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    Acts of supremacy
    Acts of supremacy
    Acts of supremacy
    Ebook456 pages6 hours

    Acts of supremacy

    By Manchester University Press

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2021
    ISBN9781526162953
    Acts of supremacy

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      Acts of supremacy - Manchester University Press

      INTRODUCTION

      Why people dress themselves up and act out characters and stories, and why other people go out of their way to watch them, is as difficult to explain as it is basic to human society. It is more complex even than the act of literary creation, the telling of stories, because the actor not only creates a fiction, an alternative history, but also pretends that s/he is living in it, in a different world mysteriously made manifest within the present moment. And when this pretence is presented, the majority of people will actively collaborate with the pretenders, and themselves pretend that they believe the actors are who they say they are, and can do what they claim to be doing. The power of this mutual act of pretending, through the pleasure it creates and the needs and functions which it fulfills, is very great, and has many levels. It must be understood in relationship to the individual experience of the audience member, the group awareness of the audience as a whole, and the intersubjectivity – the shared experience and feelings – of the society to which those individuals belong. Performance will enter the consciousness of the participators on all these levels, and may therefore influence their construction of their world in any of its aspects, affecting the way they see themselves and other people, how they think about the world around them and their place in it. The essays in this volume all try to understand the kind of cultural work done by theatrical representation, as it relates to a particular and hugely influential phenomenon in British culture for more than a hundred years: British imperialism.

      The Empire appeared pervasively in the nation’s theatrical life during the nineteenth century. Consider these verses:

      In come I, King George, the champion bold,

      I won ten thousand pound in gold.

      ‘Twas I that fought the fiery dragon and brought it to a slaughter,

      And by these deeds won the King of Egypt’s daughter.

      I’ve travelled the whole world round and round,

      And never a man of my equal found.

      If you don’t believe these words I say,

      Step in, Black Prince, and clear the way.

      In comes I, Black Prince of Paradise, born of high renown,

      This night I’ve come to bring King George’s life and courage down.

      If that be he that standeth there,

      That slew my master’s son and heir,

      If that be he of royal blood,

      I’ll make it flow like Noah’s flood.

      Stand back thou black Moroccan dog

      Or by my sword thou’ll die.

      I’ll pierce thy body full of holes

      And make thy buttons fly ...¹

      The Antrobus Soulcaking Play, from which these introductory speeches come, is an extreme instance of the function of theatre in a community, and therefore of the part it can play in symbolic discourses of social belonging and exclusion. Very near the centre of public performance is the dramatisation of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In this instance, there are two such polarities in simultaneous operation: the whole play articulates the local v. outsider opposition, with some of ‘us’ understood to be representing ‘them’; and, within the fiction, an opposition is played out between the conquering British and the rest. King George and the Black Prince, played by known local men who are the inheritors of their roles in the local seasonal drama, appear in the ritual Hero Combat; they fight, the national representative triumphs, but the Black Prince is revived, and both are prevented from further battle and sent off, to ‘live to fight another day’, while other figures occupy the stage. At the end they all unmask, and merge back into the community drinking in the pub. The actors are familiars, who once a year mask themselves to represent a group of outsiders who are demonised but also familiarised and contained by the play. King George wears a British soldier’s uniform; the Black Prince adopts signs of difference, a foreign helmet and a blackened face. Each actor, but neither character, is ‘one of us’. The enactment of national triumph is carried out under obviously assumed identities, and the conflict is contained, its impact on normal life controlled, by seeing it thus played. The soulcaking play, which probably developed in this form to cement village community feeling while it was under intense pressure from the changes taking place in the early nineteenth century,² is doing work analogous to public performances of many other kinds, at every level of professionalism, capital investment and State control.

