SOURCE: Shaughnessy, Robert. “The Last Post: Henry V, War Culture and the Postmodern Shakespeare.” Theatre Survey 39, no. 1 (May 1998): 41-61.

[In the following essay, Shaughnessy surveys stage and film versions of Henry V from the postwar period, evaluating the ways in which the interpretative principles of postmodernism increasingly informed these productions.]

“Marketing, that mysterious part of the theatre industry, can produce surprising effects,”’ observes Peter Holland in his recent book on Shakespearean production in Britain during the 1990s.¹ Discussing the material constraints on the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Holland cites the promotion of the 1994 production of Coriolanus as it transferred to the Barbican, which, knowingly addressed a “youth” market versed in the work of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. The RSC poster displayed a blood-soaked Toby Stephens in the title role, accompanied by the slogan “A natural born killer too.” For an even more surprising and mysterious example of optimistically modish marketing, consider the tactics of the newspaper advertisement announcing the 1996 season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Avoiding any direct mention of Shakespeare, his plays, or theatre, it pictured an ominously darkened cloudscape, with slogans projected onto it, almost like skywriting. These posed a question, “Virtual reality?” and a riposte: “Try the real thing.” This intriguing solicitation aptly summarized the RSC's current perception of its position as an organization dedicated to the production of Shakespeare's plays within the global multi-media cultural economy. On the face of it, this was a none-too-subtle attempt to expand and rejuvenate the RSC's audience base. Closer inspection reveals an antithesis between the virtual and the real that rehearses a well-entrenched opposition between the insubstantial, possibly worthless, even narcotic products of technological mass culture, characterized by banality and nerdish triviality on the one hand, and high theatrical culture, centered, inevitably, on Shakespeare on the other. It is equally evident that the exhortation to “try the real thing” evokes the qualities of immediacy, relevance, even danger, as well as those of authority and authenticity that have traditionally informed the company's work and provided its raison d'etre. The advertisement also offers a point of departure for a consideration of the relations between contemporary RSC Shakespeare and postmodernism. The opposition also implicitly differentiates between the modernist and postmodernist modes of cultural production or between a conception of theatre as high art that (notwithstanding the populist aspirations of successive RSC administrations) has held sway at Stratford since the early 1960s, and what Fredric Jameson has famously termed the “cultural logic of late capitalism”; the logic, that is, of “consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like.”² Much virtue in “virtual.”

There is, however, some irony in this particular instance of RSC self-promotion. Even if we ignore the not-so-faint echoes of the slogan of the Coca Cola Company (purveyor of perhaps the central component of globalized culture), and leave aside the Pirandellian question of how theatrical performance has become the “real thing,” it has become evident in recent years that the RSC's repertoire is no longer (if it ever was) separable from mass and media culture. Viewed within the frame of high culture, of course, the postmodern theatrical Shakespeare has begun to attract some critical attention.³ Dennis Kennedy identifies the key characteristics of this latest phase of Shakespearean production toward the end of his history of Shakespearean stage performance in twentieth-century Europe and America. Contemporary Shakespearean production is, he argues, mesmerized by the rhetoric of the image, and what he terms “neo-pictorialism” is dominant. This mode is characterized by self-consciousness, intertextuality, baroque ornamentation, eclecticism, quotation, hybridity, and pastiche. It is typified by the Shakespeare productions of figures as diverse as Peter Zadek in West Germany, Ariane Mnouchkine at the Theatre du Soleil in Paris, Robin Phillips at Stratford, Ontario, and Adrian Noble at Stratford-upon-Avon. Kennedy observes that the lingua franca of late twentieth-century Shakespearean stage production carries the distinguishing marks of the postmodern, signaled by “a clear preference for the metaphoric over the metonymic” and “a trans-historical or anti-historical use of eclectic costuming and displaced scenery, creating, through irony, a disjunction between the pastness of Shakespeare's plays and the ways we now receive them.”⁴ In this essay I wish to explore further some of the effects of this pervasive sense of irony, displacement, and disjunction, first by offering a brief overview of the RSC's work in the 1980s and early 1990s, and then by means of a more extended discussion of a recent postmodern production, the 1994 revival of Henry V, directed by Matthew Warchus.

As a self-reflexive, stylistically eclectic and contradictory text, Henry V is already easily readable as a presciently postmodern work; it has, moreover, also become increasingly problematic in terms of its cultural politics. If Kennedy's sense of the “pastness” of the play can be extended to include not only the evidently archaic qualities of language, characterization, and ideology but its specific cultural histories, the pastness of Henry V is partly constituted by its contribution to the shaping of British national identity in terms of military conquest. As Kennedy notes, the postmodern Shakespeare is not simply a repertoire of stylistic devices, but operates within the context of postcolonial and intercultural Shakespeare, where, Barbara Hodgdon writes, the yoking of “divergent cultural materials and identities into pastiche, collage, and bricolage, is oppositional to the grand literary and theatrical narratives that would draw national and cultural boundaries around ‘Shakespeare’ and manage ‘his’ meanings.”⁵ But the 1994 Henry V demonstrates that, in the case of the RSC, the postmodern Shakespeare is constituted by relations between text and mise-en-scene that are governed and administered within national and cultural boundaries, themselves rather less secure than they might at first appear.

