BODY PARTS I & II

In March 2008, a number of London newspapers carried press advertisements for the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of the Henry IV plays, which ended its run at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon towards the end of the month, and transferred to the Roundhouse at the beginning of April. Touted as the centre-piece of a marathon cycle of eight history plays, the two parts of Henry IV encapsulate the appeal of an event that drew heavily upon a sense of the RSC's own institutional history, its traditions and its mythologies, which, in the advance publicity, are figured in the persona of the productions’ Falstaff, David Warner (Illustration 8). Garlanded with quotes from four-star reviews (‘Warner's return to the RSC after more than forty years away proves a triumph,’ declared the Evening Standard; ‘The RSC is making a triumphant return to its roots,’ announced the Sunday Times), the advertisement remembers the glory days of the early years of the RSC under Peter Hall, with Warner's resurrection in Stratford and London after a gap of four decades summoning memories not only of his own Richard II and Henry VI of 1963–4, but also his gauche, iconic Hamlet of 1965. The narrative is that of a prodigy returned, of a movie actor long exiled from his home in the theatre finally rediscovering his stage vocation. Warner’s twice-iterated ‘return’ is that of the RSC also, which has learned to recall the story of its own youth with him; caught in a carefree pose that seems to catch him toasting his own ‘triumph’, Warner’s Falstaff can barely contain his glee over his and his company’s success. The compositional centre of this publicity image is Falstaff ’s belly, here an expanse of red-framed white space that invites us to project upon it a theatrical and institutional history.

Modern narratives of Shakespeare's life have tended to expand our sense of the playwright's representativeness of his own culture in perhaps every area but one: his use of the Bible. The boundaries of this subject have long been shaped by two biographical assumptions about Shakespeare's encounters with scriptural texts: that they occurred mainly when he was a boy in school and later when he attended church services. Both assumptions have sedimented into part of our cultural memory of Shakespeare that no recent biographer, as far as I am aware, has questioned. They constitute what one might call, following Pierre Bourdieu, the historical field that determines the social value and scholarly production of Shakespeare's discursive relationship with the Bible. The critical result, evident in any modern edition, has been a reduction of Shakespeare's biblical references to the level of proverbial wisdom or unproblematic doctrine. These scholarly tendencies have been reinforced by wider cultural attitudes, such as long-standing admiration for the plays’ absence of religious dogma, as well as wariness of provoking outdated polemics or fanciful speculations about Shakespeare's personal beliefs.

The current consensus has had the less desirable effect, however, of inhibiting historicized investigations of Shakespeare's biblical intertexts and early modern English culture, including potentially diverse responses by original spectators and readers to scriptural allusions in the plays. While modern scholars have catalogued scores of references to the Bible in Shakespeare, most of these remain untouched by recent theoretical discourses and cross-disciplinary methodologies which have transformed Shakespearian historicism in other areas, including early modern contexts of religious politics and the theatre.

Before I left Philadelphia on a madcap voyage to Stratford to see Shakespeare's two history tetralogies performed over a four-day weekend, a colleague who thought me rather deranged for undertaking this adventure during the teaching term remarked sardonically that ‘Jack Cade's Rebellion, the most trite episode in all of Shakespeare’, would surely make my trip worthwhile. Admittedly, Michael Boyd's ‘Glorious Moment’ – the title of this ‘once in a lifetime’ theatrical event – was a form of Extreme Shakespeare not for the faint of heart (or hind). But its rendition of Cade's Rebellion provides an improbably elegant entry point for theorizing the intersection between event-based theatrical phenomena and the construction of Shakespearian history. In this production of 2 Henry VI, Dick the Butcher, one of Cade's followers, wore a bloody apron and punctuated his speech with the emphatic wave of a bloody meat cleaver. Stripped to the waist, he had scrawled on his chest (in more blood) the obstinate declaration, ‘We're ’istry’.

