The Lady’s Percy: Challenging Expectations of Structure and Gender in Henry the Fourth Peter Orford Shakespeare seems to have designed that the whole series of action from the beginning of Richard the Second, to the end of Henry the Fifth, should be considered by the reader as one work, upon one plan, only broken into parts by the necessity of exhibition. - Samuel Johnson 1 This is a play which all men admire, and which most women dislike. - Elizabeth Inchbald 2 In April 2008 Simon Benson presented a rediscovered Shakespeare play at the Donald Roy Theatre in Hull, and the Friargate Theatre in York. The play as presented had not been performed for over a century, despite it once being Shakespeare’s most popular play (as the number of quarto editions indicate); its title was The History of Henry the Fourth. Performed alone, with neither the baggage of a history cycle to limit its interpretive range, nor the fanfare that such epic productions usually produce when performed at the RSC, the production challenged many of our preconceptions about character, theme and structure in the play. This last point is particularly significant for introducing new light to an old topic, as discussions of structure in Henry IV Part One, as it has come to be known, have had two things in common to date: first, a particular focus on the end of the play, and how conclusive it is (for example, Johnson complains that ‘the rebels are not yet fully suppressed’), with less regard for the overall content and arrangement of scenes; secondly, the arguments assume that there is one correct answer, whether that be that the play is an individual drama with an opportunistic sequel, a planned first part of a duet, the first of a trilogy celebrating Henry V, the second of a tetralogy incorporating Richard II, or one chapter of eight in Shakespeare’s grand cycle. 3 Paul Yachnin dismissed all but the first option with despair, claming ‘The fact that the two plays were never performed together in Shakespeare’s time should have constituted definitive evidence against the view that the two plays are in fact one play with two parts’. 4 Of course, the lack of evidence does not constitute a fact, and ultimately, even if such evidence were to exist, the point is now academic: for better or worse, the eruption of the history cycle onto the twentieth century stage has left an indelible mark on The History of Henry the Fourth, and from this point forward there is no longer one definitive structure for the play, therefore what we need to do as academics is recognize the consequences of each approach, and acknowledge which one we are assuming when we draw conclusions on the play and its characters. I previously expressed these thoughts in a paper presented in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2005, and Benson, sitting in the audience, decided to use the theory as the basis for his production. 5 Benson’s direction of the play was one that very specifically tried to redress the cycle emphasis, and present the play as a stand-alone drama, returning to the Quarto title rather than the Folio’s rebranding of the histories, which Benson considered off-putting to a modern audience: ‘Who would buy a ticket for Henry IV Part Two knowing there’s a Part One? It’s like theater-land closing the door on its audience.’ 6 The production strived for innovation, with minimal costume and props; the actors, who numbered only nine, performed in white tunics in the round, the only feature on the stage being a small flight of steps at the top end, leading up to a platform that circled behind the audience. The emptiness of the white stage reflected the blank page which Benson had made of the play in his decision to ignore the surrounding histories: the result was an innovative performance that challenged preconceptions of the plays structure; ironically this was exactly what was achieved when the play was first presented as part of a tetralogy with continuous narrative at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951 by Anthony Quayle, and I shall consider some of the key aspects of this production later on with reference to the legacy and challenges it posed to Benson’s production. But Benson did not only address conceptions of structure in this age of cycles, but also confronted the masculine world of the histories by using an all-female cast. The production was consequently full of surprises that at various points would either dismiss or subvert expectations and precedence, and highlighted the malleability of the play and its potential for interchangeable protagonists. In this article I will begin by briefly exploring the presence of several conflicting central characters in the drama, begging the question of whose story is being told, following which I shall outline the basic elements of my original argument in favor of Hotspur’s importance to the play as a counterpoint to Hal. I shall then explore how these ideas were brought to the stage in Benson’s production, the impact of an all-female cast and the final conclusion of the play. Devils, Suns and Stars: Choosing a hero Benson’s willful abandonment of the cycle context had a radical effect on the characters within the play: without the precedent of Richard II to recommend him, King Henry became a distinctly unsympathetic character. Confined to the evidence within the play, Benson perceived that ‘he’s actually not a very nice guy, not very heroic: Worcester actually has a very good point, then there’s that long speech [in 3.2] about how humble he is, and how he revealed himself as Mars, plus the insistence on making Hal justify himself, and talking about what a disappointment he is.’ Henry IV, the heretofore selfeffacing and penitent king with a guilty past, was reinterpreted as a vain and giddy king by the actress Amy Jones. When he spoke to Hal in 3.2, it was no longer a one-to-one between concerned father and wayward son, but a demonstration of the king’s hypocrisy, as he preached at the top of the stairs surrounded by followers who mimicked his movements or fawned upon him, while Hal was left isolated below, frustrated by the distractions and rivals for his father’s attention. It was an aggressive reworking of a scene that usually allows the future Henry V the opportunity to show his true self to both the king and audience, but Benson’s direction, and the absence of Part Two, left Hal in a much weaker position than we are used to seeing. The decision to isolate the drama redefined the hero of the play, just as the decision earlier in the century to connect the histories had done; for the first time since Laurence Olivier’s bravura performance of 1945 at the Old Vic, Hal was being challenged for stage supremacy by Hotspur. The protagonist of Henry IV Part One is open to debate; certainly the titular character, sympathetic or otherwise, fails to dominate the plot as we might expect, thus leaving a void that has been filled at various times by Hal or Hotspur, but always challenged by Falstaff, the ‘devil’ who haunts both Hal and the play ‘in the likeness of an old fat man’. 