Nicholas Grene. Shakespeare's Serial History Plays.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xviii + 278 pp. index. illus. chron. bibl. $65. ISBN: 0-521-77341-5.

Tom McAlindon. Shakespeare's Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.

Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001. xii + 226 pp. index. append, illus, bibl. $79.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0468-3.

Steering clear of the political criticism dominating the last two decades of scholarship on Shakespeare's history plays, these two books concentrate on relationships among the plays, returning to questions about unity and structural and thematic patterning. Nicholas Grene explores the serial design of the two sequences of history plays--Henry VI-Richard III and Richard II-Henry V--within the context of theatrical practice and the plays themselves. Tom McAlindon focuses on 1 and 2 Henry IV, arguing for the "complex unity" (24) of this two-part play. In contrast to Grene, McAlindon situates his study within a historicist tradition, but one that stops in the early 1980s, before the advent of "new" historicisms.

Epitomized by E.M.W. Tillyard's influential study on the history plays, arguments for seriality have tended to elaborate grand narratives within an ideological framework. Reacting to this preoccupation with ideology, Grene argues that Shakespeare's serial histories were as much a response to market pressures and theatrical practice as they were to Tudor propaganda or post-Armada politics. This approach allows Grene to reframe, and reinvigorate, a longstanding if not tired debate about the unity of these plays. Carefully examining the plays for evidence of sequential design, Grene offers these conclusions: the first sequence of Henry VI-Richard III was actually planned and performed "as an interlocking series with a narrative rhythm building across the parts rather than in the individual plays" (23); the second sequence, by contrast, is characterized by a more "tentative progression" (27), lacking the coherence and deliberateness of the first group, a conclusion that reverses standard assumptions that the overall design of the Henry VI plays is less clearly defined in comparison to the later plays.

The book's first section makes a persuasive case for these claims by closely examining the theatrical marketplace and Shakespeare's use of source material. If the vogue for two-part plays like Tamburlaine encouraged serial production in the early 1590s, so too did the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, which offered a plentiful supply of ready-made narratives ideally suited to the serial enterprise. Grene investigates Shakespeare's handling of his sources in conjunction with the formal features of the plays themselves (seeding of characters, through-characterization, narrative continuities and discontinuities) for evidence of serial design. The remainder of the book builds on these observations by tracing key themes and concepts through the two sequences. Representations of war, the role of prophecy, and character organize the discussion of Henry VI-Richard III; chapters on Richard II-Henry V focus on such familiar themes as the retrospective nature of these plays, the mix of comedy with history, and Hal's development from prince to king.

A second strand of discussion takes up subsequent serial performances of the histories to show that the plays, "themselves constructions from the chronicles, are open to continuous reconstruction on the stage" (3). Grene devotes a chapter to surveying modern productions and adaptations, beginning with nineteenth-century German performances of the history cycles and ending with the recent stagings of Schlachten! and This England in 2000. He also brings recent productions to bear on discussions of structural and thematic patterns of the plays, although here the relationship between past and present productions is less successfully theorized. His inclusion of modern productions does suggest parallels between late-Elizabethan England and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when audiences could, once again, "re-imagine national history in action" (250), but rather than pursuing the ideological implications of "staging the national epic," as he terms it, Grene keeps his focus on the theatrical conditions (festival traditions, state support for theaters, and ensemble action, for example) that make the revival of Shakespeare's serial histories possible.

McAlindon's more political, and more polemical, study of 1 and 2 Henry IV is intended "to correct a certain falsification of critical history" (ix) associated with postmodern criticism. To this end, he begins with a chapter reviewing three centuries of criticism on the plays, followed by a chapter on the religio-political conflicts of the Tudors. The second part of the book looks closely at the two plays in chapters focused on the themes of time, truth, and grace.

Drawing on arguments for the organic unity of Shakespeare's history cycles set forth by A. W. Schlegel and Hermann Ulrici in the nineteenth century and reiterated by Tillyard in the twentieth, McAlindon is interested in recovering "the fascinating nature of the play's construction, its unique encompassment in what seems like a single world and a unified work" (23-24). While the book's arrangement underscores the thematic nature of this unity, McAlindon attends to topical patterns as well and again takes his interpretive models from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the work of Richard Simpson and Lily B. Campbell in particular. Finding parallels between 1 and 2 Henry IV and the sixteenth-century religious rebellions of 1536, 1547, and 1569, McAlindon looks closely at the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, an uprising involving the Percy family and meeting a bloodless defeat thanks to the treachery of Henry VIII, a clear counterpart to Prince John's much-debated diplomacy at Gaultree in 2 Henry IV. This is a compelling line of inquiry and suggests possibilities for further work on the conjunctions of Catholic rebellion, Tudor Protestantism, and Shakespeare's staging of history in the 1590s.

The remainder of the book examines the themes of time, truth, and grace within the critical and intellectual contexts set forth in the first section. Overlapping with these themes is an interest in Machiavellian politics and carnival festivity that has figured importantly in recent work on the plays. Resisting an overt political reading in which the plays' topsy-turvy festivity is seen as "subversive of the dominant order" (82), McAlindon emphasizes Falstaff's wit and his function, along with Hotspur, in throwing Hal's princely qualities into relief. McAlindon is particularly concerned to defend the prince against those, from Robert Ornstein to Stephen Greenblatt, who would see him as a Machiavel, an interpretation McAlindon attributes to "liberal, republican, and left-wing sensibilities ... assisted by the postmodernist flair for radical demystification" (123).

Central to these chapters and to the book as a whole is the assumption that Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, interpreted the past in relation to his own time. McAlindon does not see the Henry IV plays as intervening in conflicts and debates of present politics--as a new historicist might--but rather as looking back to a unified feudal past, nostalgically idealized as already lost with the decay of the chivalric ethic signaled by the Wars of the Roses--a relationship between present and past not unlike this book's own relationship to its critical tradition.

NINA LEVINE

University of South Carolina