The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History

by Barbara Hodgdon

Overview

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society—particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory, and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to recuperate and redirect their social energies. By giving special emphasis to theatrical reproduction as a form of textuality and to the intertextual relations between drama and other forms of history writing, Hodgdon situates performance as a type of new historicism and shows how theatrical productions, like critical discourse, participate in cultural work. Through a study of playtexts and selected performance texts, she negotiates between the critical and theatrical guises of Shakespeare to assess how past and present-day theatrical practice has appropriated his work to serve particular institutional and social practices.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691637198
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1162
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d)

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The End Crowns All

Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History

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By Barbara Hodgdon

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06833-6

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CHAPTER 1

"CHORUS TO THIS HISTORY"

My subject is closure and its contradictions in the ten plays First Folio (1623) calls "Histories"—The Life and Death of King John; The Life and Death of Richard the Second; The First and Second Parts of King Henry the Fourth; The Life of King Henry the Fift; The First, Second, and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixt; The Life and Death of Richard the Third-, and The Life of King Henry the Eight. Quite simply, I am interested in mapping how these plays, which close with and on sovereignty, fashion a sense of ending. I also want to read their narrative structures and rhetorical figuring in such a way as to open up the relations between the plays and their past as well as present-day historical contexts and, in the process, explore how such contexts contribute to shaping closure. Moreover, since I consider that a Shakespearean play exists in multiple states—as the words constituting the playtexts, as the readings based on those texts, and as their concrete, historically particular theatrical representations, or performance texts—my project encompasses all these forms of textuality or, to put it another way, several different "Shakespeares," each an altered, provisional state of what First Folio's title page calls "the True Originall copies."

Appropriately, then, I want to situate "the play" as one part of a larger intertext and to begin from a point outside its customary boundaries, with one historically particular "Shakespeare-closing." It is late evening on 31 December 1988 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the cast members are acknowledging spectators' applause for Adrian Noble's Plantagenets—Henry VI, The Rise of Edward IV, and Richard III, His Deaths—all three performed, in sequence, throughout the day. Just moments ago, in the performance text's final image, Richmond had stood in front of Richard's body, which had been impaled on Richard's own boar-spear; Richmond had raised the crown high above his head, proclaimed the end of the war dividing Lancaster and York, united the realm, and prayed for peace. Now, the company bow reveals that Richmond's army is made up primarily of women, giving a curious spin to the play's gender economy, which intensifies when, as the audience rises to a standing ovation, Penny Downie, who has played Queen Margaret, steps forward, thanks them for coming, and invites all to sing "Auld Lang Syne." Cued by Richard III's choral figure, who repeatedly and insistently reminds the play's other characters of past history, spectators take hands and sway slowly from side to side for a chorus of the familiar tune, joined together briefly at the turning of the year to commemorate their own endurance and their historical past, as remembered by a "Shakespeare" reified and remystified by a Royal Shakespeare Company production which itself looks back toward the institution's own past. In this oddly skewed but nonetheless apt coda, closure reaches beyond the play's last words, the actors' gestures and movements, their placement in stage space—beyond, too, the applause for both the play and the actors' individual contributions to its realization—to intersect with and, however briefly, reshape a wider cultural community. And if all ends, not, as in Richard III, with "Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again: / That she may long live here, God say Amen," but with "Should old acquaintance be forgot," that latter phrase also moves outward to encircle and capture spectators' assent, if not to the play's royal mythologizing, certainly to its theatrical reproduction.

While this curtain call locates one of the "Shakespeares" I will be speaking of in the recent past, such extended after-plays or memorial transactions are by no means exclusively a present-day phenomenon. Renaissance writers made distinctive, forthright claims for the capacity of plays to reach beyond their textual boundaries and so to perform similar cultural work. Among them, Thomas Heywood provides testimony to the affective powers of stage performances as well as to their ability to blur the distinctions between past and present, representation and reality:

To turn to our domestic histories, what English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hug his fame, and honey at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his heart all prosperous performance, as if the performer were the man personated, so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the hearts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.

Heywood's comments are inscribed not only within a body of writing that defines and defends the ability of poetry as well as plays to inspire and refashion ("new mold") readers and spectators but also, of course, within an extensive antitheatrical discourse of sermons, pamphlets, and official documents bearing hostile witness to the dangers inherent in theatrical representations, especially their potential to invert, interrogate, even contest, the dominant fictions of power. Discussing the capacity of Shakespeare's theater to reproduce, anatomize, and so to challenge cultural practices, Louis Adrian Montrose writes, "In some members of an audience, the openness of Shakespearean drama may create a disposition to work out the potentialities of the play experience within their own world, which resumes its normal flow after the characters' final exeunt. ... In the society in which Shakespeare lived, wrote, and acted, the practical effect of performing his plays may have been to encourage the expansion and evaluation of options.... Plays are provocations to thought and patterns for action." If, for Elizabethan and Jacobean spectators, the "ends" of plays and playing could indeed call cultural prerogatives into question and if plays could not only invite but insist on the powerful metaphorical equation between stage and world, what part does closure play in such potential transformations and exchanges?