7 The fat knight dominated the play in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as a celebration of Shakespeare’s wit and a character who was bigger than the play; he appeared in numerous appropriations (e.g. Oliver Goldsmith’s Revelry at the Boar’s Head in 1759, or Falstaff’s Wedding by William Kenrick in 1766), and critics justified his banishment as a point of dramatic necessity rather than what Shakespeare wanted for the fat knight: Corbyn Morris pleaded that Falstaff’s comeuppance was ‘written by Shakespeare in compliance with the austerity of the times, and in order to avoid the imputation of encouraging idleness and mirthful riot by too amiable and happy an example’, whilst an anonymous writer justified Falstaff‘s opportunistic stabbing of Hotspur by claiming that ‘Shakespeare made him guilty of it to prevent our being too fond of such a villain’. 8 The impact of these opinions on the structure of the play lay in the first part being thus explained in context of the second; Falstaff’s actions in one drama were an essential part of building character for his reappearance on another night. Dramatically, it centered both plays around Falstaff, as in the 2006 National Theatre production directed by Nicholas Hytner, for which the director explained that his first piece of casting was Michael Gambon as the knight, adding ‘that every production of Henry IV should start there, because if you don’t know who’s going to play Falstaff there’s no point in doing them.’ 9 But when the twentieth century ushered in the era of the history cycle, the devil stepped back and the focus fell on ‘the sun/Who doth permit the base contagious clouds/To smother up his beauty from the world’ (1.2.194-196). Following initial stage experiments of the cycle (the most ambitious being by Franz Dingelstedt in Germany in 1864, and Frank Benson in Stratford in the early 1900s), Hal was re-identified as the protagonist. Tillyard labeled him as ‘the great hero king‘, to which everything in the cycle led; an idea subsequently put into practice by Anthony Quayle in his 1951 cycle of Richard II, Henry IV Part One and Two and Henry V at the RSC, where he announced Hal as the ‘true hero of the whole play’, the four separate dramas being, for Quayle, one, and their division into four the result not of design but because ‘the economic and organizational difficulties in the way of presenting the cycle as a whole are so formidable.’ 10 Quayle’s tetralogy is of huge significance to the stage life of these plays, being the first to truly present a continuous narrative and overall design, and one which left a lasting legacy on how we perceive and perform Part One. Hal’s soliloquy in 2.1 became the announcement of a plan that would stretch over the course not only on this play but the following two, and the play extempore scene was reinvented as a forecast of Hal’s renouncement of his riotous followers. ‘I do, I will’ (2.5.486), spoken by Richard Burton, raised the line to one of utmost significance, but what was innovative at the time is now an interpretation that has become welded to the text; not a single performance since has deviated from Quayle’s vision. As Scott McMillin writes, ‘The days of innocence when the line could be tossed away with the fling of a cushion, as was done in the Old Vic production, are over. 11 The importance attached to this one line marked a shift in the characterization of Hal; one reviewer noted that ‘an excellent feature of this production is the emphasis on Prince Hal’s sense of destiny’ 12 Ultimately this resulted in Richard Burton’s Hal as brooding, not jolly, very much the prince in disguise, who was always conscious of the day he would break free of his riotous companions, and even after his coronation the character was felt to lack ‘the personal vigour and personality usually associated with this popular hero.’ 13 In criticism, Hal was the central player, and Falstaff merely a necessary hurdle; as Wilson explored, with ‘Falstaff typifying Vanity in every sense of the word, Hotspur Chivalry of the old anarchic kind, and the lord Chief Justice the Rule of Law’; each of them merely bit players in the morality tale of Hal, the king in waiting, whose story was left unfinished at the close of Part One. 14 But in performance, Henry V (both the play and character) was transformed into a retrospect of tragedy, whereas Henry IV Part One became an anticipation of tragedy (as it was in a two-play structure and, arguably, as it has remained ever since), its tone set by the plays that followed rather than its own content; Hal may have been the hero, but the banishment of Falstaff was still the defining moment on stage and one that clouded the triumph of the prince. Benson’s production had to challenge this if he were to make the play work individually; taken alone, the framework of the play, now divorced from Falstaff’s banishment and Hal’s ascension to the throne, forces us to reconsider what constitutes the triumph of the prince, and the conclusion of the story. This can be found by readdressing the role of Hotspur, who represents, in this play alone, the end of the prince’s journey, and a nemesis to Hal, the two of them together constituting the two stars of the show. The double reign of Harry and Harry In the fifth act of The History of Henry the Fourth, the two young Henrys finally meet. Harry Percy announces his own name and asks if the youth in front of him is Harry Monmouth, to which the young Prince replies: Why then, I see A very valiant rebel of the name. I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy, To share with me in glory any more. Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, Nor can one England brook a double reign Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales (5.4.60-66). The moment constitutes the climax of the play as the two Henrys face off against one another, one destined to fall and the other to rise; ironically Shakespeare’s scene foreshadowed the success of the characters in the play’s afterlife, Hotspur declining in importance and popularity due to the ever growing focus on Hal. It is only when the play is presented individually that Hotspur and Hal can share equal billing, for any larger production will leave the former behind while Hal (along with Falstaff) goes on to appear in subsequent chapters. If we forget the cycle momentarily and address the first quarto’s title, it appears that Hotspur was undoubtedly the more popular character: The /History of /Henrie the /Fourth; /With the battell at Shrewsburie,/ betweene the King and Lord/ Henry Percy, surnamed / Henrie Hotspur of /the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir /John Falstalffe. What stands out in this title to a modern reader is the complete absence of Hal. In the nine quartos that appeared of the text, not one title mentioned the Prince of Wales. In contrast Hotspur’s name alone takes up nine words of a thirty-two word title: almost a third, which suggests that he was either an important part of the plot or else a distinctive feature of the play by which it might be recognized. Roberta Barker agrees that ‘Such foregrounding of Hotspur suggests that his presence was one of the play’s major selling points in its own time.’ 15 When both parts of Henry IV happened to be presented as part of a larger group of plays at the wedding celebrations for Princess Elizabeth in 1613, they were not called Parts One and Two; the second play was called Sir John Falstaff, while the first play was entitled The Hotspurre. 16 For a further indication of Hotspur’s popularity, Francis Beaumont quotes the character in his parody The Knight of the Burning Pestle, his version of Hotspur’s speech varying slightly from the original, which suggests it is a memorial reconstruction: Beaumont is citing a well-known speech. 