways that I find applicable here. Aleksandra Wolska notes that “critics who interpret the theatrical event as a form of absence […] center their attention on transience,” and that “when applied to the stage, the notion of unraveling temporality macerates performance into a succession of fading instants, from the not-yet to the already-gone.”52 She acknowledges the truth of this approach but seeks to modulate it as well, arguing that “theatre engages forces of becoming as well as those of vanishing.”53 Diana Taylor makes a similar point in her response to Peggy Phelan’s statement that “performance’s only life is in the present.”54 Taylor writes: Performance makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and

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collective life. These specters, made manifest through performance, alter future phantoms, future fantasies […] performances tap into public fantasies and leave a trace, reproducing and at times altering cultural repertoires […] Performance, be it artistic or political, accomplishes a moment of revisualization. It disappears only to hover.55

This last statement seems to me to advance the concept of “hauntology” in productive ways for theater analysis, especially for analysis of a theater as influential as Shakespeare’s has been. For, in his employment of a theaterhistory analogy, of theatrum historiae, Shakespeare and his performers have been remarkably successful in “reproducing and altering cultural repertoires” of historical materials. His King Richard III, in particular, has managed to “hover” even as each individual performance of him disappears. The success of the play, in the long run, has guaranteed that Richard’s story will be linked to the theatre and professional playacting as much as “theatricality” in a general sense, or with the messianic rise of the Tudors or the pains of tyranny. What ultimately endures in the popular imagination of this king is the image of not just a “stagey” figure but of a stage figure. Richard III has become in a sense a locus classicus of florid acting, not in a way that merely confirms the New Historicist perspective on the performative nature of royal authority but in a more literal association with aesthetic playacting. The play makes the theatrum mundi trope secular and situated rather than theological and universal, as Richard’s story comes to be associated with a literal rather than a metaphorical stage. This is evident in a series of contemporary and near contemporary references to the play which call attention to the player who acted King Richard, Burbage, who, after Richard Tarlton and Edward Alleyn, was probably the best-known player of his era. John Manningham tells an oft-cited bawdy anecdote about Burbage’s performance of Richard (recorded 1601): Upon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich. 3 there was a citizen greue soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night unto hir by the name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Rich. the 3.d was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Rich. the 3.56

Whatever truth value we assign this story in terms of Shakespeare’s or Burbage’s biography, it confirms an association between that actor and the role of Richard III. The play itself is linked to the professional theatrical milieu in the anecdote, constructing as it does a network of connections among playgoer, player, and playwright. Shakespeare, armed with a

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mischievous sense of historical chronology, prevails here. But the more salient point of the anecdote is the way it links the two Richards, actor and historical figure. In Part II of the anonymously authored academic play Return from Parnassus (c. 1598–1601) we see this link again. A “character” version of Burbage and Shakespeare’s clown Will Kemp appear here. Burbage tests a potential actor: “I like your face, and the proportion of your body for Richard the 3. I pray […] let me see you act a little of it.” The man responds: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sonne of Yorke.”57 While his protégé’s lines aren’t strictly accurate, the episode again links Burbage the actor with the role of Richard III, as though a representation of Burbage necessitates mention of this part. The trend of associating the figure of Richard Gloucester with not “theatricality” broadly speaking but with a concrete stage and, further, a particular, professional player is perhaps best seen in the poem Iter Boreale by Bishop Richard Corbett (the work was published in 1647 but written perhaps as early as 1618), which purports to document a journey through England. In his account of a stop to see Bosworth Field, Corbett includes a witty description of a host “full of Ale and History” (line 331) who serves as a tour guide.58 The host speaks of the site of the battle: see yee yond’ woods? there Richard lay With his whole Army: looke the other way, And loe where Richmond in a bed of grosse, [sic] Encamp’d himselfe o’re night with all his Force.

(lines 335–338)

The host is careful to describe the relative positions of Richard and Richmond, a hint that his knowledge of the battle may have been prompted by a memory of the split staging in Shakespeare’s play. As Corbett goes on to describe, the host reveals that his sense of the past is indeed inextricable from his theatrical memory: why, he [the host] could tell The Inch where Richmond stood, where Richard fell; Besides what of his knowledge he could say, Hee had Authentique notice from the Play; Which I might guesse by’s mustri[n]g up the Ghosts, And policies not incident to hosts: But chiefly by that one perspicuous thing, Where he mistooke a Player for a King, For when he would have said, King Richard dy’d, And call’d a Horse, a Horse, he Burbage cry’d. (lines 339–352)

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The host’s sense of the Richard III story is structured by the actual performance of Shakespeare’s version. Corbett captures the epistemological crux of this situation – the real past known through a medium that is based on pretending – in his paradoxical phrase “Authentique notice from the play.” Corbett guesses that his host knows the Richard III story through “the Play” for a number of reasons. One is his “mustri[n]g up the Ghosts.” This appears to be an allusion to the ghost scene from Richard III. Another is his inclusion of the “horse” line. But his main evidence that the host’s sense of the Richard III story is entangled with familiarity with it as it existed in performance of Shakespeare’s play is his “perspicuous” mistaking of Burbage for Richard, “a Player for a King,” and his assigning to Burbage the famous lines calling for a horse. Corbett’s poem imagines that performance of Richard III could have the effect of creating a historical memory that is entangled with theatrical memory. In an instance that conforms to Joseph Roach’s term “surrogation” as a definition of performance – the “doomed search for originals [through] continuously auditioning stand-ins” – the mediating figure, the stand-in, is the professional player, Burbage.59 The player is at once the vehicle for the fantasy of presence that performing history offers and, recognizable as a particular celebrity of the theater industry, marks the limitation of that fantasy, a sign that the perspective of the past on view is a product of theatrical labor. King Richard III holds an enduring place in the popular Anglo-American – and increasingly world – imagination of the past as a hunchbacked figure, stranded on a battlefield and missing his horse. This is an image gleaned from Shakespeare’s version of the play, and which Shakespeare himself took from the Queen’s Men and The True Tragedy of Richard III. The consciousness of history that the play constructs, then, has a lingering visual component constituted by this player and his stage presence. It is that very presence that allows Shakespeare’s dramatic historiography to complicate the dominant modes of representing the past in Elizabethan England, the written and the oral. It helps to constitute a theatre–history analogy in which history is understood not merely as a narrative that is heard or read but as having an audiovisual component, whose embodiment is experienced three-dimensionally by playgoers, and can thus work to constitute an eidetic, or image-oriented, sense of the past, one of “becoming” that “hovers” as part of the cultural repertoire. A 1741 William Hogarth painting based on the ghost scene in Richard III is one visual afterimage that captures such “hovering.” The painting, which today hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and that serves as the

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cover image of this book, is titled David Garrick as Richard III and features the actor, who had just made a name for himself by acting the part, as Richard awakening in his tent at Bosworth. The title of this work tips its hand toward a theatrical provenance for the image it depicts. This is a picture, it indicates, of an actor playing a part. But the painting itself makes the purely theatrical context for the scene intriguingly ambiguous. Garrick is not situated on a stage. This does not appear to be a snapshot of a moment in the theater. Behind the tent is what seems to be a realistically rendered, receding “deep background” that depicts the battlefield. The painting visualizes the historical event of Bosworth but draws on Shakespeare’s version of the Richard III story for this particular moment – the aftermath of the ghosts’ visitation – and plugs an actor’s face in for the historical Richard’s. Generically, this work is a “history painting,” and its use of Garrick as a surrogate for King Richard – or is he a surrogate for Burbage-as-surrogate-for-Richard? – shows how Shakespeare’s play could continue to blur the line between history and theater. The Hogarth painting is an interesting example to consider, but in the end it is a static image. More dynamic associations of this English king with acting and the stage have endured and can be seen in more recent examples. An episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus broadcast originally in 1970, for instance, features a sketch in which a doctor tours the “Royal Hospital for Overacting,” giving special emphasis to the “Richard III Ward.” The ward consists of actors particularly obsessed with declaiming Richard’s last words, the words Corbett’s host assigned to Burbage: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (V.iv.13).60 There is also a priceless segment from an 1995 episode of The Simpsons. A superhero film is being shot in Springfield, home to the eponymous family, and Bart Simpson, eager to land the coveted role of the sidekick “Fallout Boy,” quotes Richard’s “Now is the winter of our discontent” as a warm-up for his audition, words that send the emotionally fragile, perpetually confused Ralph Wiggum running away. In 2000, another animated television show, Family Guy, likewise showcased a child using the opening lines of Richard III as part of an acting audition.61 In the 1999 Spike Jonze film Being John Malkovich, a work peculiarly interested in, among so many other things, the psyche and persona of the performer and the relation between actors and roles, Malkovich is shown rehearsing the “wooing scene” from Richard III, complete with prosthetic humpback. George Buc(k) began to recuperate the image of King Richard as early as 1619.62 But a late-twentieth-century collection of essays assessing Richard’s reign demonstrates how difficult such a project is, in particular in the wake of Shakespeare’s representation of Richard as an essentially evil figure. The editor of the collection writes in his introduction that “obviously it is

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impossible to accept Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard as the evil genius whose malice and cunning overshadow the whole period from the first Battle of St. Albans in 1455 onwards.”63 This may well be the consensus – “obviously” – among modern historians, but the very fact that this statement must be aired at the start of a study of Richard and his reign is telling. Later in the same collection, another historian argues that the following question is essential to Ricardian historiography: “[H]ow much did a knowledge of Shakespeare’s play influence, wittingly or unwittingly, later writers on the king?”64 It is, indeed, a cliché of sorts for historians and scholars and teachers of Richard III to pose this question and posit a gap between the play and historical evidence as a means of introducing study of the king or the work. Historians routinely acknowledge that it was not Shakespeare who invented the demonic image of Richard. They point out, rather, how strongly his play has fixed that image. A. J. Pollard voices a sentiment that, with little variation, has been expressed in countless history books and editions of Richard III: “The play has left its indelible mark on perceptions of Richard III.”65 There remains a felt necessity to respond to the negative portrait of Richard encapsulated by Shakespeare’s play. It is as though this idea of Richard is in continual dialectic with other forces, from the recuperative agenda of the explicit partisans of the various pro-Richard III “societies” to historians who are ultimately in broad agreement with the negative characterization but feel compelled to make clear they approach the subject with a mind unprejudiced by Shakespeare. Desmond Seward identifies performance as the crucial factor that underwrites the persistence of Shakespeare’s Richard. Beyond Shakespeare’s own day, and beyond the information in the play as a text to be read, the evil crookback image “has been heightened by a theatrical tradition stretching from Colley Cibber to Laurence Olivier.”66 We should add Burbage and Garrick to the beginning of that lineage, and, now, perhaps Ian McKellan and a film tradition (including Olivier’s film performance) to the end. It is not merely Shakespeare’s exquisite poetry or the force of his work as text that has sustained the Richard of Rous, More et al. against revisionist claims that suggest a different historical Richard. It is the Richard of More et al. given a body and a stage/film set to “bustle” upon that energizes and perpetuates this dialectic. The Shakespearean Richard demonstrates the power of theater as a form to shape the historical imagination. The persistence of Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard III testifies to the experience of history the play delivers, an experience made intense by the performance tradition of the lead character

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that Burbage inaugurated, as well as the play’s engagement with history as an idea, as in the Bosworth ghost scene. This phenomenon allows us to rethink again the ancient aphorism about the didactic purposes of history. F. J. Levy notes that “History [in the early modern period] that did not teach was utterly inconceivable, and if any changes occurred during the course of the sixteenth century, these had to do not with whether history should teach but with what it taught.”67 Levy leaves little room for an idea of history as a source of pleasure rather than merely as a vehicle for education. But theatergoers in Elizabethan London found – indeed, wanted to find – more in stories about the past than moral lessons. One thing they gained was pleasure in the fantasy of access to the past as an imaginative triumph over the tyranny of time and space, similar perhaps to the pleasures afforded later audiences and readers by time-travel narratives: a desire for an experience of the past driven by the acknowledgment of its inalienable absence. Richard III throughout its history has stood as an example of the fate of tyrants and the evils of political cunning. It has been equally, if not more prominently, received as a play that, in the popular imagination, defines an archetype of the theatrical thrill of performing the historical. Through its use of another play, 3 Henry VI, as the materials of historical memory, through its own persistent indulgence in the language of the theater, and in its ultimate emergence as a star vehicle for a professional actor, Richard III offers a consciousness of history as produced by the labor of those working in the theater industry, a fact that has been amplified by the long association of the play’s leading part with ostentatious acting. As audiovisual spectacle, featuring the desirable bodies of star players, Richard III is sensual history; as a commercial play, it is history as vendible product of human labor; formally, it represents a means of representing the past which constructs an experience of history and reveals that experiences of history are always constructed. The play and its afterlife demonstrate the peculiar frisson of this dual work of presenting the past and promoting a critical consciousness of such presentations. In another play in another genre, Shakespeare describes a mysterious kind of anticipation. The pater Leonato, in Much Ado About Nothing, proposes to deal with the rumor that a dashing soldier means to marry his daughter: “We will hold it as a dream till it appear itself” (I.ii.20–21). Richard III conveys a sense of history in which the past is in some sense “held” as a dreamlike, supernatural vision waiting to appear. The play simultaneously conveys the notion that history is really a contrived human artifact, as in the peculiar theatrical apparitions that enter the stage at Bosworth. Richard III

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visualizes history through spectral figures, offering an image-oriented sense of the past that is itself never quite there but never quite absent either. The essence of the theater–history analogy is that it presents a sense of history in which the past is what we envision and body forth. In those embodiments, we may pretend that history, like the promised action of a marriage proposal, can “appear itself” and make us its passive spectators. But theatrum historiae in Richard III makes evident that such passivity in relation to history is itself a fantasy, for, like the pleasures of theater, we can only ever have the pleasures of history through willful acts of representation and communal imagining. This is to some extent true whether these acts take the form of telling or writing, but it is most evident and most powerfully illustrated when history is the object of performance. not es 1. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 12–13. As Rackin notes, there is no precedent for this exchange in Shakespeare’s sources, thus marking it as a particular site in which Shakespeare discusses history-telling. On this exchange and historiography, see also Paul Werstine, “‘Is it Upon Record?’ The Reduction of the History Plays to History,” in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways With Old Texts II: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992–1996 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998) pp. 71–82, and James Siemon, “Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories,” in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwells, 2000) pp. 662–673. 2. The OED defines “eidetic” this way: “Applied to an image that revives an optical impression with hallucinatory clearness, or to the faculty of seeing such images, or to a person having this faculty.” 3. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 214. 4. See D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 352–391. 5. Sir Thomas More, The History of King Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 6, emphasis added. 6. This story appears only in the Latin version of The History of Richard III. See George M. Logan’s “reading edition” of More’s The History of Richard III (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. xxiii. 7. For more on this topic, see A. F. Pollard, “The Making of Sir Thomas More’s Richard III,” in R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour (eds.), Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1977), pp. 421–431 and the introduction in The History of Richard III, ed. George M. Logan.