Who are ‘we’, and what history is being claimed here? On its surface, the statement asserts the rebels’ right to control and construct events according to popular rather than aristocratic prerogative; they'll ‘set London Bridge afire, and, if [they] can, burn down the Tower too’, erasing others’ history to clear ground for their own (2 Henry VI, 4.6.14–15). Colloquially, the phrase is an acknowledgement of mortality, even imminent death, and this meaning also had significant resonance in Boyd’s productions. Jack Cade’s entourage was composed of the animated corpses of characters who had been killed off earlier in this and previous plays, including Lord Talbot and his son John, Margery Jourdain and John Hume, the murdered Duke of Gloucester, and a headless Suffolk, led haltingly around by the elbow.

The Comedy of Errors’ opening focus on the twins’ father Egeon was not suggested by either of the play's two principal sources (Plautus's Menaechmi and his Amphitruo), but the addition of this new plot element immediately directs audience attention to a number of different kinds of bonds – from the physical restraints visible on the prisoner to the law's theoretical restraints on the Duke; from the history of Egeon's severed family ties to the history behind the severed commercial and social relations between Ephesus and Syracuse now motivating the old man's imprisonment. Though Egeon's plight remains disjoined from the comedy of the twins’ mistaken identities until the final scene, the opening view of the bound and imperilled father launches visual and narrative elements decidedly pertinent to the play that follows, for the bonds and obligations of family and commerce – subsequently to find their key metaphor in the chain (which itself appears in interchangeable symbiosis with the rope) – provide the impetus for almost every plot turn. The play's first known audience, assembled at Gray's Inn on Holy Innocents Night (28 December) 1594, had a close professional interest in such questions. The Comedy of Errors was perhaps written specifically for that occasion but the surviving evidence of that performance was published almost a century later. The play was long considered an early piece of writing (Shakespeare's presumed lack of experience thus becoming a reason for some to disparage it).

18 January 2009. I'm in the Arts Centre at Warwick University, breathing down the necks of the men who are putting up the exhibition that's going to open in two days’ time, curated by my colleague, Tony Howard. I'm getting in their way, but I hardly notice, because my whole concentration is on the panels they're fixing to the wall. These storyboards are telling of a life – its ‘battles, sieges, fortunes’, ‘disastrous chances…moving accidents…hair-breadth scapes’ – that's making a Desdemona of me. Headlined ‘A Slave's Son at Stratford’, the storyboards remember a date fifty years ago. 7 April 1959. When Paul Robeson kept an appointment at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

He'd been somewhat delayed. In August 1950 the US State Department had ordered Robeson to surrender his passport. Any trip abroad ‘would not be in the interests of the United States’. The UK Home Office agreed. The actor, singer, international political activist for labour, race and social equality, was, a Home Office minute from August 1950 declared, ‘a nuisance’. He'd supported the Welsh miners in the 1930s (after he'd first come to London to play Othello in 1930); he'd ‘played a leading part in the formation of the World Peace Congress’ in 1949; given the chance, he would ‘play a dangerous part in his capacity of Saviour of the Negro and Oppressed Colonial’. So Robeson, stripped of his passport, was condemned to internal exile in the US. The FBI and MI5 kept him under surveillance. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogated him in 1956. Blacklisted, denied work on stage or screen, the most extraordinary voice in America was gagged. But not silenced. In 1957, spearheaded in Britain by trades unions, artists and the Left, the ‘Let Paul Robeson Sing!’ campaign organized an international concert in London and Wales via the transatlantic telephone cable.

This article argues against unnecessarily ‘scientific’ rigour in determining sources. Source study originated in Quellenforschung, a study of classical texts that mined an extant work for information about lost sources but ignored the work's own textual and contextual dynamics. Early source studies of Shakespeare similarly focused on a single source and one simple relation between source and play. Like nineteenth-century classical scholars, they insisted on quantifiable evidence and treated echoes as separate phenomena, as if they had had no effect on one another in the original process of being remembered and reused. Source study had no role in interpretation. The only important questions were: exactly how similar is each source line to its proposed Shakespearian echo? How many echoes are there?

Many accounts of sources still proceed this way but I argue instead for a contextual approach that studies each echo in the context of the original source from which it came, the play in which it supposedly landed and the other echoes from that source. My example is the Queen's Men's play, King Leir (1585–7?), long recognized as the primary source for Shakespeare's King Lear (1604/5). As critics continue to discover, the old play is the origin of many of its lines but the larger relationship between Shakespeare and Leir still remains to be examined. The following article collects all the Leir echoes together and adds a few, in order to see what Shakespeare borrowed from Leir.

