SOURCE: Hodgdon, Barbara. “Making it New: Katie Mitchell Refashions Shakespeare-History.” In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy, pp. 13-33. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Hodgdon demonstrates how Katie Mitchell's 1994 production of Henry VI, Part 3 shifted the play's focus from its male to its female characters, thus emphasizing the theme of survival rather than nationalism.]

I begin with a familiar text, Thomas Heywood's rave review of “our domesticke hystories”:

What English blood, seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the Personator were the man Personated, so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.¹

Heywood accords theatrical representation a doubled power: it not only makes the dead live again but also refashions spectators into subjects who identify with a specifically English heritage, one premised on and inspired by their forefathers' “noble and notable” deeds. Addressed primarily to male spectators, Heywood's comments serve as a touchstone for recent narratives about the power and popularity of Shakespeare's histories on the early modern stage. More specifically, his words ground conjectures about how those plays functioned within the social imaginary, both to remasculinize late Elizabethan culture and to participate in the patriotic project of nation-building that characterized the late 1590s and early 1600s.²

Although it risks collapsing one history into another, it is not entirely irresponsible to argue that “Shakespeare-history” serves a similar function in the twentieth-century social imaginary, especially in Britain since World War II, where stagings of the plays repeatedly have been aligned with celebrations of national identity. What immediately comes to mind, of course, is Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Henry V. As though explicitly evoking Heywood's ghost, Olivier dedicated his film to “the Commandoes and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture”; in representing an especially timely vision of an England “peopled with heroes” and led by a hero-king, the film invites its spectators to identify with, even to emulate, the patriotic ideals it puts on offer.³ Several years later, Stratford's Shakespeare Memorial Theatre staged 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V in conjunction with the 1951 Festival of Britain, inaugurating a tradition that has consistently linked stagings of the histories with nationally subsidized theatrical companies, especially but not exclusively the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose (male) artistic directors have repeatedly mobilized the plays to mark moments in their own professional and institutional histories. Peter Hall and John Barton's The Wars of the Roses (1964), for instance, restructured the long-neglected early histories into three well-made plays; in the mid- to late 1970s, Terry Hands marked the histories with a structuralist stamp; and Trevor Nunn chose 1 and 2 Henry IV to celebrate the 1982 opening of the RSC's new London home at the Barbican Theatre.⁴ The most recent attempt to fit the early histories into dominant tetralogy thinking generated several monumental theatrical marathons, among them Adrian Noble's The Plantagenets (1988), a compilation in the Barton-Hall tradition of slimmed-down, reconstituted narratives subscribing to the myth of linear historical movement and representing early modern English history as a pictorial discourse. Evoking the aura of nineteenth-century theatrical representation, Noble's productions reified the past as a fancy-dress pageant filled with neo-chivalric tableaux, drum-and-trumpet marches, splendid costumes, and RSC signature stage smoke, and shot through with notable performances showcasing exemplary figures.⁵ Widely praised, his achievement is perhaps best summed up by Richard Edmonds, who saw it as an exercise in historical reconstruction that generated “a sense of England itself singing the clear tunes of its history.”⁶

I rehearse these histories in order to situate the subject of this essay: Katie Mitchell's 1994 staging of 3 Henry VI in Stratford's smallest theater, The Other Place, a performance that breaks with the traditions of theatrical representation I have just mapped out. To invoke Heywood once again, it “new molds” both narrative and spectator-subjects to refashion a different history and a different spectatorial economy. Such refashioning, I will argue, aligns with a newly historicized viewing pleasure. In exploring what that means, I want to map its traces in several ways. One strand of my argument points to those features that distinguish Mitchell's staging from previous productions of the histories; another marks how women's bodies and voices intervene in, even disrupt, a narrative centered on constructing masculine kings and re-engendering a dynastic heritage. How, I want to ask, do women's performative bodies function as levers to decenter those narratives? How do such performances serve to open up spaces in which alternative histories can be discerned and to offer sites from which spectators can re-perform those histories? In addressing these questions, I contextualize my own responses as a historically situated spectator in relation to the review discourse surrounding the performance—a move that, at least in part, will demonstrate how individual spectators' accounts are empowered and restricted in unique ways.