      It can be argued that all performance deals with ‘the problems of finding and maintaining identity, of establishing the self in the real world’ and with challenges to identity – ‘the joint activity of actor and audience [is] ... a means by which man [sic] attempts to complete his relation to the world, especially to everything in the world that strikes him as dangerous or strange.’³ This perception applies as much if not more forcefully to the communal identity fostered by theatrical performance as it does to more private aspects of individuation. The part played by performance, therefore, in the structure of feeling peculiar to any historical moment is centrally important; and during most of the nineteenth century theatre’s contribution to the maintenance of the hegemonic ideology was to focus this identity-making through the discourse of British imperialism. The stereotypes presented here offer a crude imperialist paradigm: King George announces that he has ‘won’ wealth and women from the Orient, and believes himself better than any other man in the world; the Prince is black, boastful, proud and vengeful, all aspects of the Oriental stereotype,⁴ and he offers an unsuccessful challenge to the British overlord. However, the conspicuous containment of the Empire’s triumph within the presented pretence, and therefore the consignment of protagonist as well as antagonist to the category of the Other, can be argued to modify its meaning significantly; the position of imperialism within the culture negotiated by this play is by no means straightforwardly dominant. In this the traditional, amateur mumming play, like every enactment of such typologies and paradigms on nineteenth-century stages, actively engaged with imperialist ideology rather than passively reflecting it. Theatre contributed vividly and powerfully, but in complex and sometimes qualified ways, to the web of meaning generated and maintained by official documents, news reportage, romantic adventure stories, military and economic argument, political debate and commercial exploitation whereby the Empire was naturalised. The project of this volume is to explore imperialism’s rhetorical forms in a wide spectrum of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century performances. A reading of such performances discloses the imperialist claim that the Englishman is the natural leader of the world; but it also reveals stress points and problems of imperialist discourse, and the means by which it negotiated consent in order to override rational scepticism, perceived self-interest, and potentially rival or oppositional ideologies.

      During the spring of 1880 the Royal Aquarium in London had an exhibition of Zulus, which included ‘three of Cetewayo’s daughters’.⁵ This represents, perhaps, the most basic level at which show business reproduced imperialism. The instinctive curiosity about the deviant or the exotic was focused upon a recently-defeated subject group; with the excuse of a pseudo-scientific authenticity, real people were made the objects of public diversion, confirming the inferiority attributed to them by framing them in a way which constituted them as specimens, and limited their humanity to a secondary order. The fact that they included three women supposed to be daughters of the defeated King Cetshwayo both enhanced their authenticity – they were not just any black people but prime examples of the Zulu tribe – and increased their symbolic value as trophies, spoils of war exhibited on the principle of the Roman triumph. This interplay of triumphalism, an intellectual quasi-scientific discourse concerned with constructing a hierarchical ethnology, and the perennial attractions of the pseudo-educational spectacle, can be observed in numberless variations throughout the period. Its theatricality is important, in that while one formal requirement of such displays is that they claim authenticity, the unmediated presentation of reality, they always determine what is seen through other formal means and structures which make the display conform to the demands of the discourse. No black person (or Scot or Irish person, for that matter) appeared in a public show without being re-produced by that presentation.

      This is also evident at the level of narrative: during the nineteenth century theatres and other live shows performed many of the functions now explicitly regarded as documentary and supposed to be non-fictional, and, then as now, the world of events was significantly modified by its presentation through a medium which also carried the world of entertainment. Theatres attracted interest by the topicality and relevance of a play’s title and supposed subject-matter, perhaps explicitly claiming to deal with authentic information, but the tale told was endowed with meaning by formal principles not determined by the events it supposedly reflected or reported. The popular interest in imperial news – whether in the form of public debate, shifting official policy or the progress of territorial expansion and foreign wars – was commonly inflected and conditioned by its presentation in terms of representation of earlier events already discursively incorporated, the reiteration of the most satisfactory actions from a dramatic (and therefore effectively hegemonic) point of view. Wars, for example, would tend to elicit re-enactments of the triumphs of Nelson’s navy, however superficially irrelevant the national conviction of Britain’s superiority at sea: at crisis points in the long-drawn-out struggle to incorporate Ireland in the United Kingdom, key moments of long-past events in that history were represented; and in the most apparently strange sidestep of all, the slave play scenario, which shows the noble and suffering black liberated by the English hero, was made the narrative basis of several plays staged in London as a response to the repudiation of that patronage in the Sepoy Mutiny. This is not to say that the changes in imperialism over the century were not executed on the stage as in every other area of discursive practice, but that one has always to look obliquely to see the correspondences between event and incorporation, and that we should not expect the deliberate topicality of commercial stage presentation to be transparent, directly representing either imperial policy or its popular reception. Cultural negotiation is conducted through the prismatic structures peculiar to its several forms, which are determined by the need to reconcile many transactions simultaneously performed.

