The Spell of History
How Shakespeare's war-soaked 'tetralogies'—in 3 epic stagings—are shedding new light on our troubled times
By Stephen Nunns
History often seems to consist of nothing much more than one horrid catastrophe following another. Admittedly, this appears to be a terribly pessimistic viewpoint—so politicians, historians, religious leaders and more than a few artists have tried to persuade us that there is actually some trajectory we are following, some Higher Goal we will eventually attain that will justify the carnage and emotional devastation that has preceded it. This is a very old tendency, though it's often gussied up in new clothes. Nowadays, for instance, we talk about such trends as "the triumph of modernity" and "the defense of our democratic values"; these are viewed in the context of "the clash of civilizations" and "a nation's destiny." Quite often, God is invoked as being on someone's side. You don't have to be much of a historian or political philosopher to figure out that things really haven't changed much over the past several centuries.
So, perhaps it's a sign of the national zeitgeist that a number of theatres around the country have chosen the present moment to present, in various permutations, Shakespeare's accounts of the wartime horrors of 15th-century England—what one 16th-century writer termed, with a quaint knack for understatement that only a historian could muster up, "the unquiet time." For his part, Shakespeare's descriptions of the era are a bit more blunt, as when he writes in the famous Temple Garden scene in Part One of Henry VI:
This brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send between the Red Rose and the White
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
Shakespeare's two "tetralogies" (or quartets of related plays) follow the rise and fall of the Lancastrian line, and, in a move that's reminiscent of George Lucas's Star Wars saga, the dramatist started with the end. The first set of plays, written near the beginning of his career (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III), traces the fall of the House of Lancaster from the death of Henry V in 1422 to the triumph of the Tudors in 1485. In the second tetralogy, Shakespeare—like Lucas—backed up and traced the family's rise to power, from Bolingbroke's usurpation of the throne from his ambivalent and ineffectual cousin, Richard II, to the foreign victories of the warrior king Henry V.
These history plays aren't generally considered the playwright's "greatest hits"—only the two parts of Henry IV and Richard III show up with any regularity in the brochures of America's resident theatres, and that can be chalked up to the Bard's keen-eyed character studies: There are few meatier roles in the English-language theatre than those of Richard III, Hotspur or Falstaff. Henry V—in spite of (or maybe because of) Laurence Olivier's jingoistic 1946 movie treatment—hasn't fared well with either scholars or producers; Richard II, despite an interesting and complex title role, is often ignored; and the Henry VI plays are, for many, well, a bit of joke—they see the light of day about as often as Timon of Athens or The Two Noble Kinsmen. Generally, all these plays are considered too obscure, too talky, too violent, too specific historically, and—maybe most important—too big and costly. (All those characters! All those battle scenes!)
But this year, things are different. Three dissimilar theatres in diverse parts of the country have embarked on mammoth productions of the history plays. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has been presenting the three-play Henry VI cycle (without its followup play, Richard III) this season, adapted into two very different evenings of theatre by the company's resident voice and text expert, Scott Kaiser (who co-directs with artistic director Libby Appel). The first part of Kaiser's adaptation (subtitled "Talbot and Joan") is performed in OSF's New Theatre, an intimate black box that usually serves as the home for productions of new works. In the second part (subtitled "Henry and Margaret"), Kaiser collapses the second and third plays into one hugely epic piece, appropriately played out on the theatre's outdoor Elizabethan Stage.
Meanwhile, Chicago Shakespeare Theater is bringing last season's wildly successful production of Rose Rage to the Duke on 42nd Street in New York City. This adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy by Roger Warren and director Edward Hall is performed as a single five-and-a-half-hour event (split into two parts with a dinner break in between). Set in a Victorian meat market, the cast—a dozen male butchers—recount in Grand Guignol fashion the bloody War of the Roses and fall of the Lancastrian Empire to the rhythmic accompaniment of real knives, cleavers and axes as they hack at raw meat and red cabbages. By the show's end, the stage is a literal slaughterhouse, with blood, smashed cabbages, and pieces of entrails and liver scattered around the stage.
Finally, Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, R.I., will produce the full second tetralogy in repertory as the first offering of its 2004–05 season, under the title The Henriad. A cast of 16 actors from Trinity's resident company will perform Richard II, directed by Kevin Moriarty; Henry IV (with the two parts condensed into one evening), directed by Amanda Dehnert; and Henry V, staged by artistic director Oskar Eustis. Doing three separate plays by three different directors in a single production slot is an enormous undertaking (Eustis acknowledges that it has been a "marketing nightmare"), but it will offer audiences a rare opportunity to see the cycle in its entirety.