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8. The phrase refers to the title of Barbara Shapiro’s book A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). Shapiro discusses legal and historical facts, pp. 8–62. See pp. 12, 15–16, 38, 42–43 and passim on the growing authority of documents in determining the truth about the past. 9. See Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, pp. 213–258, and Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, pp. 352–391, on the decline of oral tradition. See Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, pp. 363–368, for discussion of some early critics of oral tradition in historical writing. 10. Quoted in Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, p. 216. 11. The quarto (Q) quoted from Kristian Smidt, ed. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third: Parallel Texts of the First Quarto and the First Folio (New York: Humanities Press, 1969). 12. James A. Knapp, Illustrating the English Past in Early Modern England (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), p. 33. 13. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 37. 14. The Mirror for Magistrates: Edited from Original Texts in the Huntington Library, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), p. 359. 15. One early reader of The Mirror for Magistrates claims that the book was effective in creating a fiction of presence. John Higgins was inspired by Baldwin’s The Mirror for Magistrates to write a “prequel” of sorts that includes stories from Geoffrey and other early British historical works. He writes in his induction that as he first read The Mirror for Magistrates and its presentation of ventriloquized voices, “Mee thought in mynde, I sawe those men in deede.” John Higgins, The First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates (London: 1574), sig. A2v. 16. See Blair Worden’s comments on this subject in “Historians and Poets,” in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2006), pp. 69–90. 17. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 133. 18. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 19. 19. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 20. 20. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 21. 21. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 144. 22. The plays most commonly known as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, following their designation as such in the First Folio, pose some of the most perplexing difficulties in Shakespearean textual studies. In 1594, a play called The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster was published in quarto, and the following year, a play called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York was published in octavo. Scholarly opinion is divided between those who see these earlier publications as more or less mangled versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI as they appear in the First Folio and those who

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would see them as entirely separate plays. There is not space here for me to document this issue fully. My feeling is that the Folio play 3 Henry VI and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York are in essence one play. The differences between them have, and should continue to, occasion arguments about such topics as Shakespeare’s evolving politics, revision practices, or texts as properties of different playing companies. But because the incidents from The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and 3 Henry VI that I refer to here occur in both texts, I am comfortable using the more familiar and convenient title 3 Henry VI to refer, albeit anachronistically, to what was performed on the Elizabethan stage prior to Richard III. 23. On two-part plays, in particular on Kyd’s contribution to this vogue, see Lukas Erne, Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 37–38. 24. On this point, see Marjorie Garber, “‘What’s Past Is Prologue’: Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare’s History Plays,” in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 301–331; p. 319. 25. Gary Taylor assumes a boy actor took the part of Henry, at least in 1 Henry VI. See Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 7 (1995): 145–205, p. 152. In terms of company issues, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which, as I say above, I believe to be substantively the same play as 3 Henry VI, was published in 1595 stating on its title page that it had been “sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants,” while the first quarto of Richard III published in 1597 says on its title page that the play “hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants.” Hammond, however, has suggested that Richard III was first played by Pembroke’s Men, which would make the same company conjecture plausible; Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Hammond, p. 62. As Lawrence Manley, in “From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men: 2 Henry VI and The First Part of the Contention,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 54 (2003): 253–287, shows, there is another possibility. Manley writes, “Pembroke’s Men included a number of the lesser players who had been in Strange’s Men and who would later act in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.” He goes on to note the “unproven […] implication which possibly follows from this: that some of the more important personnel of Strange’s Men who eventually became the sharers in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men arrived there by way of Pembroke’s Men” (p. 284). It is unproven, but plausible. If that is so – that “lesser” and “more important” players came to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men via Pembroke’s company – we could also conjecture that essentially the same company of players put on 3 Henry VI and Richard III. This is of course a much more involved problem, with a long tradition of scholarly debate, than I can fully discuss here. The bibliography to Manley’s article provides a good starting point for the critical history of this issue.

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26. Marjorie Garber, Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 26. 27. Wolfgang Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III, trans. Jean Bonheim (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 213. Garber qualifies her own assertions a bit by calling the Bosworth experience an “apparition dream” (Dream in Shakespeare, p. 19). 28. The directions read, “Richard Stareth up out of a dreame,” (Q), “Richard Starts out of his dreame” (F). Q and F quoted from Kristian Smidt, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. 29. The phrase “objective reality” in reference to the ghosts comes from Clemen, A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III, p. 214. On this point, see also Stanley Wells, “Staging Shakespeare’s Ghosts,” in Murray Biggs, Philip Edwards, IngaStina Ewbank, and Eugene M. Waith (eds.), The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Stuart Drama: Essays for G. K. Hunter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 50–69; p. 51. 30. Quoted in Wells, “Staging Shakespeare’s Ghosts,” p. 51. 31. Wells, “Staging Shakespeare’s Ghosts,” p. 51. 32. Thomas Betterridge, in Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), refers to the ghosts’ “spectral materiality” as the key to their “monstrosity” (p. 56). 33. Jacques Derrida introduces the concept of “hauntology” in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 10. 34. This riff on “hauntology” is from Graham Fraser, ‘No More than Ghosts Make’: The Hauntology and Gothic Minimalism of Beckett’s Late Work,” Modern Fiction Studies, 46 (2000): 772–785 (p. 777). In a formulation relevant to my argument that the ghosts disrupt the binary of written and oral, Margreta de Grazia writes: “Ghosts throw into doubt the fundamental twos upholding traditional thought. Neither alive nor dead, absent nor present, real or unreal, they elide or exceed the binaries that organize learned inquiry” (“Teleology, Delay, and the ‘Old Mole,’” Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999): 251–267 (p. 264)). 35. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001) pp. 195, 199. 36. Jeremy Lopez, “Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 20 (2007): 187–203 (p. 195). 37. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, pp. 193, 157. 38. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), vol. IV, pp. 250–251. 39. Anthony Hammond, for instance, includes a note explaining that he finds it necessary to add a number of specific stage directions for this scene, including “Richard’s tent is raised, on one side of the stage,” and “the tent is now ready” (Richard III, pp. 307–308). See also similar directions provided by editors for this scene in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare

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40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

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(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) and Evans et al. (eds.), The Riverside Shakespeare. The definitions of these terms are taken from Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathellen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 4. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 12. On sources for the play, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), vol. III, pp. 221–248, and Peter Saccio’s chapter on Richard III in Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). On Shakespeare’s relation to his sources, see also Marjorie Garber, “Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History,” in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds.), The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 79–103, and also Richard P. Wheeler, “History, Character and Conscience in Richard III,” Comparative Drama, 5 (1971–1972): 301–321. See, for instance, Russ McDonald’s brief discussion of Richard III’s rhetoric in Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 38–40. Wheeler, “History, Character and Conscience in Richard III,” p. 311. See also A. P. Rossiter, from the title chapter in Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd, 1966), pp. 1–22; Rackin, Stages of History, p. 63; and Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 297, 305. Herschel Baker, introduction to Richard III in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 751. Phyllis Rackin writes that “[as] Shakespeare’s historical representations become more providential, they also become more self-consciously theatrical,” Stages of History, p. 71. Here, Rackin is specifically talking about a trend she sees in the second tetralogy. I am attempting to locate a similar insight earlier in Shakespeare’s career. For a survey of ancient sources, see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), pp. 138–144, as well as Righter’s enormously useful Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, pp. 64–66. Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, p. 100. Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, pp. 97–100. Later critics in the New Historicist school built on this insight and added more flexibility to its operations, arguing that acting the part of a monarch is in fact a sine qua non of kingly authority, a means of exercising and maintaining power, in which all monarchs, regardless of their legitimacy, must engage.

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49. Stephen Greenblatt argues as much in his introduction to the play in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 507–512. 50. Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 1. 51. “Demon Opera,” an interview with Peter Sellars conducted by Edward Lewine, New York Times Magazine, September 14, 2008, pp. 22–23 (p. 23). 52. Aleksandra Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” Theatre Journal, 57 (2005): 83–95; pp. 85, 86. 53. Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” p. 85. Emphasis added. 54. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146. 55. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, pp. 143–144. Peggy Phelan’s statement, quoted in Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 142, can be found in her Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, p. 146. 56. Quoted from the Hammond edition of Richard III, p. 67. Barbara Hodgdon refers to this anecdote in the course of her fascinating analysis of the film surrogations of Richard by Ian McKellen and Al Pacino. See her essay “Replicating Richard: Body Doubles, Body Politics,” Theatre Journal, 50 (1998): 207–225. 57. The allusion to Richard III in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus can be found at IV.iv.1835–1839 in The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd., 1949). The Second Part, in which the allusion appears, was published in 1606. See also the twovolume collection, John Munro et al. (eds.), The Shakespeare Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591 to 1700 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932) for a complete listing of allusions to Burbage and this role. 58. Richard Corbett, Iter Boreale, in The Poems of Richard Corbett, J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (eds.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 43. 59. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 3. 60. Monty Python’s Flying Circus,“Spam,” Episode 25 (1970). This was perhaps the first line of the play to be actively parodied in Shakespeare’s own time. See John Marston’s Scourge of Villanie (1598), in which he writes “A Man, a man, a kingdome for a man.” 61. The Simpsons, “Radioactive Man,” Episode 702 (1995) and Family Guy, “The King is Dead,” Season 2, Episode 7 (2000). 62. See Buc[k]’s The History of King Richard the Third, ed. Arthur Noel Kincaid (Gloucester: A. Sutton, 1982). 63. The statement appears in the editor’s introduction to Richard III: A Medieval Kingship, ed. John Gillingham (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 2. 64. P. W. Hammond, “The Reputation of Richard III,” in John Gillingham (ed.), Richard III: A Medieval Kingship (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 133.

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65. A. J. Pollard, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 3. See also P. W. Hammond and Anne F. Sutton, Richard III: The Road to Bosworth (London: Constable, 1985), p. 13. 66. Desmond Seward’s Richard III, England’s Black Legend (New York: F. Watts, 1983), p. 15. 67. F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), p. 7.

chapter 6

Henry V and the extra-theatrical historical imagination

In the opening scenes of Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely have an extended conversation about the maturation of their sovereign from a madcap Prince to a king “full of grace and fair regard” (I.i.22). This story of Hal as wild youth who is shocked into maturity by his father’s death was available to playgoers in The Famous Victories of Henry V as well as in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays. As the churchmen propose various explanations for King Henry’s turn – ranging from the miraculous intervention of God to Hal’s own shrewd management of his persona – playgoers can think along with them, choose one version or another, or even think up a different version altogether based on their own experience of the story. The backward gaze in Richard III that I discussed in the last chapter, a kind of intertheatricality whereby characters in that play repeatedly refer back to events of 3 Henry VI, features prominently in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy as well. Henry IV, Part 1 looks back on Richard II, 2 Henry IV looks back on both, and Henry V looks back on all those plays. Because of its Chorus figure, who is not subject to the fiction of belonging to the past world that Henry V depicts, this play can even end with a reference to the Henry VI series. Those plays precede Henry V in Shakespeare’s career but follow it in historical chronology. Henry V thus closes with the most temporally complex vision of history – and the history play – in the Shakespeare canon. It looks back on the history that is still to come from its own putative perspective. Shakespeare emphasizes more urgently in Henry V than elsewhere the ways in which intertheatricality in history plays amounts to a theatrum historiae trope – where history is conflated with the simulated behaviors of theater – through the presence of the Chorus. When in Richard III reference is made to previous plays, the audience is implicitly constructed as witnesses to the history those plays presented. This construction is significantly more explicit in Henry V, as can be seen in the metaphor of the “prompt” employed by the Chorus to Act V of Henry V: “Vouchsafe to those that 178

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have not read the story / That I may prompt them” (V.Chorus.1–2). Prompting, in the business of staging plays, happens between players and others involved in mounting the production. The Chorus now includes the audience in the sphere of those who can be prompted, an admission that the players must rely on audience members to an extent that makes the theatrical event collaborative. It’s not insignificant that, in the final words of the Prologue, the Chorus refers to Henry V as “our play.” This is a verbal echo of the words of a few lines earlier, when the Chorus explains “For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings” (Prologue.34, 28, emphases added). Our kings, our play; history, like theater, is collective work. Through the self-reflexive presence and words of the Chorus, the play amplifies the theatrum historiae concept by underlining the fact of this traffic between players and audiences. Shakespeare inherited from the Queen’s Men the dramatic and thematic possibilities that arise from the interplay of historical culture and theatrical practice. He developed and exploited these possibilities early in his career in plays such as 1 Henry VI and Richard III. Shakespeare in Henry V uses the insights he gained from writing and acting in these and other history plays to show that historical culture is a two-way street. To exist, history involves a dynamic loop of production and reception. The Chorus in Henry V has attracted a good deal of critical attention. Much of it has to do with the political implications of how the Chorus describes Henry, while another strain argues about the date at which the Choruses were initially composed: they did not appear in print until the publication of the First Folio in 1623, despite the fact that several earlier quarto editions of the play had been published.1 Of course, consideration of the metatheatrical element of the Chorus also features prominently in criticism of the play, often as a way to show the demystification of theater to be aligned with the demystification, or remystification, of the political and ideological work the play pursues.2 I want to open up fresh areas of inquiry into the topic of Henry V’s reflection on historical representation through considering what else the Chorus tells us about Shakespeare’s sense of the past. To do this, I will first consider the extent to which Shakespeare understood the production of history as conceptually similar to the production of the most outlandish kinds of drama by comparing the Prologue to Henry V with the similarly worded Prologue to Thomas Dekker’s bizarre play Old Fortunatus. This is a work that may in fact have preceded and inspired Shakespeare’s own Chorus and thus helps fix an early date for the composition of the Chorus’s speeches. In both works, the authors make clear that audiences must indulge in great imaginative leaps in order to take

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any pleasure in what the play has to offer. Henry V, then, defines historical representation as a species of the fantastic, and seemingly locates the imaginative work of history within the walls of the playhouse where incredible things are allowed. The imaginative work of history does not remain there, though. The Chorus in Henry V does more than merely tell its audience how to watch a history play. After all, this is the ninth play about the medieval English monarchy Shakespeare had written over the course of a decade. It’s safe to say that, by now, his audience had gotten the message that theatrical representation does not deliver the past as it really was. In Henry V, the Chorus suggests to playgoers that the historical imagination can move outside the theater. In the last Elizabethan history play in the style of the two tetralogies and King John that he would write, Shakespeare suggests that the imaginative faculty that creates a consciousness of the past in the theater can be portable. For even as the Chorus in Henry V seems to circumscribe historical consciousness to the “wooden O” of the stage and the time of the performative present, the play also unmoors historical consciousness in new and exciting ways. There are a number of small but notable moments in the play where the Chorus and other characters refer to things outside the theater in London and its environs – places, objects, even the remains of bodies – that playgoers might use as vehicles for historical imagining that normally only happens in the theater. History, the play ultimately implies, involves mental exercise both in and beyond the playhouse walls. The dialectical method of envisioning history that might begin in the theater between players and playgoers, then, can continue to work in audience members’ minds once they leave the playhouse. Newly energized by the power of performance, they can engage anew the traces of the past that surround them in the world outside. “like” theater, “like” history: the past as fantasy In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Quince inadvertently but correctly promises that his acting troupe will “disfigure” the interlude of “Pyramus and Thisby” they intend to present to the Athenian court (III.i.60). The Chorus at the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V likewise asserts that the play to follow will be riddled with defects. The play’s prologue is famously embarrassed about the prospect of performing history: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France?” (Prologue.11–12). The Chorus asserts that incredulity is the natural response to such attempts at representation, and

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simultaneously readies the incredulous audience for a play. Performance of the past is necessarily imperfect and “disfigured,” but that won’t stop it from happening. As the prologue makes clear, attempts to connect the “now” of performance with the “then” of precedent can only sharpen awareness of the irrecoverable past, and yet the impulse to act out history is too powerful to abjure. As countless critics have pointed out, the opening lines to Henry V offer a devastating critique of the theater’s representational inadequacy while further asserting history to be, like the figure of the “O” used to describe the playhouse, an absence, a void that might be filled by the creative power a “muse of fire” enables.3 The lines, though familiar, are worth quoting in full: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels (Leash’d in, like hounds) should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these two walls Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies, Whose high, upreared, and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth; For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, Turning th’ accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,

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(Prologue 1–34)

