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Then and Now: Henry IV’s England via the RSC and Bell Shakespeare

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 12:24 authored by Rosemary Gaby
Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays invite a split temporal vision, depicting through one lens historical figures from a specific moment in British history and through another a group of fictional characters from Shakespeare’s present. The degree to which the plays have been geared towards the past or the present in performance has varied widely, with some landmark productions choosing to utilise contemporary settings and many others constructing medieval or Elizabethan contexts for the plays. This paper compares two contrasting examples: the RSC’s 2014 productions of the two parts of Henry IV, directed by Gregory Doran, and the Bell Shakespeare Company’s 2013 Henry IV, directed in Australia by John Bell and Damien Ryan. It situates them as, respectively, embracing historicist and presentist approaches to the plays and considers what their divergent representations of Henry IV’s England might say about the companies and the disparate cultural contexts in which they reproduce Shakespearean history.

History

Publication title

Shakespeare

Volume

11

Pagination

303-315

ISSN

1745-0918

Department/School

School of Humanities

Publisher

Routledge

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

Copyright 2015 Rosemary Gaby

Repository Status

  • Restricted

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