These productions suggest that there might be considerable life left in Shakespeare's old histories (though it seems unlikely that a great number of theatres will be clamoring to do The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eighth any time soon). Why the sudden interest? The simple answer could be that in times of international hostilities, plays about war have a resonance. (Again, Olivier's film was as much a piece of British propaganda as a work of art.) But the fuller answer is probably more complicated than that.
The presentation of history is really an attempt to create a narrative out of contingency; it's a way of making order out of chaos. In the late 1500s, historians—and playwrights like Shakespeare—tried to justify the carnage of the previous century essentially by claiming that this was the story of a people who, under God's benign guidance, fulfilled its patriotic destiny. As one 16th-century historian put it, "as by discord great things decay and fall to ruin, so the same by concord be revived and erected." Academics call this "catastrophic millennialism"; it's a kind of thinking that suggests that destruction of the existing order is a necessary step in reaching a perfect age. In other words, a scorched-earth policy is an essential step in getting to the Promised Land. This can be an attractive way of thinking about history, as it can justify all kinds of questionable historical moves: It's certainly one argument now being used to validate nearly 1,000 dead American soldiers in Iraq.
To a certain extent, Shakespeare fell under the spell of catastrophic millennialism; the overall narrative of the history plays suggests that the decimation of England in the 15th century was God's way of clearing the stage for the (comparatively) civilized culture of the Elizabethan era. At the same time, you can't help but notice that the Bard is a bit cagier than that: Witness Falstaff's subversive humor, Richard III's creepy Machiavellian attractiveness, the playwright's ambivalence in the presentation of both Richard II and Bolingbroke (Shakespeare obviously admires the latter more, even though his actions start all the trouble), and the relentlessly brutal depictions of violence (particularly in the Henry VI plays, with the decapitations of Suffolk, Cade and York; the murder of York's child; and the disquieting depictions of "a Son that hath kill'd his father" and the "Father that hath kill'd his son," dragging the respective bodies across the stage).
All of these moves suggest that Shakespeare
was too critical, too smart, too agnostic and maybe too politically and
morally ambivalent to buy into the kind of straight millennial narrative
that was so attractive to the historians he pilfered for material. He
knew that the past, like the present, is never quite as simple as we wish
it could be. In unsettled times such as ours, the ambivalence and complexity
of Shakespeare's histories make a whole lot of sense. —S.N.
SCOTT KAISER, adapter and co-director, HENRY
VI, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland:
Libby Appel commissioned me in 2001 to do this adaptation, so it's taken three years to make it fit into our repertory and onto our stages. It's complicated, because most of the actors carry on into Parts Two and Three—except of course for the ones who are dead. There is the logistical issue of using the same actors in repertory. Oregon Shakespeare Festival has a commitment to doing the entire canon, so, naturally, these works are bound to come around eventually. But this is the first time since 1935 that all of the plays have been done in one season, so it is unique.
The Henry VI plays are very rarely done. I think it's because they're early works of Shakespeare—some academics even claim that the plays aren't his, or that that they're collaborations or adaptations. A lot of scholarly writing denigrates these plays. But, actually, they're extremely fascinating. They're full of action. And they have a resonance. They're not really about English history. They're about power and what people will do to get it and to keep it. That speaks to modern audiences, without a doubt.
They are barbaric works—there's
no getting around that. One of the things that has come up for us is the
violence—particularly the many severed heads. We opened not long
after Nicholas
Berg was executed, and more than a couple of people thought I'd inserted
the decapitations. They'd come up to me after the show and ask, and I'd
have to say, "Look, it's in the play." But you can see just how little
we've progressed in 400 years—this kind of barbarism still exists.
LIBBY APPEL, artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare
Festival, Ashland, and co-director, HENRY VI:
When I asked Scott to do these plays, he had a very clear mandate—to make it an event, not just compress these works into one play. And I was very interested in trying to use different locations for the different parts—I'm really fascinated by how architecture affects how you watch a play. The first part is in our experimental theatre—our smallest space—and the experience is incredibly intimate. You really get involved in the characters' psychology. Then, when you move outdoors for the second part, it becomes epic—it develops into a theatrical adventure. Some audiences are up for such an event, and some aren't. Henry VI will never be as popular as King Lear or Much Ado About Nothing, but the audiences who commit to both pieces—who really come along for the ride—are avid in their listening and very strong in their response.
I suppose that in certain ways
these Henrys are not "great" plays. But they are politically
vibrant. They're about family dynasties. They're about war. They're about
people fighting who believe they have God on their side. And so they are
unbelievably potent in our particular time. Nowadays, we have David Hare,
Michael Frayn and David
Edgar writing about contemporary politics, and that's exactly what
Shakespeare was doing in his time. These are political plays, dealing
with timeless political themes.