The marking and remarking of history – personal or national – is arguably one of the most consistent topoi in the Western canon, let alone in Shakespeare; personal anxieties of ageing persist and prevail in vocal counterpoint to memorial reconstructions of ‘historical’ or political events. The two justices of 2 Henry IV, Shallow and Silence, are what Hamlet probably never intended in his reference to the players as ‘abstract and brief chronicles’ (2.2.524). And yet they are, in another sense, precisely ‘abstract’ if perhaps not quite ‘brief’ almanacs of both personal and political recollections that articulate the relation of war and remembrance to memory and nostalgia. So are several other representations of ‘geezerdom’ seen and heard throughout the second tetralogy: Gaunt, York and of course Falstaff. In this article I want to trace out the justices’ personal frames for measuring and remembering ‘history’ as localized and alternative versions of their play's (and the tetralogy's) larger concerns with time, succession, memory, obsolescence and war – all inevitable and simultaneously dangerous to incumbent order.

As one-fourth of the second tetralogy, 2 Henry IV inescapably focuses on time and remembrance, and on the national crisis sprung, two plays and a represented generation earlier, by Richard II's deposition, the consequent breach in succession, and on Henry IV's role in that breach. These of course are the play's large issues; in their midst Shakespeare pauses to reflect on time's passage and remembrance in terms more minutely focused.

Beatrice and Benedick ‘never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them’ (1.1.60–1), we are warned, and their encounter a few lines later does not disappoint:

This greeting brilliantly captures the ceremonial idiom central to the social politics of Much Ado About Nothing. Both characters overplay deferential formality in their use of titles, ‘Lady Disdain’ and ‘Signor Benedick’, while simultaneously flouting the code of politeness in their insults. The satirical effect would be increased by appropriate courteous gestures of greeting: a formal bow from Benedick and an answering curtsey from Beatrice traverse the space between their bodies. Their ‘skirmish of wit’ immediately establishes Messina as a high-risk environment for face-to-face interactions, something that the tragi-comic extremes of the plot go on to demonstrate.

In the public, courtly environment of Leonato's household, identity is highly dependent on superficial signifiers and interactions. Benedick draws attention to both verbal and non-verbal surfaces in the play, pointedly warning his friends ‘The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments, and the guards [decorations] are but slightly basted on, neither’ (1.1.268–70).

This has not been a good year for the texts of Romeo and Juliet. Apparently, though, the worst is not so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’. I was ready to pronounce an edition prepared by two relatively inexperienced editors, in which I found forty-one substantive errors (see below), the worst edition under review. And yet, that distinction belongs, utterly surprisingly, to the work of a veteran editor: Jay Halio's new parallel-texts edition of Romeo and Juliet contains an astounding 108 errors in the text of the play.

The experience of reading Halio's edition is an emotionally variegated one for a critic concerned with textual accuracy. I laughed at the howlers (e.g. instead of calling for a mattock as he enters the tomb, Friar Laurence requests a ‘hammock’, Q1 5.2.21; his poison resides not in the infant rind of a weak flower but in its ‘instant rind’, Q1 2.2.23); I cried at the invented words (e.g. at Q1 1.1.222 ‘with beauty’ unaccountably becomes ‘with heaven's beauty’; ‘rest’ at Q2 4.5.6 becomes ‘sleep’); and I got angry at variants appearing in lines which are identical in Q1 and Q2 (e.g. whereas both Q1 and Q2 read ‘I lent him’ at 2.2.81, Halio's text of Q1 reads ‘I gave him’; both Q1 and Q2 read ‘poison’ at 4.3.20 but Halio's Q1 reads ‘potion’). All told, I found seventeen lines with invented words, twenty-one lines with omitted words, twenty transpositions, ten instances in which a different preposition is substituted for the one in the copy-text, an omitted line (at Q2 2.4.127 add ‘him than he was when you sought him; I’), and thirty-nine further assorted textual errors. A parallel-text edition of Q1 and Q2 has obvious potential utility, but the unfortunate textual editing throughout renders this one all but useless.