Given the present climate of cultural critique, many automatically assume that stagings mounted by women directors, especially those who, like Mitchell, have publicly espoused ideals of social and economic equality and have attracted notice within a primarily masculinist theatrical meritocracy, will be “feminist” productions. Speaking to this point, Gale Edwards, director of the RSC's recent The Taming of the Shrew (1995), remarked in an interview with Kate Alderson: “People don't think, gee, a man is going to direct King Lear, this'll be really good because a man is directing. … It's part of what [Shrew] is about, isn't it?”⁷ Although 3 Henry VI offers fewer opportunities than Shrew for a potentially deconstructive staging, news of Mitchell's project spawned assumptions that she might tease feminist scenarios from the plays, might retell Shakespeare's history as the story of her feminism.⁸ Yet this was not precisely the case. Speaking several years after the production of her anxieties about engaging with the sexism of early modern drama, Mitchell explains: “I think ultimately the best way of approaching it is to put the woman in the historical context, be as true to that as is possible, even if it is offensive, because sometimes in portraying the women as the victims they are textually, it can actually awaken people to more sense of the need for equality.”⁹ Situating the play in its prefeminist world, then, opens up a space for the director and her actors, as well as for spectators, to perform a cultural materialist, or materialist feminist critique. Indeed, by “attending to women” historically (to invoke the title of a notable University of Maryland conference), Mitchell's Henry VI uses Shakespeare's text to interrogate structures of hierarchy, especially those concerning gender and class relations, in a prevailingly masculinist culture. To borrow Lisa Jardine's evocative metaphor, Mitchell reweaves the historical tapestry inherited from her theatrical predecessors.¹⁰ Marking a radical shift from past as well as present stagings of Shakespeare's histories—notably Matthew Warchus's Henry V, which occupied Stratford's main stage the same year—Mitchell's production is less interested in memorializing national history than in releasing different ways of responding to traumatic national, and global, memories.

LOOKING BACK FROM NOW

Mitchell's choice of 3 Henry VI for her first Shakespeare project seemed an odd one for a rising directorial star whose RSC career as an assistant director had included work on Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, and Deborah Warner's groundbreaking Titus Andronicus; and, as a director, acclaimed productions of Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness and Ibsen's Ghosts.¹¹ Admitting to not being “smitted” by most of Shakespeare, Mitchell was drawn to 3 Henry VI for several reasons. Part of its appeal was that it had never been performed on its own in Stratford. “That's very liberating for a director,” remarked Mitchell, “a great Shakespearean play without any ‘production luggage’ along with it. Audiences—and actors—don't come weighted down by the way it's been performed before. … [Y]ou start with a clean slate, which is very exciting.”¹² Although by staging the play that made the youthful Shakespeare's reputation (in Robert Greene's famous accusation, a “tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide”) she affiliates herself with the RSC's house dramatist, Mitchell sidestepped that potential connection: “I am interested in art for change's sake, not art for art's sake, and certainly not art for my ego's sake.” When questioned further, however, she admitted a hidden agenda:

I very much wanted to respond to the situation[s] in Bosnia and Rwanda. … I wanted to present a civil war … which occurred on our own turf. Maybe this will help us view similar conflicts abroad with a cooler perspective. We need to re-observe the world through a new pair of glasses. That is why I did not want to update the play, or stuff it with graphic images from the television or newspapers. We are completely immune to modern reports of human horror anyway.¹³

Certainly this was not the first time that a state-subsidized production of one of Shakespeare's histories had sought to make connections with contemporary events, either by staging their traces or through accidents of historical reception. Both the London press and academic critics quickly labeled Adrian Noble's Henry V (1984) an anti-war, post-Falklands staging; when the production reached London, the scrim backing the final tableau was inscribed with the names of the Agincourt dead, paying specific homage to Maya Lin's Vietnam War memorial, which had been recently unveiled in Washington.¹⁴ More recently, Ian McKellen reports that the Royal National Theatre's Richard III (1992), set in an imaginary 1930s black-shirt regime, prompted audiences in Bucharest to cheer at Richard's death in memory of their recent freedom from Ceauşescu's tyranny.¹⁵ In Mitchell's case, however, even more directly personal as well as topical connections influenced her decision. Noting that “forty percent of the play takes the form of direct audience address, as the characters manipulate opinion in a dramatic debate about civil war,” she discerned, in the play's formal structures, an opportunity to address nontheatrical events she had observed during her research on Eastern European theater as the holder of a 1989 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, experiences that had also energized her staging of A Woman Killed With Kindness. Speaking of herself as a “closet anthropologist,” Mitchell emphasized her ability to think and feel her way into “alien cultures, value systems, and social atmosphere” and, especially, her interest in the ways in which cultural minorities, Catholic as well as Russian Orthodox, cling to religion as a way of giving form and structure to their lives.¹⁶

Significantly, however, Mitchell does not mobilize Shakespeare's play to tell the history of another culture, nor does her staging make any attempt to turn the struggle it dramatizes into a universal phenomenon. Retitled as Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne to mark its reappearance in isolation as a “new” story, one engendered and energized by present-day contexts that demand such a retelling, Mitchell's staging offers an ethnography of England's own genocidal struggle, premised on Brechtian notions of historicized theatrical representation. As Brecht writes:

We must leave [social structures] their distinguishing marks and keep their impermanence always before our eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too. … “Historical conditions” must of course not be imagined (nor … constructed) as mysterious Powers (in the background); on the contrary, they are created and maintained by men (and will in due course be altered by them): it is the actions taking place before us that allow us to see what they are.¹⁷

In several ways, the production announced its debt to Brechtian methods. Rather than subscribing to the usual practice of privileging characters' names and ordering them in relation to each other, the production's program lists the actors' names first, in alphabetical order, followed by those of the character or characters each plays. In print, then, the actors stand apart from their roles—a move that not only erases myths of royal (and gender) hierarchies but also serves to demystify the illusion that the player is identical with the character and the performance with the actual event.¹⁸ Moreover, in advocating a type of theater that “not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself,”¹⁹ Brecht suggests the need for practitioners to understand historical differences in order to respond to them, a practice that aligns with Mitchell's own research methods, which resemble those of the alternative theater company Joint Stock, a collective ensemble committed to creating political theater, more than the traditionally director-oriented practices of the RSC.²⁰ Her passion for giving drama direct access to non-theatrical life surfaces in several interviews with Henry VI's actors. Jonathan Firth, who played Henry VI, mentions a preparation period of historical readings on the period, and Liz Kettle, who played Lady Grey, recalls how, before going into rehearsal, the actors also went to York and Tewkesbury to visit the locales of the play's bloodiest battles. “Until then,” she observes, “I hadn't really realized that England had killing fields of its own … these fields that looked like any other were in fact places where 30,000 men had died.” Connecting that to her own experience as a production assistant on a BBC documentary in Ethiopia, where she saw firsthand the brutal aftermath of war, with rusting tanks by the side of the road, Kettle speaks of keeping these images in mind as she worked.²¹

This insistence on exploring material history links Mitchell's practice, within theatrical culture, to that of Deborah Warner, whose Titus Andronicus and King John (as well as her 1995 Richard II for the Royal National Theatre) model a similar attention to physical, tactile detail in order to evoke an “authentic” and “true-to-life” sense of cultural differences. Almost unanimously, reviewers praised Mitchell's production's precisely articulated recreation of a historical past. Although critics' thorough documentation of the set, props, costumes, lighting, and sound design can be attributed in part to the “close up and personal” circumstances of any staging in The Other Place, many remarked on what Nick Curtis called a “brooding, intense vision … [that] concentrates on the complexities of text and on acting” to evoke a late medieval world of ordered ceremony and gesture that, at the time of the events dramatized, was in crisis.²² Even those who, like the Sunday Times's critic, mourned the loss of “blood-soaked pageantry … huge events rocking and wrecking the country” and missed the “grand theatrical lyricism of the writing, the sense of big public passions [and] Tudor spectacle,” mentioned how, in this “symphony played by a small ensemble,” the actors' clear articulation of speeches and their ability to speak Shakespeare's early verse “as though it were modern prose” turned dynastic politics into personal arguments, conveyed with clarity and precision.²³

Especially striking, however, was how critics spoke about the significant features of Mitchell's staging in terms of a sensory, even sensual, experience. Mentioning in particular the music of shawms and bagpipes, the offstage drumming and clamor that signified battle engagements, and the repetitive tolling of the bell that hung above the massive upstage doors, they were also alert to other sounds: the rushing winds and the cries of wolves and dogs baying that echoed the animalistic behavior of the mortals. Repeatedly, reviewers recalled the sound of birdsong heard in the pause before the climactic battle, evoking a natural world that counterpointed the butcheries that would cut off Lancastrian succession. Moreover, Mitchell's staging prompted critics to write their own ethnographies of mise-en-scène: the wood-bark shavings covering a rough-boarded floor, the upstage barn doors closed with a huge iron bar and dominated by a fading Bayeux tapestry-like image of St. George, and the equally faded banners, hanging right and left stage, emblazoned with the cross of St. George—signs of the realm as slaughterhouse, a farmyard milieu in which the characters themselves have become the dragons of a lost English Eden, where falling leaves, swirling snow, and a single pine tree mark seasonal cycles and the passage of time.²⁴ Once again, Brecht offers a useful gloss: “Our enjoyment of old plays becomes greater, the more we can give ourselves up to the new kind of pleasures better suited to our time. To that end we need to develop the historical sense … into a real sensual delight. When our theatres perform plays of other periods they like to annihilate distance, fill in the gap, gloss over the differences. But what comes then of our delight in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity—which is at the same time a delight in what is close and proper to ourselves?”²⁵