17 Certainly the joke relies on the audience recognizing it, so Beaumont must have been confident that Hotspur’s speech is one which a contemporary audience would immediately identify. In subsequent years Hotspur maintained his popularity over Hal in the play, though both were under increasing threat from Falstaff. Roberta Barker notes how before the twentieth century ‘Luminaries such as Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, William Macready and Edmund and Charles Kean all chose to wear Hotspur’s sword, while Hal was most often played by supporting actors’ (p. 291). It appears that Shakespeare had some purpose in mind for Hotspur in relation to Hal, as he altered history to make Hotspur the same age as Hal, even though the historical Harry Percy was twenty-three years older. The play’s opening, after a brief summary of the current state of England, focuses upon the two young Henrys. King Henry contrasts Northumberland’s noble son Harry Percy with his own riotous child, Harry Monmouth. Yea, there thou makest me sad, and mak’st me sin In envy that my Lord Northumberland Should be the father to so blest a son – A son who is the theme of honour’s tongue, Amongst a grove the very straightest plant, Who is sweet Fortune’s minion and her pride – Whilst I by looking on the praise of him See riot and dishonour stain the brow Of my young Harry (1.1.77-85). The common name of the two sons is pushed further by King Henry when he wishes that it could be proved that some night-tripping fairy had exchanged the infant Harrys in their beds, and that Harry Percy was in fact his son after all. After outlining the contrast of the two characters in this speech, Shakespeare continues to suggest the duality of the two Henrys in the structure of his scenes (see Table 1). Scene Appearance 1.1 1.2 Talked about Hal and Hotspur Hal 1.3 Hotspur Hal 2.1 2.2 (2.3) Hal 2.4 2.5 Hotspur Hal 3.1 Hotspur 3.2 Hal 3.3 Hal 4.1 4.2 Hotspur Hal and Hotspur Hotspur Hal 4.3 Hotspur 4.4 5.1 Hal and Hotspur Hal Hal and Hotspur 5.2 Hotspur 5.3 Hal and Hotspur 5.4 Hal and Hotspur Hotspur Hal 5.5 Hal Hal and Hotspur Hotspur Table One: The presence of Hal and Hotspur in Henry IV Part One 18 Save for the brief interlude of Gadshill and the carriers in 2.1, the play takes us back and forth between each Harry, and when they do not appear, they are talked of and contrasted again. Shakespeare builds up anticipation for the final battle by teasing the audience, inferring the connection of Hal and Hotspur with references to the two Henrys. They both experience similar situations: in 1.3 Hotspur is brought to a reckoning in front of the King, and later, Hal too must account for himself before his father. It is a meeting by proxy, and again serves to contrast them in their differing reactions: the noble Hotspur responds with rebellion while the riotous Prince of Wales promises obedience. In 2.5 Shakespeare gives us a large, boisterous scene in the tavern, in which we see Hal with friends as he goads Falstaff; in the very next scene the focus falls on Hotspur, and again we have an equally large scene with the rebellious lords now at rest, and Hotspur with his peers, goading Glendower just as Hal teased Falstaff. By putting them in similar situations Shakespeare both contrasts the characters and strengthens the link between them. Each one talks of the other: in 1.3 Hotspur vows to have ‘that same sword-andbuckler Prince of Wales […] poisoned with a pot of ale.’ Hal retorts in 2.5 by announcing to Poins and the audience that: I am not yet of Percy’s mind, the Hotspur of the North – he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.’ ‘O my sweet Harry,’ says she, ‘how many hast thou killed today?’ ‘Give my roan horse a drench,’ says he, and answers, ‘Some fourteen,’ an hour after; ‘a trifle, a trifle’ (2.5.102-109). The reference to Hotspur bears no relation to any preceding conversation in this scene; Poins merely asked the Prince why he had been teasing Francis. However, for the audience the reference is very apt as we have just seen Hotspur and his wife in the previous scene; each Harry has a metatheatrical knowledge of the play’s structure as they refer to the progress of one another. The conflict is confirmed in 3.2 when King Henry goads his son with the glory of Hotspur, and in retaliation Hal pinpoints Henry Percy as the culmination of his successful transformation that the audience has been promised since his soliloquy in 1.2. Hal’s promise to his father in 3.2 confirms Hotspur’s defeat as the conclusion of his transformation, and the drama: I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son; When I will wear a garment all of blood, And stain my favours in a bloody mask, Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it. And that shall be the day, whene’er it lights, That this same child of honour and renown, This gallant Hotspur, this all-praised knight, And your unthought-of Harry chance to meet (3.2.132-141). Note that the young Prince does not suggest that Falstaff’s banishment will scour his shame, nor does the King reproach him specifically about Falstaff. Derek Cohen recognizes that ‘Hotspur’s death […] is directly referable to Prince Hal’s vow of fealty to the King’. 19 The structure is quite clearly laid out and the audience clearly informed that when Hal defeats Hotspur, he will throw off his shame. At no point in the play does Hal or his father name Falstaff’s rejection as the moment of truth; only Hotspur’s defeat is nominated here as that moment when Hal will fulfill his prior aim to break through the ‘foul and ugly mists/Of vapours that did seem to strangle him’(1.2.199-200). Some critics have queried why, having defeated Hotspur, Hal should relinquish credit for the deed to Falstaff. The English Shakespeare Company responded by reordering the close of the play, precisely in order that it was no longer self-contained: Falstaff’s arrival on stage with Hotspur’s body occurred after the King’s triumphant closing speech; the director Michael Bogdanov’s intention in doing this was that ‘The King patently believes Falstaff has killed Hotspur and that Hal’s claim to have done so is a lie.’ 20 Thus the moment was transformed from conclusive to inconclusive, one critic complaining that ‘Bogdanov has turned a brilliantly constructed and unified work of art into something that is incomplete and unsatisfying. He could not have said “to be continued” more clearly if he had had a couple of pom-pom girls parade a banner across the stage’. 21 Pom-pom girls aside, Beatrice Groves, reading the drama as a morality, also suggested that the crediting of Hotspur’s death to Falstaff was a necessary step towards another play, that ‘The design has gone awry and before Hal can become the victorious king of Henry V he must wait through another play.’ 22 Yet it is possible for Hal’s decision not to take credit to be seen as his final triumph; Jesse Lander sees Hal’s modesty as a rejection of the Machiavellian principles in the plot, suggesting that ‘Hal’s willingness to “gild” Falstaff’s actions with a lie reveals a degree of magnanimity that appears to be beyond calculation; indeed, this episode serves to distance Hal from the calculative rationality that informs his thinking throughout the play.’ 23 For Hal to truly defeat Hotspur and distinguish himself from the other Harry requires for him not only to best him in a swordfight, but also to reject the appealing fame and honor which led to Harry Percy’s downfall. In the final battle, Hal’s retort to Hotspur specifically tries to differentiate the one Harry from the other. Hotspur calls him Harry Monmouth, but Hal identifies himself throughout the scene as the Prince of Wales. Hal’s attempt to distance himself from his own name gives a second meaning to his judgment that Harry Percy is ‘a very valiant rebel of the name.’ To be a Harry and to dishonor, as Hotspur does in his rebellion, goes against that honor in which Harry Monmouth hopes that his name be considered. Handling audience expectation The challenge for directors such as Benson who are trying to show the play individually is to clarify the structure at each stage of the production, in this instance by making the nature of Hal’s personal journey implicit throughout the play, in order to manage audience expectation for the conclusion. Looking at the play objectively, the significance of Hal and Hotspur and their relationship is clear, but when it is presented individually audience expectation can still create the same emphasis found in a cycle production. When the play was performed at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2004, it was announced as Henry IV Part One, and it was clear that the director Alan Strachan felt the necessity to address concerns with what may therefore have been received as an incomplete play. After Shrewsbury was won, and the last words spoken, Falstaff appeared at the edge of the stage and cried ‘Hal’ whilst waving a tankard encouragingly; Hal, in response, looked with disgust and shrugged away his companion, leaving the stage with his father instead. Thus the end of Part Two was brought forward to conclude Part One, so that even in trying to present the play alone, Strachan reconfirmed the assumed necessity for a sequel. It is not enough simply to stop with one play; the audience needs consistent signposting through the duration of the action to indicate what will be the resolution of proceedings; the director needs to lay a trail of breadcrumbs indicating the central characters and the nature of their journey in order than we can anticipate the end. Though Strachan reverted to preconceptions, which might suggest the folly of redefining the play’s conclusion, it should be remembered that it was just such issues of audience expectation that dogged Quayle when he, in turn, tried to reinterpret the structure of the play in presenting the tetralogy to an audience long used to the plays individually. He remarked that ‘In Henry IV Part 1, Hotspur’s part is far more rewarding than Hal’s, so Hotspur has always been the choice of the star, who naturally plays it for all the sympathy he can get. But in doing this he distorts the true dramatic value of the play’. 24 In his book commemorating the production, T. C. Worsley revealed how the treatment of Hotspur was a distinct difference brought about by a cycle, rather than an individual, production: It is customary when playing Henry IV singly for Harry Hotspur to assume the hero’s role. But in this production a conception of Hotspur has to be found which will be congruent with all that we hear about him, but yet will be quite different from the usual admired romantic [….] He is a fighter and a little too much of the boaster. We can’t help admiring his spirit and attack, but that over-plus of bragging is just what prevents us preferring him to Hal. 25 The answer to Quayle’s dilemma was to reduce empathy for what had been a leading character, an ’admired romantic’, to ensure the audience’s attention was upon Hal alone, in order that they would see the link through the two succeeding plays. Ironically, Quayle’s attempts to redress audience expectation proved so successful that now the modern director faces the same opposition to individual production: the perceived importance of Hotspur has dwindled significantly; Worsley remarked of Quayle’s tetralogy that ‘Prince Hal’s development is traced principally in relation to two characters, to Falstaff and his father’ (p. 48). Subsequent productions have bypassed Hotspur’s significance to focus upon the pull of Henry IV and Falstaff upon Hal, and it has been these three characters which now attract the leading actors, as opposed to the luminaries who previously played Hotspur. The posters for Hytner’s production at the National Theatre depicted just the three actors: the main roles of David Bradley as Henry IV, Mathew MacFayden as Hal and Michael Gambon as Falstaff. Hotspur and Shallow appeared on the fringes in the programme photo, an acknowledgement of two good roles that only last one play each; an unfortunate condition for a cyclical performance. His importance reduced, Hotspur has become a caricature, an overblown portrayal of honor gone too far that only serves to highlight the virtues of Hal’s understated honor, what Quayle described as ‘that over-plus of bragging’. 26 Whilst the court looks upon the glory of Hotspur, the audience is made to question whether this peculiar brand of honor is worthy of the name. Actors tend to strut the role, reveling in the absurdity of the character, and Hotspur has been subjected to various acts of indignity, most notably the disposal of his corpse in a pig-trough in the landmark 1964 RSC production. In contrast, in Benson’s production, Christabel Davy played Hotspur as an earnest character with a genuine interest n the country’s welfare, the threat to which was in turn underlined by the unsympathetic portrayal of King Henry, and as shall be discussed later, Harry Percy was not a braggart heading unthinkingly into war, but an introspective rebel haunted by everincreasing doubt. The emphasis on the nature of fathers and sons in the two plays together has detracted from the contrast between Hal and Hotspur in their various environments, and instead has increased focus upon the contrast of court and tavern, and it is this that productions tend to emphasize in their staging, which in turn upsets the rhythm of the play outlined earlier, and leads to the Hotspur scenes becoming interruptions. The continual emphasis upon the play extempore has elevated 2.5 especially to a scene of utmost importance in every production, while the following scene of 3.1, in which Hotspur has his corresponding moment of wit and glory, is usually cut or diminished. Simon Callow, who had played Falstaff himself, in writing on the play spoke of 2.5 as a ‘whole, vast scene’ that ‘covers extraordinary amounts of ground, narratively and in mood, action and relationships’ whilst he denounced its counterpart 3.1 saying that ‘it’s hard not to feel impatient with it. We know that Hal is about to meet his father for the first time in the play, and it is a confrontation we are eager for.’ 27 Benson’s answer was to intermix the two scenes, switching back and forth between Hal and Hotspur in their element, the contrast emphasized even more than in Shakespeare’s original text. Benson approached the two scenes cinematically, explaining that ‘I thought if I was filming it, I wouldn’t do the scenes in their entirety, but cross-cut between them’, justifying the intermixing of the two scenes by the length of each and the need to maintain audience interest in both and maintain pace at the end of the first half. It also provided the opportunity to contrast different moods in each scenes, Benson feeling especially proud of ‘the end of the ridiculous scene with Falstaff hiding from the sheriff, then going to the Glendower scene with the horrible ending, as Glendower and Mortimer walk out, leaving Kate.