English
Shakespeare's Histories: Dynasty-Building Choices
Professor M.J. Kidnie
Fall Half Course
This half-course on the second tetralogy (Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V) will interpret the plays from the perspective of performance and adaptation. We will begin by exploring the plays’ treatment of power and authority, and consider what it means for characters such as Richard Plantagenet, Henry Bolingbroke, and Prince Hal to “make history”. In a different sense, what does it mean for Shakespeare to “make history” for the public theatres at a time not only when fears of succession and war were pressing issues, but Elizabeth I was famously reported to identify herself with her deposed predecessor, Richard II? This course will then pursue an alternative form of “dynasty-building choices” by exploring this tetralogy’s history of performance from the mid-twentieth century. We will study landmark productions by the English Shakespeare Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC, and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Through this study of modern performance and adaptation, students will consider how theatre companies and directors use an individual play, an individual character, or in some cases, Shakespeare’s entire sweep of history from Richard II to Henry V to effect their own forms of empire building.
Shakespeare’s history plays are nowadays rarely studied at the undergraduate level beyond a single representative example, perhaps because some students and profs regard them as relatively inaccessible. But not only did Shakespeare favour the genre (he wrote ten English histories – twelve if one includes Cymbeline and King Lear), but the histories have been hugely important in terms of defining Shakespeare in performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This course will broaden students’ reading, help them learn how to formulate research questions in the field of theatre history (whether on film or stage), and introduce them to the practical skills of archival research at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The teaching programme will include sessions in the Festival archives.