Sovereign Outlaws: Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-79
Author(s):  
Conor McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Sovereign Immunity ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Second Tetralogy

This chapter asks whether the sovereign can (and perhaps must) act outside the law in a reading of the second tetralogy of Shakespeare’s history plays. The discussion opens with an examination of the notion of sovereign immunity, contrasted with a competing line of discourse against tyranny. It then argues that questions around the king’s status relative to the law constitute an important set of issues within Shakespeare’s Richard II,where both individuals (Richard and Bolingbroke) and events (Richard’s deposition) may be read as existing outside of the law in various senses. The chapter proceeds to consider the remaining plays in the tetralogy, arguing that Henry V, a sort of quasi-outlaw before gaining the throne, finds as king that he must act outside the law to defend the interests of his state. The discussion surveys a range of legal questions in Henry V, from his claim to the throne of France to his threats before Harfleur and his killing of prisoners at Agincourt. The chapter concludes with a brief glance at espionage in Elizabethan England, and the Elizabethan state’s recourse to methods of invisible power.

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.

scholarly journals Beyond the Epic. Richard II and the Nature of the Tragic in Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 120-141
Author(s):  
Igor O. Shaytanov
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
Second Tetralogy ◽  
Dramatic Technique ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The major disagreement on the nature of the epic is rooted in the opposition of two concepts — either the epic draws on the myth, or its optics is regulated by history. In Leonid Pinsky’s opinion the way leading from the epic past towards the individual and inward self was the way of Shakespeare’s heroes both in his tragedies and history plays. Richard II (1595, opening the second tetralogy) follows one of the two archetypes suggested by Hugh Grady in his article “Shakespeare's links to Machiavelli and Montaigne.” Richard is not essentially a machiavellian type, though occasionally called a weak, “deficient” tyrant by critics and a “landlord” (not a king) by John Gaunt in the play. Creating this character Shakespeare makes the first step towards Hamlet. The climax is reached in the scene of his dethronement, much more known for its political topicality than being scrutinized for the discovery a dethroned king is to make. Who is he now? A nonentity, or a new being? The mirror he asks to bring lies, he thinks, when he recognizes his own unchanged face in it. Several scenes in the play (the Queen and Bushy, Richard and his jailor) demonstrate how the lyrical experience, Shakespeare must have acquired in the two plague years (1592–1594), had changed his dramatic technique. In Richard II he gave a start to a new metaphysical tradition.

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.

Hamlet and the Sovereignty of Reasons

2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Knapp
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
The People ◽  
Cast Doubt

AbstractWhy does Shakespeare link the psychological disintegration of Hamlet with the political disintegration of Denmark? This essay answers that question by comparing Shakespeare's tragedy to his later history plays, which foreshadow the “antic” Prince Hamlet in the “frantic” King Richard II and the “madcap” Prince Hal. All of these plays insist that a monarch pays a heavy price for claiming that he represents and even embodies the people he rules: he comes to feel internally divided, multiplicitous, populous. But the plays also cast doubt on the ability of the people to achieve any greater coherence as a sovereign power. ThroughHenry VandHamletin particular, Shakespeare offers the theater as a model of powersharingamong diverse forces: not only the monarch and the people, but also the actors, the audience, and the author.

Bonfire of the Vanities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey McEleney
Keyword(s):  
Richard Ii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Second Tetralogy

Chapter Two extends the work of the previous chapter by offering a more focused critique of the rhetorical and ideological strategies by which aesthetic pleasure has been devalued in both Renaissance and contemporary humanism. The chapter engages in an intensive analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard II in order to reveal how the forceful abjection of vain pleasures, as personified in King Richard and his sodomitical counselors, animates the play’s ideological machinery. It demonstrates further that, as a play, Richard II is itself a manifestation of the forms of futile pleasure that the dramatic world within the play aims to scapegoat. It ends by turning to the remainder of the second tetralogy to trace the plays’ reconstitution of pleasure’s vanity in the form of Prince Hal so that it can be reformed as useful once the prince is redeemed and assumes the throne as Henry V. This reading of Shakespeare’s texts is framed by an argument against commonplace narratives about the legacy of deconstructive theory. Just as Shakespeare’s second tetralogy stages and reinforces the submission of pleasure to use and vanity to virtue, so have critics tended to redeem the forms of queer pleasure for which deconstruction has been routinely vilified.

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 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?

scholarly journals "This Blessed Plot": An Ecocritical Approach to Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Silvia Barna
Keyword(s):  
Human Dimension ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Wars Of The Roses ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Second Tetralogy ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Relationship

This research project aims at bringing to light the non-human dimension in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, i.e., Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV and Henry V. In the context of the military confrontations that preceded the Wars of the Roses, the disruption of human relationships bears an impact on the land and the non-human cosmos in general. Through his literary craft and thorough understanding of human and non-human nature, Shakespeare reveals an intricate network of relationships, which, even when broken, can be mended. My project is guided by a presentist understanding of literature. Studying the relationship between the human and the non-human in Shakespeare’s histories can also inform our own relationship with the land we inhabit and our mutual interdependence. Matter and spirit are integrated in this analysis and inspiration is drawn from Pope Francis’ so-called green encyclical <em>Laudato Si,</em> which invites us to see the earth as our common home and, consequently, exhorts us to be responsible and caring.

Shakespeare's Body Parts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huw Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
Human Flesh

This book provides a sustained, formalist and theoretically-informed reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare’s history plays, including Henry V, Richard II, Richard III, King John, and the Henry IV plays. Starting with a literary critical analysis of these dislocated bodies, the book follows Shakespeare’s own relentless pursuit of a specific political question: how does human flesh, blood, and bone relate to sovereignty? Shakespeare’s treatment of the body is also read against two other bodies of work: early modern political writing, and twentieth- and twenty first-century critical theory. Like Shakespeare’s histories, these develop understandings of sovereign power through considerations of the body: from Jean Bodin’s inalienable sovereignty, located in the body of the monarch, through Hobbes’ mechanistic Leviathan, to Kantorowicz’s “two bodies” and Derrida’s “prosthstatics” in which forms of sovereign power are imagined as machine- or animal-like. Along the way, particular body parts – knees, hands, heads, and throats – come to the fore as particular objects of interest.

Under the law: Masking reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (3) ◽  
pp. 64-65
Author(s):  
Robert Kim
Keyword(s):  
School Districts ◽  
Disease Control ◽  
Vaccination Status ◽  
Legal Decisions ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Centers For Disease Control ◽  
K 12

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that students, staff, and visitors at K-12 schools wear masks indoors, regardless of their COVID-19 vaccination status, led numerous states to issue mask mandates for some or all K-12 schools. Most of the remaining states have decided to allow school districts to do whatever they want around masks, but a few banned local mask mandates. These developments invite a number of legal questions about the legality of mask mandates (and bans on those mandates). Robert Kim reviews the legal decisions issued thus far related to mask requirements.

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