At first glance, the Prologue traces a movement from a fantasy of presence to the realization of absence, a turn that occurs at the caesura of line 8, as “But pardon” deflates the heady image of the “warlike Harry.” The reading of initial presence is complicated, though, by the “like” which follows this image – “like himself.” A “Muse of fire” could produce the King, the “warlike Harry,” and this warlike Harry is still only “like himself,” not the genuine article. Harry is further distanced from “himself,” for in this supposedly ideal version of presenting the past, the King aspires to be “like” another: to “assume the port of Mars.” The Chorus envisions an ideal aid to telling history, the “Muse of fire,” only to undercut and implicate that in mediation and distance from getting at history “as it really happened.” Even before arriving at the worthless “scaffold” of line 10, the Chorus cannot conceive of a way to present history that gets outside the contingencies of its telling or beyond the “like-ness” of all re-presentation. David Quint has noted the “willed aesthetic distance” of the discourse of Henry V.4 Quint deftly argues that Shakespeare’s play reveals a critical historical consciousness by making “the literary mediation separating the audience from the historical event” apparent.5 It seems to me equally important to emphasize in Henry V the theatrical mediation: the mediation of a live moment of performance. As a mediating figure, the Chorus reflects on the belatedness of historical representation. The sense that this is a project that is taking place within a time scheme shared by the actors and the audience – and thus necessarily separated from the past – is emphasized over and over by the Chorus’s use of the imperative mood, a grammatical means of confirming temporal continuity between those on and off stage: “Suppose that you have seen” (III.Chorus.3); “[S]it and see” (IV. Chorus.52); the imperative further establishes the presentness of the play when it is joined with the direct invocation of the present moment: “Now entertain conjecture” (IV.Chorus.1); “But now behold” (V.Chorus.22). The Chorus actively solicits the audience to participate in the imaginative construction of the play and its stories. The Chorus acknowledges that this construction involves taxing the imagination and in a sense adopts the perspective of cynics like Sidney, who writes of the absurdity of a stage on which “you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other.”6 The play from the outset is conspicuously conscious about the challenges such a scheme of representation poses to playgoers and so offers a strategy to

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apprehend the performance in a key line to the prologue: “Think,” says the Chorus, “when we talk of horses, that you see them” (Prologue.26). The imaginative work audiences are pressed to undertake at a performance of Henry V is ultimately much more involved than the relatively simple exercise of imagining a horse on stage, though. To imagine a horse within the walls of the “wooden O” would require an act of imagination to be sure. But horses were everyday sights for early modern Londoners, an ordinary prospect that was probably seen, heard, smelt, and perhaps touched by many playgoers on their way to a typical afternoon of theater. It is not just this quotidian animal, or even a battlefield in France that must be imagined, but an entirely separate temporal moment. The performance of a distant era involves for Shakespeare a representational conceit that can be best illuminated through reference to a similar Chorus figure in a contemporary play Shakespeare certainly knew, Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus. A comparison between these plays shows that Shakespeare understood fantasy to be a key component of historical consciousness. Consideration of this play is also the best means to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s Chorus was a part of the earliest productions of Henry V at the turn of the sixteenth century, and thus the culmination of his dramatic history-making in the 1590s. Why this must be demonstrated bears a brief explanation. Questions of absence and mediation raised by the Chorus are attached not only to performance of the play but to its textual history as well. The speeches of the Chorus, including the Prologue, did not appear in the initial published version of Henry V, a quarto from 1600. They were not seen in any subsequent printing of the play until the 1623 First Folio. The absence of the Chorus from early editions of Henry V has prompted some speculation that the Chorus’s lines may have been added after the play’s probable premier in 1599 either as part of a theatrical revival or as a species of literary revision. Richard Dutton and Stephen Orgel, for instance, believe that the Chorus part may have originated sometime after 1601. James Bednarz has recently shown this argument to be suspect, based on allusions to the Henry V Chorus in the 1599 Ben Jonson play Every Man Out of His Humour, an argument I will extend below with reference to Old Fortunatus.7 Other critics, meanwhile, believe the Chorus may have been cut for publication as a nod to the politically sensitive topic of the Earl of Essex’s failed Irish campaign, for Essex seems to be the object of a flattering reference in the Chorus for Act V. But one incendiary topical allusion could hardly account for the wholesale removal of the Chorus part from the play. Lukas Erne has proposed a yet more radical explanation. In support of his compelling thesis about Shakespeare’s literariness, Erne speculates that the lines could have

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been specifically added for readers of the play.8 And yet, they speak so clearly to a playhouse audience that it is highly unlikely they would have been prepared only for a text; such an argument requires a strained interpretation of how the imperatives the Chorus directs toward playgoers might actually be aimed at readers. More plausible is the argument put forth by Andrew Gurr that the lines were in the authorial manuscript, and then were cut for brevity’s sake in a players’ copy that became the basis for the early quartos, to be restored only when the authorial manuscript was consulted for the Folio. For Gurr, this means that “[the Chorus] was unlikely to have been heard […] at any time before 1623, and probably not until the play was revived with the aid of the Folio-based editions of the eighteenth century.”9 But the fact that the lines do not appear in the first print editions does not indicate that they were not said on stage in 1599. Their absence from early editions can actually best be explained by Erne’s own arguments about the literariness of the endeavor of publishing plays.10 The printer or whoever prepared the manuscript for publication in 1600 may have decided that, as a product meant to be read, the first quarto of Henry V did not need to include lines clearly intended for theatergoers. However, aside from this common-sense argument, it is the coincidence of the language and the date of composition and original performance of Henry V and Dekker’s Old Fortunatus that provides the most convincing evidence of an early date for the Henry V Choruses. Simply stated, Shakespeare’s Chorus in Henry V originated either in close response to Dekker’s play, or it influenced, and therefore preceded it. Dekker’s Old Fortunatus was, like Henry V, first published in 1600. Unlike Henry V, Dekker’s play did not go through subsequent reprintings and so would not have been circulating in a current edition in 1623 and thus be likely to have influenced the Folio’s publication of the Choruses. The complete prologue to Old Fortunatus goes as follows: Of Loues sweete war, our timerous Muse doth sing, And to the bosome of each gentle deare, Offers her Artles tunes, borne on the wing Of sacred Poesy. A benumming feare, (That your nice souls, cloyd with dilicious sounds, Will loath her lowly notes) makes her pull in Her fainting pineons, and her spirit confounds Before the weake voice of her song begin. Yet since within the circle of each eye, (Being like so many suns in his round Sphere) No wrinckle yet is seene, sheele dare to flie,

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Borne up with hopes, that as you oft do reare With your faire hands, those who would els sinke down, So some will deigne to smile, where all might frown: And for this smal Circumference must stand, For the imagind Sur-face of much land, Of many kingdomes, and since many a mile Should here be measurd out: our Muse intreats Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, and to allow, That I may serue as Chorus to her scenes; She begs your pardon, for sheele send me foorth, Not when the lawes of Poesy doe call, But as the storie needes. Your gracious eye Giues life to Fortunatus historie.11

The final ten lines of the prologue, which I have emphasized here, bear an obvious relation to lines from the prologue to Henry V. In particular, we can note the idea expressed by Shakespeare as “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” and by Dekker as “our Muse intreats / your thoughts to helpe poore Art” as well as Shakespeare’s “Admit me Chorus to this history” alongside Dekker’s “allow / That I may serve as Chorus.” There are more moments elsewhere in Old Fortunatus, notably the Choral lines that open Act II of that play, which share the vocabulary and style of Shakespeare’s Chorus, in particular the use of the word “suppose” as a directive that is also a kind of plea to the audience.12 There is no clear answer to the question of priority between Old Fortunatus and Henry V. I have found only a few scholars who have commented directly on the issue, and all assume Shakespeare was the original. For instance Gary Taylor, in his edition of Henry V, mentions possible “echoes” of Shakespeare’s Chorus in Dekker’s but passes over it without further comment.13 This consensus about Shakespeare’s priority is based on no firm evidence. A full review of the relevant facts shows the case is unresolved, and, probably, irresolvable. It is worth noting, though, that a stronger, if still undefinitive, case can be made that Shakespeare’s Chorus is derivative. A no-longer-extant Fortunatus play was on stage in 1596, at least three years prior to the composition of Henry V. It appears that Henslowe paid Dekker to rework this older play about the character Fortunatus for the 1599 performance that yielded the 1600 quarto of Old Fortunatus we now possess. A court-specific opening for a royal performance was definitely added at this time at Henslowe’s request.14 Whether the Prologue quoted above and the rest of the Chorus part was also added then, or was part of the older, now lost, version of the Fortunatus play is impossible to determine. The available evidence, then, leaves open the possibility that the Chorus of

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Old Fortunatus was present already in the 1596 version of the play that Dekker revised. Apart from the question about dating the Chorus, let us consider why the resemblance between Henry V and Old Fortunatus matters. On the surface, these two plays are very different, so the similarity in these framing comments is quite suggestive for assessing Shakespeare’s sense of the conceptual stakes of performing history. Old Fortunatus, like its German prose source, is full of wonders, somewhat in the mold of The Old Wives Tale. It involves fantastic objects, such as a purse with an endless supply of gold and a hat that grants wishes to its wearers, including wishes for instantaneous, farflung travel across great distances. In other words, it is a play that consciously and deliberately calls upon its audience to stretch their imaginative capacity and to consider, for the time and place of the play, that they are witnessing what it is normally impossible to witness. The Chorus’s intervention in Henry V, in the Prologue, and elsewhere, represents a similar consciousness of the play’s own status as a production of the fantastic that involves “turning th’ accomplishment of many years / Into an hourglass” (Prologue.30–31). If we allow for the possibility that Shakespeare followed the lead of the Old Fortunatus Chorus figure, it is striking that he recognized in the supernatural-oriented Old Fortunatus a dynamic of audience reception that he also saw necessary for historical representation. By the end of the seventeenth century, as part of his scathing critique of the propriety of Othello and its indecorous emphasis on a handkerchief, Thomas Rymer specifically compares that play to Dekker’s (or, at least, the subject material of Dekker’s play, which circulated in other forms): “we have heard of Fortunatus his Purse, and of the Invisible Cloak, long ago worn thread bare, and stow’d up in the Wardrobe of obsolete Romances.”15 In a clever rhetorical move to solidify his case against Othello, Rymer compares it to a story that he assumes is universally recognized as preposterous. But Shakespeare saw something else in Dekker’s play, or, at least, in Dekker’s way of talking about his play in the Prologue, that struck a chord with his own approach to dramatizing the past. Just as audiences of Old Fortunatus must consent to accept the wonders of the magic hat, the golden purse, or apples that cause horns to grow on the eater’s head, audiences of Henry V must consent to receive the wondrous pretense that they are witnessing Henry’s presence first in England, then in France, and of being with the King at Agincourt and later as he woos Queen Katherine. I believe it is likely that Shakespeare did get his idea for the Chorus from Dekker. But it is not essential to determine that the Chorus’s lines in Old Fortunatus came before Henry V to recognize that the two plays are in

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dialogue, or to see that Henry V as a whole shows that Shakespeare understood his play as working in a similar imaginative terrain to Dekker’s. The words at the start of Henry V are calculated to assure playgoers that the producing agents of the history they are seeing are aware that the representation of history gives not a simulacrum of the past but a theatrical exploration of the extraordinary. The display of the fantastic on stage must always risk the skepticism of playgoers, the skepticism we detect in Sidney’s reference to the absurd mutability of stage space playgoers must accept: “you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers: and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place: and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock.”16 As Sidney makes clear, theater audiences must always go through some process of skepticism and resignation. The phrase “we are to blame if we accept it not” indicates a sense that this was always understood as part of the theatrical contract, as the responsibility that a playgoer (in Sidney’s case, resentfully) accepted upon entering the theater. The Chorus in Henry V fits this standard experience of skepticism and resignation specifically to historical representation. Shakespeare admits up front the outrageous conceit of both theatrical and historical representation. He directs playgoers to be aware of the element of – perhaps irrational – belief that historical culture demands, because history has no being in itself. This belief overlaps conceptually with the acceptance of theatrical conventions for representing the otherworldly. The language of the Chorus before Act IV of Old Fortunatus once again resonates in explicit ways with Shakespeare’s Chorus. Dekker’s Chorus declares that “If your swift thoughts clap on their wonted wings” (IV. Chorus.21) audiences will be able to envision the son of Fortunatus, Andelocia, as he moves from Cyprus to Genoa to England with the aid of his “wishing hat.” This sentiment of imagined movement is expressed in similar terms by Shakespeare: “Thus with imagin’d wing our swift scene flies / In motion of no less celerity / than that of thought” (III.Chorus.1–3). And yet it is in this same Chorus to Act IV of Old Fortunatus that we can begin to see something of a split between how Dekker and Shakespeare figure the fantastical imaginative work they have been asking of audiences. Dekker describes how Andelocia abducts a woman who had cheated him out of his other magical object, the purse of endless gold. To get the purse back, he takes hold of her and calls on the power of the wishing hat, and “So flies he with her, wishing in the air / To be transported to some wilderness: / Imagine this the place” (IV.Chorus.29–31, emphasis added). Old Fortunatus never stops pressing audiences to use stage space and theater technology to

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conceive of wonders as they watch the play, such as thinking “this,” the stage, to be a remote wilderness. As we will see, Shakespeare begins to enjoin audiences to imagine not just the theater to be other places but to use that same imaginative faculty to imagine places outside the theater; that is, to historicize imaginatively the spaces and objects of London. imagining the past from the “scaffold” to “blackheath” to the “tomb” The prologue establishes that playgoers at a performance of Henry V must use their minds to see what isn’t really there. In this opening speech, it is the palpable place of the theater and its technologies of representation that are most often invoked as the vehicles for that mental work: the “flat unraised spirits,” or the players; the “scaffold,” or the stage; and in the injunction we have already considered, “think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,” the spoken language of drama itself. This all takes place within the “wooden O,” or the “cockpit,” in other words, inside the actual playhouse. The Prologue teaches audiences how, “within the girdle of these walls,” they can respond to theatrical voices, performing bodies, and playing spaces by transforming them in their heads into historical bodies and far-flung places such as the “vasty fields of France.” In the lines that precede Act II, the Chorus seemingly fixes the audience to this space: “There is the playhouse now, there must you sit,” as though it is only in the playhouse, directly aided by the work of the production, that they can do the work of imagining the past (II.Chorus.36). The Chorus implies that without some outside force of “prompting” within the “playhouse” playgoers can have no experience of history. However, Shakespeare expands on the strategies for attaining a consciousness of the past inside the playhouse. The Chorus begins to cite vehicles for the historical imagination that can be found outside the walls of the theater. The Chorus at the start of Act III says: Suppose that you have seen The well-appointed king at [Hampton] pier Embark his royalty.

