By Trevor Nunn for The Guardian, 12 September 2015
On day one of rehearsals, and in a crowd-pleasing attempt to explain to my company of actors just what it was that we were taking on, I told them that with his early history plays, Shakespeare had invented the box set. Much mirth of course, but actually, this claim is not far wide of the mark. At the very beginning of his writing career (which in my view started after he had begun his acting career), he wrote, or collaborated on, a play called Henry VI. It was popular and clearly created a craving in the playhouse audience to know what happened next. So he (they) wrote Henry VI, Part II – just like The Godfather, Part II – satisfying the demand for more. Further success and further demand producedHenry VI, Part III, and by then young William was almost certainly getting the sole writing credit. And so of course, he then followed them up (perhaps announcing that it was “the finale”) with the last part, Richard III.
But what is clear from performance records and from Shakespeare himself is that the whole saga was revived, and remained in the repertoire of Shakespeare’s company. At the end of Henry V (which might have been advertised as “the prequel”), the Chorus tells us that after England’s mighty achievement at Agincourt:
That they lost France …
Which oft our stage hath shown.
Of course, our stage hath shown the early history plays much less oft these days, and the cycle, from Henry VI through to Richard III very rarely indeed. Partly of course, that is due to the expense, and the sheer physical demands of a big acting company, sword fights and battles, and the necessary evocation of a 15th-century world. The plays are written in documentary detail, describing the ever changing relationship of England to France and the subsequent descent into civil war.
Updating to modern dress is not an option. While the saga is extraordinarily relevant to our war-torn contemporary world, through association and comparison (as we inwardly groan that nothing has changed), it can’t be through transposing the events to “now”.
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