‘ The minimalist stage allowed for swift interplay between locations, and prompted the audience to compare both the two scenes and the two Henrys, whilst Benson’s prioritizing of theatrical effect over naturalized acting permitted the sleeping Falstaff to stay in the center of the stage while Glendower and Hotspur concluded their business. More significantly, it allowed both Benson and the cast the opportunity to detract from the presumed significance of Hal’s mock banishment of Falstaff. At the moment that Hal said ‘I do, I will’, it cut back to Hotspur and Glendower, so that, in Benson’s words, the focus is more on ‘the to-ing and fro-ing, rather than looking forward: I’m aware that it’s become a very important scene, a pivotal moment, and in some ways I wanted to acknowledge that, and in some ways I wanted to erase it, play against it, challenge it in some way and confront the idea of Hal picking this moment and it being contingent as a particular interpretation of Shakespeare. Interestingly, the actress playing Hal, Kate Allan, studied it at school and was really concerned about that moment: her English teacher had said ‘that this is the most important line in the play’, and she really panicked about doing it. I compromised by using that theme of Falstaff and Hal being another perspective on Hotspur and Glendower, and with the authority of women, the division of the map and this line thrown into the loop together created a triptych. It made it easier for Hal to read the line. Benson was redressing audience expectation and structure throughout the play, in the process making some elements easier for the actresses by reducing their importance, though this does raise the question of how a director should prioritize what elements to focus upon and which to pass over. Much of Benson’s work was to address those aspects, such as ‘I do, I will’, whose importance owes more to subsequent interpretations rather than the original text. Consequently Benson decided to go back to the beginning, and use the quarto title as his starting point, to identify four key issues to focus on: We need a Falstaff, a king, a Hotspur, and a damn good battle. The battle is one of the four major elements in the title and I decided to go with that. Why would Shakespeare mention it if it wasn’t going to be staged? Many were not, there were some skirmishes. I decided to work up to that battle, which is basically what that play does. It builds up momentum, the lights get redder and redder until the stage is awash with red. For Benson, the battle, as conclusion, needed to be both impressively staged and hinted at through the earlier scenes, in this instance through the use of lighting. In addition, when the actors returned after the interval, they wore garish make-up, their faces covered in white with red lips and black eyeliner, as a Brechtian technique exploring the theatricality of the experience, preventing the audience from becoming complacent in following the plot. Benson wanted to challenge their expectation of how the play was going to unfold, to get past the more common approach of ‘exploiting continuity: The first half ended with a degree of realism. You come back in expecting it to pick up from where it left off. I wanted to destroy that trajectory. I liked the idea of them coming in with much more makeup. There’s anonymity in those white faces; it allows enough of their features to come through to recognize them, but also to draw attention to them. It looks almost clownish, so the first impression is ‘it’s a role’. It’s not realism, it’s the act of playing a character: that doesn’t deny empathy for the stage audience, but it does allow you to play. Benson wanted to keep his audience guessing, and by doing so allow his cast the freedom to reinterpret characters in an environment free of expectation. This was particularly useful when it come to doubling the parts; Arthur Colby Sprague noted that in terms of doubling ‘the histories were embarrassing because of their long casts.’ 28 Given that Benson was working with only nine actresses, the issue was thus how to populate the play without compromising on clarity, whilst also avoiding excessive use of make-up and costume changes. He merged or cut smaller parts, and the remainder were doubled as follows: Falstaff, Courier Prince Hal, Lady Mortimer Blunt, Westmoreland, Mortimer, Pilgrim, Sheriff Worcester, Peto, Courtier, Servant Henry Percy, Courtier, Pilgrim Lady Percy, Vernon, Pilgrim, Scumbag, Courtier Musician, Scumbag, Courtier King Henry, Hostess, Robber Ned Poins, Douglas, Bardolph, Courtier Northumberland, Glendower, Gadshill, Courtier Benson’s focus on a theatrical experience allowed him to use a great deal of doubling without conflicting any sense of naturalism: the use of a bare, white stage and simple tunics for costumes highlighted that the play was clearly a construction. The audience was therefore more inclined to accept the same actor representing different characters through the use of neckerchiefs, atop the head one moment for the hostess, over the mouth the next for one of the Gadshill thieves. Furthermore, Benson worked his actresses through a grueling rehearsal period in which they learned to communicate through their bodies, contorting their shapes to represent men both young and old, and the focus upon this increased in the second half to complement the shift in presentation, Benson wanting ‘to explore working on a much more physical level after the interval: the physicality is much more heightened’. The actresses remained on stage throughout the play and all were actively involved in scenes, either as courtiers of Henry or pilgrims and ‘scumbags’ in Eastcheap. The production succeeded in bringing the characters to life as distinct personages without the need for elaborate costume changes, each part coming forth from a melting pot of uniformly dressed actors to result in a structure of continuous flow. Taken in turn with the same-sex cast, the result is a number of unique pieces of doubling: who would have envisioned King Henry doubling as the Hostess? ‘Constant you are/But yet a woman’ The use of an all-female cast was the final challenge Benson made to our preconceived understanding of the play, inviting the audience to make-believe and clothe the actresses in their imagination to see young women as medieval warrior men. The paradox of women as men is emphasized in this play through the male character’s preparations for war, a distinctly unfeminine environment: Hotspur proclaims that ‘This is no world/To play with mammets and to tilt with lips./We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns’ (2.4.88-90). Coppélia Kahn has voiced the common opinion that ‘The patriarchal world of Shakespeare’s history plays is emphatically masculine’, suggesting that ‘the two tetralogies are a continuous meditation on the role of the father in a man’s selfdefinition’: young men define themselves with reference to the role-models of old men. 29 Accordingly, Benson’s decision both highlighted and undermined the overt masculinity of the play (there are only three female roles in the drama, one of whom cannot speak English). The decision was partly arbitrary: Benson wanted to work with a single gender cast as he felt it would help them bond for what would be a play involving a great deal of physical work and expression. Camaraderie between cast members would thus be an advantage, and having made this decision, the subsequent choice between all-male and all-female was determined by the number of female actresses available in the student company, and the limited number of roles for them to play, especially in Shakespeare, as Lizbeth Goodman has previously noted: British theatre has left a legacy of practical obstacles for the female performer today: employment opportunities are obviously limited by perpetuation of a canon built around Shakespeare, whose parts for women are comparatively few and composed largely of supporting rather than leading roles. 