Shakespeare's history plays show a man's world more unequivocally, more inescapably, more impenetrably than his comedies or Romances, perhaps even more than most of his tragedies. Yet when women appear in these plays they are rarely presented as mere victims of the system, or of individual men, but as having agency. Sometimes that agency even extends to become power. These instances open up a space to examine what power a woman can have in a man's world, and how we identify and reflect on such power. The process of staging the text will establish the position from the artists on what quantity but also what different qualities of power a woman can enact within a framework that is unabashedly patriarchal. Performance offers an excellent canvas on which to draw images of the potential varieties of female power and, whether deliberately or not, the performance practitioners who create those images also give indications of approval or censure. At first glance the history plays tend to offer less to the female performer than those of other genres, but the exceptions are exciting ones. Queen Margaret is an acknowledged tour de force of a role, stretching over four plays. The relative obscurity of 1 Henry VI means that many people remain unaware that Shakespeare wrote of Joan of Arc (or Jeanne la Pucelle here), but what he created was a virtuoso role startlingly modern in its conception. Richard III is often thought of as a vehicle for a single, male star, but not only includes four strongly differentiated female characters but shows them conversing together. In performances that can struggle to distinguish the many Lords from one another, the women trumpet their distinctiveness and individuality.

One of this year's finest monographs is Gail Marshall's far-ranging, erudite and engaging Shakespeare and Victorian Women. I will return to this excellent book in more detail later in the article, but Marshall commences her study by quoting a remarkable piece by Kathleen Knox, published in 1895, ‘in the guise of a letter to her young friend Dorothy’ (p. 1). This is where I, too, would like to begin. The premise is that Dorothy has begun to study Shakespeare in a school context and is very uncertain about the whole experience: ‘You have recently been moved up into the “Senior Cambridge” form’ the ‘letter’ observes, noting that this obliges Dorothy to undertake a systematic study of a Shakespeare play. It continues (and the Shakespeare scholar's heart sinks) ‘you have found the occupation dry, difficult, and uninteresting.’ As a result Dorothy wants answers to some pressing questions such as ‘why what was meant for a pleasure in one generation should be a pain and grief to another’ and ‘what there is in Shakespeare to make people rave about him as they do’. ‘In short,’ Dorothy wonders, ‘why should one “learn Shakespeare” at all?’ (p. 1). This seems a remarkably contemporary lament, one heard daily in schools and around many breakfast tables, and a large number of publications this year have in part been commissioned with the aim of helping those struggling with the effort to ‘learn Shakespeare’. A cluster of companions, handbooks, surveys and guides offer their words and contents to the undergraduate and sixth-form college reader with the aim of making Shakespeare seem accessible, interesting and anything but ‘dry’ and ‘difficult’. It is with this cluster of texts – many of them authored, it should be noted, by the most eminent of Shakespeare scholars, an indication in itself of how seriously the task of engagement is taken both by the academic world and the major publishing houses – that I will commence.

Throughout much of the 1570s, Christopher Saxton must have had terrible muscle aches. Day after day, week after week, he marched through the English countryside and climbed the steepest hills; yet he was not seeking personal pleasure but was on a mission: Saxton was the first map-maker in a modern sense to be sent out by an English monarch to measure the extent of the kingdom. His project – a collection of detailed maps created with the help of the latest technology available – was intended to contribute to the aggrandizement, or cult, of Queen Elizabeth, and his maps were supposed to show the vast spatial extent of her power. Thus, it was for political reasons that Saxton grew blisters on his feet – and, indeed, map-making turned out to be political, albeit with the result, at least in the long run, not quite hoped for by Elizabeth. We do not know how content she was with Saxton's maps when they were published in 1579; we do know, however, that neither Elizabeth nor her successor James I funded any of the great cartographic projects that were to follow. None of the major map-makers of late sixteenth-century England, such as William Camden, John Speed or John Norden, received royal funding as Saxton had. Obviously at some point in the late sixteenth century, map-making had gone wrong in the eyes of English monarchy. But where exactly?