MOVING PICTURES

Before beginning a detailed discussion of this production, however, I need to establish its broader critical and theatrical context. In order to recognize the distinctive features of the postmodern RSC Shakespeare, it is necessary to set it against its modernist antecedents. The late 1970s were both a defining moment in Shakespearean performance criticism and a period of significant transition for the English Shakespearean theatre. If “neopictorialism” has become the dominant mode in the last decade-and-a-half, it was certainly not the future imagined for Shakespeare, particularly within performance criticism twenty years ago. In 1977, J. L. Styan proclaimed a “revolution” in both criticism and performance, and, declaring that “the straining towards a psychological and pictorial realism for Shakespeare” was “all in the past,” confidently prophesied the revival of “the half-apprehended mystery of a supremely non-illusory drama and theatre.”⁶ This was apparently confirmed by RSC practice. The 1970s saw celebrated non-illusionist productions such as Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970, John Barton's ritualistic Richard II in 1973, and, on a smaller scale, Buzz Goodbody's Hamlet and Trevor Nunn's Macbeth in The Other Place in 1975 and 1976, respectively. Much of this was seen in another definitive RSC event of the 1970s, Terry Hands's 1975 production of Henry V. In 1977, RSC director Barry Kyle confidently declared that “there's a new simplicity, director's theatre is dead.”⁷ As almost everybody recognized at the time, the move towards the “poor Shakespeare”⁸ of scenic austerity was more the product of a progressive squeeze on the company's funding than an application of the methods of Poel, Granville-Barker, Guthrie, Brecht, Grotowski, or Brook; nonetheless, the work of this period was in a tradition of twentieth-century Shakespearean performance which operated within the paradigm that Hugh Grady has identified as the “modernist Shakespeare” in that it aimed to offer “a critical and Utopian alternative to instrumental reason and capitalist discipline.”⁹ The empty-space aesthetic of the 1970s was recognizably modernist, insofar as it was founded upon a metaphysics of presence, and upon the unity and hermetic self-sufficiency of both text and performance. The productions of the 1970s demonstrated a close convergence of theatrical and literary values, as the eschewal of illusion and spectacle appeared to be coextensive with respect for or trust in the text; these maneuverings, in turn, derived their immediate impetus from the rich (but also unstable) combination of E. M. W. Tillyard, F. R. Leavis, and Jan Kott that provided the critical and theoretical rationale for much of the RSC's work.¹⁰

But in the early 1980s it all changed. At the turn of the decade, the RSC took stock of its position in the cultural market-place and, as Terry Hands recalled (in terms which suggest a diversification of a portfolio of investments), “took a policy decision to go into spectacle.”¹¹ Initially, the change of direction was signaled in Trevor Nunn's 1981 production of All's Well that Ends Well, which located the play in what Nicholas Shrimpton described as an “explicitly and persuasively Edwardian” social world.¹² The setting provided a context for a notoriously difficult play, offering a persuasive rationale for both Bertram's rejection of Helena and what emerged as her proto-feminist assertiveness. In retrospect, however, the scrupulous historicity of this production seemed more like an elegiac tribute to a vanished era of realist pictorialism (and hence, in itself a postmodern strategy of stylistic pastiche) than a clue to the future direction of the RSC. This kind of actualization of social settings as complete, coherent, and comprehensible reflects a positivist historiographical perspective which is in turn a product of enlightenment rationality. It declares a certain faith in the grand recits of history in that it attempts to substantiate the motives and behavior of Shakespeare's characters and to contextualize the action of the plays. A year later, however, the main-stage debut of director Adrian Noble and designer Bob Crowley established a different kind of postmodern pictorialism as the dominant form. In their 1982 King Lear, the specificity of historical reference that had underpinned All 's Well was supplanted by a freewheelingly anachronistic and eclectic mise-en-scene. This appeared to range from the Austro-Hungarian empire to the nineteenth-century English music hall to contemporary Beirut, from the world of Edward Bond's Lear to that of Beckett's Endgame. It featured, Shrimpton recorded, “everything from Russian soldiers with sandbags to Japanese kendo fighters.” Although Shrimpton thought this merely “whimsically diverse”¹³ (the Shakespeare Quarterly reviewer similarly described it as a “hideous visual muddle”¹⁴), the production could be seen as staging the postmodern fragmentation and commodification of history itself as, to quote Jameson again, “a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum,” fueling the fantasies of “a society bereft of all historicity, one whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles.”¹⁵King Lear was followed, in 1984, by a Measure for Measure which, although apparently set in an eighteenth-century Vienna, featured an electric chair for the prison scenes and depicted Mariana's moated grange as “a Jazz Age villa on the French Riviera.”¹⁶ A “post-Falklands” Henry V followed in which fifteenth-century French aristocrats in black velvet and golden armor went to battle with an English army in anonymous combat fatigues which “inevitably prompted associations with the First World War.”¹⁷ Bill Alexander's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in 1986, “placed the court of Theseus in 1930s Mayfair, took the mechanicals from a 1950s beatnik espresso bar, and (despite lip-service to Arthur Rackham) based the fairy scenes on Cicely M. Barker's saccharine Flower Fairies.”¹⁸ The culmination of this trend was John Caird's exuberant, and, as Stanley Wells put it, “brilliantly clever, consistently postmodern”¹⁹ production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the end of the decade, which treated the conjuncture of play and production as a huge metatheatrical joke. In this production, which trawled shamelessly through Anglo-American popular and high culture, as well as through the stage and screen history of the play, the stage was filled with scrapyard junk, delinquent fairies were dressed in heavy boots and shoddy gauze wings, and Puck was portrayed as a combination of “Just William, Bugs Bunny, Olivier's Richard III, Ken Dodd, Biggles, Groucho, Batman.”²⁰ This was not only theatre about theatre; it was also a richly anarchic celebration of the relations between Shakespearean tradition and pulp culture.

