Awake remembrance of these valiant dead : Henry V and the politics of the English history play

'A PROPAGANDA-PLAY on National Unity: heavily orchestrated for the brass' was how A. P. Rossiter summed up Henry V in 1954. (1) The assumption that this play is complicit with the promonarchical, nationalist rhetoric of the Chorus, and with the particular myth of Englishness it propounds, has persisted. In recent years the most cogent articulation of this view has come from Richard Helgerson, who sees the play as the culmination of Shakespeare's gradual tightening of his "obsessive and compelling focus on the ruler" during the writing of his English history cycle, at the cost of occluding the interests of the ruled

Not to Be Altered”: Performance’s Efficacy and Audience Reaction in The Roman Actor

This paper argues that Massinger's The Roman Actor attempts to construct stage performance as non-effective in reaction to the riotous actions of early modern London audiences

Mediating Between the Mediums: The Changing Shakespearean World

Shakespeare\u27s A Midsummer Night\u27s Dream has been described as poetry, ritual, ballet, and circus rolled into one (Bryden 17). Encompassing so many different mediums of performance and human experience, these various levels incorporated the realms of words, music, movement, and spectacle as integral parts of Shakespeare\u27s production. Music was, of course, by the sixteenth century an accepted addition to the spoken language of the plays. Louis Elson, for example, writes that [a]11 performances of [Shakespeare\u27s] epoch were preceded by three flourishes of the trumpets, and it was only after the third flourish that the curtain was drawn and the prologue spoken (318). In addition to boasting the inclusion of such incidental music which, admittedly, played a decidedly subservient role to the action on stage, Shakespeare\u27s A Midsummer Night\u27s Dream dignified the role of music by incorporating it directly within the drama. Where incidental music occurred as background effects (i.e., fanfares or dance music), as entertainment between scenes, or as a postlude to the play itself, stage directions within Shakespeare\u27s play specified the need for music to be performed in conjunction with the action on stage, to reflect the actual text

Kent’s Best Man: Radical Chorographic Consciousness and the Identity Politics of Local History in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI

In this article, the character of Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI is reconsidered through an exploration of the local history and traditions of Kent. I argue that Shakespeare, through Cade and his followers, created a sense of local historical consciousness which directly challenged the structures of chronicle history and manifests itself in various acts of self-affirmation. Shakespeare departed from his sources by giving Cade a Kentish identity. I also challenge the modern critical consensus that Shakespeare made Cade more violent than he was in the play’s chronicle sources

William Shakespeare as a Purveyor of Re-Productions: Understanding Shakespeare’s Plays as Profitable Products

This project, “Recasting William Shakespeare in The Business of Playwriting,” works to reinvigorate the value gained by reading Shakespeare by: Beginning with espousing the importance of reading Shakespeare as a practical businessman first, instead of the mythological literary genius that men decades and now centuries after Shakespeare marketed and herald him as. Although this is not the primary focus of this paper, it is an important framework that begins to enable us to shift our presumptions of the canonical text, Romeo and Juliet . The next section sets the backdrop, i.e. the environment, in which Shakespeare used an emerging profession to recreate literature and runs through the “ancestry” of the star-crossed lovers archetype. Finally, the main section of this project identifies and explicates particular loci where Shakespeare transformed the original text in order to target and appeal to the audience of the times; in particular to Romeo & Juliet , this includes that of the creation of suspense, tragedy in relation to comedy, and an interrogation of love at first sight. This project concludes with a quick review of other proof of audience recognition within Shakespeare’s corpus that can lead to further investigations and close readings of other texts, Shakespearean or not, for financial motivations. All of which will help readers of Shakespeare come away with a greater business appreciation of his work and possibly force readers to think about the economic constraints and incentives shaping literature

Reading Metatheatre:Special issue, Metatheatre and Early Modern Drama, ed. Sarah Dustagheer and Harry Newman

How did the early moderns read metatheatre? This article challenges the conception that metatheatre can only be realized and experienced through theatrical performance. It offers a new methodological framework and body of evidence for the analysis of metatheatre in early modern drama by addressing the importance of the materiality of the text to ideas about theatrical self-reflexivity. Focusing on “paratexts” to a range of plays printed in England in the early seventeenth century, including character lists, errata lists and manuscript marginalia, I investigate implied and actual readers’ responses to the self-reflexive qualities of playbooks, whether or not those qualities are intentional. In doing so, I argue that early modern printed playbooks prompted “performative” reading practices through which readers actively reflected on the relationship between the real- and play-worlds, and enacted their own roles in the production of metatheatre. While Stephen Purcell proposes in this special issue that metatheatre is a “game that … can be played only in [theatrical] performance”, I contend that certain forms of metatheatre are accessible through—and sometimes even dependent on—the inter-play between different agents of meaning-making (dramatists, stationers and readers) on the “paper stage” of the printed book. More broadly, the article demonstrates the need for metatheatre to be re-assessed from the perspective of book history and textual studies as well as theater history and performance studies, with particular attention to the intersections between theatrical culture and print culture

Portraying the Role of Ezra Chater in Tom Stoppard\u27s Arcadia

In January of 2011 I began working on the role of Ezra Chater in Tom Stoppard\u27s 1993 masterpiece Arcadia . The production was under the direction of Mavourneen Dwyer. After a month and a half of rehearsal we opened on February 25th, 2011, and began a run of performances that lasted until March 6th. Ezra Chater appears twice over the course of the play, first in Act 1 scene 1, then in Act 1 Scene III, and his character is integral to the mystery that connects the past and present scenes together. In this paper I will be detailing the process I took in rehearsing and performing the role

“A Feast of Languages”: The Role of Language in the Globe to Globe Festival

In 2012, Shakespeare’s Globe hosted the Globe to Globe Festival, which featured performances from thirty-seven international companies in their native tongues as part of the Cultural Olympiad in the lead up to the London Olympic Games. This paper explores the role that language played in the Globe to Globe Festival, and the way in which language mediated direction and translation of various plays, specifically in the rehearsal room in anticipation of the performance itself. Translating Shakespeare into thirty-seven different languages allowed the companies to think about the potential benefits of performing their play in a specific dialect or style for both audiences at the Globe and their own language and culture as well. This paper considers the impact of language barriers that existed even within individual companies, and shows that the specific choices around language informed the ways audience members understood and interpreted the narratives of the plays during the festival

Book Reviews

Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Harry Berger Jr.) (Reviewed by Dale G. Priest, Lamar University