30 Thus Benson redressed the long-standing obstacle, with many advantages. Goodman herself adds that while all-female casts do not have the stamp of authenticity that all-male productions appear to offer by presenting the plays as they would have been in Shakespeare’s time, nonetheless she argues that the presence of women only, rather than all-male, brings a different perspective to gender, the ambiguity of which she suggests is ‘the essential point of interest in Shakespeare’ for women as they, unlike the boy-actors in Shakespeare’s time, can ‘choose to play those parts as a woman, or as a woman playing a man playing a woman, or not at all’ (p. 88). It was another instance in which the possibilities for interpretation were thrown wide open; in Benson’s play, the cast and director never specified the gender of characters, but instead played once again with audience expectation as they contrasted their appearance with their behavior. The drama began with all nine actresses assembling at the front of the stage singing ‘Underneath the Mango Tree’, synonymous with Ursula Andress in Dr No and consequently a song which conjured up images of female sexuality and submissiveness, the beautiful girl singing while the man plays the role of the action hero. The moment deliberately off-set both audience expectation and the end of the play when the actresses were effectively unsexed through their violence and inhumanity on the battlefield. Women playing men emphasizes the nature of masculinity, ‘like bright metal on a sullen ground’, and so brings the actions of the characters into question, as Alisa Solomon suggests: In the theater, which by its very nature can investigate and undo conventions of representation, women in drag can do far more than display their legs; they can call into question the social conventions of gender roles and gender representation, and, as a result, the very category of gender. 31 Solomon summarizes that ‘men dressed as women parody gender’ whereas ‘women dressed as men, on the other hand, tend to perform gender’ (p. 145); the idea links to common pantomime performances: the man plays the dame for comedy, whereas the woman play the young hero faithfully. The actresses in Benson’s play avoided the temptation to mock men through their characterization, refraining from over-exaggerated swaggers, puffed chests or deep voices. They played the roles seriously and in so doing questioned behavior that we would understand more readily when played by men. Furthermore, it allowed the women an opportunity to address the issues of power in the play that are usually denied to the play’s three female roles; indeed the histories as a whole have been long recognized as predominately masculine, even amongst a canon written for boy actors. Observing that Shakespeare ‘was under no pressure to distort historical fact in order to provide a meaty part for a leading actress’, W Robertson Davies, writing in the pre-feminist age, is openly frank about the perceived merits of women in the male arena of warfare and politics: 32 The Historical play was the Elizabethan actor’s opportunity to roar and to rant, and it is likely that he did it very well, and it is certain that the presence on the stage of skilled swordsmen must have made the battle-scenes exciting and dangerous. In displays of this sort the audience did not want to see boy actors, and their roles are usually those of weeping queens or bashful princesses who provide some slight relief from the stress of the main action and introduce a pleasantly romantic note into the spectacle (p. 82). Even in the wake of feminism it is accepted that the women are sidelined from the main action; Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Racking note of the histories that ‘Entirely confined to domestic settings and domestic roles, female characters serve only as the objects of male protection and the occasions for masculine competition.’ 33 Femininity is defined as other to the workaday world of the men, Falstaff assigning himself and Hal as ‘Diana’s foresters’ (1.2.25) identifying an ethereal feminine presence looking on as the men steal, whilst King Henry identifies England itself as female, to be protected from war, praying that ‘No more shall trenching war channel her fields/Nor bruise her flowerets with the armed hoofs/Of hostile paces’(1.1.7-9): womanhood is affected by the events, without the opportunity to directly influence them. However, though relegated to the background, Barbara Hodgdon suggests an element of subversion in the fact that the scenes in which they appear, Eastcheap, Wales or indeed the Percy home, are all ‘associated with rebellion’, thus implicating them in the growing disorder affecting the country. 34 By its very nature, Benson’s all-female production was bound to upset the traditional dichotomy of masculine and feminine behavior and setting, and allow any subversive influence of the female to become explicit. In entering the masculine arena, the women themselves became host to masculine tendencies that were made conspicuous by their external femininity. Benson noted how the actresses instinctively reacted to Glendower’s proud speech concerning his heritage, interpreting it as the boastful bragging of a boy in the playground: With actresses we can question and critique power and its relationship: Glendower’s absurd talking made the girls laugh, so they played it for laughs. Men or boys playing that scene would mask the ridiculousness of it, but the girls bring it out. The natural reaction of the actresses was to scoff at the nature of Glendower’s hyperbolic speech, and the direction of the scene stemmed entirely from that reaction. It was a feminist take on the character that illustrated a general approach throughout the play to query both the glory and validity of war, as the lust for power and prestige, specifically in reference to heritage and lineage, was interpreted here as a moment of parody and hot air. One aspect that Benson had not anticipated was how an all-female cast would allow his company to sidestep issues of equality, especially with reference to Lady Percy. The small number of female parts entails that in a standard production Lady Percy is presented as an equal to her husband, thus providing a strong female role, one subsequently perceived by critics to be ‘an important character in Part One’. 