Henry V (Vol. 30) - Historical Elements
HISTORICAL ELEMENTS
A. P. Rossiter (essay date 1954)
SOURCE: "Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories," in Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, edited by Graham Storey, Longmans, 1961, pp. 40-64.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1954, Rossiter ascribes a dialectical "way of thinking about History" to Shakespeare.]
Stratford 1951, a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre playing a sequence of History-plays in a fixed unchanging Elizabethan-house-front stage-set. Stratford 1612, a man writing his last History: Henry VIII, first performed 29 June 1613, when in a sense it 'brought the house down', for The Globe was set on fire.… And as far as I know, no Shakespeare History-play was staged with Elizabethan décor—or non-décor, if that suits you better—till this year, 1951. We should hope to find some curtains taken away (from the mind, I mean), some unanticipated continuities revealed,...
[The entire page is 25448 words long]
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