Clearly missing the familiar spectacle of royal packaging, Benedict Nightingale cites the irony of the play's subtitle (“The Battle for the Throne”) in relation to the item of furniture to which it refers: “what the characters battle to obtain is a squat, chunky lump, more desirable than the wooden chairs beside it only because it has arms and some rudimentary carving at the top. It goes very well with the crown, which is a flimsy band of metal with a tiny cross pathetically protruding from its front.”²⁶ But whereas Nightingale silently evoked Peter Brook to read the production's “down-at-heel” approach as “rough theater,” others aligned Mitchell's simplified, near-diagrammatic stage space with the stark, emblematic staging of medieval morality plays.²⁷ That connection was especially obvious in the play's allegorical signature, the molehill scene, in which Henry VI wears a symbolic crown of thorns and in which the corpses of the father killed by his son and the son killed by his father are represented by the roses of the opposing faction. As Paul Taylor writes, “when murdering kin stare with horror at what they are holding in their hands, the fragile beauty of the flower brings home … its incongruity as the logo for war and butchery.”²⁸

Further signs of that incongruity appeared in the production's strong religious overtones, enhanced by anthems and chants sung in Latin, and in a series of powerful stage images juxtaposing Catholic ritual, ceremony, and gesture with rituals of killing. All wear armor over a kind of monastic smock that becomes increasingly broken down, stained with mud and blood, as if to symbolize the nobles' desecration of the religious ideals they pretend to espouse. Yet these warriors retain some residual memory of the Christian idealism that they constantly violate: Lancastrians and Yorkists alike swear oaths on a Bible placed on a small table, each calling for God to sanction the cyclical blood revenges that pattern the action. And, in an extraordinary moment, both sides become their own clergy as they kneel before the weathered, broken-down icon of St. George, joining together briefly to sing a Latin anthem at the walls of Coventry before drums interrupt the chant and they hack each other to pieces. If there is a presiding deity here, he exists only in the memory that links Henry V to St. George, a memory far in the past that emphasizes how, in a war that has degenerated into personal vendettas, national interests are increasingly overlooked.²⁹ To drive the point home, the clergy themselves enact their own rituals at the edges of the action. After York's assassination on the molehill, a priest kneels and prays silently at a tiny double-doored shrine containing a pietà icon, in which the Virgin's head, wreathed with holly leaves and red berries, affords a single spot of bright color in the production's otherwise monochromatic palette; the priest carries a bowl, which catches the blood dripping from York's (unseen) head on the battlements, perhaps collecting relics of his martyrdom, either for posterity or out of his own self-interest. Similarly, a half-naked man kneels to pray before the shrine in the French scene, chanting in Latin throughout the action, as though to mark the difference between one nation and another, between faith and its absence.

Another sense in which the production engages with history or, perhaps more appropriately, enables spectators to fix its theatrical signs in relation to what Janet Staiger calls an “historical real” is by situating its aura of authenticity in relation to other texts and discourses.³⁰ One of these is the discourse of art history. The figure of Bruegel's Dulle Griet, her eyes flashing fire and carrying a long sword, graces the program cover as the production's apocalyptic “muse,” and several other details depicting monstrous creatures from the same painting appear on its inner pages, signs of a world gripped by terror. Not only do the painting's browns and rusts echo in the rough-timbered set and the armor, but Mad Meg's costume—armor worn over a loose undergarment—appears to have inspired the costume worn by Yorkists and Lancastrians alike. Even Queen Margaret, whose white smock and cropped hair enhances her resemblance to Henry VI, wears laced-up boots, marking her aggressive, even transgressive, behavior. A kind of sixteenth-century Guernica, Bruegel's painting, which represents the horrors of foreign occupation during the religious wars between Flemish patriots and Spanish soldiers, seems an especially appropriate emblem for this performance, not only because it documents a history that negotiates between that of Shakespeare's play and contemporary genocidal struggles but also because its representational style echoes that of a medieval mystery play.³¹

Two other intertexts are equally crucial to mapping the production's intersections with early modern history. Although this is only a conjecture, it seems probable that some of the readings Jonathan Firth mentions were The Paston Letters, four excerpts of which appear in the program.³² In one, John Paston, the head of the family and a major figure in Norfolk, writes to his brother about the September 1471 outbreak of plague (“the most universal death that ever I knew in England”) and warns him “to be careful of your behaviour and especially of your language, so that henceforth no man may perceive by your language that you favour any person contrary to the King's pleasure.” In another Margaret Paston writes to her husband, soliciting his help in obtaining “cross-bows and grappling irons to bind them with, and quarrels [metal arrows] … pole-axes … and as many jacks as you may” so as to fortify her house. And in a second letter to John, dated October 27, 1465, Margaret writes of the destruction of Hellesdon Manor by the Duke of Suffolk's men:

[They] ransacked the church and bore away all the goods that were left there, both of ours and of our tenants, and even stood upon the high altar and ransacked the images and took away those that they could find. … As for lead, brass, pewter, iron, doors, gates and other stuff of the house, men from Costessey and Cawston have it, and what they might not carry away they have hewn asunder in the most spiteful manner.