35 However, the presence of what were now so many strong female roles in Benson’s production allowed for Lady Percy to become much more subservient and neglected, which is arguably more telling of the original text: Howard and Rackin note the reductive nature of her part, given that ‘Hotspur’s wife is the only woman in the play who manages to speak good English, but she speaks only 1.7 percent of the words in the script, and even then her husband criticises her choice of language’, while Robertson Davies summarizes that the female characters in the play are ‘of very minor importance’ and the scene between Percy and his wife ’designed more to reveal his character than hers.’ 36 Benson’s production highlighted this misogynistic aspect of the play; Hotspur was both annoyed by and dismissive of his wife, the relationship was one that had long since turned sour and his only passion left was for the battlefield. Like Glendower’s pomposity, Hotspur’s bloodlust, shown to be at the expense of his marriage, underlined the question being asked throughout the production regarding whether any of the bloodshed was merited. The closing of some glorious day Having managed audience expectation of structure throughout the play, the payoff for Benson’s production came in the drama’s conclusion, in which he made his final statement on the characterization of Hal and Hotspur, and the conflicting ideas of femininity and masculinity became most prominent. Benson was very keen that the end of the play should ‘deny the idea that this was Part One, with people looking forward’: that there is potential for more to follow after the conclusion of the play is true of any play, especially one with a historical source, as M. A. Shaaber noted, ‘So far as the play is incomplete, it is incomplete because history is an endless chain, and Shakespeare is dramatizing history’. 37 Benson, keen to dissuade his audience from looking beyond the play, felt that ‘Somehow the ending ought to encourage the audience to look back.’ To this end, King Henry, Falstaff and Hal stood on stage while all the characters dead and defeated walked before them. Benson explains: I don’t want the audience thinking about what’s going to happen next, I wanted to focus on the sense of loss, of all the stuff that’s happened in the play. I wanted them to feel that for all that it’s been building up towards, more has been lost than gained. After all other actors had left, only Hal and Hotspur were left on stage. Hotspur, in defeat, was now rather sympathetic, looking indignantly at Hal but ultimately powerless before him. Hal, in contrast, gloated, holding his sword aloft and gazing wondrously at the blood upon it. Benson explained that ‘What happens to him in the course of the play from performing and joining in at Eastcheap, then court, to murdering Hotspur somehow destroys the warmth and humanity he had. It is gone, and there’s something disturbing about that, shown in the way he licks the blood off the sword. He taunts Hotspur at the very end with the sword.’ The inhuman approach of Hal to the death of his rival mirrored the RSC production of 1964, when Ian Holm’s young prince stabbed his rival with the knife, rather than the sword, and left his body submersed in pig swill. As one concerned critic wrote at the time, it was ‘a demonstration of the battlefield brutality that ran through the entire cycle, and one took no pleasure in knowing that a hero-King of England was emerging out of such violence.’ 38 Where Benson’s production differed is that, whilst the presentation of Hal was equally disturbing, nonetheless the audience was still directed to focus equal attention on Hotspur, with the actress returning at the close of the play to remind them of his defeat as an equally significant event as Hal’s victory. It ensured that the balance between the two which I had previously discussed was reiterated for the audience; in this instance, the triumph of Hal was clearly counterpoised with the tragedy of Hotspur, and the audience was encouraged to reflect on their earlier attitudes to both characters through the play to ask themselves who was the true hero. Bringing further doubt into this query was the portrayal of Hal by a woman, which demonstrated a distorted femininity that subverted a concept of the character as investigated by Linda Bamber: Prince Hal/Henry V is an approach to the tragic hero: he becomes more of a man for having been less of a man. The simple code of manliness defines honor as the courage to fight one’s enemies and the loyalty to avenge one’s friends […] The son inherits his friends and enemies from the father, and he learns how to behave toward both simply by imitating his father. But Prince Hal refuses this kind of manliness even as he refuses collaboration with his father. 39 In the text, Hal raises himself above his peers by refraining from entering wholeheartedly into the masculine obsession with warfare, politics and inheritance. He takes no joy from Hotspur’s death, and allows Falstaff to take the credit for his defeat with little hesitation; he is a character who externally is a male role-model, but internally has feminine elements. In contrast, Allan’s prince/princess was quite clearly feminine externally, yet proved to possess unfavorable masculine qualities such as bloodlust, betrayed through her longing gaze at her blood-soaked sword. Yet Hotspur was no saint in this production, especially with reference to his marital relations. The unsympathetic qualities of Hotspur in the first half of the play were deliberate, Benson used the character to foreshadow what Hal would become by the end of the play, and in contrast worked on feminizing Hotspur in the second half in order to shift audience sympathy and query the legitimacy of the battle. In the scenes leading up to battle, Hotspur became increasingly more ponderous, querying what was to occur and bringing doubt into the honor which was forecast to come, Davy portraying the character as having lost that passion for warfare which he had in the first half. His tragedy was that just as he was developing these ideas, he died, killed by a character who was developing inversely into a killer. Benson summarized of that ‘Hotspur before the interval is an echo of Hal after the interval’. Thus Hal and Hotspur developed in relation to one another, two characters on a see-saw journey that resulted in each becoming the other. Conclusion The play that this paper is concerned with is one of many possibilities and identities. Various editions refer to it as Henry IV Part 1 (New Shakespeare), Henry IV, Part 1 (Penguin), King Henry IV Part 1 (Arden third series), Henry IV Part One (Oxford Shakespeare), King Henry the Fourth First Part (MacMillan), The First Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge) or The History of Henry the Fourth (Oxford Complete Works). Hamlet will always be Hamlet, but the folio editor’s decision to rebrand this play as ‘Part One’ has led to subsequent confusion over exactly what it is called or how to refer to it; the flexibility of its title in turns betrays the malleability of the play and its structure. This could be interpreted as a positive influence on the play, allowing for a myriad of approaches, cyclical or otherwise, yet for all the possibilities this play has within the framework of anywhere from one to eight plays, it is individual productions that are currently most underdeveloped and in need of further exploration. Of the four centuries in which this play has been performed, only the last has explored and exploited the cycle, yet its dominance is remarkable, and barely questioned. Edward Burns notes of the cycle that ‘While even conservative literary critics would feel they have to employ, at the very least, some fancy rhetorical footwork if this kind of idea homed into view in their arguments, it is part of our taken-for-granted as far as Shakespeare goes that he may well have operated in this way. 40 Benson’s approach avoided the temptation for an epic production, and the decision to not dress his cast and stage in historical costumes and props, nor to