Posed in this way, the question assumes, on the one hand, a critical preoccupation with closure and, on the other, a coordinate relationship between closure and cultural practice. Both strategies of reading draw on methodologies that would have been unthinkable to, say, a Samuel Johnson. Indeed, Johnson's famous opinion on Shakespeare's endings provides a rationale for ignoring them that has, until fairly recently, functioned as an invisible critical tool: "In many of his plays, the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labour, to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented." In drawing a line between the play as a commercial, and thus imperfectly ended, project and an ideal neoclassical form, Johnson hints at the contradictions between theatrical venturing or venues, where Shakespeare's plays were originally "published" as staged performances, and their later reconsideration, as printed texts, by audiences of critical readers. Similar contradictions pertain to issues of methodological inquiry. On the one hand, a formalist model can usefully explore how narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical figures control the developing textual process of closure and, finally, mediate between play and audience. But that enterprise, in turn, needs to intersect with historical inquiry. It has to ask how, in plays that take sovereignty as their subject, such formal features serve to negotiate a relationship central to Elizabethan and Jacobean culture—that between ruler and subjects—in order to articulate, or rearticulate, prevailing responses to the structure of experience and so invite connections between staged representation and the everyday circumstances that lie outside Montrose's conception of the theater as a paradoxically marginal and privileged cultural space. And in yet another locus for a historical Shakespeare, it is equally pertinent to ask how present-day performance texts reinterpret these signs, structures, and conventions, recuperate their social energies, and reinscribe their fictional power to perform such cultural work. Since one of my interests is in coordinating these methodologies, I want to set them in place by sketching a series of contexts for closure, beginning with Renaissance dramatic theory.

In spite of a prevailing obsession with classical forms, Renaissance theorists take the construction of closure and completeness in poetry and drama largely for granted. At the level of language, Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique and George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, handbooks that prescribe ways of fashioning language to various purposes, do no more than list "figures of ending," such as the rhetorical formulas for conclusio and peroratio that both writers copy from Cicero and Quintillian. But even Puttenham's epithonema, which he calls the surclose or consenting close, applies more to discrete units of oratorical discourse, as a figure that permits a speaker or writer to design and control parts of a larger argument, than to performed drama. Nor do Renaissance dramatic theorists provide anything more than a broad theoretical framework for the fundamental contribution an ending makes to a dramatic work. Classical theory, on which Renaissance writers built their structural rules—not, to be sure, consistently obeyed in practice—considers endings simply one principle contributing to an overall order. Speaking of tragedy as the "imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude," Aristotle defines "whole" as "that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end" and an ending as "that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as rule, but has nothing following it"—a definition not unlike Roland Barthes's analogy with the structure of a sentence: that closure is the site where the subject is fixed, or predicated. And Donatus's threefold division of comedy into protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe—the sudden conversion of affairs to a happy ending—echoes Aristotle's beginning, middle, and end, though connections between the two writers' thinking cannot be precisely made. Renaissance theorists synthesized this scheme, first applied to Terence's comedies by Donatus and subsequent commentators, with the five-act structure prescribed by Horace in the Ars Poetica, producing a method of construction and analysis that could be applied to any play, whether comic or tragic. But whatever structural prescriptions they may seek to enforce, such umbrella notions describe the stages of a dramatic narrative in generalized abstractions, leaving the playwright's (and his acting company's) invention relatively flexible and free. In framing his famous metaphor, the tying and loosing of a knot, Aristotle writes that "many poets tie the knot well, but unravel it ill," yet he gives no specific examples of "faulty" endings. Aside from Horace's warning, "Let no god intervene, unless a knot come worthy of such a deliverer," endings per se receive only scant attention. Seneca, for example, writing in Epistolae ad Lucilium, has only this to say: "Crown the drama with a fine last scene."

Discussing language, usage, and style in Discoveries, Ben Jonson comes closer than any classical or Renaissance theorist to noting that endings require special attention: "Our composition must be more accurate in the beginning and end, than in the midst; and in the end more, than in the beginning; for through the midst the stream bears us." Indeed, Jonson even inscribes his neoclassical precepts into an encounter between theory and its perception in the between-act choruses of The Magnetic Lady. In each, Probee, the author's boy, and the untutored spectator Damplay comment on the play's structure and progress. Through their discussion, Jonson presents his understanding of the Horace-Donatus-Terence synthesis, slightly modified by Scaliger's notion of catastasis, or counterturn, which the boy has already mentioned in the act I Chorus. In the Chorus that bridges acts 4 and 5, Probee and the boy instruct Damplay, who longs for the play to be over, on the dramatic artistry of endings:

DAMPLAY. Why, here his Play might have ended, if he would ha' let it; and have spar'd us the vexation of a fifth Act yet to come, which every one here knows the issue of already, or may in part conjecture.