Placed in its broader theatrical context, the neo-pictorial RSC Shakespeare of the 1980s and 1990s may well reflect the influence, not only of Euro-Shakespeare, but of the postmodern theatrical avant-garde, typified by the work of Robert Wilson, where, as Nick Kaye summarizes, the “gradual transformation and development of images which reflect and fold into each other … continually invites and at the same time seeks to displace particular readings.”²¹

I would suggest, in addition, that the RSC's mutating house style owes as much to the influence of cinema. The mixing of styles, genres and periods is reminiscent of a number of postmodern cult movies of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, as well as of the “art house” films of Peter Greenaway (most obviously, the “neo-Jacobean” The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and, of course, Prospero's Books) and Derek Jarman (The Tempest and Caravaggio). In the RSC's productions of the history plays, in particular, the juxtaposition of disparate periods deliberately confused the mythical past, fragmented present and imagined future, producing a weird hybrid of costume drama and science fiction. In Noble's Henry V, which has already been mentioned, the French appeared at Agincourt “on a gleaming, pennant-hung gallery which beams down on the stage with spaceship lights.”²² The awesome armor and weaponry of The Plantagenets (Noble's 1988 adaptation of the First Tetralogy) suggested a kind of medieval cyberpunk, recalling the milieu of The Terminator and RoboCop. In The Plantagenets, especially, the re-presentation of the Elizabethan “world picture” as baroque technological spectacle provided an analogue for the cyberpunk worldview characterized by Jameson as a vision of “the labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies … the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.”²³ Increasingly, during the 1980s, Shakespeare's texts were read and presented in cinematic terms—the borrowings from, and references to, film culture proliferated, and stage productions drew upon its repertoire of images of the past as if these were the substance of history itself. Bob Crowley said of Henry V that “it was as though Shakespeare had composed the very first film script.”²⁴ Maria Bjornson's monochrome design for the 1984 Hamlet depicted “a Jacobean film noir.”²⁵ A world of movie gangsters and detectives was also evoked in the same season's Measure for Measure, according to Nicholas Shrimpton, with prison scenes conjuring “the State Pen circa 1930—a wall of grey bricks and an electric chair.”²⁶ In Bill Alexander's Merry Wives of Windsor (1985), set in the 1950s, the cinematic references were even more overt: “characters rushed about … to incidental music in the manner of the Ealing Comedies … Dr. Caius became (to very good effect) a medical equivalent of Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau”; Nicky Henson's disguised Ford appeared “dressed in a Hollywood tough guy's trench coat”²⁷ (like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner). In Ian Judge's 1990 production of The Comedy of Errors, cinematic intertextuality activated the various layerings of illusion and artifice: the first scene “began in police-cell monochrome” for Egeon's narrative, but moved “at once from black and white to the Technicolor of Mark Thompson's shamelessly vivid set … the transformation to this surreal dreamscape was rather like that in the film of The Wizard of Oz.” (Peter Holland also caught hints of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.²⁸) Whereas during the 1970s, the square box of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre had aspired to the condition of the Wooden O, it now seemed to want to transform itself into the silver screen.

This sustained preoccupation with film culture on the part of the RSC during the 1980s and 1990s is one of the most visible ways in which the company's work has become postmodernized, and may well reflect increasingly pressing (although rarely openly articulated) concerns about the changing status of the theatre within media culture. Working upon the fair assumption that the bulk of the RSC audience will command a degree of cine-literacy which is likely to be considerably higher than their knowledge of literary, theatrical, or art history, easy-to-spot references to the film canon now function rather like Peter Brook's use of Watteau in his 1946 Love's Labour's Lost, or of Beckett in his 1962 King Lear. It is also important that the heyday of Styan's Shakespearean revolution, which supposedly saw specifically theatrical production situated at the center of Shakespeare studies, coincided with the arrival of the cheap video technology that decisively moved the teachings and criticism of Shakespeare-in-performance from the domain of the theatre into that of film and television. This has involved a shift from live performance towards a new set of texts—whether these are the canonical film versions of Olivier, Kurosawa, and Branagh, the dull but reliable BBC Television Shakespeares, or the more user-friendly animated Shakespeares. As public perceptions of the plays are increasingly shaped by their screen versions (which present their own hierarchies of definitive and variant readings), live performance seems to carry less and less conviction as the true or natural home of Shakespeare.

I suggest, moreover, that the combination of postmodern scenography and cinematic intertextuality is beginning to have a significant impact upon the way the text-performance relationship is perceived, and hence signals a significant shift in the RSC's use of Shakespeare. The old imperatives of faithfulness to the text and topicality, a conjuncture which Alan Sinfield has labeled “Shakespeare-plus-relevance,”²⁹ have given way to irony, knowingness, and, in some instances, to camp. If the half-empty spaces of the 1970s aimed to reveal the essential Shakespeare by stripping away what was extraneous and inorganic, the productions of the 1980s and 1990s reversed this process by situating the plays amidst a ludic proliferation of images, quotations, and associations. Increasingly, Shakespeare's texts might be said to be quoted rather than spoken; the act of interpretation is foregrounded. Rather than being located “in” performance (as in the modernist paradigm), the “text” of the postmodern Shakespeare is suspended alongside it in wry quotation marks. What this involves is a desanctification of the formerly empty stage itself—no longer evacuated and hermetically sealed from history, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre now acknowledges its permeable boundaries, acknowledges that it is as likely to register the traces of the mass media as any other cultural space. Even more disconcertingly, the typically postmodern playful refusal of depth, origin, and foundation may also threaten to dismantle the humanist subject of modernist Shakespearean performance. Benedict Nightingale observed of the 1982 King Lear that its visual inventiveness risked “substituting theatricality for truth of feeling.” Robert Smallwood voiced similar doubts about the 1989 Dream, arguing that the relentless theatrical virtuosity eradicated both character and genuine feeling: “the audience applauded a performer as they might applaud a magician doing his turn.” Peter Holland criticized the 1990 Comedy of Errors in much the same terms. Appraising the production's essentially cinematic (or televisual) tactic of having the sets of twins each played by a single actor, he concluded that the inventiveness and ingenuity of the staging became far more important than the action of the play: “the history of the characters is replaced by the history of the performance.”³⁰ This displacement itself signifies a postmodern rupture, between a depth model of self/character and a performative account of subjectivity.