have a large cast, allowed the play to be produced outside of the major theaters. The temptation to produce these plays as a cycle, though it may yield great results, can create a deterrent to smaller companies who are unable to dedicate an entire season to Shakespeare’s histories: what Benson has proved is that it is possible for more companies to produce the histories, simply by dismissing the call for epic, cycle presentations. Opening the play up, both in terms of interpretation and through the range of companies performing the histories, is paramount, as the conviction in the cycle is in turn railroading The History of Henry the Fourth into one recurring interpretation, the aforementioned tragedy of Falstaff, with the education of Hal as a key plot device within that. While I applaud the dramatic potential of this vision, the relentlessness with which directors present the play in such a way, almost as though unaware that other options exist, has led to a dismal predictability in recent productions of Henry IV Part One, for example the latest RSC cycle production of 2007 in which reviewers noted Hal ‘lacks a sense of fun or shame’, being ‘almost entirely unsympathetic’ and leaving the audience with ‘an ambivalent anticipation’ of his reign. 41 By focusing on the prince’s long-term growth to maturity, and suggesting that this is not completed in Part One but in Falstaff’s rejection in the next part¸ the play becomes a study of an unruly prince who, in the boundaries of the text, does not change: it becomes a play with no clear conflict, character development or interest. In contrast, by returning to an individual focus, the Hal and Hotspur conflict offers vitality to The History of Henry the Fourth. Both roles offer the actor a chance to be the most sympathetic in the play; either part can be construed as the hero depending on the interpretation of director, actor and audience. Through Benson’s play we empathized with Hal, but by the close our sympathies lay with Hotspur as Hal became immersed in the political world around him. The audience looked back upon the tragedy of Hotspur rather than anticipating the continuing success of Hal: the play’s close was absolute and the death of Harry Percy served as a clear signal that for the first time in a century, there would be no ’to be continued’. 1 2 Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. by R. W. Desai (London: Sangam Books, 1997), pp. 168-169. Elizabeth Inchbald, British Theatre, cited in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 353. 3 Samuel Johnson, Notes on 2 Henry IV, repr. in Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 201. 4 Paul Yachnin, ‘History, Theatricality and the “Structural Problem” in the Henry IV Plays’, repr. in 1 Henry IV, ed. by Gordon McMullan, Norton Critical Editions (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003), 114128, (p. 114). 5 Peter Orford, ‘The Rise and Fall of Hotspur in 1 Henry IV’, The International British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, held at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2005. 6 Simon Benson in interview with the author, April 2008. All subsequent quotations are from this interview. 7 ‘The History of Henry the Fourth’ in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 2.5.52-3. All subsequent references are to this edition. 8 Corbyn Morris, ‘An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire and Ridicule. To which is Added, an Analysis of the Characters of An Humorist, Sir John Falstaff, Sir Roger de Coverly, and Don Quixote’ (1744), repr. in Vickers, III, 122-129 (p. 122); Anon, Vickers, VI, p. 134. 9 Nicholas Hytner in Bella Martin, With the Rogue’s Company: Henry IV at the National Theatre (London: Oberon, 2005), p. 2. 10 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), p. 240; Anthony Quayle, ‘Foreword’, in J. Dover Wilson and T. C. Worsley, Shakespeare’s Histories at Stratford 1951 (London: Max Reinhardt, 1952), p. vii. 11 Scott McMillin, Henry IV Part One, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991), p. 47. 12 13 14 15 Ivor Brown, cited in Wilson and Worsley, p. 69. Nottingham Guardian, 2 August 1951. John Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff (London: Cambridge UP, 1943), p. 17. Roberta Barker, ‘Tragical-Comical-Historical Hotspur’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 3, 288-307 (p. 288). 16 17 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. by Michael Hattaway (London: Ernest Benn, 1969), Induction.76-80. 18 The Oxford Complete series has split what is traditionally seen as 2.2 into two scenes, with the scene break occurring during the robbery when all have left the stage. To avoid confusion, I have grouped the scenes together in this table. 19 Derek Cohen, ‘The Rite of Violence in “1 Henry IV”’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 77-84 (p. 77). 20 Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington, The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of ‘The Wars of the Roses’ 1986-1989 (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 55. 21 22 The Toronto Star, cited in Bogdanov and Pennington, p. 55. Beatrice Groves, ‘Hal as Self-redeemer: The Harrowing of Hell and Henry IV Part 1’, Shakespeare Survey, 57 (2004), 236-248 (p. 248). 23 Jesse M. Lander, ‘“Crack’d Crowns” and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in 1 Henry IV’, Shakespeare Studies, 30 (2002), 136-161 (p. 154) 24 25 26 27 28 Quayle, p. viii. Wilson and Worsley, pp. 44-5. Quayle, p. viii. Simon Callow, Henry IV Part I, Actors on Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 62, p. 67. Arthur Colby Sprague, the Doubling of Parts in Shakespeare’s plays, (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1966), p. 29. 29 Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981), p. 47. 30 Lizbeth Goodman, ‘Women’s Alternative Shakespeares and Women’s Alternatives to Shakespeare in Contemporary British Theatre’ repr. in Kate Chedgzoy (ed.), Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender, (London: Palgrave, 2001), 70-92 (pp. 70-71). 31 Alisa Solomon ‘It’s never too late to switch: Crossing towards power’, in Lesley Ferris (ed.), Crossing the stage; Controversies on cross-dressing (London and new York: Routledge, 1993), 144-154 (pp. 146) 32 W. Robertson Davies, Shakespeare’s Boy Actors (London: J. M. Dent, 1939), p. 81. 33 Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 206. 34 Barbara Hodgdon (ed.), The First Part of King Henry the Fourth: Texts and Contexts (Boston, New York: Bedford Books, 1997), p. 217. 35 Giorgio Melchior (ed.), The Second Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 96, 2.3n. 36 37 Howard and Rackin, p. 24; Robertson Davies, p. 90. M. A. Shaaber, ‘The Unity of Henry IV’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. by James G. McManaway and others (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), p. 219. 38 39 McMillin, p. 65. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men; A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: SUP, 1982), p. 152. 40 Edward Burns, ‘Shakespeare’s History Cycles’, in Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad ed. by Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 151-168 (p. 155). 41 Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 17 August 2007; Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, 20 August 2007; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 18 August 2007.