(III.Chorus.3–5)

The lines as quoted here include a standard emendation of “Hampton” for “Douer Peer,” or Dover Pier, the words that appear in the Folio.17 Since the Chorus had previously specified Southampton to be the King’s departure point, it is a reasonable, albeit not strictly necessary, editorial intervention to create consistency. The Chorus says to playgoers, “Suppose that you have

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seen” the King at either Southampton or Dover; both were well-known English ports, and both were within 130 kilometers of London. Anyone who had been, or might in future go to, these places could now imagine them not only as they are in the present but could “suppose” them also to be sites of history. Whatever placename was actually spoken aloud in performance of the play, Shakespeare here marks a location in England outside the theater as a possible occasion for envisioning the past. Such reference to geography becomes more proximate to the place of Elizabethan London in the Chorus before Act V. The audience is informed here that the King, flush with his victory at Agincourt, departs from France for England: So let him land, And solemnly see him set on to London. So swift a pace hath thought that even now You may imagine him upon Blackheath. Where that his lords desire him to have borne His bruised helmet and his bended sword Before him through the city. […] But now behold, In the quick forge and working-house of thought, How London doth pour out her citizens! The Mayor and all his best brethern in best sort, Like to the senators of th’ antique Rome, With the plebeians swarming at their heels, Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in; As by a lower but by loving likelihood, Were now the general of our gracious Empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword, How many would the peaceful city quit, To welcome him! (V.Chorus.13–34)

This passage is overdetermined in commentary because of the tantalizing reference to the “general of our gracious Empress,” discussion of which tends to dominate analyses of the speech. The “general” is conventionally held to be the Earl of Essex, although some critics have proposed other candidates, an issue that is intertwined with controversies over the date of the Chorus speeches noted above. Discussion of the lines, then, tends to remain fixed on the identity of the General and the implications of the reference to Ireland for understanding how Henry V reflects and shapes Elizabethan imperial ambitions and practices.18 The passage is allusive and

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temporally complex in other ways worth considering, though. It compares a past event, the return of Henry, to the practice of meeting a conquering Roman hero. It also looks to the present through the topical allusion to Elizabethan foreign policy in Ireland and proposes that audiences contemplate a future event, the return from Ireland that has not yet happened. This thing that happened in the English past (Henry’s return from France) is like a thing that happened in the still more distant past (a conquering Caesar’s return to ancient Rome) and is also like a thing that has not yet happened but that can be imagined happening (the celebration of the defeat of Irish rebels). This range of reference creates a sense of what Reinhart Koselleck calls the “planes of historicity,” a linear conception of time where those in the present can contemplate the past and imagine the future.19 In terms of how Henry V helps audiences apprehend such a plane, the linchpin of these lines is the reference to Blackheath, then an “open space Southeast of London.”20 The lines can work in two ways. First, more conventionally, they can signify in the same way as Dekker’s lines about the wilderness to which Andelocia removes with the princess he abducts: “Imagine this the place.” In other words, Shakespeare’s Chorus here could be saying something like: “Imagine this stage, where I, the Chorus, am speaking, to be Blackheath when Henry entered.” But Henry V does not purport then to represent the scene on Blackheath the way that Old Fortunatus purports to represent the scene in the wilderness. And so a second sense emerges in Henry V: “we are not going to bother to make you think this stage is Blackheath. But next time you see Blackheath, then you can imagine it as a place where Henry arrives in triumph. Or, if you have seen it before, you can, in your minds, now imagine it with Henry there.” A physical location near London, likely very familiar to many playgoers, Blackheath becomes resignified by the Chorus from just another space in the London area through the injunction “you may imagine him upon Blackheath.” The Chorus alerts the playgoers that, once outside the playhouse walls, they might engage in the exercise of producing for themselves the visual image of the historical King Henry V as he appeared in their own city. It is a suggestion that originates in the theater, spoken by a player, but it serves as a heuristic. Henceforth, without the aid of a “prompt” from a Chorus figure or any player, and without, too, the aid of theatrical props or setting, playgoers can see familiar areas of their environment as “historical” and can imagine them, and the events they hosted, as they existed before their own temporal moment. In other words, the Chorus proposes that the ability to imagine the past that had originally seemed tied to direct, visual,

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and auditory stimulation on the “scaffold” in the theater – “here must you sit” – can in fact be portable. It is a skill that, mastered in the theater through the promptings of various aspects of the production, can then be taken out into London itself, so that the city and its environs become occasions for the historical imagination. In terms of the historical “traffic” of the stage, what happens in Shoreditch or Southwark need not stay in Shoreditch or Southwark. As it does inside the theater, such imagining outside of it involves the dialectic of desire and loss that is so much a part of performing the past. To have to “imagine” Henry V on Blackheath is to acknowledge his inalienable absence from that space – and the world – in the late 1590s. Of course, Henry V is not the first of Shakespeare’s history plays to make reference to London locales and to call to mind the absences of the past in relation to present urban space. Henry VI, Part 1 employs slang to allude to the infamous brothels of the Bankside when Gloucester calls his rival Winchester a “goose,” and accuses him of being one “that giv’st whores indulgences to sin” within his bishopric (I.iii.35); in 2 Henry VI there are multiple references to Smithfield, London Bridge, and London Stone, the last the place from whence Jack Cade makes his stirring pronouncement that the “pissing conduit,” itself a notable landmark, should “run nothing but claret wine” for the first year of his “reign” (IV.vi.1–6); Richard III mentions Crosby House as well as Baynard Castle and, infamously, the Tower; and the Henry IV plays are notorious for their Eastcheap settings. Each of those references could provide the spur to the historical consciousness of playgoers once they leave the playhouse and encounter these places that the citation of “Blackheath” does in Henry V. But it is the Chorus’s particular locution that distinguishes the force of that particular line: “you may imagine him upon Blackheath” directly transfers agency to audiences and so can work on the imaginative processes of playgoers in a more powerful way. The Chorus transfers agency in imagining history from the start of the play. This act infuses all of the play’s references to the places and materials of the past still evident to Elizabethan Londoners with an aura of opportunity: the opportunity to imagine the past through present-day spaces. Early in the play, the Archbishop of Canterbury moves from a stultifying recitation of the Salique Law to a powerful command to help incite Henry’s taste for war: “Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb, / From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit” (I.ii.103–104). Canterbury shifts from his use of genealogy as obfuscation to genealogy as a clarifying link between generations, as he attempts to bind Henry to the English past: “your great

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grandsire […] from whom you claim.” He proposes that the tomb of Edward III might serve as a muse for war and, perhaps, a material connection to the past. In directing Henry to visit the tomb, though, he also broaches the broader idea of such places as repositories of the historical. Playgoers are inspired here to imagine King Henry V in another potentially familiar place in the landscape of early modern London: the tombs of English kings in Westminster Abbey. Edward III was buried in the late fourteenth century in Westminster Abbey to the south of the Abbey’s central memorial, Edward the Confessor’s shrine. Shakespeare had previously called attention to Edward III’s resting place in Richard II when Northumberland tells Richard that “Bullingbrook, doth humbly kiss thy hand, / And by the honorable tomb he swears / That stands upon your royal grandshire’s bones” (III.iii.104–106). Audience members familiar with the popular play Edward III, believed by some scholars to be by Shakespeare, might have connected such references to the King’s tomb with the stage figure of Edward they encountered in that work. Such connections would jump-start a dialectic between the living, mobile body on stage and the recumbent, frozen effigy atop the coffin in the Abbey. This dialectic reinforces the notion that performing history is about a particular kind of imaginative encounter with the dead, and even perhaps the accoutrements of the dead: Edward’s enormous ceremonial sword, today on display in the Abbey Undercroft Museum, was also visible near his tomb in the Elizabethan era. Canterbury’s command to Henry to visit Edward’s tomb might have inspired playgoers themselves to “go to the tomb” of this revered king or, if they had already, to think on it in relation to the theatrical representation of the King and his descendants, depicted as they were in Richard II as being aware of it as an “honorable” object to be sworn upon, or in Henry V as being an imperative site to visit to feel a link to the past. The Chorus to Act V I have been considering might also be alluding to the tombs of Westminster: You may imagine him upon Blackheath; Where that his lords desire him to have borne His bruised helmet and his bended sword Before him through the city.

King Henry V, like Edward III, was buried in Westminster Abbey, in a grandiose tomb also proximate to the shrine of the Confessor, just to the north-east of his “great-grandsire” Edward’s tomb. Henry outdid all his ancestors in specifying in his will the grandeur he desired for his resting

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place, which included construction of an elaborate chantry chapel above the tomb itself. The tomb and chantry chapel in fact tower over the Confessor’s memorial and today obscures the view of the shrine from the eastern end of the cathedral. A sword believed to be Henry’s was visible near by the chantry, and could account for the reference to the “bended sword,” as James Shapiro has recently argued.21 Hanging from a beam directly above Henry’s tomb were further military accoutrements from Henry’s funeral procession, including his helmet, saddle, and shield. Mention here of the “bruised helmet” of Henry may have provoked audience members to “go to the tomb” to see the material object of the helmet here mentioned. In the Prologue, one of the impossibilities of representation mentioned are “the very casques / that did affright the air at Agincourt,” that is, the actual helmets worn in the battle (13–14). Unless we assume this to be a metonymy in which “casques” stand in for warriors, the prologue calls attention to an odd detail here. The Chorus assures us that the prop helmets or “casques” worn by the actors, including the actor playing Henry, are not the real thing. The helmet is still visible in Westminster (it too has been removed to the Undercroft Museum). It is now believed to have been strictly ceremonial, but it may have been perceived in the Elizabethan era as the genuine article from Henry’s military heyday. In any case, it would have been understood as Henry’s own helmet. The play’s two references to the “very” helmets Henry and his soldiers wore may have worked in conjunction with this material object in Westminster to stimulate audience ability to see such objects anew, as invested with a historicity created by performance of this play. The words of the Chorus provide a strategy for imagining the past out of materials visible in the present, adding a new dimension to the “imaginative archeology” of the history play. By the late seventeenth century, some seventy years after the production of Henry V, Westminster Abbey certainly was a conventional venue for sightseeing. Samuel Pepys in 1669 records stopping by the Abbey on a holiday with relatives who were visiting London, remarking that, in addition to him and his family, there was “other company this day to see the tombs, it being Shrove Tuesday.”22 It is not certain when exactly Westminster Abbey first became a place to which people like Pepys resorted specifically to look upon the tombs of royalty and other prominent individuals buried there, but we can begin to see evidence for this practice in the years just before and after Henry V was performed.23 In his 1584 Discourse in Defence of the Earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney indicates that the tomb of Henry V was an available sight at the Abbey: “In Harry the Fifth’s time the Lord Dudley was his Lord Steward, and did that pitiful office, in bringing

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home, as the chief mourner, his victorious master’s dead body, as who goes but to Westminster, in the church may see.”24 Sidney is speaking to an elite, courtly audience here. But the Abbey was also a stop on the itinerary of two sixteenth-century European tourists who are well known to Shakespeare scholars because their memoirs of traveling through London include valuable references to the popular theaters: the Swiss-born Thomas Platter and Samuel Kiechel of Ulm. Kiechel, who was in England in 1585, notes that on a day in September he visited “the church, which is called Westminster, a beautiful, large building,” and goes on to note various details about the construction of royal monuments there.25 Platter reports from his account of 1599: “In this chapel [Westminster Abbey] I witnessed some most magnificent and stately tombs of the kings and queens of England, finer than ever I beheld.”26 John Donne, in a satire that most editors date c. 1597, confirms that by the end of the sixteenth century going to Westminster to see the tombs was an established activity. He writes a feigned conversation: O, Sir, ’Tis sweet to talk of kings. ‘At Westminster,’ said I, ‘the man that keeps the Abbey tombs, And for his price doth with whoever comes, Of all our Harrys, and our Edwards talk, From king to king and their kin can walk.’27

In 1598, roughly contemporary with this poem and the composition and performance of Henry V, Thomas Bastard published among his epigrams in the collection Chrestoleros a sonnet that begins: When I beholde with deepe astonishment, To famous Westminster how there resorte, Liuing in brasse or stony monyment. The princes and the worthies of all sorte […]28

None of these examples come from equivalents of the less privileged playgoers who filled the popular theaters. And, according to Donne, seeing the tombs of the kings had a “price.” But he does not indicate that the tombs were off limits to the ordinary Londoner. The keeper of the monuments, he writes, will show them to “whoever comes” and, most importantly, pays. The cost may not have been entirely prohibitive to a public interested in the historical. Just as those who desired a look at the tombs had to pay for it, those who desired a look at players portraying “Harrys and Edwards” on stage had to pay admission to the playhouse as well. Indeed, according to Henry Peacham, the admission price to see the tombs may have been on par

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with admission to the yard of most playhouses. In his contribution to the satirical verses prefixed to the 1611 travel narrative Coryats Crudities, Peacham asks “Why doe the rude vulgar so hastily post in a madness / To gaze at trifles, and toyes not worthy the viewing? / And thinke them happy, when may be shew’d for a penny” sights including the “Westminster monuments.”29 Given the mocking tone of the verse and its placement among ironic panegyrics to Coryate’s book, it is difficult to know how seriously to take Peacham’s conflation of the tombs with other things that the “rude vulgar” can see for a “penny,” like “The Fleet-streete Mandrakes.” But this is perhaps a tantalizing glimpse at the practical administration of the tombs for public viewing approximate to the time of Henry V’s performance, a glimpse in which we see the vulgar sharing the spectacle of the tombs around the Confessor’s shrine with the more elite voices that record the same experience. Likewise, Platter’s or Kiechel’s agenda in London obviously cannot be said to be representative of what a London resident might do with their time, but it is hard to overlook the fact that both of their visits to London – Kiechel c. 1585 and Platter c. 1599 – included stops at playhouses and Westminster Abbey. These locales were representative of what London had to offer visitors interested in contemplating the past (Platter records that he took in a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe), and, perhaps, both places served this function for locals as well. As the remarks by Sidney, Donne, the foreign visitors, Bastard, and Peacham indicate, a degree of familiarity among a critical mass of Londoners is certainly possible.30 One of the most bizarre artifacts to be seen by visitors in Westminster Abbey in Shakespeare’s day must surely have been another that impinges on his play about Henry: the visible remains of Henry’s wife, Katherine of Valois. John Stow, writing in 1598, describes the scene: Katherine […] was buried in the Old Lady chapel [of Westminster Abbey] 1438, but her corpse being taken up in the reign of Henry VII., when a new foundation was to be laid, she was never since buried, but remaineth above ground in a coffin of boards behind the east end of the presbytery [i.e. in Henry V’s tomb].31

During his visit to the Abbey in 1585, Kiechel does not mention by name Henry or Katherine, but he notes that he saw an open coffin in the place to which Stow designates Katherine’s corpse had been moved. The German traveler reports being told that the coffin had been exposed to view for “200” years. He goes on to compare the remains inside to an Egyptian mummy (“mommia in Aegipten”); shockingly, he arrives at this comparison by, along with his companions, physically touching the body (“also würs zum theil angriffen […] das fleisch”).32

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Later traditions confirm Kiechel’s report that it is not merely Katherine’s coffin, but her body itself, that was visually and physically accessible. In William Camden’s 1600 work about Westminster Abbey Reges, reginae, nobiles, Camden records her epitaph in Latin and English, so that “Hic Katherina iacet Francorum filia Regis, / Heres & Regni, Carole Sexte, tui” becomes “Here lies Queene Katherine clos’d in grave.” But he also records that her “corpus in loculo inhumatu,” (emphases added) or that Katherine’s body now lies unburied in the small space of her husband’s tomb.33 John Speed, in 1611, refutes a legend that this unburied state was at the Queen’s own request, made because she felt guilty that she had disobeyed King Henry when she gave birth to their hapless son at Windsor. Speed instead repeats Stow’s statement that the coffin was disinterred during the construction of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, and, moved to Henry V’s tomb, was simply never reburied. Speed then gives a surprisingly casual detail about the openness of her coffin and the vulnerability of her remains that affirms Kiechel’s outrageous account: [Katherine’s] Corps taken vp in the raigne of King Henry the seuenth her Grandchild, (when he laid the foundation of that admirable structure [the Lady Chapel],) and her Coffin placed by King Henry her husbands Tombe, hath euer since so remained, and neuer reburied: where it standeth (the Couer being loose) to be seene and handled of any that will (emphasis added).34

John Weever’s 1631 Ancient Funerall Monuments repeats Speed on this almost verbatim and also confirms Donne’s report that there is a person at Westminster, here described as “he that sheweth the Tombes,” available to pass on various traditions about the monuments upon request.35 Finally, we see an even more specific account of what part of the corpse was visible in Henry Keepe’s Monumenta Westmonasteriensia, a Restoration-era work that is one of the first attempts at a full description of Westminster Abbey. Keepe states that the body remained in a “wooden chest or coffin, wherein part of the skeleton and parched body of Katherine of Valois his [Henry V’s] Queen (from the waist upwards) was to be seen.”36 These later statements all bolster and help to clarify the sixteenth-century accounts by Kiechel and Stow: Katherine’s corpse was on display to be seen and even touched by, in Weever’s variation on Speed’s words, “any that will much desire it” well before Henry V was written and performed.37 It is thus striking that Katherine’s first scene in Henry V is a language lesson that centers on body parts. With the aid of her bilingual nurse, Katherine produces an anatomy as she learns to describe the human physique in English: “d’hand, de fingre, de […] nailes, de arma, de ilbow […]

