Geoffrey Bullough, editor. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: Volume III, Earlier English History Plays: Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1960, xvi+512 pp. $7.50.

1961 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-290
Author(s):  
Virgil K. Whitaker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry Vi

Telling the Story: Shakespeare's Histories in Performance

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (23) ◽  
pp. 207-214
Author(s):  
Andrew Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
History Plays ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
Wars Of The Roses ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Henry Vi

The English Shakespeare Company was founded in 1986 by Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington with a commitment to take large-scale productions to regional venues. Henry IV, Parts One and Two and Henry V opened at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in November 1986 under the title The Henrys: they were then staged at the Old Vic and toured extensively. In December 1987 Richard II, with a two-part adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI (House of Lancaster and House of York) and Richard III, were added to the previous trilogy to create a complete cycle of history plays – The Wars of the Roses. The cycle was toured in England and abroad before playing at the Old Vic in the spring of 1989. It has since been filmed for television by Portman Productions. The only comparable treatment of the histories in the theatre took place at Stratford in 1964. when Peter Hall and John Barton staged seven plays as a sequence spanning English history from the reign of Richard II to the downfall of Richard III. Andrew Jarvis has been with the English Shakespeare Company since 1986 when he played Gadshill, Douglas, Harcourt, and the Dauphin. He has since played Exton, Hotspur, and Richard III. In 1988 he won the Manchester Evening News Award for Best Actor in a Visiting Production for his portrayal of Richard III. Prior to joining the ESC he had played many roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Here, he is interviewed by Stephen Phillips, lecturer in drama at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, who is currently preparing a study of Shakespeare's history cycles in performance in the twentieth century.

The Paradoxes of ‘Popularity’ in Shakespeare’s History Plays

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lake
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
History Plays ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
The Public ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter surveys the development of sixteenth-century popularity politics, noting Burghley, Essex, and Bancroft all to have been practitioners of that ‘dark art’. It shows that popularity was a term of opprobrium and distaste to the elite, yet was taken up with equal enthusiasm by Puritanism and Roman Catholic enemies of the Elizabethan regime, contributing to a fitful emergence of the public sphere. Deploying English history in support of their claims, religious partisanship focused certain late medieval reigns: those of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III—the very reigns that Shakespeare then addressed in his history plays. Shakespeare’s dramas are shown to present the complexities and risks attendant upon popularity politics; and to demonstrate, further, the resistance of popular attitudes to conscription by elites, given the independent intelligence of commoners and their capability for large-scale news gathering.

Shakespeare’s Tragedy and English History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The People ◽  
King John

In the history plays of the 1590s Shakespeare covers most of late medieval English history, representing the struggle between the rival claimants to the crown and the people as a tragedy. Shakespeare was influenced by the verse tragedies in A Mirror for Magistrates—as well as by Holinshed’s Chronicles—which presented history as a series of stories from which relevant morals could be drawn. In following A Mirror Shakespeare had one eye on the present, articulating the fear that history might repeat itself and produce yet another tragedy. In his plays Shakespeare represents a series of kings with varying personalities and abilities struggling to rule in trying circumstances, each living out his own tragedy, leaving the audience to work out the relevance and significance of the plays. In this chapter I provide specific readings of Richard II, Richard III and King John.

4. Plays of the 1590s

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Wells
Keyword(s):  
National Unity ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The People ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
National Welfare

During the first decade of Shakespeare’s career he wrote a series of closely inter-related plays based on English history drawing heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicles and other accounts. These plays show a serious concern with political problems, with the responsibilities of a king, his relationship with the people, the need for national unity, and the relationship between national welfare and self-interest. ‘Plays of the 1590s’ introduces each of these plays, sketching its origins, stories, and themes. It also touches on aspects of Shakespeare’s techniques and artistry. The plays considered are Henry VI (Parts One to Three), Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Edward III, and King John.

Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceri Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Change Model ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Private Prayer

Early modern private prayer shows skill in narration and drama. In manuals and sermons on how to pray, collections of model prayers, scholarly treatises about biblical petitions, and popular tracts about life crises prompting calls to God, prayer is valued as a powerful agent of change. Model prayers create stories about people in distinct ranks and jobs, with concrete details about real-life situations. These characters may act in play-lets, or appear in the middle of difficulties, or voice a suite of petitions from all sides of a conflict. Thinking of early modern private prayers as dramatic dialogues rather than as lyric monologues raises the question of whether play-going and praying were mutually reinforcing practices. Could dramatists deploying prayer on stage rely on having audience members who were already expert at making up roles for themselves in prayer, and who expected their petitions to have the power to intervene in major events? Does prayer’s focus on cause and effect structure the historiography of Shakespeare’s history plays: 2 and 3 Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, Henry V, and Henry VIII?

The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics. Edited by Henry T. Edmondson III. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000. 272p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Shakespeare's Political Realism: The English History Plays. By Tim Spiekerman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 208p. $16.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-178
Author(s):  
Ethan Fishman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
History Plays ◽  
State University ◽  
Political Realism ◽  
English History ◽  
Basic Assumptions ◽  
Public Ethics ◽  
The Human Condition

As their scholarship indicates, Henry Edmondson and Tim Spiekerman share two basic assumptions: There exist certain enduring issues of politics, such as the nature of social justice and the legitimacy of power, and authors of fiction, drama, and poetry who write with knowledge and sensitivity about the human condition often will have something significant to say about them.

Hark what discord follows

1980 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Ian Linklater
Keyword(s):  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Wars Of The Roses ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Tetralogy

"Richard II" is the first play in the second Tetralogy or group of plays broadly about the history of England from 1399 to 1415. It is followed by the two parts of Henry IV and climaxes in the so-called English Epic play Henry V. The first Tetralogy, obviously written before, comprises the three parts of Henry VI and culminates in "Richard III" and deals with the period of the Wars of the Roses from 1420 to the accession of Henry Tudor in 1485, which final date marks the beginning of the Tudor Dynasty.

‘My kingdom for a horse’: Bestial Sovereignty in Richard III

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Huw Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Two Bodies

This chapter offers a conclusion to the book, through a movement away from the human body into the ways that animal bodies are also recruited for Shakespeare’s metaphorics of sovereignty. More than any other of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III is dominated by animal imagery. One way to understand this is as a form of moral commentary on the “bestial” state that England has been dragged into by the civil war and, particularly, by the evils of that war as concentrated in Richard himself, a concentration particularly in the image of his body as deformed. However, the slipperiness of metaphor does not allow for the stabilization of sovereignty in any one body, including the stability imagined in the metaphysical conceit of the “kings two bodies”. In this chapter, I offer a final countermand to Kantorowicz’s reading of Richard II wherein Richard’s abdication offers up the Christ-like sacrifice of the king as a concentrated image of divine sovereignty. In place of this, I read Richard III backwards from the moment of Richard’s own brief “abdication” at the end of the play: his willingness to exchange his kingdom for a horse, albeit in the face of death. Whilst not ascribing any revolutionary intent to the character of Richard, this moment affords an alternate insight into the translatable locations of sovereignty. Re-read through its figurations, sovereignty is conceived of as never inalienable; it is, rather, always dependent on the bodies of others including, here, the bodies of animals.

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