Louis Fantasia - Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen

Louis Fantasia

Americans have mixed feelings about monarchs and monarchies. We revolted against one, yet, in our periodic yearnings for the trappings of the occasional imperial presidency we sometimes wish we had a king. We embrace, unknowingly perhaps, the medieval concept of the kings two bodies, often equating the health and stability of the man (almost always men in Shakespeare) who rules, with the body politic of the country itself, whether it is the Life magazine-style glamour of Kennedys Camelot or the Twitter-fed tribalism of Trumps American carnage.

Americans, speaking again very broadly, tend to view Shakespeares histories through the first of these two bodies. We look to the plays for a study of the man, not the monarchy: Hals growing up, Hamlets angst, Richard IIIs seductive villainy, Lears madness, etc. Then we pause and look kindly, if not condescendingly, on the political bits, cutting them where we can (maybe the Brits get this stuff, I dont) or trying to make them relevant (setting the Henriads in the American Civil War, for example). All of which tends to imbue the plays with an over-coating of rugged American individualism that I am not sure Shakespeare had in mind (as if one could ever know).

One of the ways recent productions have tried to counter this, as several of our contributors point out, is to have women play the kings (not that women cant be rugged individualists, let me hasten to add). It seems from the essays in this volume, as well as other recent commentaries, that the casting of women, and particularly women of color, has a democratizing effect on these plays; that their kingships seem more collaborative and their relationships less self-aggrandizing than when performed by men. But is that what Shakespeare intended (again, as if one could ever know)? Or does it simply frame the individualism through an alternative lens? A refreshing and 1 | 2 needed lens, but an individualistic lens nonetheless. Is there yet another lens through which we can read the plays as more about the public body politic, than the private one?

Jan Kott, in his seminal study The Kings, wrote of history as a Grand Mechanism, a staircase or a great wheel, on which a Henry or Richard is always rising or climbing to the top while another of the same name is tumbling down. History is a ruthless machine, implacable and impersonal. There was no Lords anointed in Shakespeares view of history, Kott argued, only a lust for power that drove monarchs to chop off heads, build or break alliances, and busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels ( HIV2 , 4.1.37230). But when Henry V reads out the list of English dead after the battle of Agincourt, those mentioned are nobility, like himself, the one per-center band of brothers. Of those of no name but five and twenty who died ( HV , 4.8.110), both Hal and Kott seem to have forgotten the likes of Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, Fang, Bullcalf, Snare and Davy, who Shakespeare and Falstaff use for cannon fodder in Henry IV, Part 2 . To the one percent they are indeed of no name.