The final excerpt, from John Paston II to his mother, lists the nobles and esquires who lost their lives at the Battle of Barnet and, after reporting that “the Queen Margaret is verily landed with her son in the West Country, and I believe that tomorrow or else the next day the King Edward will depart from here towards her to drive her out again,” expresses a somewhat uneasy providentialism: “God has shown Himself marvellously like Him that made all things and can undo again when He pleases, and I can think that in all likelihood He will show Himself as marvellous again, and that in short time.” Appropriately, given Mitchell's emphasis on the relations between secular and sacred histories and on how religious sanctions are brought forward to justify familial revenge, these voices are juxtaposed, however ironically, to selections from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens … A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace”; and “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. … The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

MATERIAL WOMEN

If Mitchell's staging gave the events related in the Paston Letters a precisely sustained theatrical life, the balanced phrases of the Ecclesiastes poet—“A time to be born, and a time to die … A time to weep … a time to mourn”—offer a kind of mantra for the production, made intensely visible in the ritual ceremonies that accompanied each death, beginning with that of York's youngest son, Rutland. Dressed in black, her head covered by a pall reminiscent of those worn by Muslim women, a woman enters and begins to chant, a cappella, a miserere; the lament is taken up by the noble warriors and a priest, and together they raise Rutland up and lead him off the stage, through the audience. Following York's death, the procession recurs: as the smell of incense again fills the theater, this time the chant is a kyrie, and the woman holds in her hand the bloodied napkin with which Margaret has taunted York. Similarly, after Henry VI's murder, she carries a feather and a rosary, signs of his failed pacifist regime. After each death, a small cross of ragged sticks bound together and bearing a red or white rose is placed in the rim of earth framing the playing space; at play's end, thirteen frail crosses are all that remain.

Setting Mitchell's strategies beside those of Matthew Warchus's mainstage Henry V highlights how each director incorporated tropes of memorialization and images of traumatic memory. Using Henry V's previous theatrical and cinematic histories as touchstones, Warchus's staging explored how Henry's life and his history has become a national—and theatrical—myth. From time to time, an onstage audience, primarily of women and boys dressed in 1940s costumes, gathered behind red-velvet-roped stanchions familiar from museum displays to listen to Henry's famously rousing speeches. Agincourt's battle, played out on a steeply raked platform inscribed with the dates of Henry's birth and death (1387-1422), appeared to be taking place across his gravestone. Scribes seated at each side of the platform wrote the battle into chronicle, while rows of poppies surrounding the platform conflated two very different histories—those of Agincourt and World War I—into one. In this Henry V, women and children have a liminal status: consigned to the margins of the stage, they bear witness to the wartime losses of husbands and fathers; simultaneously, however, their silence in the face of Henry's rhetoric appears to acknowledge, even sustain, the impression that his words have become synonymous with patriotic and national agendas and with educational protocols.³³ Warchus's representation of Agincourt recounts a history of great deeds enacted and recorded by men, one in which the echo of Flanders Field appears as an entirely gratuitous overlay, an attempt to collapse war into a universal phenomenon.

By contrast, Mitchell's ceremonial processions of mourners and emblematic crosses not only make the universal particular—both in historical and theatrical terms—but also offer a more precisely articulated critique. Continuing its debt to Brechtian techniques of distantiation, the performance stages a tension between the actors' dignity and the characters' lack of it: whereas the characters repeatedly mock and insult the dying, the actors, stepping out of their characters and allegiances with kinship, join together as mourners to eulogize the dead.³⁴ Curiously, only one critic, Peter Holland, noted that it is a woman who leads these processions.³⁵ Yet to me, as to Holland, including women's voices as well as presences seemed one of the production's most crucial, and resonant, choices. On the one hand, such inclusion clearly marks their exclusion from a history that centers on retelling and memorializing masculine deeds. On the other, in that these moments open up a potential spectatorial position for women on an otherwise homosocial stage, they work not only to give weight and value to women's experience of war but to evoke connections between the dramatic situations crafted by Shakespeare and those recorded and pictured in contemporary news stories about Yugoslavia.³⁶