      The most important of these other transactions in the nineteenth century were concerned with hegemonic practices nearer home. Imperialist discourse interacted with regional and class discourses; imperialism’s incorporation of Welsh, Scots and Irish identities, and of the working class subjects of all four countries, was both necessary to its own success and one of its most powerful functions in terms of the control of British society. Much nineteenth- and twentieth-century debate about imperialism has been concerned with its manifest power, by the 1890s, to override and even to supersede class consciousness, creating a unity of feeling which has seemed wonderful and reprehensible, inspiring or horrifying, according to the position of the analyst. Theatrical and quasi-theatrical presentations, whether in music hall, clubroom, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre or the streets and ceremonial spaces of the capital, made an obvious contribution to that much-discussed national mood. They played a large part in the creation and propagation of the ‘traditions’ of the nation, supplanting local, fragmented and potentially subversive histories. The cultural negotiations involved were sometimes complicated. Consent to identification with heroic images of the British had to be secured by the presentation of potentially contradictory and anti-heroic figures and actions, to be incorporated rather than suppressed by the narrative. Existing communal and personal self-images could not be simply ignored or replaced but had to be shown to belong within the larger imperial identity instead of standing in opposition to it. The issues of loyalty and identity involved still cannot be finally resolved – the distinct languages of the various peoples of the United Kingdom, for example, continuing to present ineradicable marks of differences of interest – and these conflicts are therefore played out, over and over again, until ‘there was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman...’has become to the majority a ‘harmless’ joke. In terms of class discourses, a very common transaction in the Victorian theatre was the interpellation of every Briton, however humble, not as a member of his class but as an empire-builder, and a natural superior of the other races and nations of the world. There were also less overt hegemonic practices involved, especially in the construction of ‘them’ not simply as the Other, all that is opposed and hostile to us, but as a projection of those things in ourselves that we do not wish to countenance or acknowledge. On to the transgressive and hostile imperial subject on stage the audience could project all sorts of anti-social characteristics, and these could well be the same evils which were condemned as characterising the working class, and which also present problems of control in the individual psyche. The stage, therefore, offered a framed and bracketed space in which licence, violence, irresponsibility, physicality and other such enjoyable but antisocial acts or sensations could be savoured and then rejected and denied. The nature of the audience enjoyment of the spectacle of the demonised aspects of the self must vary according to the class position of the individual, and all the other factors which make up psychological identity on conscious and subconscious levels. The possible complexity of these negotiations, which even on the nineteenth-century stage were psychological, social and emotional as well as imperialist and hegemonic in class terms, is almost inexhaustible.

      It follows that the complexity of these discursive interactions must have been supported by a similarly complex representational structure, an apparatus of theatrical convention and practice which could generate many overlapping meanings. The nineteenth-century stage drew upon the conventions of representation in many ways, often putting them to new and startling uses, while retaining their older resonances to enrich and legitimate new meanings. The pastoral convention, for example, is a trope with deep roots in western culture, connoting positive values, idealism and the affirmation of life, which was used in extraordinary ways to validate the new ideologies. Melodrama uses the idealisation of Old England as represented by the supposed virtues and joys of the rural community – pastoral innocence and fertility – to provide concrete images to embody the domestic ideology which the British Empire claimed to propagate across the world. The touchstone of home could be emotionally reinforced in sentimental song with the addition of Scots or Irish local colour, in the characteristically nostalgic emigrant’s dream of home. The emotional colouring of pastoralism could be applied to the native village transported from various places in the Empire to be displayed in London, or reproduced in shows and circuses around the country, in a picture which compounded images of innocence (access to which was somehow gained by appropriation of the image, and of the territory from which it came) with images of savagery and backwardness (making civilised intervention a Christian duty). Even the slave plantation, as represented in minstrel song, was laden with nostalgic and pastoral imagery and so ameliorated. The convention imposed upon all these various sites of oppression and appropriation an ideological interpretation, naming them beautiful and desirable, an ideal for which all should be happy to suffer; and since by definition ideals are unattainable, the patent artifice of the convention did not weaken its emotional power.