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de nick, et de sin” (III.iv.45–49). Perhaps this is a morbid joke on Shakespeare’s part. A woman whose desiccated and disintegrating body was visible in Westminster Abbey is represented on stage learning to blazon in English the fragments of the human form. In Henry V, Katherine is an object that unites Henry’s political and erotic longing; in Elizabethan London, Katherine was a pile of leathery dead flesh and bones. In a play that, as commentators have long argued, continually ironizes the heroism and accomplishments of its protagonist, this may be yet another means to undercut Henry’s triumph. His “capital demand” (capital is itself a term derived from a word for the human head) in the negotiations with France is, at the moment those words are spoken on stage, a “parched body” in the Abbey (V.ii.96, emphasis added). The representation of Katherine might also work in reverse. Audience members familiar with the sad state of Katherine’s remains might have found them more poignant upon seeing this playful version of her. Anyone who saw this play and then looked upon her in Westminster would be equipped now to imagine her body differently, informed by the visual memory of the simulated Katherine on stage. In the play, Henry calls attention to the bones beneath his own skin, and those, perhaps, that lie beneath his tomb, when he defies the French Herald’s demand to “compound” terms for ransom before the battle: “Herald, save thou thy labor. / Come thou no more for ransom, gentle herald, / They shall have none, I swear, but these my joints” (IV.iii.121–123). Katherine’s own joints, available to the eye and the hand, are now available also as parts of an animated player stand-in on stage. For the playgoer familiar with Westminster Abbey, the fantasy of access to the climactic courting of Henry and Katherine on stage is haunted but perhaps also inspired by knowledge of how far this all is from the still figures – buried and unburied – in his tomb. The moments I have focused on here are, to be sure, small things in a play concerned with big events such as the conquest of France. The references to Southampton/Dover and Blackheath are tiny specks on the grand scene of the play and can credibly be said to be used up in their strictly functional purposes. And the extent to which the reference to the tomb of Edward III, the helmet of Henry V, and the discourse of bodies connected with Queen Katherine might have created direct connections in viewers’ minds with the corresponding sights at Westminster is certainly debatable. But I would submit that each of these references in the play is linked to a physical place or a trace of the past that was available to early modern Londoners. They are articulated in a play that is incredibly self-conscious about the work involved in historical representation and so could work in tune with the

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Chorus’s more general injunctions to playgoers to use the “working-house of thought” to create a sense of the historicity of the city and its objects. When a boy purporting to be Katherine moved, spoke, and shared an awkward kiss with the player acting as Henry on stage, his body was a surrogate of the one whose remains sat visible in the Abbey. It afforded a fantasy of access to it that would not provoke images of Egyptian mummies. But even Katherine’s body in its reduced state in the coffin continued for many years to be an object of fantasy in and of itself, to “be seene and handled of any that will much desire it.” In fact, it became for Pepys just such an occasion for macabre cavorting with greatness on his visit in 1669 when, infamously, he records that “there we did see […] the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and [I] had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth.”38 Joseph Roach connects Pepys’ “assignation” with Katherine’s corpse to the King Henry V play which he saw on stage and commended in his Diary: not Shakespeare’s, but the Earl of Orrey’s 1664 Henry the Fifth. Orrey’s version of Henry’s life introduces a romantic triangle involving Henry, Katherine, and Owen Tudor, Katherine’s second husband (it was from this union that the Tudor dynasty sprung). For Roach, it is surely the experience of seeing the play, and the erotic energy of wooing that it depicts, that “motivates his [Pepys’] role in the necrophilic carnival he later stages at the Abbey.”39 I am suggesting here that Shakespeare’s Henry V might have similarly shaped and inspired how Londoners experienced the tombs of Westminster at the close of the sixteenth century, or helped those already familiar with the tombs to experience them anew. The play itself may have been shaped and inspired by the author’s own possible familiarity with the tomb of Henry and its strange content, the exposed coffin of Katherine. Roach further notes that the Undercroft Museum at Westminster Abbey today contains the wooden effigy of Katherine that was prepared for her funeral in 1437. This effigy can still be seen, unlike her now buried body (the body was interred underground in the late eighteenth century and later relocated to a tomb beneath the altar of Henry V’s chantry chapel in 1878, where it has since rested). Roach writes, “Her image painted on wood is no doubt as close as physical vision can come to realizing her presence. Imagination can do more. Onstage in effigy, Katherine becomes the ventriloquized object of synthetic experience, refleshed at intervals.”40 The “synthetic” experience of history that performance of Henry V provided was also synchronistic. When Katherine of Valois appeared on stage, her body was fantasized as being lively. As that performance took place, the actual, decaying remains of this figure were exposed not so far

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away in Westminster Abbey. From the scaffold of the stage to the fields of Blackheath to the tombs at Westminster, the injunctions of the Chorus to imagine the past did not propose a field of imagination limited to the time and place of the performance at hand. Rather, the play offered the environs and objects of London as continual occasions for exercising this imagination, which, in response to a desire for the past and an impetus to act on that desire inside and outside the theater, can always, as Roach says, “do more.”

henry’s hobbyhorse: chantries and the tomb of richard ii Hamlet, more than any other figure in Shakespeare, is sensitive to the impermanence of memory. In a caustic exchange with Ophelia, he mocks the ease with which Gertrude and others have put the death of Old Hamlet behind them: Look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within’s two hours. ophelia: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord. hamlet: So long? […] O heavens, die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year, but, by’r lady, ’a must build churches then, or else shall ’a suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is “For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot.” (III.ii.126–135) hamlet:

It is especially poignant that this exchange unfolds as the Danish court awaits the visiting players’ adaptation of The Murder of Gonzago. The playlet serves ultimately to remind its audience of the old King through reenacting the true manner of his death, as though Hamlet, and Shakespeare, are suggesting that theatrical performance is a means to keep the past in circulation. The hobbyhorse, a prop for use in the Morris Dance and other pantomime shows, is itself a species of performance. The reference here is usually taken by commentators as a symbol of the merry old England that was being threatened in Shakespeare’s time by anti-festive Puritan zeal. Hamlet’s words introduce a performance – his so-called Mousetrap – that is a means to avoid erasure. And at the same time, he introduces the possibility that forms of performance – the forgotten hobbyhorse – can themselves be erased. By reciting the lines of a ballad about the loss of the hobbyhorse from English folk play traditions, though, Shakespeare has guaranteed that the memory of the hobbyhorse lives on in productions and texts of Hamlet. In this case, memorial through performance has indeed proved efficacious,

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but with a twist: the hobbyhorse is frozen in memory as that which is fading into oblivion. Hamlet’s comments to Ophelia contain a pragmatic bit of advice on a more material way a man might preserve his fame: building churches. The historical King Henry V did something like that early in his reign. Shakespeare has his Henry make modified reference to this fact when he contemplates the coming battle against France, clearly terrified that his imperial gambit will have a disastrous end. It is a move that brings us back to the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey and the tombs of the kings that surround it. Henry, alone on stage, makes a desperate prayer to the “god of battles”: Not to-day, O Lord O, not to-day, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown! I Richard’s body have interred new, And on it have bestowed more contrite tears Than from it issued forced drops of blood. Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay Who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built Two chauntries, where the sad and solemn priests Sing still for Richard’s soul. (IV.i.292–302)

Shakespeare’s chief source for Henry V, Holinshed, notes that shortly after his coronation Henry had conspicuously reburied, or “interred new” Richard’s body at Westminster Abbey.41 Some chronicle sources besides Holinshed that Shakespeare may have used also mention Henry’s efforts to build ecclesiastic structures. According to Robert Fabyan, writing in 1516, Henry “Buyldyd .iii. houses of relygyon, as the Charterhouses of monkes called Shene, the house of close nunnes called Syon, and the thirde was an house of Obseruauntes buyldyd upon that other side of Thamys.” In addition to these “houses,” Fabyan reports on the arrangements for Richard that Shakespeare’s Henry outlines, stating that Henry “ordeyned at Westminster to brenne [burn] perpetually without extinccyon .iiii.tapers of waxe upon the sepulture of kynge Richarde; & ouer yt he ordeyned ther, to be continued for euer, one day in a weke, a solempne dirige to be songe.”42 In Henry V, Shakespeare conflates these projects.43 One editor of the play compactly glosses the speech: “Shakespeare converts the religious houses into chantries, and applies to them the performance of dirges and masses at Westminster.”44 Chantries were chapels funded by testators so that intercessory prayers and songs would be conducted on the departed one’s behalf.45 Intercessory

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practices such as these were anathema to reformers. Acts of parliament in 1545 under Henry VIII and in 1547 under Edward VI dissolved the chantries. The preamble to the 1547 Act characterizes the chantries as “phantasising vain opinions of purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed.”46 Seen as quintessentially “popish,” their elimination was part of the larger effort to drive such ritual out of the English Church. The abrogation of the chantries in 1547 removed these institutions from the religious experience of the sixteenth-century English faithful.47 It is doubtful, though, that these measures could have expunged them entirely from the consciousness of Elizabethans two generations removed. Rather, the chantries were a symbol of a time that was gone, a separate era from that of theatergoers in the 1590s. The play at this moment displays the radical distinction between the time it purports to represent in the early fifteenth century and the time of the play’s performance in the late sixteenth century. Henry speaks in an eternal present tense: “the sad and solemn priests sing still for Richard’s soul.” But theatergoers of the 1590s knew that this was simply not true. The suppression of the chantry and its intercessory modes of salvific practice meant that no priest anywhere in England should be singing for another’s soul in the manner described by Henry. As Henry notes, Richard II was also (eventually) interred at Westminster. Like his grandfather, Edward III, and his usurping cousin’s son, Henry V, Richard rests in a bay on the apse that encircles the Confessor’s shrine, directly next to Edward’s tomb and just a few steps from Henry’s. Playgoers familiar with Richard’s tomb could now see it through this reference and understand that it came into being as a bargaining chip Henry V had offered to placate the wrath of God over the murder of King Richard. But they could not go and see the obsequies described in this speech performed there. Henry presents a scene of singing priests and the vivid image of poor men holding their “withered hands” in prayers for the dead, a sight that was unavailable anywhere in Elizabethan London but in the backward gaze of the mind’s eye. The mention of a chantry for a king may actually have resounded as much with Henry’s own tomb as it does with Richard’s, the ostensible object of Henry’s speech. Henry left instructions in his will that 20,000 masses be offered up for him in the chantry chapel to be built above his tomb, and that today still spans the ambulatory east of the Confessor’s shrine.48 The magnificent chapel was constructed of distinctive Caen stone. It was adorned with niches that contain statues of saints as well as intricate carvings of Henry’s coronation and other decorations celebrating his life. It was finished by about 1450. According to one Abbey historian, the chantry

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was to be built “high enough for the people down in the Abbey to see priests officiating there,” while another notes that the chapel was built “on such a scale as to make it one of the most conspicuous objects in the Abbey.”49 An illustration from the late eighteenth century, long after Henry’s gilded effigy in the tomb below had been stripped and literally defaced by grave robbers and iconoclasts, shows the floor of the chantry littered with memorial detritus associated with Henry, including the effigy of Katherine, his saddle, shield, and helmet.50 When it became an ad hoc storage area for these things is another unknown, but by Shakespeare’s time the chantry was already a neglected – in some senses abandoned – space, and, more poignantly, a silent space where no one sang for the souls of monarchs.51 Early in the play, Henry airs anxiety that failure in France would mean that he would fade from memory: Either our history shall with full mouth Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave, Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth, Not worshipp’d with a waxen epitaph

(I.ii.230–233)

In one sense, these words serve as a kind of dramatic irony. Henry’s place in the English chronicles, in ballads, and on stage, was in the 1590s an easy rebuke to the threat of such oblivion. And yet, Henry here is correct in associating a “tongueless mouth” with his grave site (and not only because the head of his effigy had been stolen in the 1540s). The tongueless mouth is an appropriate metaphor for his tomb, and for the neighboring site he erected for King Richard, because neither, by the late 1590s, was a place for singing priests. Henry’s reference to his efforts on behalf of Richard’s soul is a stark reminder of how far removed his time is from the present of London, circa 1599. His words generate interest in Richard’s resting place, and perhaps in his own tomb as well, topped as it was with a breathtaking chantry chapel. But for a playgoer who visited Westminster on the heels of seeing Henry V to experience them, the singing of priests to which Henry alludes could exist only in the working-house of thought.52 The play whets audience appetites for the past moment when Henry’s intercessory efforts were active, but a visit to the site of their enactment at Westminster would only enforce the sense that places where history happened are in the present tense places of lack. As we saw in Chapter 5, though, while some sense of lack in thinking about history, especially history in performance, is inevitable, it need not be absolute. We discussed there how one recent critic, Aleksandra Wolska, has, in her words, sought to “retrieve performance from transience and other derivative categories of loss.” Wolska writes:

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Transience is at work in theatre as well as in any temporal art; one cannot step twice into the same show. In performance, however, the action onstage does not glide uniformly toward the void. It also directs itself toward transmutation and change, flowing away from nothing toward an ever-expanding material appearance.53

The discourse in Henry V about the memorial relics in Westminster Abbey, as well as the physical site of Blackheath, resignifies these things. The “material appearance” of these objects and places can “expand” in the minds of playgoers as a result of the performance. This does not mean that such discourses in this or any other history play reify the past in some way. The silence of the chantries by the end of the sixteenth century enforces the dialectic of tantalizing presence – it was here that the actual priests sang for Richard and later for Henry – and inexorable absence that this and all of Shakespeare’s history plays pursue. The performance of history that articulates these discourses does not simply move toward “the void,” though. Its peculiar “becoming” is the creation of the historical consciousness that allows a playgoer to visit the tombs and experience the silence not only as absence but also as an index of change and temporal distance and, perhaps, as a space in which to imagine something different from its present state. Leonard Barkan, we noted in Chapter 1, has associated the exhumation of buried objects and the reappraisal of visible monuments in Renaissance Europe with an “unearthing of aesthetic consciousness.”54 Barkan speaks of this phenomenon largely in the context of Italy, but, insofar as it reaches England, it is the English Reformation that forces a new confrontation there with the objects of the past. Margaret Aston, in an important article about such effects of the Reformation, has argued that when the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII created a series of ruins throughout England, the presence of these physical remains served as a “stimulus” to historical thinking and activity. She goes on to assert that The writing of English history was permanently effected by the stimuli which it received at the Reformation, and the feeling for those – largely irrevocable – losses of the past reached out beyond the work of antiquarians and historical researchers into more indefinable areas of literary consciousness.55

Henry V works to couple an aesthetic, literary consciousness with a historical consciousness by putting dramatic play in dialogue with elements of London’s past: visible monuments such as the tombs and Henry’s chantry chapel, forever altered by the Reformation and that which, like Katherine’s coffin, has been unearthed and brought to view. Aston quotes from one noted seventeenth-century antiquarian, John Aubrey, who reflects that the

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detritus of the past can “breed in generous mindes a kind of pittie; and sett the thoughts a-worke to make out their magnificence as they were when in perfection.”56 Historical fragments, in this formulation, are generative. But, as always, this is never a passive process. “Generous minds” must be conditioned to be so sensitive to ruins and other artifacts, and there must be an act of will on the part of the observer to then mentally “make out” their past state. Indeed, the language here, of “thoughts a-worke” recalls the words of the Choruses in Old Fortunatus and Henry V. The mental exercises required for theater of the supernatural in Dekker, and for a theater of history in Shakespeare, are assumed by Aubrey’s time to belong to the terrain of history-writing itself. The moments in Henry V that I have been considering here are potential conditioning agents, seeking out among playgoers the kind of “generous mind” needed to enjoy a historical consciousness and sustain a historical culture and perhaps help prepare the ground for a figure such as Aubrey and his approach to the past.

acceptance take When King Henry, in the play’s most famous speech, speaks of a future time for those who survive the day to reflect on the past, he emphasizes a communal gathering as a means to ward off the threat of oblivion. Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day. Then shall our names Familiar in his mouth as household words […] Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.

(IV.iii.49–55)

“Freshly remembered” implies that the names and deeds have been, even if momentarily, forgotten.57 As Henry’s elaborately imagined future moment of conviviality makes clear, history requires regular expenditure of effort, including the continual involvement of an audience that enables the story to take place. The theater also provides a time and a place where people gather to tell and receive stories about history. In the persistent presence of the Chorus and its injunctions to the audience, Shakespeare acknowledges that history cannot exist without both sides of this equation. Here, the past is freshly remembered in the “now” of the performative present. Like the future vigil Henry promises for his troops, theater works by remembering with “advantages,” the supplementarity of performance itself.