Perhaps the best way of marking the difference between each production's gender politics would be to say that whereas Henry V stages a phallic war, one enhanced by spectacular tableaux that, as Holland notes, might have come from a Boys' Own history book,³⁷Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne stages an erotic one. In part, the latter's perspective derives from a scripted emphasis on the dangers of femininity, especially insofar as it mars the warlike man. Although, as Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin observe, that potential threat is not as fully developed in 3 Henry VI as it will be in Shakespeare's later plays (notably 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and Troilus and Cressida), it undergirds the play's central domestic relationship, that between Henry VI and Margaret, and is crucial to understanding Margaret's contradictory ideological position. “The scandal,” Howard and Rackin write, “… is not that a woman is a general but that a man, and an anointed king to boot, can perform none of the actions expected of father and king. He is less fit to rule than his French-born wife.”³⁸ Set beside Henry's quiet, rational, near-androgynous presence, Margaret has often appeared, in the theater as well as in critical discourse, as the “she-wolf” warrior queen or “monstrous” mother, an early study for the transgressive Lady Macbeth. A small, slight figure, Mitchell's Margaret (Ruth Mitchell) plays against this Amazonian stereotype: although perceived by the other characters as undermining the Lancastrian dynasty, she becomes its most aggressive and eloquent defender, upholding her son's claim to the throne. Driven by her knowledge of what she will lose if she does not look out for herself, all her energies appear directed toward preserving her son and toward her own sense of national interests: when, just before his death on the molehill, York turns on Margaret, she crosses quickly to stand in front of Ned, protecting him from York's curses; later, shackled to a tree, she listens helplessly to a son who borrows her language to taunt the Yorkist brothers and swoons as they turn on him with their swords.

Elsewhere, however, Mitchell's staging represents war as a homosocial, even homoerotic, affair. Here, Klaus Theweleit provides a useful gloss on Shakespeare's play and on this performance. Observing that the need to conquer femininity and the feminine undergirds the culture of war, Theweleit observes how the “idea of ‘woman’” merges with representations of violence, a violence that stems, in his view, from a fear of dissolution through union with a woman and thus propels man—or, to evoke Julia Kristeva, abjects him—into a homosocial relation with other men.³⁹ Time after time in Mitchell's Henry VI, the nobles cling to each other as they die in one another's arms: Clifford cuts the white-robed young Rutland's throat during a smiling, sotto voce embrace; later, as Edward and his brothers drag Clifford's body center stage to mock his corpse, Richard caps their elaborate cruelties with a kiss before slinging him over his shoulder. Finally, at Henry VI's murder, Richard draws his dagger, runs at Henry and sits astride his struggling figure, killing him in an orgy of sexual violence. Costumed, like Rutland, in a pure white monastic garment that enhances his passive, pacifist stance, Henry represents a feminized presence, and his death at the hands of a Richard who resembles a neo-Nazi skinhead thug offers perhaps the most blatant instance of how Mitchell's staging weaves together masculinist wartime aggression and sexual domination. For me, the moment recalled the climactic sequence of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) in which the marines, thinking that they are besieged by an entire enemy force, discover that they are up against a single sniper who turns out to be a young Vietnamese woman. If, as Tania Modleski writes, “the moral of [that] encounter might be summarized, ‘We have met the enemy and she is us,’”⁴⁰ that “moral” offers an equally pertinent gloss for Mitchell's scenario, in which Henry VI's murder is driven by a need to kill the woman in the king.

An equally apt subtitle for Mitchell's staging of Henry VI, in that it evokes the feminine as that which threatens the integrity of the masculine subject, might be “A War of Wives and Roses.”⁴¹ Aside from Margaret, the play's most visible wife, the woman who achieves particular prominence is Lady Elizabeth Grey, played by Liz Kettle, who also leads the ritual processions of mourning. Howard and Rackin offer a pertinent reading of the scene in which Edward IV “woos” Lady Grey, mapping how its staging signifies “the new power dynamics that are evolving at Edward's court.” Here, rather than surrounding the king at center stage as wise counselors or warlike brothers, Clarence and Richard are consigned to the margins, from which they mock their brother-king as he seduces a woman “who has neither high rank nor great wealth to recommend her as a king's bride.”⁴² In Mitchell's staging, Edward sits on the crude throne, one leg thrown over its arm, exposing both legs and one thigh, a sign both of his sensualism and his disregard for the crown's meaning. As though showing off his power, Edward snaps his fingers at the black-gowned Grey, who lies prostrate before him as she asks for the return of her lands lost in the war. Reminiscent of a similar encounter between Isabella and Angelo in Measure for Measure, the scene unfolds as a clash between two competing discourses in which the tension between masculinity and femininity is played out for Edward's brothers' enjoyment. Crossing casually to the now-kneeling Grey, Edward lifts up his smock as though inviting her to perform fellatio. When she turns away, he forces her onto her back and gets on top of her, holding her arms outstretched at either side to pin her to the floor. But he stops just short of rape: deciding, on the spur of the moment, to make her his queen, Edward yanks her to a standing position, seats her on the throne and jams the crown on her head. Interrupted by the business of war, he then shoos her out the upstage door and follows her, smirking over his shoulder at Clarence and Richard.

