[In the following review, Gajowski appraises Margaret Shewring's Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II, praising the work's broad scope, including nineteen theatrical productions over four centuries, but faulting its limited attention to the theoretical aspects of contemporary performance.]

“I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Elizabeth I famously remarked to William Lambarde regarding Shakespeare's history play. Margaret Shewring appropriately devotes the introductory chapters of her book for the Shakespeare in Performance series to the “dangerous matter” of Richard II: deposition and regicide. The politically subversive nature of the play's challenge to political stability was exploited by the supporters of the earl of Essex, who commissioned a special performance on the eve of their abortive coup against Elizabeth in 1601. When Nahum Tate adapted Shakespeare's play as The Sicilian Usurper eight decades later, he distanced the issues of deposition and regicide by changing the names of the dramatis personae and setting the play in Italy. Despite this fact, these issues were, three decades following the execution of Charles I, still controversial: Tate's version was banned after only two performances.

Shewring's discussion of the subversive potential of staging deposition and regicide resonates with her central discussion in chapter VI, “In the context of English history.” Here she focuses on three twentieth-century productions that emphasized power politics by staging complete cycles of various history plays: Anthony Quayle's 1951 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, starring Michael Redgrave; Peter Hall's, John Barton's, and Clifford Williams's 1964 Royal Shakespeare Company production, starring David Warner; Michael Bogdanov's 1987-88 English Shakespeare Company production, starring Michael Pennington. When Richard II is staged together with other history plays, Shewring points out, “the full narrative dramatises the fate of the English Crown from the reign of Richard II to that of Richard III” (92-93). Individual characters no longer dominate; instead, each play “takes its place in a complex discussion rooted in power politics, and individual characters are seen in relation to their ability to seize or to retain power” (93). The program notes for the Quayle/Redgrave production emphasize that the second tetralogy presents “not only a living epic of England” through the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V but also “a profound commentary on Kingship” (95). The Hall/Warner production of the Wars of the Roses emphasized the national crisis triggered by Richard's deposition; that crisis was presented “not in terms of who ruled, but how they ruled” (102). Richard II was not so much “the dramatisation of an old order” in this production as “a seedbed of potential violence” (104). Bogdanov and Pennington wanted to demonstrate the history plays' immediacy by seeking out their implications for an audience in the 1980s.

A history of theatrical performances, like a history of literary criticism, is a history of the construction of different meanings in different periods. Shewring is adept at presenting not only a performance history of a single play but also at suggesting larger developments in theater history constituted by shifting political, social, and aesthetic ideologies. Chapter IV, “The spectacle of history,” details the nineteenth-century-antiquarian approach to Shakespeare's plays which fetishized the medieval world of Richard II and was concerned to paint a pretty picture; productions such as Charles Kean's 1857 Princess's Theatre production emphasized visual display and ceremony. In reaction, the personality of the king and the actor playing him dominated twentieth-century productions, as Shewring points out in chapter V, “A play of personality.” In productions such as Frank Benson's 1896 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, Harcourt Williams's 1929 Old Vic production starring John Gielgud, Gielgud's 1937 Queen's Theatre production, and Richard Cottrell's 1968 Prospect Theatre Company production, the ultimate concern was with “the personal tragedy of the man” (63). In turn, however, twentieth-century productions of Richard II which were a part of a larger cycle of history plays deemphasized Richard as a tragic figure and instead emphasized the complementary plot—the fall of Richard and the rise of Bolingbroke.

Although Shewring appreciates the significance of power politics, she gives female characters, feminist criticism, and gender politics short shrift. Because Shakespeare invented the female characters' roles and speeches in Richard II, they deserve a modicum of theatrical and critical attention. Shewring, however, devotes only a one-page section, “The play's female roles” (8-9), to the subject in chapter I, “A question of balance: the problematic structure of Richard II.” As recent feminist criticism has demonstrated, the female characters in Richard II provide an alternative perspective on the political events with which the text is centrally concerned, privileging familial over political bonds, as Katharine Maus points out; this gendered disparity of perspectives brings home the point that England's political crisis is also a familial one.¹ With the exception of brief remarks regarding the Yorks and Aumerle as recipients of inappropriate audience laughter and (therefore) as targets for deletion, Shewring offers no analysis of the alternative perspective that the queen, the duchess of Gloucester, and the duchess of York provide.

It is not a huge leap, I suppose, from experimental casting decisions such as that employed by John Barton in his landmark 1973-74 Royal Shakespeare Company production, which alternated Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson in the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke, to cross-gender casting in Deborah Warner's 1995 Royal National Theatre production, starring Fiona Shaw. Shewring devotes an afterword to the Warner/Shaw production, which was produced when her book was going to press. Doubling the roles of king and usurper on alternating nights in the Barton/Richardson/Pasco production “literalize[d] the duplicities” in the play's plot, its roles, and its system of verbal and visual exchange, as Carol Rutter puts it.² Among the most extraordinary achievements of the Warner/Shaw production was likewise Shaw's and David Threlfall's Richard/Bolingbroke double act. Their Richard II involved a different kind of shifting, however, revolving around “the kinship of two same-but-different cousins” and around “the kinship of two same-but-different genders.”³ What is the significance of cross-gender casting? There were certain areas where the effeminization of Richard worked to stunning effect, as in the trial by combat at Coventry. Rutter observes:

When “womanish” Richard threw down the warder, it was because she couldn't stand any more. The incredulous look on her face made this male ritual of combat an act of mass lunacy. Could men genuinely intend to settle their affairs this way? Her gesture read as a wholesale indictment of male “order,” male protocol.⁴

Cross-gender casting was obviously germane to the Warner/Shaw production, yet Shewring curiously denies that it is. While she appreciates that kingship is concerned with theatricality and role-playing, she denies that the decision to cast a female actor to play the role of a male monarch has anything to do with the “f-word”: Warner and Shaw “do not rely upon the controversial politics of feminism,” she claims (181). Her ambivalence regarding feminist criticism and the gendered meanings it makes possible in Richard II attenuates her analysis where a deployment of feminism could have enriched it. She fails to understand the way in which power politics and gender politics intersect and inform one another in society and in the Warner/Shaw production: “It is not the fact that the King is played by a woman that is significant; it is that the presentation of kingship is, in itself, an elaborate theatrical charade” (182). Women in a patriarchal society are, like monarchs, expected to play prescribed roles: a woman is expected to play the role of social inferior to a man, while a monarch is expected to play the role of social superior to her and to his subjects. The Warner/Shaw production problematizes this apparent contradiction, as Rutter notes: “perhaps gender did matter after all. Perhaps only a woman playing the king could estrange the role sufficiently for this demystification to happen and to permit a British audience to consider what a very odd idea a ‘king’ is.”⁵ Shewring concludes her book with the claim that Warner's and Shaw's “compelling, essentially apolitical interpretation will earn its place in the collective memory of performance history” (184). Her notion that the Warner/Shaw production is “apolitical” depends on the assumption that politics and gender are mutually exclusive: according to this formulation, “politics” is for boys, while “gender” is for girls. When a female director and a female actor collaborate to interrogate the confluence of Elizabethan and contemporary power-and-gender politics, it is unfortunate that Shewring denies that these meanings exist.

Shewring does have a keen eye for the visual language of Richard II and a good appreciation of directors' different uses of various components of design. Her understanding of how staging, blocking, and costuming reinforce the issues of power politics is noteworthy. The Quayle/Redgrave production, for example, used the downstage-right placement of the throne and the downstage-center placement of those characters in quest of it to emphasize political instability and jockeying for power. The effect, as she puts it, was “to open a central area of the performance space to a flexible blocking which put the focal emphasis on the changing pattern of relationships within that space, a space that marked the way across the stage to and from the throne” (102). Traditional staging and blocking, in contrast, use the upstage-center placement of the throne to reinforce a Tillyardian ideology of symmetrical, hierarchical stasis. Ariane Mnouchkine's 1981 Théâtre du Soleil production attracts Shewring's attention, as well. Noting Mnouchkine's use of Japanese costume and movement, Shewring points out that Richard's physical dimensions gradually diminish until he appears nearly naked in the prison scene, while Bolingbroke's physical dimensions gradually increase. The unusual effect Mnouchkine produced was an original variation on the thematics of heights and depths, which the play's action, language, and theatrical history have traditionally insisted on.

More ambitious in historical scope than other volumes in the Shakespeare in Performance series, Shewring's book considers no less than nineteen productions from 1680 to 1995, including three Continental productions, two television productions, and several in-depth analyses. Unlike other authors in the series, she concentrates on neither post-World War II stage productions nor film productions. Although she analyzes two French and one Italian production in part III, “Richard II in other cultural contexts,” she ignores American productions; it is as if the American continents do not exist. Shewring also draws on a variety of source materials: her own experience as a theatergoer; reviews of performances; interviews with and materials of directors, designers, and actors; and critical opinion on the history plays. Among the most significant developments in contemporary performance criticism is the influence on theatrical practices of recent theoretical developments in Shakespeare studies; the intersection of the theoretical and the theatrical has been explored in recent years in books, articles, and Shakespeare Association of America plenary sessions and research seminars. While Shewring notes the influence of Tillyard on the Quayle/Redgrave production and the influence of Brecht and Kott on the Hall/Warner production, she largely ignores the impact of the theoretical on the theatrical.

Despite its shortcomings, the book has a wide appeal. It will be most valuable to scholars, teachers, and students of Shakespeare and of theater studies, as well as directors, actors, and playgoers. It will also be useful to those who study performances in the theater or as adjuncts to the classroom, or use student performance groups as a pedagogical tool. If you are interested in cogent analyses of a range of primarily British productions of Richard II from the late-seventeenth through the late-twentieth centuries, then this is the book for you. If you are interested in the impact of contemporary theoretical developments—particularly feminist criticism and gender studies—on recent theatrical practices, then it is not.

Notes

1. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Richard II in The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 948.

2. Carol Chillington Rutter, “Fiona Shaw's Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 314-24, esp. 316.

3. Rutter, 318.

4. Rutter, 323.

5. Rutter, 323.