      The convention of the pastoral, the Golden Age of rural innocence, is not necessarily very interesting of itself – to nineteenth-century audiences as well as to us, its imagery was no doubt threadbare, the combination of familiarity in song and story and increasing distance from quotidian experience having worn away the poignancy of its appeal. But the known pattern, recognised in new manifestations, was capable of powerful effects when it was put to new uses, interacting with unfamiliar, acutely felt and potentially painful new experience. The old emotion freshly felt could be welcomed for itself, and for the familiarising pattern it imposed upon the new and perhaps dislocating emotional encounters. Hence the miner’s dream of home, the old folks at home, the little grey home in the west, are images very successfully employing the convention for ideological ends in the new age: they evoke emotional rejection of and rebellion against the demands of empire-building and the encounter with inimical cultures, in order to capture that strong feeling in a conventional form which redirects it. As a result the pain of separation is felt not as an oppression but as inevitable, and moreover the activities which have caused the separation are presented as necessary to the perpetuation and defence of the valued object. This operation of convention might be seen in two ways. It is, it can be argued, part of the function of ideological discourse: the language in which experience is framed and discussed determines the ways in which it is perceived and thought about, so that conventions of this kind, which operate to shape new events by means of old patterns which have a predetermined range of meanings, pre-empt free and conscious engagement with ethical and political problems. If the emigrant’s suffering is nostalgia for his village home, it is part of the universal condition, not something created by expansionist policies which might be gainsaid. On the other hand, the very familiarity of the convention employed might suggest another way of conceiving its function. The presence of recognisably formal, patently artificial elements in a performance might be said to alert the audience, rather than to lull their mental responses; might render it possible for the refreshed, newly invigorated conventional pattern to be enjoyed, without obliging the recipient to assume that it represents reality. Those who confuse fiction with life have often enough been made the subject of derision; there is no reason to assume that the experienced and sophisticated urban audiences of the nineteenth century were any less able to recognise convention than were the readers of Cervantes. Both these approaches to the interpretation of theatrical meanings should be kept in mind.

      The pastoral convention is a minor element in the theatrical artifice which this book will consider; much more important to the function of theatre in negotiating identity, which is our central concern in relating it to imperialist discourse, is the formalisation and conventionalising of the concept of character, via the mechanism of the stereotype. Stereotyping is a mental activity condemned without a second thought by the more simplistic and moralising modern critical arguments, as the root of almost all the evils of misprision, injustice and oppression from which we suffer. Simply forbid and punish stereotypes, so this piety runs, and we will relate to each other as our real selves, encountering each other without prejudice and in limitless good will. The difficulty is that without the mental activity of discrimination of which stereotyping is the first tool we learn, we would be without any sense of a real self with which to begin. Sander L. Gilman, discussing stereotypes of sexuality, race and madness around 1900,⁶ contends that stereotypes are rooted ‘in the myth-making made necessary by our need to control the world’ and that ‘we cannot function in the world without them’. While Gilman’s assertion that stereotyping is an ‘innate and ungovernable human need’ remains speculative, he is nevertheless right to claim that stereotyping itself ‘has acquired catastrophic potential at a pace roughly in step with technological advances in our ability to harm one another’ (pp. 12, 16). His account of the mechanism by which stereotyping emerges and operates is as follows:

      The creation of stereotypes is a concomitant of the process by which all human beings become individuals. Its beginnings lie in the earliest stages of our development. The infant ’s movement from a state of being in which everything is perceived as an extension of the self to a growing sense of separate identity takes place between the ages of a few weeks and about five months. During that stage, the new sense of ‘difference’ is directly acquired ... With the split of both the self and the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects, the ‘bad’ self is distanced and identified with the mental representation of the ‘bad’ object... The deep structure of our own sense of self and the world is built upon the illusionary image of the world divided into two camps, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ‘They’ are either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’... Stereotypes are a crude set of mental representations of the world. They are palimpsests on which the initial bipolar representations are still vaguely legible. They perpetuate a needed sense of difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘object’, which becomes the ‘Other. ‘ Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; ... this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. This can be observed in the shifting relationship of antithetical stereotypes that parallel the existence of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ representation of self and Other ... We can move from fearing to glorifying the Other ... The most negative stereotype always has an overtly positive counterweight. As any image is shifted, all stereotypes shift ... Stereotypes arise when self-integration is threatened. They are therefore part of our way of dealing with the instabilities of our perception of the world. This is not to say that they are good, only that they are necessary, (pp. 17–18)

      He goes on to argue that it is only the pathological personality which relies so heavily on maintaining the line of difference that it lacks the ability to create sophisticated rational categories alongside the stereotypes, and deal with people as individuals. To suggest, therefore, that the British public at large in the nineteenth century were unable to make this mental reservation is to suggest that an imperialist nation is in a state of anxiety so acute as to make psychopaths of all its members. While this is plainly not the case, Gilman suggests that the beginnings of the science of psychology in the late nineteenth century were not unconnected with a perceived need to begin to bring increasingly dangerous mental processes into the realm of understanding, and more effectively to stave off the tendency to pathological aggression.

      The discussions that follow will all draw on his account of the creation and use of stereotypes to control the self and the world, and explore the often complex relations between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, Others and selves, and their interaction with more sophisticated national categories and perceptions of individuality. It is undesirable, however, to go so far as Gilman in arguing absolutely for the necessity of the stereotyping process in the symbolic reproduction of group identities and boundaries. We acknowledge with Lippmann, who was the first to offer a conceptual formulation of stereotypes,⁷ that ‘the need for economising attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes would impoverish human life’ (p. 60). But we would also stress, with him, that what matters ‘is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them’, for ‘if our philosophy tells us that each man [sic] is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly’ (p. 60). Stage performance offers audiences, individually and collectively, a rich assortment of stereotypes and a locus for relation to them which has greatly varied potential. The emotional response elicited may be blindly, pathologically crude, or, at the other extreme, the complexities of performance may offer a unique opportunity for the individual to become aware of stereotyping as a mental activity rather than a reflection of reality, and so to acquire the beginnings of detachment and understanding. Yet the most crucial aspect of this way of conceptualising stereotyping processes and responses to them is that they should be neutral. Stereotypical patterning ‘is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights’ (pp. 63–4). The corollary of such patterning is that it so often involves the denial of the identities, humanity, and rights of other people, and the significance of this in the context of British imperialist discourse has been fundamental.

      It is our contention that one of the functions of art in a national culture is to form part of the discourses of power; in theatrical presentation one may see this operate in, for example, the generation of subversion in order to contain it, and the definition and display of subversives and enemies in order to subjugate them. This is a routine operation of all discourses of power, but it is particularly necessary for colonial and imperial power, which is both more and less monolithic than regal or State power, more in need of a justifying self-image and more beset by the conflicting claims of those it seeks to dominate. ‘Colonialist discourse voices a demand both for order and disorder, producing a disruptive other in order to assert the superiority of the coloniser ... Colonialist discourse does not simply announce a triumph for civility, it must continuously produce it, and this work involves struggle and risk... [there is a] complex relation between the intention to produce colonialist stereotypicality, [and] its beleaguerments and even its possible erosion in the face of the other.’⁸ The crucial negotiations of this discourse can thus be seen as crises of self-confidence – identity crises. And this brings us back to the special power of theatrical presentation in dealing with identity.

