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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses
Shakespeare's Serial History Plays, by Nicholas Grene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 278. Cloth $80.00.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays, edited by Michael Hattaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 283. Cloth $70.00.
IT is unsurprising that books on the histories should be so shot through with anxiety about what history actually is, how it is constructed, staged, and analyzed. But there is something more here, something shifting and opalescent concerning their own historical (or historicist) perspective, their own place in history and their sense of what might be better termed historiography, which seems almost deliberately indeterminate. In both books history becomes a catchall, though a catchall of different kinds, which facilitates the projects at hand and lends authority to their various claims and arguments without ever coming out into the light where the reader can see what it is.
Grene's book, as many readers will know, is the more controversial of the two, and seems to posit a claim for the sequential organization, composition, and staging for Shakespeare's first tetralogy, while making something like the reverse argument for the second, claiming that the plays were generated one at a time, the author keeping an eye on the box office for signs of when to stop. But I say "seems" advisedly, for the historical grounding of the thesis is oddly cursory, taking only the first 23 pages of this 278 page study. The core argument concerning the first tetralogy unfolds roughly like this.
1. The plays were written in sequence beginning with 1 Henry VI--contrary to the opinion of the Oxford editors and others--as they appear in the First Folio. This claim rests less on new evidence than it does on new readings of old evidence ("ne" in Henslowe's diary could mean "newly licensed" rather than simply "new"), and much of it comes from a commonsensical reading of internal evidence within the plays. If we are to believe that 2 Henry VI (published as The First Part of the Contention) was in fact written before I Henry VI, we have to believe that Shakespeare chose to begin his history in 1444, an obscure period in the middle of a muddled reign, and that he chose to pass over all reference to Talbot, the obvious hero of the French wars. This is, Grene suggests, beyond counterintuitive. The plays show evidence of careful "seeding" of characters who will be drawn upon later, and of a patterning of curse and prophecy that clearly knows where the sequence is going. Shakespeare the upstart crow, furthermore, was not beautified by the feathers of other writers from whom he had plagiarized. He began at the beginning of Henry VI's reign. He did not write of Talbot and the French wars in 2 Henry VI because he had already covered them. He was the Johannes factotum who had dared to do what no other writer of the period had, and drawn up an epic historical series of four plays.
2. The plays were staged in sequence in the 1590s. This ingenious argument is grounded on evidence that, following the two parts of Tamburlaine, Henslowe regularly bought or commissioned sequels which, after their initial novelty value had worn off, were staged on the day following the original piece. Though all the hard evidence is for two-part plays (and there are numerous examples), Grene speculates that Shakespeare's first tetralogy did the same.
Grene is, of course, not the first to buck the Oxford editors' arguments about the sequencing of the first tetralogy (Michael Hattaway, editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Histories, has made similar arguments), though he is the first to utilize such a claim (and that about original performance conditions) to make a case for treating the first tetralogy as a unit--albeit an admittedly disparate one. It is premised on the assumption that the textual history is incomplete, that the shreds and patches on which the nonsequential argument is based indicates not proof but absence. The Folio was right all along, says Grene, and our overanalysis of incomplete records has led us to the wrong conclusions. There is something quite appealing about this, and many readers will concede that the evidence for the contrary position is indeed partial and open to reinterpretation, but it must also be said that a new perspective does not change the evidence at hand, and one is left feeling that Grene can offer only a leap of faith. The proof of this particular pudding (pending the discovery of new evidence) is less in the archives and more in what such a view of the tetralogy as a unit can generate for reading and performance.
The problem, of course, is that as he insists that the external historical evidence can be reread, others will say the same of his internal evidence. Yes, the first tetralogy features prophecy and curse in ways the more retrospective second tetralogy does not, but is this evidence of a different mode of composition or merely of their different positions within the larger narrative? After all "larger narrative" need not mean the histories as a series (or even two series), but might stand for history itself, the great swath of time that constructed crucial elements of Shakespeare and his audience's present. Grene seeks to affirm a continuity between the plays of the first tetralogy, though one, he says, is not "the Tudor Myth" of Tillyard, though it isn't clear what finally is unified about the series beyond their rootedness in a common history and a certain linkedness that would be expected in a single author's use of repeated characters. Indeed, the different phases of the story, each embodied in a different play (patriotic war with France [1 Henry VI], internal jars of faction and class [2 Henry VI], revenge and the brutal chaos of war [3 Henry VI], memory, moral collapse and renewal [Richard III]), might as much affirm the separateness of each project as they do the discreet phases...
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