At one performance, Grey still wore the crown at her exit; at another, Edward angrily snatched it back. Either choice reveals how, in appropriating the sacred crown to secular, and sexual, use, Edward initiates a break in the circle of male alliances that has supported the Yorkist claims.⁴³ Later, his marriage to Lady Grey becomes the sticking point that separates him from his brothers: Clarence refuses Edward's hearty offer to find him a wife; and Richard seeks the crown for himself. As the scene ends, with Edward vowing to keep the realm safe and all kneeling together to swear fealty, Queen Elizabeth glances at her wedding ring and moves aside uneasily, as though knowingly aware, in the face of this brotherly dissension, of the fragile bond it represents.

Significantly, Elizabeth's awareness recurs at the play's close, where once again her presence, voice, and her double role as mourner, energizes Henry VI's final image. In Mitchell's staging, the last scene presents an unsettled, and unsettling, Yorkist victory celebration, powerfully reworked as a kind of epilogue. As the bell tolls once again, this time heralding both the crowning of a new king and the birth of his heir, strong light coming from behind the upstage doors illuminates the stage, where white and red roses are joined together on the Bible, as though anticipating a future Tudor narrative, beyond this play and beyond this stage with its thirteen rude crosses of the war dead. Carrying the young prince in her arms, Queen Elizabeth steps onto the stage from the aisle and stands to one side as Edward turns his back on war, banishes Margaret to France and proclaims domestic peace by calling for “drums, trumpets and shows.” Little is made of Richard's Judas kiss, often the centerpiece gesture of this scene, especially in productions that purposefully drive forward to Richard's own play and to history's next chapter. Taking his newborn child in his arms, Edward exits, followed by Clarence and Richard. Alone, her son appropriated by her husband and his brothers, Bess stands, her empty arms extended, looking after the three. Then, kneeling at center stage, she takes off her crown in a gesture reminiscent of Cleopatra who, at Antony's death, proclaims herself “no more but e'en a woman” and who, at her own, figures herself as wife and mother. As Elizabeth begins a final kyrie, the others return, as before, to kneel behind her; but it is her solo voice, once again evoking an absent God and backed by the others' humming, that echoes in the darkening space as the lights fade and go out. In these moments, the player Queen, already mourning for the death of a son that is presaged here but will occur (at Richard's hands) in the future, merges with the figure whose voice remains unheard except through prayer—in a language other than English, occurring at the margins of the text. Fused into one, she speaks for the losses of this war and to spectators' own traumatic memories of this, and other, global genocides. Offering a brutal glimpse of a world that consumes women, one in which sado-masochistic behaviors are perpetuated by a male comradeship that allies the father against the mother, Mitchell's staging relegates the signs of that world to an offstage position. What remains at the center is a figure capable of voicing another, equally authoritative history, one that offers to claim, or reclaim, a right to speak, not as an “enemy” but as a survivor.

In conclusion, I would like to add an epilogue of my own, one that brings full circle Mitchell's desire to make her staging of 3 Henry VI intersect with and address contemporary events. The Commission of Experts appointed in October 1992 by Boutros Boutros-Ghali “to examine and analyze information gathered with a view to providing the Secretary-General with its conclusions on the evidence of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia” describes the cultural forces motivating the “ethnic cleansing” occurring in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia:

[T]he Commission confirms its earlier view that “ethnic cleansing” is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. To a large extent, it is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and a powerful driving sense of revenge. This purpose appears to be the occupation of territory to the exclusion of the purged group or groups.⁴⁴

As Eric Hobsbawm writes, “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist” because “nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.” Hobsbaum goes on to quote Renan, the father of European critical discourse on nationalism, who remarked, “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”⁴⁵ In refusing to stage Shakespeare's history as complicit with such agendas, Mitchell's Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne offers a critical rewriting of nationalism's project. At least from where I sat, she seems to have gotten (her) history right.

Notes

1. Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (N. Okes, 1612), I: Sig B4r.

2. See, for instance, Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997); and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

3. See Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 195.

4. See Barbara Hodgdon, Henry IV, Part 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 90-91.

5. See Hodgdon, End Crowns All, 87-88. Notably, The Wars of the Roses (1986-89), directed by Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington for the English Shakespeare Company, represents a staging that goes against the grain of RSC practice.