      As an instance of the analytical model outlined so far, this introduction will conclude with a brief discussion of the nineteenth-century manifestations of a text associated from its beginnings until the present day with the creation of stereotypes of British identity and of the enemy Others, and therefore with colonialist and imperialist discourses. The writing and first production of Shakespeare’s Henry V was, at least in part, a response to a crisis of empire, when the Earl of Essex went to Ireland to subdue rebellion against the English crown; its latest production at the time of writing, at the Old Vic in 1989, related the play to images of British nationalism and aggression crystallised by the last throes of British imperialism, the Falklands Campaign of 1982.

      Cultural materialist criticism of Shakespeare has already begun to debate the part played by seventeenth-century drama in the creation and maintenance of the first British empire. Macherey and Balibar have described Shakespeare’s ideological work as creating an ‘imaginary solution of implacable contradictions ... a ‘‘presentation as solution’’ of the very terms of an insurmountable contradiction, by means of complex displacements and substitutions’.⁹ Dollimore and Sinfield considering Henry V conclude that ‘even in this play, which is often assumed to be the one where Shakespeare is closest to state propaganda, the construction of ideology is complex – even as it consolidates, it betrays inherent instability’ by revealing the ‘existence of ... a profound structural flaw at the centre of state power’ and therefore affording ‘a cardinal exemplification of why the representation of ideological containment so often proves complex and ambiguous’. The play is concerned with the negotiation of problems in national unity: Dollimore and Sinfield demonstrate that the text is obsessively preoccupied with insurrection, and ‘committed to the aesthetic colonisation’ of resistance to the king’s authority: ‘systematically, antagonism is reworked as subordination or supportive alignment’. But in pursuing this end, they claim, the text shows that recognition of the importance of the ideological dimension of authority renders it vulnerable to demystification: it is full of people voicing objections to Henry’s wars. The issues of unity and division, inclusion and exclusion, are inseparable. Triumph over all opposition is shown to be very temporary. The ‘ceremony’ speech (4.1.218–72),¹⁰ which slides into desperate prayer to the ‘God of battles’, and then the brutally short statement of the transience of the reign’s conquests in the epilogue, acknowledges that success in subordinating all to the single source of power in the State, Henry himself, is a rare and precarious achievement, scarcely more than a fantasy.¹¹

      This is a reading of Shakespeare’s text as printed; making use of the historical imagination, and especially of the literary tools of verbal and dramatic analysis, the modem critics uncover the breaks and flaws which render the play’s ideological activity problematic. But stage texts are created, their meaning is freshly determined, in each production and indeed in each individual performance. A play may never have had the effects the critic envisages from the page; and if they are transmitted, they will be newly shaped by each occasion. Gary Taylor¹² has shown from textual analysis how Henry V was immediately modified to offer a more straightforwardly patriotic reading by seventeenth-century touring companies. Even in interpreting particular productions, no definitive and single meaning can safely be adduced: Holderness, for example, has claimed that Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Henry V has ‘an ideological tendency which is quite different from – and potentially contrary to – its ideology of patriotism, unity and just war’, but he admits that all the viewers he has ever asked remembered it simply in terms of its thrilling relevance to the current crisis. In such a case, the critic’s perception of problematic possibilities is of questionable importance in assessing the production’s meaning; a more proper proceeding would be to attempt to interpret the peculiarities of the production in terms of their perceived effect. Holderness maintains that the framing device in the film, the reconstructed Elizabethan theatre, is intended to make the audience aware that ‘once the real historical foundations of these ideologies are recognised, they lose their power to charm’.¹³ But it appears that audiences were all thoroughly charmed; so another explanation is required. It would be closer to the observed effect of the film to say that its reconstructed Globe is partly a deliberate exploitation of ‘the Shakespeare myth’ itself, alongside the story of the play, adding another dimension to the exaltation of England – not only a country righteously at war but also culturally supreme – and partly a means of manipulating and ensuring consent. Olivier was offering ‘Shakespeare’s play of Henry V’, a performance, in which the patriotic feeling of 1944 could be endorsed and bolstered, banishing weariness and self-doubt. The framework involving the theatre, like the film’s dedication to ‘the Commandos and Air-borne Troops of Great Britain’, of whom Olivier himself was one – he interrupted his service in the Fleet Air Arm to make the film – were part of the ideological work he was doing, and of its use by the audience. Actor/serviceman and an audience at war agreed together, on an almost conscious level, to generate feelings of patriotism and combat doubt and despair by rehearsing a story told by the national poet. No mystification is necessary in the operation of ideology when consent is waiting to be organised; and the recognition, and the mutual resolution, of ambiguities and conflicts is what theatre handles best.¹⁴