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The Prologue to Henry V calls for a muse. Muses inspire poets. The play opens, then, with self-reference to the creative mind behind the play itself, the authorial voice that is the first mover of the live, three-dimensional performance at hand. This kind of direct self-reference becomes as explicit in the Epilogue as anywhere else in Shakespeare. We observed in the Prologue the gestures toward collectivity – “our kings, our play” – and how they tied together history and theater as collective creations. The closing lines merge these categories seamlessly as they acknowledge that “our author” on “our stage” has contributed to a version of the past that is made intelligible to – and by – the senses of playgoers. The Epilogue takes the form of a sonnet, a form that calls greater attention than iambic pentameter or prose to the poetic hand that crafts it. Rather than describing the frustrated desire of a would-be lover, as sonnets normally do, this one describes the frustrated desire for the past, the realization that the “advantages” of performance still come short of historical presence: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Our bending author hath pursu’d the story, In little room confining mighty men, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

(Epilogue.1–4)

The story of the play, like the “story” of Agincourt that the “good man [shall] teach his son” (IV.iii.56) will always involve a kind of “mangling” precisely because stories about the past brought forth for audiences always involve recourse to “advantages.” These advantages are necessary to fill in the gaps that result from imperfect memory or imperfect means of representation, and yet they also warp the story and remove it further from the purity of the “real” past. The Epilogue also points to an almost claustrophobic sense of performing history in the theater. It “confines” the mighty men of the past to a “little room.” Here I think we see Shakespeare acknowledging that the playhouse walls are not sufficient to contain the human capacity to imagine the past. The tools the Chorus imparts to audiences – to imagine Henry “upon Blackheath” among other things – make the playhouse just one of many places where history can be envisioned. As with the Prologue, though, the apology of the Epilogue on the part of the bended author is a complex feint. The revelations of the Prologue did not prevent the play from going forward, and the acknowledged mangling of the author doesn’t stop the Epilogue from recapping the play and speaking too of the events that follow Henry’s life, as well as the author’s own previous efforts:

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“Mangling” the past on stage spills over into the aurally similar “managing” of the kingdom seven lines later that, following Henry, goes so awry. This moment conflates the retrospective mismanagement of the story of history and the mismanagement of history as it happens. “Small time” furthers this overlap between theatricality and historical action, referring as it does both to the brevity of Henry’s life and the brief traffic of the stage. The historical vision of Henry V is, like Prospero’s pageant toward the close of The Tempest, always close to collapsing. Likewise, the play emphasizes the precarious nature of historical stability in these closing words; the story Henry has written at Agincourt exists only as a “small time,” ready to give way to the looming loss of France. Emphasizing this in a play about a great, desired hero is a nod toward the aesthetics of loss so strong in the desire for the past more generally. This emphasis on loss and failure radiates outward from the world of this play to the world of another set of Henry plays, the plays about Henry VI from the early 1590s. Characters in those plays longed for Henry’s presence, locating in him a source of stability to chide the degenerate present they perceive. But the representation of King Henry V that Shakespeare finally delivers in this play is not only brief but also imperfect and powerfully ambivalent. Drawing audience attention back to the plays where Henry was longed for not only works to conclude Henry V with the compounding and haunting sense of loss that underwrites all historiographical work but also functions as a revision of the desire for Henry – particularly evident in 1 Henry VI – that infuses those plays. For to see Henry, like Talbot in 1 Henry VI, caught so powerfully in a net of contingencies, can only work to blur the perspective on him. This blurring reveals that the longing for him as a point of coherence was itself a constructed historical narrative, that, in a complex intertheatrical fashion, works at the close of Henry V to undo the foundational presumptions on which the Henry VI plays rested. Certainly, what drives the considerable scholarly and theatrical interest in thinking about and “doing” Henry V is not

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that the play delivers a secure past but that, as the Chorus makes so vividly clear, that it perpetually searches for “acceptance” to “take.” Audience acceptance perhaps “takes” when playgoers do indeed imagine they see horses when they hear mention of them. But, as we have seen, the Chorus’s injunctions are more radical and varied than this. “You may imagine him upon Blackheath” won’t ever join the pantheon of “great” quotable lines from Shakespeare. It is unlikely to be alluded to in other poems or plays or novels or serve as the epigraph to scholarly articles. I doubt it will be printed on a T-shirt or coffee mug at the gift shops in the Folger Shakespeare Library or the new Globe. And yet it is a profound sentiment in which we can see Shakespeare dispersing the capacity to imagine the past beyond the theater, and whether or not this suggestion takes, whether or not audiences leave the theater looking to exercise this imagining capacity is an open question. Henry V’s last lines leave in perpetual suspension whether, or to what degree, audiences will accept the play as a successful or galvanizing representation of history. Earlier, I discussed the theatrical provenance of the Chorus speeches, arguing that it was because the lines were so specifically geared to a playhouse audience that they were left out of the early quarto editions designed for readers. It would remain for Heminges and Condell in 1623 to recognize that these lines would be useful for the reading public as well. Shakespeare’s literary executors note in their address to the reader and in their dedicatory epistle to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery how much they wished Shakespeare himself could have lived to have been “exequutor of his own writings.”58 In 1623, to read Shakespeare was to be reminded of his absence from the world, an absence movingly acknowledged elsewhere in the prefatory materials of the Folio when Ben Jonson suggests that a way to sense Shakespeare’s continued presence is through the fantasy that he has been apotheosized and “made a constellation” in the sky.59 Even as the Chorus speeches in the Folio make the play in many senses “fuller,” they also add a strong sense of lack to the experience of reading the play. For in calling attention to the live moment of performance, the Chorus reminds readers that they are removed from the original playing space and time of the play’s performance; from Burbage and the other “unraised spirits” on stage, and from even the “bending author” himself who presumably took a part in the play; perhaps, we might sentimentally conjecture, that of the Chorus. The Chorus’s lines “prompt” the reader to reconstruct the theatrical event even as they prompt playgoers to reconstruct the historical event. But both such activities, pleasurable as they are, are bound to be imperfect strains of imaginative power. Both remind us of loss and incompleteness, as well as

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how performance, in Diana Taylor’s words, “accomplishes a moment of revisualization” that allows playgoers to apprehend in their environs a new sense of historicity.60 The text of the play, like its performance, is also always soliciting an acceptance that can never fully “take” and thus produces a suspension of absolute belief or absolute skepticism toward history and the possibilities of historical knowledge. As Dekker realizes in presenting Old Fortunatus, the dramatic efficacy of a wishing hat or an endlessly generative money purse depends on audience acceptance of the terms of the representation. Shakespeare makes this same dynamic central to the representation of history as it is analyzed within the Chorus in Henry V. To imagine what it was like to be with Henry at Agincourt, a playgoer must “min[d] true things by what their mock’ries be” and let players “right ill dispos’d, in brawl ridiculous” stand for the battle (Chorus.IV.53, 51). Thus history can be conjured in the theater with the aid of actors and props. Shakespeare innovates on the theatrical imagination of history in asserting that a conceptually connected version of envisioning the past can be done on fields in London or at Westminster. To apprehend, for instance, the rites for Richard that Henry describes, a playgoer must envision the “sad and solemn” singing that the Reformation had legislated out of existence. Like the hobbyhorse in the performance of Hamlet, the chantry and its voices are in performance of Henry V paradoxically preserved: perpetually in circulation but always as a trace of that which has faded into the past. The permanence promised by building churches that Hamlet invokes is complicated by the post-Reformation shift in what can rightfully be done in these structures. Like all the references to places and objects mentioned in Henry V and still available, in altered form, to be seen and known by Elizabethans, the chantries add to a historical consciousness that is predicated on the loss of that which can now only be imagined. But imagination, a key component of this historical consciousness that the history play helped to compose, can always “do more” than simply accept loss. Having a historical consciousness means not being content to understand history as oblivion. It means that as long as the desire and the capacity to envision and enact the past exists, then the past will, in some sense, exist; in other words, historical consciousness means having the imaginative and practical wherewithal to ensure that the hobbyhorse will not be “forgot.” notes 1. See Lawrence Danson, “Henry V: King, Chorus, and Critics,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983): 27–43 for one examination of this figure and its effect on

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audience experience of Henry. James P. Bednarz, in “When Did Shakespeare Write the Choruses of Henry V?” Notes and Queries, 53 (2006): 486–489, surveys key instances of arguments about the date of the Chorus. 2. One example is Joel Altman’s essay “‘Vile Participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991): 1–32 (p. 16). 3. See, for instance, Yu Jin Ko, “A Little Touch of Harry in the Light: Henry V at the New Globe,” Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999): 107–119. See also Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama, pp. 106–109. 4. Quint, “‘Alexander the Pig,’” p. 63. 5. Quint, “‘Alexander the Pig,’” p. 63. 6. Sidney, The Defense of Poetry, p. 65. 7. Bednarz, “When Did Shakespeare Write the Choruses of Henry V?” Bednarz usefully surveys the critical history of these debates, including those of Erne, Dutton, and Orgel. 8. Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, p. 224. 9. The First Quarto of King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. ix. 10. Erne makes a convincing case that playwrights and printers made distinctions between plays as performances and plays as texts. See Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist, p. 36, for his remarks on The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine. 11. Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus, in vol. I of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), Prologue, 1–24. See also Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) for information on the documentary evidence about the play’s composition and performance, as well as its relation to the Volksbuch, vol. I, pp. 71–91. 12. Compare the Chorus speech that opens Act II in Old Fortunatus, especially lines 4–12, to the Chorus speech that starts Act II of Henry V, especially lines 36–43. 13. Gary Taylor, Henry V (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 310–311. See also Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 214. 14. Henslowe’s Diary records several performances in 1596 of a play called, in its first entry, the “j p of fortewantus,” or “The First Part of Fortunatus.” The Stationer’s Register entry for the printing of Dekker’s play – dated February 22, 1600 – offers an unusual description of the work: “a commedie called old Fortunatus in his new lyverie.” As Chambers and others have noted, the “new livery” seems to indicate that what Henslowe had paid Dekker for in November and December of 1599 was a new version of an existing play about the story of Fortunatus. See Henslowe’s Diary, pp. 126–127, 34. Stationer’s entry quoted from A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640 A.D., ed. Edward Arber (New York, P. Smith, 1950), vol. III, p. 156. See also Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. III, p. 291.

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15. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), quoted from The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 160. 16. Sidney, Defense of Poetry, p. 65. 17. Quoted from the Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), TLN 1048. 18. See, for instance, Richard Dutton’s “‘Methinks the Truth Should Live from Age to Age’: The Dating and Contexts of Henry V,” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature, 68 (2005): 173–204. 19. See the first chapter of Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. 20. Evans et al. (eds), The Riverside Shakespeare, gloss on “Blackheath,” p. 1010, footnote 16. 21. James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 72. 22. Samuel Pepys, from his Diary, quoted from Joseph Roach’s It (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 205. 23. Records from the Abbey indicate that as early as 1561 a verger (William Jenkinson) was appointed to keep the tombs. C. S. Knighton remarks that such appointments show that by the sixteenth century in the Abbey “tourism was already a matter requiring regulation,” Acts of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster 1543–1609, Part One, ed. Knighton (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1997), p. liv. On Jenkinson, see Acts of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster 1543–1609, Part Two (1999), entry 192, note 12. See also entries 512 and 541 in Part Two. 24. Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (eds.), (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 136. 25. The original reads: “Güeng ich in düe kürchen, wölche westmünster genannt würt, ein schön, gros gebey.” This account is available in Die Reisen des Samuel Kiechel, ed. K. D. Haszler, Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, vol. LXXXVI (Stuttgart: Literarischer Verein, 1866), p. 23. 26. Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, ed. and trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 178. 27. John Donne, Satire 4, “Well: I may now receive, and die,” in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), lines 73–78. 28. Thomas Bastard, epigram 32, in Chrestoleros Seuen Bookes of Epigrames (London, 1598), p. 97. 29. Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), sig. iv. 30. It not known whether Shakespeare himself visited the tombs before he wrote Henry V, if at all. It has been plausibly suggested, though, that Shakespeare, as a member of the King’s Men, may have been among the “Groomes and Messengers” who accompanied King James and Christian IV of Denmark on a tour of the tombs at Westminster in 1606. See Julia M. Walker, “Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I,” English Literary Renaissance, 26 (1996): 510–530 (p. 525).

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31. John Stow, The Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1956) p. 409. 32. The full sentence reads: “Und ist das ober theil oder brütt der sarckh nicht verschlossen, wölches auch abgehböt worden, also würs zum theil angriffen, ist das fleisch aller ingetrücknet und hart wie ein holz, gleich als mommia in Aegipten,” in Die Reisen des Samuel Kiechel, p. 23. 33. William Camden, Reges, reginae, nobiles (London, 1600), sig. B4r–B5v. 34. Speed, The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans, etc., p. 649. 35. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), p. 475. 36. Quoted in Jocelyn Perkins, Westminster Abbey: Its Worship and Ornaments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), vol. II, p. 146. 37. Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments, p. 475. 38. As quoted in Roach, It, p. 206. Keepe goes on to write that the body is “not frequently shown to any but as an especial favor by some of the chief officers of the church,” in Monumenta Westmonasteriensia (London, 1683), p. 156; and Pepys, too, notes that he was shown the corpse by “particular favor,” It, p. 205. Whether this exclusivity is a shift from the earlier, freer access that I believe Donne and Weever indicate is hard to say. 39. Roach, It, p. 228. 40. Roach, It, p. 230. 41. Most of these chronicles emphasize that this was done by Henry out of a sense of piety and remorse over the death of Richard. Juliet Barker, in a recent book on Henry’s military campaigns in France, offers another motive: publicly parading Richard’s body from where Henry IV had it buried in the Black Friar’s at King’s Langley to Westminster offered ample proof that Richard was in fact dead, a response to some conspirators who maintained he still lived. See Juliet Barker, Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle (London: Little Brown, 2005) pp. 74–75. 42. Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1811), p. 589. 43. Sheen and Syon, the religious houses, were in a general sense part of the historical Henry’s pious program to make amends for his father’s sins. But they were not specifically chartered to serve as intercessory organs for “Richard’s soul” in the same way that the prescriptions for candles and masses at his tomb at Westminster were meant to serve. See Christopher Allmand’s Henry V (London: Methuen, 1992), pp. 273–277 for a discussion of the foundation of these houses and some of their functions, including that of Syon, where prayers were to be offered for the souls of many other specific members of Henry’s family, including his father, Henry IV, his mother, Mary, as well as his grandfather John of Gaunt and his wife Blanche. 44. King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 277. 45. Alan Kreider, in English Chantries (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), especially pp. 1–71, gives a profile of the education and

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background of the typical chantry priest and where they fit into the larger hierarchy of English priests. 46. Quoted in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994) p. 454. 47. C. J. Kitching notes that the commission sent to evaluate the status of chantry endowments in London and Westminster in response to the 1547 Act does not list any of Westminster Abbey’s foundations or chantry functionaries. Kitching writes: “Negative returns – if there were any in 1548 as there certainly were in 1546 – do not appear in the Certificate […] Westminster, now a cathedral, is omitted. Most of the assets of these monasteries had, of course, been confiscated already, and in this respect a further survey may have been deemed superfluous, though it is hard to believe they had nothing to declare by way of lights, obits and lesser endowments, even if they no longer had any active chantries.” See C. J. Kitching (ed.), London and Middlesex Chantry Certificate 1548 (London: London Record Society Publications, 1980), p. xv. See also Knighton’s Acts of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, entries 85 and especially 186 (both in Part One) for a discussion of the sale of items such as “candlesticks” for being “superstitious.” Entry 186 notes that after an inventory of “ecclesiasticall goodes” such as those that might be involved in masses for the dead, all but a few such objects were “caryed awaye” by crown officers. 48. Barker, Agincourt, p. 141. 49. The first quotation is from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London: John Murray, 1911) pp. 130–131, and the second is from C. L. Kingsford, Henry V: The Typical Mediaeval Hero (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), p. 386. 50. The illustration is reprinted facing p. 142 of Perkins, Westminster Abbey: Its Worship and Ornaments, vol. II. On the vandalism of Henry’s effigy, see Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments, p. 474. 51. Henry V’s chantry is today partially visible from the Abbey floor, but general visitors to the Abbey, even those who pay extra for the verger-led tours that include access the Confessor’s shrine, are not allowed to climb up from the shrine platform into the chantry itself. According to the Communications Department at the Abbey: “Because of the wear and tear on the stairs leading to the Henry V chantry chapel, access is strictly limited to members of the Abbey staff and contractors” (private communication, August 5, 2008). Apparently, though, it is possible for some individuals and groups – perhaps those who know the modern equivalent to Donne’s “man that keeps the Abbey tombs” – to arrange to have supervised access to the chantry. During a recent walk through the Abbey, although I was specifically told by a verger that the chantry was indeed “not suitable” for visits, I was surprised to see a group of teenagers standing up in the chapel; they were even taking photographs, which is also officially forbidden anywhere in the Abbey. The fact that I could clearly see this from below, from quite a ways away, confirmed for me the argument of

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Abbey historians, quoted above, that the chantry was constructed so that what went on in it would be conspicuous. 52. The presence of music more generally in the Abbey did persist, though. See Stanford Lehmberg’s “The Musicians of Westminster Abbey 1540–1640,” in C. S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer (eds.), Westminster Abbey Reformed (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 94–113. 53. Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” pp. 87, 84. 54. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, p. 6. 55. Aston, “English Ruins and English History,” pp. 253, 254. 56. John Aubrey, from Wiltshire, quoted in Aston, “English Ruins and English History,” p. 251. 57. See Anthony B. Dawson’s superb essay “The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theater and the National Past,” Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999): 54–67, for a reading of how memory, forgetting, and a complex sense of temporality are put in play by this speech (this essay can also be found in Dawson and Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England. 58. See the facsimile of these epistles in the Riverside Shakespeare, pp. 93–95. 59. Riverside Shakespeare, p. 98. 60. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 144.

