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Rose parade
Henry V — and VI — at Shakespeare and Company
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The Henry VI Chronicles, Parts One and Two
By William Shakespeare. Adapted and directed by Jenna Ware. Set by Tom Jaeger. Costumes by Lisa Jahn. With Georgia Adamson, Katie Atkinson, John C. Bailey, Rhydwyn Davies, Laura Fusare, Darren H. Gardner, Sarah Hankins, Birgit Huppuch, Susan Hyon, Brian Mason, Sean Miller, Elizabeth Raetz, Sam Reiff-Pasarew, Lauryn E. Sasso, Robert Serrell, and Michelle Silver. On Shakespeare and Company’s Rose Footprint, in repertory through August 24.
Henry V
By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jonathan Epstein. Costumes by Kiki Smith. Lighting by Karen Perlow. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald. With Allyn Burrows, Johnny Lee Davenport, Henry David Clarke, Jonathan Croy, Jason Asprey, Tony Simotes, Michael F. Toomey, Ariel Bock, Susanna Apgar, and Carolyn Roberts. In Shakespeare and Company’s Founders’ Theatre, in repertory through September 1.


LENOX — I always wondered what it would be like to see the plays that first made Shakespeare famous — the three parts of Henry VI — in the theater that Shakespeare made famous, the Rose. And now I’m almost there. The real Rose was in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames; Philip Henslowe built it in 1587, not far from where the Globe would rise a dozen years later. (It’s the playhouse you see in Shakespeare in Love.) What I’m in is the Rose " Footprint, " on which Shakespeare and Company is hoping to build a replica of the original, which it would then surround with a Rose Village. This is, also, not the real Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3 that S&C’s Summer Performance Institute is putting on but a two-part, three-hour condensation called The Henry VI Chronicles. Of course, the latest thinking is that the real Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3 are not unadulterated Bard but were written by Shakespeare and company, so maybe with these Chronicles S&C is throwing away the company and giving us just the Shakespeare!

Would I love to see these plays as they appeared uncut on the stage of the London Rose in the early 1590s? You bet. But I feel fortunate to see them in any form. They fell out of favor with the triumph of the proscenium arch; in his Shakespeare’s Professional Career, Peter Thomson observes that the plays " depend on the spectacular occupation by actors of an empty stage. " And spectacular they were. In all likelihood, Part 2 came first, under the marketing-driven title The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey, and the Banishment and Death of the Duke of Suffolk, and the Tragical End of the Proud Cardinal of Winchester, with the Notable Rebellion of Jack Cade, and the Duke of York’s First Claim unto the Crown. The promised sequel (Part 3) appeared more modestly as The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth, with the Whole Contention Between the Two Houses Lancaster and York. These plays encompassed the War of the Roses, whereby in the reign of Henry VI the houses of York (white rose) and Lancaster (red) fought each other for wealth, power, and the right of succession (or, failing that, usurpation). In patriotic post-Armada London they proved so popular that Henslowe, anticipating George Lucas, set his stable of playwrights to working on a prequel; it appeared in March 1592 under the modest title Henry VI, and drawing on the contemporary French exploits of the Earl of Essex in its depiction of the heroic John Talbot, it proved another box-office bonanza.

Yet the Henry VI trio, like the rest of Shakespeare’s history plays, transcend battles and winners and losers. In its Temple Garden scene, Part 1 depicts England as one big rosebush with few blossoms and many thorns; and the demonization of Joan of Arc (doubtless enjoyed by the groundlings) underlines national attitudes about women and foreigners. In Part 2, the decapitation derby begins (Suffolk, Lord Saye, Jack Cade and, continuing into Part 3, York and Young Clifford) as England becomes a body without a head. Kentish rebel Jack Cade’s role as the Lord of Misrule at England’s Feast of Fools presages Henry and York as the real Lords of Misrule in Part 3, where any common fool, it seems, can become queen (Elizabeth Woodville) or even king (Warwick). Part 3 is all crowd-pleasing alarums and actions intercut with introspection, Henry VI musing on what it means to be a king, or merely human, Richard Duke of Gloucester musing on what it means to be a crookback, Queen Margaret musing on what it might mean to be a woman at the helm of the ship of state. Richard’s murder of Henry at the end speaks to what it means to be king in 1471 England: you kill all your rivals.

What’s more, the Henry VI plays shed an ironic light on their own prequel, Henry V, which Shakespeare wrote in 1599 and which S&C is putting on in its Founders’ Theatre. When in act one of Henry V the Archbishop of Canterbury embarks on that interminable Salic Law speech explaining how Henry can claim the French throne through the female line, he’s actually undercutting Henry’s claim to the English throne, since that’s the argument the Yorkists use against the Lancastrians. Indeed, if in 1399 it was all right for Henry Bolingbroke to depose weak king Richard II (and become Henry IV), why shouldn’t Richard Duke of York depose Henry VI 50 years later? And though Henry V ends in apparent triumph with the marriage of Henry V to French princess Katherine, for playgoers that finale would have conjured unpleasant memories of the marriage of Henry VI to French princess Margaret. Even the opening scene of Part 1 — Henry V has died in France, leaving England with an infant king — gives the lie to the hands-across-the-sea optimism with which Henry V concludes. In these plays, the question of what to do when God’s anointed ruler doesn’t measure up is never far from Shakespeare’s mind.