A LITTLE TOUCH OF LARRY

There is much at stake here, I suggest: not only the “humanity” of Shakespeare in the broad sense, but, more narrowly and perhaps (for some) even more troublingly, Englishness itself as recurrent anxieties about the self-referential virtuosities of director's and designer's Shakespeare coupled with the perennial issue of the quality of verse speaking, reflect a deeper unease over the changing status of the Shakespearean text, and over the continuing viability of the cultural and national values that it supposedly embodies. It is here that we may turn to Henry V, a text whose own stage and screen history in the British Isles demonstrates the close relations between the reproduction of Shakespearean drama, the military adventures of the English/British, and the fashioning of national identities. The play's political significance lies not simply in its ostensible “relevance” to the historical and political situations in which it has been read, quoted, staged and screened, but also in its capacity actively to produce national history and patriotic myth. As Tom Healy observes, “whether extended by spectacle or depleted by cuts, the play has come to constitute the actual history of national comradeship which it purports merely to be culturally celebrating.”³¹ The most important twentieth-century version of Henry V, in this respect, is Laurence Olivier's 1944 film; and because they are central to the 1994 production, the implications of the dominance of this film text over the play's subsequent stage history need to be briefly addressed. Martin Banham has commented that “when thinking of Henry V many of us think first of the play as a film—Laurence Olivier's famous version”; Ralph Berry refers to the film's “dominant grip on the public consciousness.” Both comments point to the profoundly ideological nature of its role within post-war culture.³² As Berry has demonstrated, every stage version of the play since the war has taken its bearings from Olivier, especially, from the 1960s onwards, in the form of anti-heroic counter-readings, set in conspicuous opposition to Olivier's heroic and celebratory account of Henry and of Agincourt. The best-known instance of this is Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film of Henry V, which, as has been shown by a number of commentators, is locked into what Peter Donaldson characterizes as an Oedipal “intertextual rivalry”³³ with Olivier's film text; and which, Branagh declared, sought to liberate the play “from jingoism and World War Two associations.”³⁴

The point is that these associations are specifically focused upon Olivier's film. What I wish to emphasize here is the remarkable convergence of the cinematic strategies deployed in the film, the film's continuing ideological role within British culture, and the post-war stage history of Henry V itself. It is well known that the most spectacular (that is, the most purely cinematic as well as extra-textual) elements of Olivier's film (notably the setpiece battle scenes) have been the key factor in its particular potency in its first instance and its popularity ever since; and it has been recognized that this is where the film most clearly evidences “its patriotic application of the play to the current national crisis” and where it celebrates “the confident, militaristic emotions of 1944.”³⁵ But as a number of commentators have argued, the film's ideology is less cohesive than it appears—in particular, the opening scenes at the Globe complicate (and possibly even subvert) the patriotic project. Of particular relevance here is Graham Holderness's emphasis upon the disruptive potential of the first, “theatrical” part of the film, which, he argues, “distance[s] the art of film from reality, displaying the artificiality of the medium in such a way as to qualify (though not, ultimately, to dispel) the passionate conviction of the patriotic emotion.”³⁶ Importantly, this qualification, and the ambivalence which it articulates, are mediated through an interplay between the theatre and the cinematic medium (which itself is divided into variegated strata of realism and artifice, ranging from the non-naturalistic painterly codes of the French scenes to the epic treatment of Agincourt).

Yet this is not how Olivier's version has generally been received, and if it is the most spectacularly cinematic aspects of the film that have afforded it its enduring ideological potency, these have also been the source of its contentiousness. The lasting appeal of the film, particularly within the British context, lies in its continuing capacity to mobilize nostalgia for the Second World War itself (for which Agincourt is a surrogate), and for the ideals of national unity and purpose that supposedly obtained during that period, in the context of the dissolution of empire and declining military and economic power. This is what the post-war performance history of the play has had to contend with. And if this history of Henry V has operated within the framework of a dialectic between heroic and anti-heroic readings which are identified with and against Olivier respectively, then this history is also readable as a succession of exchanges not just with Olivier, but also between the cinematic and theatrical modes of Shakespearean production. This has been evident in the three previous RSC productions of the play. Working through the related binary oppositions of heroic versus anti-heroic, depth versus surface, illusion versus non-illusion, myth versus realism, the productions of 1964, 1975, and 1984 all engaged with Olivier, to a greater or lesser extent, as a means of contending with the larger spectacular and patriotic theatrical, cinematic, and nationalist traditions that his film is held to embody, and, importantly, in order to assert the primacy of theatre over cinema. With the Vietnam War in mind, Peter Hall and John Barton's production of 1964 combated Olivier on various intertextual fronts: casting Ian Holm against romantic type as Henry (“his style is contemporary, there is nothing statuesque or declamatory about him,” wrote Hugh Leonard); battle scenes which, according to Gareth Lloyd Evans, were “bloody, clobbering and unpleasant;” and signs of authenticity in the shape of smoke and mud, and dirty grey and khaki costumes. Juxtaposed with all this, however, was a Chorus who appeared to have just stepped out of Olivier: a “miniature by Nicholas Hilliard,” as Robert Speaight put it, and dressed (like Leslie Banks's Chorus) in vivid yellow, he was conspicuously at odds with the rest of the production, and according to John Russell Brown, “was allowed to orate and make flourishes about a quite different play, as if the directors thought that all he said had to be ironically wrong.”³⁷ Here was the myth, the rhetoric, the world of film; there was the reality, the world of the stage. The implication was that the theatre is more real, more true, more authentically Shakespearean than the cinema could ever hope to be. Rather than framing the world of the play, this Chorus was ironized by the insistent authenticity of the stage production. If this production evoked Olivier's patriotic iconography in order to dispute it, Terry Hands's 1975 production was both more detached and more conciliatory, even as it emphasized the ultimate superiority of live performance. As Hands saw it, Olivier had (necessarily, in the circumstances) suppressed the “doubts and uncertainties” in the play which his production sought to restore; more crucially, Hands aimed to reclaim the text from Olivier by taking “Shakespeare's theatre play par excellence” on its own terms, which meant that he could “abandon the artistic strictures of ‘naturalist’ theatre, with its cinematic crowds and group reactions.”³⁸ But if Hands's approach repudiated the vocabulary of stage illusion (significantly elided with cinema here), aspects of his production actually seemed to reproduce Olivier's tactics. The most important of these was the decision to start the play in modern dress and in a mock “rehearsal-room” situation and then gradually, and partially, let it take on the trappings of illusionist representation. This removed the opening-out process in Olivier's film, particularly when considered in conjunction with Guy Woolfenden's musical score (that in places pastiched William Walton's score for Olivier), which provided a quasi-cinematic accompaniment to the action. The depiction of the French as figures trapped within highly formalized settings modeled on medieval miniatures was another obvious nod toward Olivier, and here articulated the opposition between the enemy and the English as an antithesis between pictorial artifice and three-dimensional theatricality. The French were afforded a similar treatment in Adrian Noble's 1984 “post-Falklands” production, which featured Kenneth Branagh in the title role, and which, as noted earlier, the designer Bob Crowley approached as a film script. I have already noted that in the staging, the French army appeared just before Agincourt as if on a descending spacecraft out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The night before Agincourt was even more memorably staged. The French aristocrats lounged upstage in glistening bronze armor, behind a trellis of golden spears, while the khaki and grey English huddled on the forestage. As Roger Warren observed, the moral “was absolutely clear: visual splendor must automatically be distrusted, while drabness must reflect the grim reality underneath the glittering surface of war, and the price in human terms to be paid for it.”³⁹ The relative scarcity of overt references to Olivier in this production did not, however, mean that it was free of his spell. Ian McDiarmid's skeptical Chorus, who with blue bomber jacket and white scarf looked like an RAF bomber pilot, might well have been one of the “airborne troops” to whom the 1944 film was dedicated. But more significantly, a number of reviewers evoked Branagh's predecessor as the absent Other against which his portrayal of the king was to be defined. Francis King, for example, mused that, physically, he was “far removed from the romantic hero-king best exemplified by Olivier;” B. A. Young recorded that he was “no dashing hero leading his army into victory with Churchillian periods;” and Sheridan Morley wrote that “Branagh's Henry remains in some doubt about the wisdom of going once more into the breach, and his doubts are what inform much of the rest of an intelligently low-keyed reconsideration of a play that is in fact a great deal darker than Olivier's Technicolor version allowed.”⁴⁰ Thus the anti-heroic made sense in relation to the heroic: because the terms do not negate each other but are interdependent.