6. Richard Edmonds, “A Haunting, Horrifying Marathon,” Birmingham Evening Mail, October 24, 1988. All reviews cited from clippings books in the Shakespeare Centre Library.

7. Kate Alderson, “Interview with Gale Edwards,” Times [London], April 21, 1995.

8. See Ellen Rooney, “What's the Story? Feminist Theory, Narrative, Address,” Differences 8.1 (1996): esp. 10-11.

9. Katie Mitchell, quoted in Katie Normington, “Little Acts of Faith: Katie Mitchell's ‘The Mysteries,’” New Theatre Quarterly 54 (May 1998): 105.

10. See Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), 132-33.

11. In addition to her stagings for the RSC, Mitchell has also worked with Paines Plough, The Writers' Company, The Tron Theatre Glasgow, The Abbey Theatre, and The Gate.

12. Marion McMullen, “Hooray Henry,” Manchester Evening News, September 30, 1994.

13. Alfred Hickling, “Choice Part for Katie,” Yorkshire Post October 12, 1994.

14. See Hodgdon, End Crowns All, 209.

15. See Ian McKellen, William Shakespeare's Richard III (London: Doubleday, 1996), 13.

16. See Paul Taylor, “An Eye for the Small Print,” Independent, October 10, 1994.

17. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 190.

18. Ibid., 195. See also Rod Dungate, “Henry VI, Part III,” Plays and Players (September-October 1994): 31.

19. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 190.

20. On Joint Stock, especially in relation to Caryl Churchill's plays, see Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women (London: Macmillan, 1984), 86-90; and Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997), 88.

21. Liz Kettle, quoted in “Killing Fields of England,” Hartlepool Mail, September 26, 1994. See also Alan Hamilton, “Tewkesbury 1471: Slaughter in the Abbey,” Times [London], August 4, 1994. Hamilton's article was part of “The Times Guide to Battlefields of Britain,” which appeared as Mitchell's production opened.

22. Nick Curtis, “Strife Assurance,” Evening Standard, October 11, 1994.

23. Sunday Times, October 14, 1994.

24. See, for instance, Michael Billington, “The Power, the Pain and the Pity,” Guardian October 11, 1994; Paul Taylor, “The Horror, the Horror,” Independent, October 12, 1994; Ann Fitzgerald, “Henry VI,” Stage, October 1, 1994; and Margaret Ingram, “Young Company in a Restrained Henry VI Entitled to Travel Hopefully,” Stratford Herald, September 18, 1994.

25. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 276.

26. Benedict Nightingale, “Rough Theatre, Rough Times,” Times [London] August 12, 1994.

27. Taylor, “The Horror, the Horror.”

28. Ibid.

29. See Billington, “The Power, the Pain and the Pity”; and Taylor, “The Horror, the Horror.”

30. See Janet Staiger, “Securing the Fictional Narrative as a Tale of the Historical Real,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Spring 1989): esp. 395-96, 400-402.

31. See Robert L. Delevoy, Bruegel, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1959), 70-75.

32. See Norman Davis, ed., The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

33. Such agendas and protocols are not exclusively English. William J. Bennett, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and ex-drug czar, includes Henry V's St. Crispin's Day Speech as an example of perseverance in The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 514-16. Bennett notes that the speech is the model for football coaches' locker-room addresses to their players, a suggestion appropriated, whether consciously or unconsciously, during the pregame show of the 1997 Super Bowl, in which the speech, as it appears in Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film, appeared on the screen while Branagh's voiceover glossed the pseudo-heraldic insignia of both teams.

34. See Dungate, “Henry VI, Part III,” 31.

35. Peter Holland, “In a World with No Use for Goodness,” Times Literary Supplement, August 26, 1994.

36. For example, the New York Times International reported on March 28, 1998, that in Kosovo Province, 5,000 ethnic Albanians buried two men, cousins aged 19 and 21, who were killed during an eleven-hour gun battle between Serbian police officers and ethnic Albanians. The picture accompanying the report shows the two men's bodies in open coffins, draped with Albanian flags and surrounded by some 20 women mourners, some of whom held up photographs of the dead.

37. See Peter Holland's review of Henry V in English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 194-99. See also Nicola Barker, “Not a Trouser in Sight,” Observer, August 14, 1996.

38. See Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 85-86.

39. Klaus Theweleit is discussed in Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 62-63.

40. Ibid., 62.

41. I adapted the title of Carole Woddis's review, “Wars of Wives and Roses,” Glasgow Herald, September 7, 1994.

42. Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 91-92.

43. Ibid., 93.

44. This document, called the Bassiouni Report, is cited in Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996), 44 (emphasis added).

45. See Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 12.