One big difference between Shakespeare’s Rose and S&C’s Footprint is that the current Footprint stage measures just 18 inches high. When S&C builds the real thing (the construction phase is scheduled to begin in 2005), it’ll be five feet high; as it is, sitting in the bleachers around the Footprint’s circumference, you’re looking down on the actors. And though it’s impossible to cut these plays from eight hours to three without losing essentials, I wish adapter/director Jenna Ware had focused more on meaning and less on spectacle and narrative. Joan of Arc is conspicuous by her absence from The Henry VI Chronicles, and Talbot makes only a cameo appearance, whereas the dizzying red-white-red-white of Part 3 is indulged to a fault. Credit Ware with spotlighting the intimacy — and the tearful farewell — of Queen Margaret and the Duke of Suffolk; on the debit side, the Jack Cade sequence is milked for comedy, the danger getting short shrift. Many of the male roles are given to women, and in a history play, where these characters have been aged and tested, that’s asking a lot. Georgia Adamson need yield to no man as Richard Duke of York, and her King Louis of France is equally credible. Birgit Huppuch’s Duke of Exeter and (in the second half of the Chronicles) Henry VI are commendable, as is Katie Atkinson’s Richard Duke of Gloucester; and though I wasn’t thrilled with Elizabeth Raetz’s mugging as Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester, her scene-stealing Iden (the Kent gardener who kills Jack Cade) would have brought howls from the groundlings. Sarah Hankins’s Queen Margaret is powerful but not always nuanced. Best of the men are John C. Bailey as an unctuous Cardinal Winchester and Sean Miller as a voice-of-reason Earl of Warwick.

THE ROSE FOOTPRINT isn’t S&C’s only attempt at Bardic authenticity: the new Founders’ Theatre could double for the Blackfriars’ Theatre that Shakespeare’s company leased in 1608 so as to be able to perform indoors and at night. The space is shoebox-sized, the stage running almost the width at one end, with seats on a raked floor and in two galleries overhead. The gallery over the stage serves as a second playing space, allowing an imaginative director to juxtapose scenes. Every seat is a winner.

I wish the current Henry V were equally authentic. The clown noses are the least of it; director Jonathan Epstein wants to call attention to the " unlit " of history ( " At one time or another, each of us is the Clown, " he writes in his program note), but he only makes these people — the commoners of the play — look silly. Ditto the Archbishop of Canterbury, who in act one gets turned into a Julie Taymor figure (specifically the sleeves-without-end Durandarte from The King Stag) while the Yorkist implications of his Salic Law oration go begging.

Concept also rules the opening of the play, where before the Chorus is allowed to invoke that Muse of fire we see Harry making a pincushion out of an armored Jack Straw figure who’s standing in for . . . Jack Falstaff? Harry’s father, Henry IV? Harry’s irresponsible and carefree former self? England’s Green Man withered and sterile? At the end of the play, Jack Straw reappears and a straw babe (the " present " offspring of barely engaged Harry and Katherine?) is brought in and placed in his arms. Perhaps Epstein means to suggest that we’re straw men as well as clowns.

That’s poetry, at least. This production also brings us poverty, in the removal of captains Gower (English), Jamy (Scottish), and Macmorris (Irish) from their confrontation with the Welsh Fluellen in act three scene two; they’re replaced by Nym, Bardolph, and, I gather, Exeter. (Macmorris’s " part " is played by Johnny Lee Davenport, with a Southern accent, and I thought I heard the character referred to by name, but in the program Davenport is listed as playing only Exeter and the Constable. A photo in the S&C lobby identifies him as Macmorris; the same photo in the press kit calls him the Constable, as if a Frenchman would be chewing the fat with the English troops.) Shakespeare wants to show the different British Isles nationalities working out their differences; without Gower and Jamy and Macmorris, there’s no point to the scene. Worse, having Harry let Bardolph off from hanging (Prince Harry’s former Eastcheap companion, he looted a church) destroys Shakespeare’s carefully calibrated counterpoint between what being king of England demands of Harry (he has to kill his Falstaff side) and what happens to England (Falstaff’s cronies gradually kill their Harry side) as a result. Bardolph and Nym should both have been hanged, leaving Pistol an embittered survivor and an emblem of Harry’s " new " England; instead, they survive to tell Pistol off (taking Gower’s lines) after his leek dinner with Fluellen, making nonsense of that scene as well.

As conceived by Epstein and played by Allyn Burrows (who was Prince Harry in S&C’s 1997 Henry IV Part 1), Harry recovers his Falstaff side: at Southampton he throws a temper tantrum over the Earl of Cambridge’s defection (perhaps realizing Cambridge has the better claim to the throne), but then he reprieves Bardolph, and he doesn’t give order to kill the French prisoners till after the French have massacred the youthful English luggage watch. Conjuring Brideshead Revisited’s Anthony Andrews in a sour mood, Burrows is energetic and authoritative, and he grows in the course of the play, particularly in his wooing of Susanna Apgar’s wary but willing Katherine. Epstein accords that scene ample room, and likewise what is a poignant account of Falstaff’s death (where Ariel Bock as Mistress Quickly takes full and fervent advantage). He also makes good use of the gallery space to overlap scenes, and he fills the Chorus’s lines (distributed among various characters) with pregnant visuals. But if he’d paid more heed to the Chorus’s opening appeal to us to use our imagination, he might have remembered that in Shakespeare less is almost always more.

Issue Date: August 8 - 15, 2002
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