Conclusion: traces of Henry/traces of history

Henry V was among the first productions put on at the reconstructed Globe Theatre on the Bankside in Southwark in 1997. Like all plays, this Henry V existed in a series of performative presents and then disappeared. Traces still exist, to be sure: playbills, production photographs, newspaper reviews of the show, eyewitness accounts, as well as scholarly articles about it. In addition to all the ways “Shakespeare’s Globe,” as it is officially known, strives to recreate Shakespeare’s working theater, it also supplies things we wish the Elizabethan version had contained, chiefly, an archive of its own productions where some of these traces have been stored. There is, indeed, one remarkable trace of the 1997 Henry V available at the Globe Library, one more vivid than anything the Lord Chamberlain’s or the King’s Men could have left behind: videotapes of the performance (the Library houses tapes of every production put on since the Globe opened its doors). Of course, video is far from a cutting-edge technology today. Videotapes have become increasingly irrelevant over the past several years. In addition to being relatively cumbersome and limited in their “storage” capacity, they are warped with frequent use and can be easily snapped by frequent rewinding and fast-forwarding. These records of Globe performances are subject to various kinds of breakdown and erasure, and one wonders when the tapes will all be transferred to fallible but perhaps more durable media such as DVD, Blu-ray disc, or electronic files, and when, or whether, they will all be put in wider circulation, perhaps through sales to individuals or libraries, increasing the chances for preservation. But for now, those with scholarly credentials can sit in a small closet of a room beneath the new Globe complex and, surrounded by shelves full of videotapes, books, and papers, plug headphones into a small television set and watch. In summer 2007, I had the opportunity to watch one performance of the 1997 Henry V on tape in this manner at the Globe. I have spoken throughout this study about the ways in which the Elizabethan history play provided a mediated experience of history to playgoers. A brief reflection on looking at 214

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this performance on tape – a mediated experience of the mediated experience of “pastness” the new Globe affords – seems an appropriate place to end this book. The day before I watched Henry V on video, I stood in the pit to see an afternoon production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The sensation of standing for the duration of a play under the summer sun was new to me, and the very recent memory of this sensation informed my viewing of the tape the next morning. Still, I cannot analyze the production of Henry V in the same way that, say, Yu Jin Ko does in his informative article about the show, which includes his first-person account of what it was like to be at the theater to see it “live.”1 Diana Taylor notes, as she elaborates her concept of the archive and the repertoire in performance studies, that “live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire).”2 A video obviously gives a more lively impression of performance than anything that remains from sixteenth-century stage business. But, like my analysis of plays in this book, I can ultimately only see the 1997 Henry V darkly and speculate and infer about “what it represents” based on the opaque evidence available on video and elsewhere. Several aspects of the production have been widely reported on, such as the way audiences took delight in hissing and booing at the French characters each time they appeared. It is audible on the tape how varied vocal participation was throughout the show. As Mark Rylance delivered the prologue, his question “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?” was met with a cry of “Yeah!” and a swell of laughter. Dennis Kennedy notes that Rylance, the Globe’s first artistic director, “undertook a press campaign inviting spectators to throw tomatoes at the actors if they did not like the performance” during the early shows at the Globe.3 I did not see any fruit thrown on the tape, but the audience seems to have felt invited to participate verbally in the show in the jingoistic manner of the response to French (as well as in the less reported but equally interesting derision heard at any mention of the Scots), and in the more intriguing response to the Chorus’s question about theatrical representation. The first case is unfortunately predictable. The second demonstrates the extent to which visitors to the Globe in its first official season went into it prepared to do the imaginative work the Chorus asks. A knowing resignation to the limits of what the performance can do, and, perhaps, a knowing resignation to the limits of how well the new Globe itself can replicate a day at the theater c. 1599 did not dampen enthusiasm to have fun with what the place and the production had to offer. As Ko says of the cries of “Yeah” (audible to him in the

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performance he saw as well – was this the same one I watched on tape, or did the “Yeahs” become a conventional response at some course in the play’s run?): “In this the audience was affirming not only its role as participants in the imaginative recreation of past military glory […] but also a parallel role of recreating the past glory of Shakespeare’s Globe.”4 The noise of airplanes overhead is just one of the many ways in which the modern world impinges on the new Globe experience and disrupts the recreation of “past glory.” At the production of Love’s Labour’s Lost I attended, a man behind me ate an entire bag of Doritos he had brought in with him. The crunching sound was perhaps a link to the hazelnuts theater archeologists have posited were consumed in playhouses in Shakespeare’s day, but the distinctive odor of artificial-cheese-dusted tortilla chips that hung in the air for much of the afternoon near where I was standing provided an olfactory barrier to over-identification with an Elizabethan playgoer, just as an actor wearing a sandwich board with a “no mobile phone” icon on it provided a visual barrier. In the same way that the plays I have studied in this book continually vacillate between the cultivation of a sense of pastness and the acknowledgment of the time and place of the performance, the new Globe swings between such poles, as any “heritage site” inevitably must. The rushes on stage for the 1997 Henry V are visible and, when trudged through by the actors, auditory evidence of the “otherness” of the production to modern theatrical sensibilities unaccustomed to dressing the stage in this way. Meanwhile, during scene changes, stagehands in modern clothes could be seen swarming around the stage clearing and adjusting props, an explicit counterpoint to the meticulously Elizabethan style costumes worn by the players.5 By the time I arrived in Southwark to see the new Globe in action and to look at the tapes in its archives, it had been ten years since it first opened its doors. The Globe had already had a rich life in the Shakespeare scholarship I studied. I had read about Sam Wanamaker and his efforts to create the theater, and about the various controversies that attended the project.6 I had seen photographs and had heard first-hand accounts of the exhibits and the productions from students and colleagues who had been. By the time my opportunity to visit London came, the new Globe had its own history that intrigued me and that triggered some longing on my part to experience its initial incarnation in the 1990s, an exciting moment when the desire for a fantasy of contact with Shakespeare’s “laboratory” had crystallized in the form of the replica theater. Watching the tape of Henry V, I wanted, then, to imagine what it would have been like to have seen a production during the earliest days of the new

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Globe project, before I had gotten so much information about it filtered through secondary sources. I wanted also to imagine the Globe as it existed in Shakespeare’s time, to have some sense of what it was like then to see and hear a show in an open-air theater in broad daylight in Elizabethan London. In trying to imagine such an experience, and especially in doing so watching Henry V, my own interests in the history-play genre made me want to know, too, how audiences watching a production of Henry V in 1599 reacted to it as itself an evocation of the past. Watching a videotape cannot substitute for any of these direct experiences, but, as a version of a performance before an audience, it did stimulate a consciousness of the histories of the Globe – modern and Elizabethan – that was different from the consciousness I had developed from any of the reading about the new or the old Globe I had done. One incident from the taped performance I watched might illuminate the nature of this difference. Before Henry makes his desperate plea for aid to the “god of battles,” while in disguise he has a tense conversation with his common soldiers, including the suggestively named “Williams,” as they sit in a camp near Agincourt where the decisive encounter will take place. Williams, cynical that the King wants to face the French any more than he does, declares: “He [King Henry] may show what outward courage he will; but I believe, as cold a night as ’tis, he could wish himself in Thames up to the neck; and so I would he were, and I by him” (IV.i.113–116). On tape, these lines can be heard to draw a great laugh from the audience. Williams’ lines are funny in the way gallows humor is funny. In his view, high ideals and talk about the justness of war is all very well and good; but, in the end, deep down, the King fears that he and the common soldiers are equally screwed. The laughter, though, seemed especially in response to the mention of “Thames.” Reference to the Thames is funny because the new Globe is situated a few steps from the river. Directly across from the entrance to the “yard” where latter-day groundlings enter the theater there is a promenade and a set of stairs that lead down to the river. The character Williams is in a camp in France when he mentions the Thames as a distant, other place he wishes to be. But the player acting as Williams is really just a few steps away from fulfilling his wish to be in the river up to his neck. The joke works also for spectators as they negotiate their relationship to their Elizabethan counterparts. Wouldn’t they have found this wink to the audience funny as well? In this way, the Thames reference in 1997 perhaps unites audiences with playgoers in 1599 even more than do the recreated playhouse architecture or the supposedly “authentic” costumes worn by the actors, for the river that separated the City of London from Southwark then still does so now.

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When these lines were originally spoken, though, the reference to the Thames would have worked differently. We have two options for considering the degree of difference. Tradition has held that Henry V was the first Shakespeare play put on at the newly constructed Globe in 1599. That Globe was close by the site of the new Globe, but a bit farther from the river. The immediacy of the reference is amplified on the new site. The other option is the Curtain, a theater in Shoreditch located north of the river, at a more considerable remove from the Thames. I am inclined to believe the initial performance did take place at the Curtain.7 The reference to the Thames might have elicited laughter in that case, but it could not have stimulated quite the same spark of recognition through nearness. Whether in the original Globe, or, especially, at the Curtain, the proximity of the Thames to the performance was considerably different in 1599 from that in 1997. The question of where Henry V was first performed remains unanswered, but, in either case, we can note how even an Elizabethan reference to the natural landscape, a reference that might initially seem to create a moment of continuity between watching Shakespeare then and watching Shakespeare now, in fact introduces new discontinuities. This discontinuity can be described in writing, as it is here. But it is an insight whose power is heightened through awareness of theatrical form, the shared spatio-temporal space theater creates for players and playgoers. In watching the scene where Williams refers to the Thames, and hearing the audience’s response, I was given a set of visual and auditory materials with which to assess the implications of this shared space in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as to consider the different implications the moment might have had for audiences in the sixteenth century. The materials included both the awareness of how the reference might be working in particular moments on the audience and the awareness that, as a retroactive spectator, I was not myself in any of those particular moments. Cut off from a historical instant that intrigued me, the tape nonetheless allowed me some measure of – perhaps more accurately, a fantasy of – an experience of the past. Recognizing how the presence of performance can act on an audience while recognizing my own removal from the presence of the 1997 Henry V has helped to clarify what I have always found so intriguing about the performance of the past in the Elizabethan theater. Just as videotape offered me a more distinct sense of how performance at the new Globe works than written description could, these Renaissance performances gave audiences a distinct sense of the past that no chronicle, ballad, or even woodcut, sculpture, or painting could. And just as video ensures an inexorable distance between my sensory experience and my desire to connect with the past, the liveness of

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performance in the Elizabethan theater ensured a distance between playgoers and the past that was enacted there. Not far from the new Globe, the lower level of an office building today houses the eerily quiet and dilapidated archeological site of the Rose Theater. The foundations of the Rose are under a sheet of concrete and a pool of water meant to preserve the remains until further money can be raised to complete the excavation. In the meantime, there is a glow-in-the-dark tube that outlines where the stage is believed to have been, which visitors can peer at from a slight elevation in the warehouse-like structure. Tour guides will inevitably mention that here is where Dr. Faustus may have first stood, as well as Titus Andronicus and Talbot from 1 Henry VI. The stage outline, which looks like a series of lights inside a large and eccentric red hula-hoop, is all that one has to go on in thinking about the performance of these plays. As Joseph Roach writes about the effigy of Katherine of Valois, “imagination can do more;” indeed, it must if there is to be any more. Almost directly across the street from the Rose site is the site of the original Globe. Adjoining a parking lot behind a series of handsome Georgian townhouses on Southwark Bridge Road is a small bit of pavement underneath which the partial remains of the Globe were excavated in 1989. The line of the foundations that were found is marked out through a pattern of cobblestones of a different color (reddish, like the stage outline in the Rose building) to the dominant materials around them. There is an iron gate that prevents direct access, on which is hung a tablet with information about the original Globe and the excavations which were halted because further digging would have encroached upon the landmark townhouses and the busy thoroughfare beyond them.8 Anyone standing there today can peer through the gate and make out the faint hint of where one wall of the Globe stood by noting the distinct trail of differently colored stones. Iain Sinclair captures the dynamic of such an encounter beautifully in a book about modern London subtitled, appropriately enough for our purposes here, “City of Disappearances.” Writing about the consequences of the transformations the city has undergone throughout its long history, Sinclair gives voice to the historical consciousness I have argued that the Elizabethan history play helped bequeath to us: “All we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves […] and the stories, the lies we assemble to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define.”9 not es 1. See Ko, “A Little Touch of Harry in the Light.” 2. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 20.

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3. Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,” Theatre Journal, 50 (1998): 175–188 (p. 183). 4. Ko, “A Little Touch of Harry,” p. 107. 5. On the claims for authentic costume, see Kennedy, “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,” p. 184. 6. See, for instance, Graham Holderness’s interview with Wanamaker in Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 16–23. 7. In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 85–87, Shapiro assumes Henry V was first performed at the Curtain, following scholars like Rosalyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), p. 61. See also Melissa Aaron’s intriguing “The Globe and Henry V as Business Document,” Studies in English Literature, 40 (2000): 277–292. 8. On this controversy, see, for instance, Terry Trucco, “Debate in London on Excavating Where the Globe May Have Been,” New York Times, October 30, 1989. 9. Iain Sinclair, London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), p. 12.