DON'T MENTION THE WAR

Turning now to the 1994 production of Henry V, directed by Matthew Warchus and with Iain Glen in the title role, it is possible to see elements of this pattern repeating themselves. Comparisons were again drawn with Olivier. Nicholas de Jongh wrote that Glen “cuts a convincing new interpretative line” on a figure “whom Laurence Olivier made into a symbol of confident warrior glory,” while Chris Peachment felt that, in the final scene, Glen (who in the battle scenes was like “an early Errol Flynn”) “suddenly reveals a gauche, awkward man, far removed from Olivier's smooth seducer.” More widespread, however, were the comparisons with Branagh (the film rather than the stage version): Benedict Nightingale concluded that Glen “avoids both Olivier's triumphalism and the post-Falklands ennui of Branagh;” Charles Spencer reckoned that he was “far sexier than Branagh;” while a more skeptical Russell Jackson felt that Glen's “straightforwardly heroic and fundamentally dissatisfying” performance “did not tell a story (as did Noble's stage production and Branagh's film) of Henry's personal journey to maturity and what the war cost him.”⁴¹ While it is the business of reviewers to draw such comparisons, the postmodern orientation of the Warchus production actively encouraged this through its tactics of pastiche, quotation, and reflexivity. There were many echoes of previous stage and screen versions of the play, but once again the most significant intertext was Olivier's film, seen in such elements as its overall color scheme—with azure skies and impossibly yellow fields recalling Olivier's Technicolor landscapes—the Book of Hours iconography utilized at Harfleur, the pennants fluttering overhead before Agincourt, and the woosh of arrows during the battle itself. One important opening-out in Olivier, the account of the death of Falstaff, was reworked. Whereas Olivier depicts the death of the knight in poignant detail, with Olivier as Prince Hal declaring his rejection in voice-over; Warchus juxtaposed the Hostess's description with a spotlight on Henry's face, “as if he knew telepathically what was occurring.”⁴² This was a rather cinematic touch, a flash-sideways rather than a flashback, which switched the focus from Falstaff's memory of his own rejection to Henry's prescient imagining of Falstaff's death. If, in Olivier's film, the demise of Falstaff marks the point of transition from theatrical to cinematic space, this juxtaposition afforded Glen's Henry a temporary panoptical authority over his subjects and over the stage world. The associative and disjunctive scenography tended on the whole to work in a manner akin to that of cinematic montage—this was appropriate enough, given that the vocabulary of the war movie continues to provide a primary means of structuring public perceptions of war itself. As in Branagh's film, the recurrent nods towards Olivier served to interrogate the film's martial and heroic rhetoric, although to a less emphatically “anti-heroic” effect. The key difference was that while Branagh countered Olivier with a fierce insistence upon the “reality” of political chicanery, of the blood and squalor of battle, Warchus appeared content to leave the ethical and political questions open.