BOY. That conjecture is a kind of Figure-flinging, or throwing the Dice, for a meaning was never in the Poet's purpose perhaps. Stay, and see his last Act, his Catastrophe, how he will perplex that, or spring some fresh cheat, to entertain the Spectators, with a convenient delight, till some unexpected, and new encounter break out to rectify all, and make good the Conclusion.

PROBEE. Which, ending here, would have shown dull, flat, and unpointed; without any shape, or sharpness, Brother Damplay.

DAMPLAY. Well, let us expect then: and wit be with us, o' the Poet's part.

These remarks reveal that act 4, the latter part of the epitasis, both tightens the "knots" of act 3 and shows some conclusion: Damplay knows, or can conjecture, the end. But the Boy suggests that the conclusions already reached are neither ultimate (the catastasis will "perplex" them) nor satisfactory (Probee's "dull, flat, and unpointed"). Act 5, then, has a twofold function: it springs a "fresh cheat," as well as "some unexpected and new encounter" that rectifies all, and "make[s] good the Conclusion." And even though Damplay can anticipate the play's end, he remains willing, after this explanation, to "expect"—not necessarily what happens next but how the Poet's wit will give "shape, or sharpness" to the long-awaited resolution. What Damplay learns—that endings require close attention and depend not only on knowing "the issue" but also on potential narrative surprises, enhanced by the Poet's shaping—transforms him into a neoclassically informed, newly critical spectator.

Two other theatergoers, Nell and George, the citizen-grocers of Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle, are even more unsophisticated than Jonson's Damplay. They fail to follow the complications of either plot or character in The London Merchant, the play they constantly interrupt by speaking to the actors and by insisting that Rafe, their apprentice, be allowed to demonstrate his Hotspur-like specialty, "a couraging part." Structural unity eludes them; they desire only to see episodes, reprises of familiar scenes in shorthand versions that highlight spectacle and melodramatic rhetoric. But however obtuse and aesthetically naive Nell and George may be, their Philistine reputation is somewhat undeserved; they are experts on the generic signs and rhetorical conventions of endings. The London Merchant achieves resolution with Old Merrythought's song celebrating Luce and Jasper's love, with speeches of reconciliation and forgiveness, and with an imminent marriage. Recognizing these signs of "happy ending," George comments, "Everybody's part is come to an end but Rafe's, and he's left out." Nell then suggests, and George agrees, that Rafe "come out and die," but the players' Boy reminds them that no reason exists for Rafe's death and that dying is "unfit" in a comedy. However, George will not listen: "Is not his part at an end, think you, when he's dead?" His wishes prevail, and Rafe concludes his role as aspiring actor-wandering knight with a wildly parodic death speech in which he recapitulates a fateful romantic past, even comparing the forked arrow through his head to the cuckold's horns. This draws Nell's praise: it is all she could have hoped for, and she directs Rafe to exit. Now the players rescue their play from Rafe's death throes with a group song that reasserts comic finality; its last couplet even glances, with perhaps ironic generosity, at Rafe's death: "Hey ho, 'tis nought but mirth / That keeps the body from the earth." This celebratory song satisfies George: "Come, Nell, shall we go? The play's done." But Nell has "more manners." She knows that convention demands an Epilogue: one must thank audience members for their patience (she even invites them to her house for wine and tobacco); ask for applause, at their discretion; and seek God's blessing for them all.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The End Crowns All by Barbara Hodgdon. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. ix
• ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. xi
• PREFACE, pg. xv
• CHAPTER 1. "Chorus to This History", pg. 3
• CHAPTER 2. Fashioning Obedience: King John's "True Inheritors", pg. 22
• CHAPTER 3. Enclosing Contention: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, pg. 44
• CHAPTER 4. "The Coming On of Time": Richard III, pg. 100
• CHAPTER 5. "If I Turn Mine Eyes upon Myself": Richard II, pg. 127
• CHAPTER 6. "Let the End Try the Man": 1 and 2 Henry IV, pg. 151
• CHAPTER 7. "A Full and Natural Close, Like Music": Henry V, pg. 185
• CHAPTER 8. Uncommon Women and Others: Henry VIIÌs "Maiden Phoenix", pg. 212
• CHAPTER 9. "No Epilogue, I Pray You", pg. 235
• NOTES, pg. 239
• INDEX, pg. 287