An answer emerges when we take a closer look at some of these projects, following for a moment Richard Helgerson’s illuminating discussion of them. My first images show the frontispiece and one sheet of Saxton’s ground-breaking Atlas of England and Wales (Illustrations 1 and 2). As Helgerson forcefully reminds us, the fact that this project was funded by the government and designed as a survey of the queen’s property shows in the map itself. The monarchic claim to the country is clearly visible: each sheet is dominated by the royal arms, reminding readers, as they turn the pages and move from county to county, that each belongs to the queen.

The possibility that Shakespeare's Richard II was the play described as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’ and performed on the eve of the Earl of Essex's rebellion in February 1601 has assured its status as New Historicism's poster boy. The association with Essex makes the play into a perfect exemplar of the Elizabethan theatre's doomed gestures towards subversion; if it didn't exist, we would have to invent it (which, of course, perhaps we have). But even as criticism has emphasized the radical energies of a play in which a lawful king is deposed without any immediate consequence for his enemies, the editorial tradition has sought to neutralize its political challenge. As this article will show, we read Richard II in texts that are much less comfortable with the fact of the transfer of sovereigns dramatized in the play than its earliest printed versions. Furthermore, in always preferring to reprint the 1608 text (Q4) over the popular Elizabethan editions, recent editors have tended to sacralize Richard's kingship, and to neutralize those aspects of the early texts that most challenge a mystificatory myth of unitary monarchical authority. In this delicate play of shifting allegiances and changing sides, few editors have easily followed Shakespeare's own examples of York, Northumberland and even roan Barbary, in accommodating themselves to the Lancastrian rule of Bullingbrook as Henry IV. Rather than seeking the play’s political charge in putative early modern performances, therefore, this article describes a Ricardian tradition of editing Richard II in the late twentieth century, an uninvestigated editorial consensus silently complicit in minimizing the play’s political charge.

Among the many contemporary pretenders to the throne of Shakespeare, Howard Barker (born in 1946) has often been regarded either as one of the most convincing contestants or as ‘a charlatan, a poseur and a prig’. Although the latter view has found ample support in reviews of his plays, Barker has gained increasing credit from both academics, actors and directors, and a powerful champion in Sarah Kane, who claimed in an article published shortly before her death that, misunderstood though he was in his own time, ‘in two hundred years’ time Howard Barker [would] be thought of a bit like Shakespeare’, an opinion that has been widely circulated since then. Aside from a debatable similarity of style and compositional practices, there is ground for such a claim. Barker has devoted most of his writing, both dramatic and theoretical, to a generic refashioning of tragedy into what he has called the Theatre of Catastrophe, a transformation that has necessarily taken into account Shakespeare's contribution to our understanding of tragedy. Moreover, his attempt to re-create a poetic and lyrical language for the stage has often been termed, notably by actors, Shakespearian. Shakespearian. Two of Barker's best known plays, Seven Lears (1989) and Gertrude – the Cry (2002), use Shakespeare's tragedies as their main source and testify, along with his rewriting of Middleton's Women Beware Women (1986), to his interest in Renaissance drama, an interest which he has also manifested in choosing to locate several of his plays in this period, most notably Brutopia (1993) and The Seduction of Almighty God (1997), set during the dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s.

Over twenty years ago, James C. Bulman made the striking claim that Virgil's Georgics provided one of the ‘deep sources’ for Shakespeare's understanding of historical life in his first and second tetralogies. Scholarship had long recognized a sporadic pattern of allusion to the Georgics throughout these plays, especially in Henry V. Indeed, in the latter work, Shakespeare returned to the original text of Virgil's poem rather than its first complete English translation made by Abraham Fleming in 1589 or the versions of its topoi found in vernacular writings such as Thomas Elyot's The boke named the governour (1531) and John Lyly's Euphues and his England (1580). However, Bulman's argument extended beyond conventional studies of sources and influences. His suggestion was that the political sensibility expressed in these plays was essentially Virgilian, more specifically georgic in character. This can be detected in both their imagery, where conflict is portrayed recurrently in terms of its drastic effect on husbandry, and in their ambivalent mode of political reflection. In both Virgil and Shakespeare, the laborious struggle to restore prosperity to the blighted land is presented as heroic, yet this endeavour is shadowed throughout by an awareness that political stability is desperately hard to maintain.

