David Carnegie

‘So the Falklands. So Agincourt. “Fuck the Frogs”’: Michael Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses

‘It is not at all clear,’ says Stephen Greenblatt, ‘that Henry V can be successfully performed as subversive.’1 Yet not only Henry V, but both tetralogies of Shakespeare’s extended chronicle of English history, are cited by Isobel Armstrong in a challenge to Greenblatt: ‘the English Shakespeare Company’s reading of the plays, [with their] sense of theatre, clarity of diction and intellectual control … makes Greenblatt’s thesis look questionable … by making the plays not so much a display of ideological containment as a study of the way a monarchy under strain maintains power and legitimises itself.’2

Locale in Cardenio, Double Falsehood, Don Quixote and Wellington

This essay deals with locale in Lewis Theobalds 1727 play Double Falsehood on the early eighteenth-century English stage, and in Gary Taylors “creative reconstruction” of it as The History of Cardenio in a production I directed on a twenty-first century New Zealand stage. Lying behind both these is the presumptive lost Fletcher/Shakespeare collaborative play Cardenio performed on the Jacobean stage in 1613; and Cervantess novel Don Quixote, the source of the story. My concerns will lie with the court, the village, the city, the mountains and, eventually, New Zealand; and more particularly with the way in which performance may highlight or solve problems inherent in the text.