I have suggested that the continuing appeal of Olivier's Henry V lies in its capacity to activate a kind of double nostalgia: for the fairy-tale feudalism it celebrates, but also for the wartime history which permeates the film, from the opening dedication to the troops onwards. In 1944, Olivier revisited Agincourt to anticipate the invasion of Europe, representing, as fantasy, what contemporary warfare ought to be. Viewed from the vantage point of 1964, 1984, or 1994, his Henry V shows us, again at the level of myth, dream, or fantasy, a nostalgic re-enactment of how it should have been. Re-viewing the film text as a historical document in the 1990s adds another dimension to an already intricate temporal structure. Warchus's 1994 production was well placed to address the nostalgia for the Second World War which has acted as such a powerful force in post-war British culture. The fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landing was marked by ceremonials and media retrospectives on an unprecedented scale, and the business of collective commemoration figured very prominently in the production. The first image was of Tony Britton as Chorus, depicted, wrote Carole Woddis, as “a bluff old Remembrance Day Colonel, complete with fawn cavalry overcoat, walking stick and medals.” With the house lights still up, he delivered the opening lines (“in the long-fossilised style of British Movietone News,” wrote Irving Wardle), and then (following the gesture of Derek Jacobi's Chorus in Branagh's film) threw a heavy wall-mounted switch that plunged the auditorium into darkness and brought up the lights on the first scene. Audiences saw a medieval regal robe draped over a tailor's dummy, surrounded by poppies and enclosed behind low rope barriers, like a museum exhibit, or, Russell Jackson suggested, a film studio.⁴³ The juxtaposition of the historic and the contemporary, while a familiar tactic of postmodern pictorialism, was particularly resonant in this instance, because it established a concern with the function of history, and of historical myth within the present. As Peter Holland read the production, it “investigated the play as a series of overlays of history.”⁴⁴ The broadly postpositivist approach to history was underlined in the production program, which contained a note on the play's cultural history by the historian John Ramsden declaring that “we are all relativists, reconstructing myths of the past for our own age.” The temporal and stylistic juxtapositions which are generic to the postmodern Shakespeare here worked to emphasize the mythical and imaginative function of this representation of history—the modern-dress Chorus was set against the medieval figures of the English and French, a distinctly Dickensian Eastcheap gang, and a silent cohort of women and children in 1940s dress (the home front—Olivier's audience). For a few reviewers, the anachronisms simply suggested the universality of the play's concerns. As David Nathan put it, the staging conveyed “the eternal sameness of slaughter.”⁴⁵ More intriguingly, the specific characterization of the Chorus had the effect of rendering the status of the events unfolding on stage teasingly ambiguous, with the Chorus supplying a frame which called the truth of the representation into question without offering a judgment upon it. Depending upon how you were disposed toward the play, its subject-matter, and old soldiers, the ensuing action could be read as a celebration, as an act of remembrance, as a dream, as false memory, as a patriotic fantasy which could be endorsed, qualified or rejected; it could also be seen as an exploration of the functioning of the Agincourt myth within the national psyche.

This use of multiple time-frames produced one particularly fine, startling effect, which attracted little critical comment, oddly enough. During the climactic scene of the battle of Agincourt, depicted as a brutal and unwieldy slog on a steeply raked stage, Iain Glen as Henry slipped, almost fell and caught the end of the walking stick helpfully thrust forward by the Chorus, who had stood as a silent witness throughout. For a couple of beats medieval king and twentieth-century veteran stared at each other, frozen as icons, locked in an indecipherable tryst. History, memory, and fantasy collided in the moment, and the spectator was left to read this Wilfred Owenite “strange meeting” at whatever realistic, fantastic, or metaphoric level he or she wished.⁴⁶ Who was imagining whom here? Was it a timeless image of bonding and comradeship, Henry's premonition of an endless future of conflict, a miraculous intervention in history? Or was it a romantic re-imagining of the Chorus's own personal experience, alerting us to the ways that the myth of Agincourt has both mediated and been mediated through subsequent conflicts? The encounter could be read sentimentally, as an affirmation of universal comradeship. Alternatively, it could be seen as a radically disruptive moment, for the intervention which ensured Henry's survival actually secured the course of the history which the Chorus was now commemorating: the Chorus was actively making history happen. While the convergence of reminiscence and re-enactment is strongly evocative of another memory play dealing with warfare, Frank McGuiness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (which was, coincidentally, revived by the RSC in 1996), this impossible exchange between past and present has resonance which, perhaps rather unexpectedly, can be located in the wider context of popular film culture. The Chorus's anachronistic intervention in history aligns the production with an entire science-fictional subgenre of time-travel movies which began in the 1980s, from The Terminator through Back to the Future and its various sequels, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, to Twelve Monkeys. With its implicit suggestion that this particular history of Henry V was a kind of self-sustaining loop, Warchus's staging of the encounter between King and Chorus offered an oedipal juncture reminiscent of the situation in The Terminator, where the time-traveling hero must ensure the survival of the child who is to become a future hero, or in Back to the Future, where the central character races to prevent his own extinction by securing the union of his parents. These are not entirely facetious parallels. As a number of commentators have pointed out, the time-travel genre articulates widely-held millennial anxieties about the supposed End of History itself, with progress, linearity, and purpose apparently evaporating—leaving, as I. Q. Hunter remarks of the genre, “no underlying pattern, only the unintended consequences of ambiguously intended acts.”⁴⁷ In Warchus's Henry V, it was the integrity of the past, rather than of the future, that seemed to be at stake.

This scene of the battle was one of the most memorably staged, in a production that fluently combined the picturesque, the emblematic, and the metonymic. The raked-stage section upon which Henry's army battled with the French, at claustrophobically close quarters as if on the Raft of the Medusa, resembled a huge memorial stone. On it was carved the dates 1387-1422: the enactment of history co-existed with its commemoration as myth. Extras planted red poppies on the flat stage surrounding this platform while scraps of armor and weaponry hung overhead like dismembered bodies. This was typical of what Jackson called the production's “scattershot of associations.” For the siege of Harfleur, similarly, “the stage became a noisy military building site” in front of a metal roller blind; after Henry's ultimatum this was raised “to reveal a stylized Gothic townscape out of a book of hours.”⁴⁸ As The final scene was coolly framed within a pavilion-like open box. As this scene ended, everyone on stage froze in place, the Chorus returned to throw the switch again, arresting a moment of history as a tableau vivant. Such spatial disjunctions are, as Jameson observes in a different context, characteristic not only of the postmodern hyperspace of the city and the shopping mall, but, in a “new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological alienation,”⁴⁹ of postmodern warfare itself.

