Ton Hoenselaars, ed. Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad.(Book review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-06

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Ton Hoenselaars, ed. Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 287. 55.00 [pounds sterling]/$85.00.

Like Shakespeare's histories themselves, Ton Hoenselaars' collection Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad covers a staggering span of cultural and geographical terrain. In traversing such spaces, the collection attempts to negotiate some of the tensions found in performance practices marked by instances of alienation, appropriation, and adaptation emerging "between the native and foreign Shakespeare industries" in order to "promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare" (10). Hoenselaars's representation of that "swelling scene" (Prologue 4), in this way, implicitly confronts a series of questions that are strikingly similar to some of those raised by the Chorus in Henry V:

Can this cock-pit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? (Prologue 11-14)

For Hoenselaars's collection, these questions might be rephrased: Can the history play, as a unique genre within Shakespeare's canon, "hold" such "vasty" cultural differences, such divergent senses of identity and authority, at the levels of language, text, and performance, while also remaining recognizable as performances of Shakespeare's works per se?

The collection opens with a forward by Dennis Kennedy and a series of introductions by Hoenselaars. Beginning with the questions "What is a nation? What is a national history?," Kennedy notes that with a few exceptions, "the history plays and their historical material have held relatively little interest for readers and audiences further afield" (2). He argues that while individual histories can be effective, "it is the perception that they constitute a dramatic series with an internal logic and a grand overplot that gives them special distinction in the world repertoire" (4). Although he locates a significant shift...

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