BARBARA
GAINES, artistic director, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, on ROSE RAGE:
Edward Hall, the director and co-adaptor of this production, has found the perfect metaphor for Rose Rage by placing it in a Victorian butcher shop. So, instead of the characters simply hacking at each other on stage—pretending to stab each other with swords—the audience sees real liver or kidneys being chopped up on stage. If a character is supposed to be stabbed in the head, a red cabbage is smashed into smithereens within feet of the audience. It's utterly shocking, and it's the perfect antiwar production.
Personally, I never worried about whether Henry VI is considered popular or not—I mean, Chicago Shakes's first production was Troilus and Cressida! My attitude is I'm never really taking a risk, because it's Shakespeare, and all his plays are blockbusters. As my mom says, "People just like his plays because they're filled with sex and violence." She knows what she's talking about.
Each act of Rose Rage is about two hours, and there's an hour-and-a-quarter dinner break, so it's five-and-a-half hours all together. You have to think of it as a happening. It's an event. You need to go into it as an adventure.
The amazing thing about these plays is that as you watch them you'll see Rumsfeld. You'll see Cheney. You'll even see Bill Clinton. Shakespeare writes in archetypes—they're all people we know. You'll hear a speech and you can't believe it was written 400 years ago. For example, "You put sharp weapons in a madman's hands"—there are gasps when the audience hears that line.
There were some people at the theatre who were concerned that the material would be too shocking, that people would stay away. But I always figure that great art will find its place in the universe. And I was proved right. I'd say 99 percent of the audience loved it. (Well, there were a few vegans who were freaked out….)
One reason I'm excited to see
this production go to New York is that there's a possibility that the
folks who should see it will. I hope people in power
see it—those who may make their little trips to Baghdad or Afghanistan,
but remain basically untouched by this war. It's not their sons and daughters
who are going over there. You can't see a production like this and think
about war in the same way. You watch these characters develop, learn about
their wants and desires…you fall in love with them, really. Then suddenly
you see their guts pulled out. There's no way you can walk away from that
unscathed.
OSKAR EUSTIS, artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, R.I., and director of HENRY V:
Doing this cycle is something I've been considering for quite a while. Five summers ago I spent six weeks working on these texts with actors and [fellow director] Amanda Dehnert at the Bread Loaf School, investigating the lives of these plays. What became clear to me is that the big issue of this cycle is leadership—what is "just rule." I was looking for an opportunity to present them, and it became clear that during this election cycle the question was unavoidable. And I realized that there's nothing I'd rather be doing this election night than investigating the questions of legitimacy of leadership through the words of William Shakespeare.
There are, I think, two different ways to look at this cycle. The first is a consideration of where political legitimacy comes from—Richard II views his kingship as a given, not something that's earned. In crude terms, his leadership has descended from above. And, of course, where this ultimately leads us is to the fields of Agincourt in Henry V, with a disguised king listening to the opinions of the common soldiers. It ultimately is a renegotiation of where political legitimacy comes from—that legitimacy comes from the king's ability to identify with the regular people. That he's not above them because of the throne. That's the positive arc.
But a countervailing current is that Henry V begins with characters engaged in a totally artificial argument about whether they should or shouldn't invade a foreign country that doesn't pose an immediate threat. We see a son basically following the orders of the advisors of his father. We see a plan to engage in a war in order to divert attention from domestic disturbances. We see Henry consolidate power by rounding up people whom he considers traitors but who are actually just opponents to the war. We see the foreign war become more and more failure-prone, with the situation becoming more and more complex.
I don't think you have to be brilliant to see the parallels. Now, this is not to say that George W. Bush is Henry V. But I do think that we can use a great poet like Shakespeare to understand in a complicated way the political dilemma we're in.
Of course, doing a project like this is risky. However, I believe it is part of my job description not to be beholden to the expectations of an audience; not just to be a curator. I think it is my job to have opinions and beliefs, and explore those beliefs through theatre. Naturally, because it is an election year, feelings are going to be strong. But that's not a reason not to do it. It's a reason to take it seriously and stand behind what you're doing.
Arts reporter Stephen Nunns is a former associate editor of this magazine.
Related stories in American Theatre:
A Different Creature, Edward Hall on his A Midsummer Night's Dream, March 2004
West is West, Lenora Inez Brown on Libby Appel and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, May/June 2001
It Would Have Been Shakespeare's Choice, Alexis Soloski on Chicago Shakespeare Theater, September 2000
Shakespeare in a Strange Land, Todd London on Shakespeare's contemporary relevance, May/June 1998
Barbara Gaines, a profile by Tony Adler, April 1993
The Festival that Ashland Built (and Vice Versa), Tad Simons on Oregon Shakespeare Festival, March 1993
Related books from TCG Books:
Rose Rage, by Edward Hall and Roger Warren
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