The production displayed considerable sensitivity to the sentiments underpinning the D-Day anniversary celebrations, and in political terms it seemed to achieve the subtly nuanced even-handedness which had been sought in every RSC production of Henry V since the 1960s. As the instance of the encounter between King and Chorus indicates, the metatheatrical structure made it difficult to ascribe to the production any singular or determinate view of the play, its hero or its subject matter. For many reviewers (largely in the right-wing press), ignoring the more disruptive implications of the production's self-reflexive subtleties (which was easily done) allowed for a fairly straightforward reading of the play and production as exhibiting a “balance” between the heroic and the realistic. Nicholas de Jongh's view was that the text was played “as an epic of regal neurosis in the face of warfare rather than as complacent royalist propaganda;” Charles Spencer was glad that “having reminded us of the modern parallels, Warchus's production doesn't deprive us of the clanking armour and Plantagenet pageantry that are such an enjoyable part of the play”; and John Peter concluded that both play and production “should appeal to the disillusioned 1990s as well as the more solid certainties of the older generations.” As always, much relied upon the portrayal of the king, and most reviewers praised what they saw as Glen's thoughtful, charismatic, and complex Henry, which reconciled the oppositions informing both the play and our divided responses to it. This was aptly described by John Peter: “His heroism, his frank, manly behaviour with his soldiers, is the conduct of a born commander, but also of the cool politician. … His spontaneity is infectious; and yet there is also a deliberateness and a hard remoteness about him.” This Henry adopted a monkish habit for his pre-Agincourt walkabout, carried out the execution of the French prisoners onstage, and yet was both ruthless and engagingly gauche in the “wooing” of Katherine. More worryingly, the production also provided the opportunity for the Daily Telegraph reviewer to dismiss “modish directors who hijack the show to demonstrate the horrors of war” and for David Nathan to take a swipe at “politically correct lecturers teaching peace studies at a polytec—oops!—I meant to say ‘university.’” Although such comments simply epitomize the tendency of reviewers to find what they want to find in productions (Carole Woddis, conversely, saw the production as “a deeply moving lament of pacifist persuasion”), they also highlight the political ambivalence of the postmodern Shakespeare.⁵⁰ Adopting the characteristic tactic of foregrounding the processes of representation, the production might have displayed the political and ethical ambivalence which has been a critical issue in postmodern cultural theory; but as these comments indicate, it could be readily appropriated for a reactionary agenda.

Perhaps reflecting this, not all the notices were so favorable. For the Guardian's Michael Billington, the production offered a dazzling array of visual effects but lacked both “a controlling vision” and a stable and coherent characterization of Henry himself: “each big speech becomes a distinct solo aria so that the terrifying address at Harfleur is treated as pure rhetoric and the inward meditation on ceremony is delivered with belting fortissimo.” This view of Glen's performance may be difficult to square with the more positive accounts offered by other reviewers, but a more important point is that it shares with them a set of well-entrenched assumptions about Shakespearean performance that the move towards the postmodern may well call into question. Billington's criticism (which recalls the doubts about the 1989 Dream and the 1990 Comedy of Errors that I have already cited) rests upon a depth model of performance which is situated within the humanist tradition of characterization, and which, partly as a legacy of the modernist theatrical Shakespeare, views conspicuous stage spectacle as always potentially meretricious. The logic of the postmodern Shakespeare, however, suggests otherwise. It may well be that Glen's discontinuous and, in Billington's terms, superficial and effect-driven performance was, in the context of the production's visual iconography, entirely appropriate. In postmodern terms, after all, everything may (or may not) have quotation marks attached. Similar objections were voiced by Irving Wardle, who found Glen's Henry a “mechanical three-note performance,” and who read the scenic juxtapositions as incoherent: the contrasts between “a heroic upstage picture” and “the down-to-earth floor” invited “a dialogue between the rhetoric and reality of war. But no such dialogue takes place.”⁵¹ These are familiar critical oppositions. A recurrent feature of reviews of the play during the post-war period has been the attempt to arbitrate the pro- and anti- views of Henry, of Agincourt, and of war in general by means of a distinction between the “rhetoric” and the “reality” of conflict—the one identified with the posturing of the Chorus, the other with the mud and blood of the battlefield. It is this distinction that informs the differing tactics of Olivier and Branagh. Warchus's production, however, dismantled this simple binary, so that the spectator was presented with (at least) two rhetorics of warfare—the rhetoric of heroism and the rhetoric of realism—with neither term privileged over the other. In this sense, the production was more concerned with the representation of war than with “war itself.” Indeed, in the postmodern epoch, these terms have become increasingly difficult to disentangle. In an era of military actions so technologized, so highly mediated, so transformed into spectacle and virtual reality that, in Jean Baudrillard's controversial formulation, the 1991 Gulf War had not really taken place, being “a process of the extermination of war, an operational stage set of a fact, war … “realized” by sophisticated technical means,”⁵² this distancing of the conflict itself had a certain cruel logic. Furthermore (as John Peter reflected in his Sunday Times review, citing “Edward Heath, Denis Healey, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn” as “the last generation of politicians whose experiences and beliefs were shaped by a great war”), the direct experience of conflict which has been a key factor in post-war political history has become the preserve of a dwindling (and now professionalized) minority. As a consequence, the relation of actors, audiences and critics to the subject matter of Henry V have become more vicarious than ever before. As direct experience of war has diminished, so too have the moral certainties and priorities associated with it. In the context of international peacekeeping, no subsequent conflict has enabled the English so unproblematically to render their own war-making as an affirmation of sovereignty, an act of national self-definition based on moral right.

If this is another (perhaps the primary) reason why the Second World War has retained its central symbolic importance within English culture for so long, then it is also a key factor in the history of Henry V in the same period. Perhaps this production, like the anniversary celebrations themselves, may come to be seen as marking a turning point. More than any previous production at Stratford, it was more concerned with nostalgia, memory, myth, and representation than with the physical realities of warfare. Although the anniversary celebrations of 1994-95 provided the opportunity yet again to recycle the cultural myths, they also may have signaled the beginning of the end of the “post-war” epoch itself. In the era of global capitalism, as the traditional boundaries of the British nation-state have, in economic terms, largely ceased to function, the mechanisms which have combined the integrity of the nation with the moral right of victory are no longer sustainable; it remains to be seen how Henry V can be (and of course will be) adjusted to this new situation.⁵³ If British cultural and national identities during the second half of the twentieth century have operated within the parameters generated by the events and aspirations of the wartime period, successive appropriations of Henry V have played a considerable part in keeping memories of that time alive. By drawing attention to the mechanisms that have maintained this nostalgia for so long, the 1994 Henry V may be seen not only as a postmodern production of the play, but as perhaps the RSC's first post-postwar engagement with it.