      If such an understanding of the creation of meaning is sought in the Victorian and Edwardian productions of Henry V, it is apparent that its ideological possibilities were focused on specifically imperialist issues. Between the releasing of the legitimate repertoire for production by any licensed theatre in 1843, and the end of the century, there were four or five major productions of Henry V in Britain. Samuel Phelps staged it as the twenty-third in his series of revivals at Sadler’s Wells, in the ebulliently patriotic year of the Great Exhibition, and redeemed a poor season at the box office as well as winning himself a royal command to perform at Windsor in 1853. Charles Kean’s production in 1859 was the last and perhaps the most spectacular of all his Shakespearean stagings at the Princess’s. Charles Calvert was similarly following through a series of lavishly-staged revivals when he mounted the play at the Prince’s Theatre in Manchester in 1872. Inspired by these successes, John Coleman in 1875 at the Queen’s (Long Acre) and Augustus Harris embarking upon his life work at Drury Lane in 1879 both chose to launch their careers in large-scale management with the play. George Rignold, playing the lead and also producing the play for Harris, copied extensively from Calvert’s production, down to the inclusion of quasi-scholarly notes on heraldry in his programme, and Coleman actually borrowed Kean’s designs, and realised them with added flourishes of authenticity, including a Coronation Chair modelled from photographs taken in Westminster Abbey, and real soldiers for the battles and triumphs.¹⁵

      These productions can be read as building a tradition for staging the play, within the central Victorian production mode of spectacular pictorialism and illustrative historical accuracy. As they remade it, Henry V was perhaps the best possible vehicle for managers intent upon substantiating the claim that the stage educated and uplifted by its power to breathe life into history, and to deliver the national bard to the eyes and hearts of the people. Kean claimed, quite without any evidence, that Henry was ‘Shakespeare’s favorite hero, and England’s favorite king’¹⁶ and made the play into a pageant, turning Shakespearean drama into unproblematic pictures of military triumph, and interpolating an elaborate historical episode showing Henry received by the cheering populace of London and a fifty-strong choir. By 1872, however, not only had historical reconstruction begun to meet with criticism as mere ‘upholstery’ substituting for art but universal consent to British chauvinism was not quite so simply invoked. Calvert’s Shakespearean productions were still lavishly ‘illustrated’, but more subtlety was employed in organising the response to Henry V. He presented the battle of Agincourt (which Shakespeare kept off the stage altogether) as a huge still life, a battle picture which froze three hundred men on stage around Henry, dismounted, hand to hand with the Duke of Alençon still on horseback. This was regularly encored, men and horses patiently manoeuvred off stage and back again into their heroic tableau. The possibility of such a repeated savouring of the moment should alert us to a complexity which underlies the apparent transparency of the pictorial method. Like the organisation of consent to patriotic excitement in Olivier’s 1944 film version of the play, which deliberately distanced the action by framing it in a representation of the Elizabethan stage, Calvert’s theatrical method relied for its effect on a deliberate and willing participation by the audience. The picture was not a ‘realistic’ illusion of the battle, appealing to partisan excitement; intensely picturesque, but standing stock still, it was an icon of history and a triumph of modern skill,

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