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Index

Æsope, 129 Agincourt, battle of, 66, 189, 206, 217 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 137 alea, 116 Alexander the Great, 74 Alleyn, Edward, 129, 165 anachronism, 54; and historical consciousness, 18, 56 anamnesis, 159 antiquarianism, 16 antiquity: and English Renaissance, 15 archeology, 15, 20, 193 Arden of Faversham, 19 Aristotle: Poetics, 17 artes historicae, 15 Aston, Margaret, 203 Aubrey, John, 203 audience, 6 Auerbach, Erich, 159

Bosworth Field, battle of, 88, 89, 98, 140, 151, 159, 166, 168, 170 Brecht, Bertolt, 53 Bristol, Michael, 51, 52 Brome, Richard: The Antipodes, 64 Bryant, Joseph Allen, 54 Buc(k), George, 168 Burbage, Richard, 162, 165, 166, 169 Burckhardt, Jacob, 41 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 136 Burgess, Anthony: Nothing Like the Sun, 35 Burke, Peter, 41

Bacon, Francis, 15; The Advancement of Learning, 74–75 Baldwin, William, 42 Barish, Jonas, 71 Barkan, Leonard, 15, 20, 203 Barker, Juliet, 211 Barthes, Roland, 11 Bassi, Karen, 44, 94 Bastard, Thomas, 194 Baynard’s Castle, 191 Bednarz, James, 183 Being John Malkovich, 168 Benjamin, Walter, 133; and Jetztzeit, 53 Berger, Harry, 23 Blackheath, London, 190–191, 197, 203, 205 Blau, Herbert, 24–25, 26, 67, 132, 136, 138 Blundeville, Thomas: The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories, 15 body, the: in performance, 1, 5, 10, 25, 26, 28, 29, 37, 39, 40, 54, 62, 65, 81, 94, 108, 130, 143, 144, 157, 159, 170, 188, 192, 197, 198

Camden, William, 15, 20, 196; Brittania, 15, 16 Cardinal Morton, 141 Carroll, William C., 136 Chambers, E. K., 104, 135 Champion, Larry, 43, 73 chantries: and Henry V, 201–202 Chettle, Henry, 53; Kinde-Hartes Dreame, 52 chronicles, 15, 85–87; Thomas Nashe on, 128 Churchill, George B., 89, 93, 104 Cibber, Colley, 169 Cicero, 17 Clemen, Wolfgang, 155 Clio, 78 clowns: and audience address, 34, 61, 65–66; and physical humor, 65; and work day, 66; in the plays of the Queen’s Men, 53–57 Clyomon and Clamydes, 31, 32, 56, 89 Cockett, Peter, 72 collective memory, 41 Collingwood, R. G., 47 Corbett, Richard: Iter Boreale, 166–167 Crane, Mary Thomas, 22, 27 Creede, Thomas, 95 Crosby, Alfred W., 50 Crosby House, 191

235

236

Index

Curtain Theater, 218 Cyrus the Great, 74 Daniel, Samuel: Civil Wars, 15 Dawson, Anthony, 29, 30, 129, 137, 213 de Grazia, Margreta, 174 de Man, Paul, 94 Dead march: stage direction, 127 Dean, Paul, 30 Dekker, Thomas: Old Fortunatus, 6, 179, 183, 184–188, 190, 204, 208; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 19 Democritus, 16 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 138; and hauntology, 158, 165 Dessen, Alan, 107 Diamond, Elin, 24, 70, 71, 136, 164 Donation of Constantine, 18 Donne, John, 194 Donoghue, Denis, 94 Doritos, 216 Dover, England, 188, 197 Drayton, Michael: Poly-Olbion, 15 Dutton, Richard, 183 Eastcheap, London, 191 Eco, Umberto, 6 Edward III, 192 Edward the Confessor: shrine of in Westminster Abbey, 200 eidetic memory, 140 Eliot, T. S., 21 Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, 18 emblematic costume, 78 Erne, Lukas, 6, 144, 183 Escobedo, Andrew, 10 Essex, Earl of, 183, 189 Fabyan, Robert, 15, 200 Family Guy, 168 Famous Victories of Henry V, The, 4, 30, 55, 57–70, 75, 76, 122, 128, 132, 134, 178; date, 72 Fenton, Geoffrey, 51, 52 Ferguson, Margaret W., 137 figurative language: and history, 89, 92 Fleay, F. G., 103 Fox, Adam, 140, 141 Foxe, John: Acts and Monuments, 15, 18, 99, 143 Fraser, Graham, 174 Fried, Michael, 29 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 14 Gaddis, John Lewis, 7 Garber, Marjorie, 154, 157, 160 Garrick, David, 169 genealogy, 5, 59, 79, 98, 109, 126, 132, 134, 142, 191

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 172; History of the Kings of Britain, 32 ghosts: and performing history, 159; objective reality of in Richard III, 155 Globe Theater (new), 6, 51, 207, 214–219 Globe Theater (original), 218 Globe Theater, site of original, 219 Gosson, Stephen, 28 Grafton, Anthony, 15, 20 Grafton, Richard, 15, 77 Greenblatt, Stephen, 20, 21; Hamlet in Purgatory, 158 Greene, Robert: criticism of Shakespeare, 108; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 31, 33, 34, 48, 55, 57, 69, 70, 108, 156; Selimus, 31, 32, 55, 69, 108 Griffin, Benjamin, 30, 68 Gurr, Andrew, 33, 184 Hall, Edward, 15, 77 Harvey, Gabriel, 60 Helgerson, Richard, 53, 55, 73 Henslowe, Philip, 28, 51, 110, 210 Heraclitus, 2 Herodotus, 26, 89, 140 Heywood, Thomas, 19, 28, 37, 103; Apology for Actors, 36 Higgins, John, 172 historical culture, 19 historical culture and historical consciousness, 13–18 historiography, early modern, 13–18; oral vs. written, 140–145 history play, 3, 5, 11, 21, 38, 40, 49, 54, 67, 68, 100, 109, 110, 111, 128, 132, 203, 208, 214; and ambivalence, 160; and clowns, 48–70; and historical culture, 19, 20, 179; and intertheatricality, 178; and Petrarch, 13; as genre, 19, 31, 49, 217; as text, 143; audience of, 154, 180; critical approaches to, 2; emergence of, 18, 30, 68, 143; impact of, 6, 219; novelty of in Elizabethan era, 3; sequential, 145 hobbyhorse: in Hamlet, 199 Hogarth, William: “David Garrick as Richard III,” 167 Holinshed, Raphael, 15, 17, 77, 143 Homer, 75 Hoskins, John: Directions for Speech and Style, 93 Hunter, G. K., 79, 83 Icarus, allusions to, 118 jig, 54 Johnson, Richard: Nine Worthies of London, 15 Jones, Emrys, 115

Index Jones, Richard, 56 Jonson, Ben: Every Man Out of His Humour, 183 Jonze, Spike, 168 Kastan, David Scott, 24, 53, 54 Katherine of Valois: corpse of in Westminster Abbey, 195–199 Keepe, Henry, 196, 211 Kemp, Will, 54, 65, 166 Kennedy, Dennis, 215 Kiechel, Samuel, 194, 195, 196 King Edward VI, 201 King Henry VIII, 201 King Leir, 30, 31 King Richard III: modern historical approaches to, 169 King’s Men, The, 214 Knapp, James, 143 Knell, William, 61 Ko, Yu Jin, 215 Koselleck, Reinhart, 50, 138, 190 Koslow, Julian, 104 Kyd, Thomas, 104: The Spanish Tragedy, 79, 145, 156 LaCapra, Dominick, 20 Lanham, John, 53 Leggatt, Alexander, 118 Legge, Thomas: Richardus Tertius, 77 Leslie, John, 124 Levao, Ronald, 137 Levin, Richard, 73 Levy, F. J., 170 Locrine, 157 Lodge, Thomas, 156, 157 Loncraine, Richard, 155 Lopez, Jeremy, 7, 137 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, The, 54, 214 Machiavel figure, 77 Malkovich, John, 168 Manley, Lawrence, 173 Manningham, John, 165 Marlowe, Christopher, 19, 36; Doctor Faustus, 10, 11, 39–40, 156, 219; Doctor Faustus, B-text, 47; Tamburlaine plays, 32, 55, 56, 145 Marranca, Bonnie, 138 Marston, John, 176 McKellen, Ian, 155, 169 McMillin, Scott, and Sally-Beth MacLean: The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 31, 32, 33, 36, 69, 72, 78, 80–81, 83, 91, 101, 102, 105 Meres, Francis: Palladis Tamia, 77 Mirror for Magistrates, 77, 95, 143–144, 162

237

mneme, 159 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 168 More, Thomas, 77, 86, 163, 169; The History of Richard III, 140 Mott, Lewis, 104 Müller, Heiner, 20, 112 multi-part plays, 145–146 Mystery Cycles, 163 Nashe, Thomas, 37, 109, 140; Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell, 49, 110, 131 Nashman, Alon, 72 New Historicism, 1 Newton, Isaac: and time, 50 Nichols, Louise, 73 Norden, John, 141 Nungezer, Edwin, 137 Olivier, Laurence, 155, 169; Richard III film, 152 Orgel, Stephen, 183 Orrey, Earl of: Henry the Fifth, 198 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 138 Parsons, Robert, 124 Peacham, Henry, 73, 194–195 Pearlman, E., 136 Peele, George, 104; The Old Wives Tale, 31, 32, 82, 83, 84, 157, 186 Pembroke’s Men, 173 Pepys, Samuel, 193, 198 performance, 1, 2, 5, 10, 21, 22–23, 49, 55, 66, 68, 69, 80, 83, 85, 88, 94, 109, 110, 116, 125, 130, 132, 133, 134, 139, 145, 156, 157, 158, 164, 167, 169, 171, 180, 182, 183, 199, 202, 204, 208, 215, 218; and disappearance, 3, 10, 115, 145, 164–165, 202–203; and play texts, 6–7, 144; and temporality, 27–29, 49–53, 60; as a term vs. “playing,” 23; as borrowed time, 25, 67; as theorized by Shakespeare, 36–39; early modern, 4, 22, 27–30, 51–53 performance theory, 2, 4, 10; and presentism, 24; and the Elizabethan stage, 21–30 Petrarch, 11–13, 21 Phelan, Peggy, 24, 25, 136, 164 Platter, Thomas, 194, 195 Pollard, A. J., 169 presence: in performance, 1, 4, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 37, 49, 54, 64, 66, 68, 76, 94, 112, 115, 129, 130, 132, 134, 144, 145, 154, 156, 157, 167, 203, 205, 218 Princes in the Tower, 86–87 prosopopoeia: in The True Tragedy of Richard III, 93–94 providence: and performing history, 159–161

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Index

public clocks, 50, 70 Puttenham, George, 11, 18, 21, 143; on prosopographia, 93; on prosopopoeia, 93; The Arte of English Poesie, 1, 76, 103; The Arte of English Poesie, anaphora in, 90 Pye, Christopher, 114, 131 Queen Elizabeth I, 33, 78, 98, 99, 100; and succession debate, 124 Queen Mary I, 78, 98, 100 Queen’s Men, 1, 3, 4, 11, 20, 30, 38, 39, 40, 109, 111, 122, 132, 167; and ghosts, 157; and invention of the history play, 3, 31, 35, 39, 48; in fiction, 35–36; influence on Shakespeare, 36, 151, 179; style and repertory, 30–35 Quinones, Ricardo, 50, 51 Quint, David, 182 Rabkin, Norman, 100 Rackin, Phyllis, 8, 55, 67, 115, 131, 171, 175 Reformation, English and historical consciousness, 18–21 repetition and history, 87 Return from Parnassus, 166 Ribner, Irving, 68 Righter, Ann, 163 Ripa, Cesare: Iconologia, 78 Roach, Joseph, 25, 94, 130, 198 Rokem, Freddie: Performing History, 26 Roscius, 129, 162, 164 Rose Theater, 48, 129; as archeological site, 219 Rous, John, 162, 169 Rylance, Mark, 215 Rymer, Thomas, 186 Salique Law, 123, 191 Sams, Eric, 104 Schwyzer, Philip, 43 Sellars, Peter, 164 Senecan conventions, 79, 156 Seward, Desmond, 169 Shakespeare: 1 and 2 Henry IV, 30, 178, 191; 1 Henry IV, 48, 58, 178; 1 Henry VI, 5, 49, 109–134, 140, 146, 179, 191, 206; 1 Henry VI, authorship of, 135; 1 Henry VI, date of, 135; 2 Henry IV, 48, 53, 54, 58, 89, 178; 2 and 3 Henry VI, textual questions about, 173; 2 Henry VI, 124–125, 191; 3 Henry VI, 125, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 156, 162, 170, 178; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 27, 180; and the Queen’s Men, 4, 35–36; as historical thinker, 35–39; As You Like It, 162; First Folio, 5, 19, 135, 144, 179, 183, 207; Hamlet, 19, 64, 91, 92, 152, 199–200;

Henry V, 6, 30, 38, 48, 58, 110, 178–208, 214–219; Henry V, date of Chorus’s lines, 183–186; Henry VI plays, as trilogy, 178, 206; Julius Caesar, 19, 144, 195; King John, 30, 180; King Lear, 19, 30; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 215, 216; Much Ado About Nothing, 170; Othello, 186; Richard II, 123, 160, 178, 192; Richard III, 5, 24, 30, 76, 139–171, 178, 179, 191; Richard III, film versions of, 155–156; Richard III, uncertain staging in, 153; Romeo and Juliet, 27; Second Folio, 37, 39; The Tempest, 19, 51, 206; Titus Andronicus, 21, 219 Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men Conference, Toronto, 72 Shapiro, Barbara, 172 Shapiro, James, 193 Shore, Jane, 87, 91, 141, 152; sympathetic portrayal of, 95 Shoreditch, 191 Shrove Tuesday, 193 Sidney, Philip, 16, 76, 100, 182, 193; and the Queen’s Men, 106; The Defense of Poetry, 187; The Defense of Poetry and “truth,” 96–97 Simpson, Bart: as Fallout Boy, 168 Simpsons, The, 168 Sinclair, Iain, 219 Singer, John, 53 Skura, Meredith, 53, 55 Southampton, England, 188, 197 Southwark, 48, 57, 127, 191, 214, 216, 217 Bankside, 191 Southwark Bridge Road, 219 Spanish Armada, 32, 99 Speed, John, 196 St. Albans, Battle of, 169 States, Bert, 23, 29 Stationer’s Register, 95, 103 Stow, John, 195, 196: Survey of London, 15 Strange’s Men, 173 Tamburlaine, 55 Tarletonizing, 60, 61, 65, 67 Tarlton, Richard, 4, 33, 46, 49, 52, 53, 54, 58, 129, 165; anecdote about performance of The Famous Victories of Henry V, 61; fame, 64 Tarlton’s Jests, 60 Taylor, Diana, 24, 144, 164, 208, 215 Taylor, Gary, 135, 137, 173 teeth, premature: in Richard III, 149 Temple Garden, London; in 1 Henry VI, 120 Tey, Josephine, 104 Thames, river, 217–219 Theatre (Shoreditch), the, 52 theatrum historiae, 5, 140, 164–171, 178, 179

Index theatrum mundi trope, 5, 162–164 Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, The, 31, 32, 34, 60 Thucydides, 89, 140 “tragical Report of King Richard the Third, a Ballad, A”, 103 Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, The, 30, 31 True Tragedy of Richard III, The, 4, 30, 33, 75–103, 122, 134, 151, 152, 157, 162, 167; induction to, 84; text of, 77, 102–103 Tudor dynasty, 33, 34, 100, 101, 159, 165 Turner, Victor, 27 Ur-Hamlet, 156 Valla, Lorenzo, 18 veritas filia temporis motif, 78 Vice, the, 64, 126, 130, 141, 162 Walker, Julia M., 211 Wanamaker, Sam, 216 Wars of the Roses, 79, 81, 145

239

Weever, John, 196 Weimann, Robert, 73; locus and platea, 85 Welles, H. G., 52 Wells, Stanley, 157 Westminster Abbey, 208: monuments and historical imagination, 192–199, 200–204; Undercroft Museum, 192, 193, 198; visitor’s regulations, arbitrarily enforced, 213 Wheeler, Richard, 160 Whetstone, George, 52 White, Hayden, 43 Wiggum, Ralph: confusion of, 168 Wiles, David, 64 Wilson, J. Dover, 104 Wilson, Robert, 53 Wolf, Johannes: Artis historicae penus, 15 Wolska, Aleksandra, 164, 202 Woodstock, 157 Woolf, D. R., 13, 19, 70, 140 Worden, Blair, 172 work day: and theater, 51–52; early modern, 51 Worthen, W. B., 137, 138