Notes

1. Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10.

2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (I.mdm: Verso, 1991), 3.

3. See, for example, Andreas Hofele, “A Theater of Exhaustion? ‘Posthistoire’ in Recent German Shakespeare Productions,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 80-86; Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper, eds., Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994); Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996); James C. Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (London: Routledge, 1996); W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997).

4. Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

5. Barbara Hodgdon, “Looking for Mr. Shakespeare after ‘The Revolution’: Robert Lepage's Intercultural Dream Machine,” in Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, 81.

6. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 232-33.

7. Quoted in Jim Hiley, “A Company with Direction,” Plays and Players, October 1977.

8. See Peter Thomson, “Towards a Poor Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1975,” Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976), 151-56.

9. Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991).

10. Accounts of the critical influences upon the RSC's work are given by Alan Sinfield, “Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology,” in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 158-81; Christopher J. McCullough, “The Cambridge Connection: Towards a Materialist Theatre Practice,” in Graham Holderness, ed., The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 1, 12-21; and Robert Shaughnessy, Representing Shakespeare: England, History and the RSC (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).

11. Quoted in Michael Coveney, “Terry Hands, Adrian Noble and Peter Hall, Masters of the RSC, Talk Theatre,” Observer, 28 June 1992.

12. Nicholas Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, 1981-82,” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983), 149.

13. Ibid, 152.

14. Roger Warren, “Shakespeare in Stratford and London, 1982,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), 85.

15. Jameson, Postmodernism, 18.

16. Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, 1983-4,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 202.

17. Ibid, 204.

18. Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances in London, Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon 1985-,” Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), 173.

19. Wells, “Shakespeare Production in England in 1989,” Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990), 200.

20. Robert Smallwood, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1989 (Part I),” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 109.

21. Nick Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 68-69.

22. Martin Cropper, The Times, 15 May 1985.

23. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.

24. Quoted in “Set Pieces That Release the Forces of Darkness,” Guardian, 17 April 1984.

25. Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 294.

26. Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances 1983-4,” 202.

27. Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances in London and Stratford-upon-Avon 1984-5,” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1986), 197-99.

28. Smallwood, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1990,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 348; Holland, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 1989-90,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991), 176.

29. Sinfield, “Royal Shakespeare,” 159.

30. Nightingale, New Statesman, 1 June 1982; Smallwood, “Shakespeare at Stratford upon-Avon, 1989,” 108; Holland, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 1989-90,” 176.

31. Healy, “Remembering with Advantages; Nation and Ideology in Henry V,” in Hattaway et al., Shakespeare in the New Europe, 181.

32. Banham, “BBC Television's Dull Shakespeares,” Critical Quarterly 22, 1 (1980), 31; Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 67.

33. Donaldson, “Taking on Shakespeare: Kenneth Branagh's Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 61.

34. Quoted in The Times, 5 October 1989.

35. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 184.

36. Ibid, 185.

37. Leonard, Plays and Players, August 1965; Lloyd Evans, “Shakespeare, the Twentieth Century and ‘Behaviourism,’” Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967), 139; Speaight, “Shakespeare in Britain,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964), 387; Brown, “Three Kinds of Shakespeare: 1964 Productions in London, Stratford-upon-Avon and Edinburgh,” Shakespeare Survey 18 (1965),151.

38. Hands, “Introduction to the Play,” in Sally Beaumann, ed, The Royal Shakespeare Company's Centenary Production of Henry V (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1976), 15-16.

39. Warren, “Shakespeare in Britain,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 81.

40. King, Sunday Telegraph, 19 May 1985; Young, Financial Times, 17 May 1985; Morley, Punch, 29 May 1985.

41. De Jongh, Evening Standard, 11 May 1994; Peachment, Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 1994; Nightingale, The Times, 12 May 1994; Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 1994; Jackson, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1994-95,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995), 345.

42. Ibid., 343.

43. Woddis, What's On, 18 May 1994; Wardle, The Times, 15 May 1994; Jackson, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon,” 342.

44. Holland, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 1993-1994,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), 208.

45. Nathan, Jewish Chronicle, 20 May 1994.

46. There was an analogous moment in the 1984 Henry V when Branagh's Henry and McDiarmid's Chorus unexpectedly encountered one another on the eve of Agincourt, and, in Holderness's account, “miming a surprised double-take of near-recognition”; for a brief moment, as in the 1994 production, “we saw the fictional world of the dramatic action suddenly enter the fictional activity of the Chorus” (Shakespeare Recycled, 200). In 1984, the surprise meeting was played for comic effect, whereas in 1994 it was strangely moving

47. I. Q. Hunter, “Capitalism Most Triumphant: Bill and Ted's Excellent History Lesson,” in Deborah Cartmell; I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide (Landon: Pluto Press, 1996), 122.

48. Jackson, “Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon, 1994-95,” 342-43.

49. Jameson, Postmodernism, 45.

50. De Jongh, Evening Standard; Spencer, Daily Telegraph; Peter, Sunday Times, 15 May 1994; Nathan, Jewish Chronicle; Woddis, What's On.

51. Billington, Guardian, 12 May 1994; Wardle, Independent on Sunday, 15 May 1994.

52. Quoted in “This Beer Isn't a Beer: Interview with Anne Laurent,” in Mike Gane, ed, Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (London: Routledge, 1993), 185.

53. As a postscript to the above, the 1994 Henry V was followed, with unusualness, by a brash and poorly-received production at Stratford three years later. It is also worth noting that the inaugural production at the Bankside Globe the same year was a self-consciously Elizabethan, all-male Henry V, directed by Olivier's son.