This article makes a new claim about the significance of the Georgics that helps both to reappraise the neglected relationship between Virgil and Shakespeare and to shed new light on the political significance of one of these history plays, Henry V. My argument is that a more detailed examination of georgic idioms in the play reveals how it contributes to the urgent contemporary debate on political sovereignty. This aspect of Henry V is also shaped, in turn, by two contrasting viewpoints that affect profoundly its reception of Virgil’s poem: the divergent accounts of sovereignty offered, firstly, by the period’s foremost theorist of the subject, Jean Bodin, and, second, by its foremost sceptic, Michel de Montaigne. Understanding the significance of these conflicting views reveals both what is at stake in Shakespeare’s political curiosity about the Georgics and how this informs the dramatic process of the play.

As the denouement of The Winter's Tale begins to unfold, we learn that, many years before, Paulina commissioned a statue of Hermione, the presumably long-dead queen of Sicilia, that with its presence will help to reconstitute the royal family. It is, the Third Gentleman reveals to the court and to us,

Nowhere else in this play, which so closely follows the romance of Pandosto by Robert Greene that it may well be a tribute to him, does fiction reach out to incorporate an authentic historic person. Why does Shakespeare make such a temporal and generic interruption and why, given this stretch, does he choose a deceased Italian artist who was far better known, in Florence and in Mantua, as a painter, architect, engineer and interior decorator than as a sculptor?

It is quite possible, of course, that Shakespeare and several members of his audience might well have known of Romano's considerable stature in his own country. He was born in Rome around 1492 and at an early age distinguished himself as a leading assistant to Raphael, filling the painter’s designs and cartoons; at the death of the famous painter, Romano, at the age of twenty-eight, was chosen to complete his master’s work then in progress – a vast fresco of the ‘Hall of Constantine’ in the Vatican consisting, along with minor matters, of four large subjects: the ‘Battle of Constantine’, the ‘Apparition of the Cross’, the ‘Baptism of Constantine’ and the ‘Donation of Rome to the Pope’.

Not too many weeks ago, I received a large parcel containing Richard Dutton's The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Drama in pristine condition. It is a measure of the sheer size of the book and the demands it puts on its reader that my copy is now sadly dirtied and dog-eared: the book is a treasure I have learned to cherish as I have carried it from graduate student to colleague and back, finding information in it that was relevant to the research of so many. I have also been busy updating my reading lists for students, often supplementing and sometimes replacing references to Cox and Kastan's New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997) with new references to the Oxford Handbook, which explicitly (and rightly) sets itself up as the successor to the Cox–Kastan History. The Oxford Handbook will have an impact on the field not only because this is a strikingly handsome and well-illustrated volume, but because it manages to square two circles. Firstly, it brings, thanks to a stunning opening chapter by William Ingram, an awareness of theoretical concerns to a field that has, in recent years, been fiercely empirical and openly resistant to theory, and it does so without in any way deflecting its contributors from their passionate attention to historical evidence and detail. Secondly, it succeeds in making narrative sense and can, despite its bulk, be read cover-to-cover. Each chapter tackles individual pieces of the larger puzzle in ways that highlight the moment where conflicting accounts can be constructed from the same evidence or where there simply is not sufficient evidence to compose a narrative. The result is a remarkably readable collection which brings together established scholars, some of the younger voices that have made theatre history such an exciting field of late and new scholars whose work is receiving its first major airing in this volume.

This article discusses the presentation of reflective retreat in Shakespeare and Montaigne, noting that for both of them reflection frequently follows an experience of shame. Moreover, for both reflection offers no path out of embodiment. That is, neither embraces a hallowed Platonic (and an imminent Cartesian) idea that a focus on mental life extricates one from the difficulties of embodiment.

Being seen in a bad light, gazed at with a critical, superior eye, promotes shame. As Silvan Tomkins comments,

Closing eyes or bowing the head to break eye contact with the shamer, covering the face or the exposed body parts, are, in effect, an attempt to enlarge or barricade the space between the shamed body and the shaming, gazing body of the other. Flushing (more involuntary than the first two, but not much more involuntary) may in some physical or residually animal way be an attempt to accomplish the same thing by changing colour, radiating heat, producing a warning sweat, stoking the metabolism for conflict or flight.