The RSC's ‘Glorious Moment’ and the Making of Shakespearian History

Summary

Whose forgetting? Whose memory? Whose history?

Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead

Before I left Philadelphia on a madcap voyage to Stratford to see Shakespeare's two history tetralogies performed over a four-day weekend, a colleague who thought me rather deranged for undertaking this adventure during the teaching term remarked sardonically that ‘Jack Cade's Rebellion, the most trite episode in all of Shakespeare’, would surely make my trip worthwhile. Admittedly, Michael Boyd's ‘Glorious Moment’ – the title of this ‘once in a lifetime’ theatrical event – was a form of Extreme Shakespeare not for the faint of heart (or hind). But its rendition of Cade's Rebellion provides an improbably elegant entry point for theorizing the intersection between event-based theatrical phenomena and the construction of Shakespearian history. In this production of 2 Henry VI, Dick the Butcher, one of Cade's followers, wore a bloody apron and punctuated his speech with the emphatic wave of a bloody meat cleaver. Stripped to the waist, he had scrawled on his chest (in more blood) the obstinate declaration, ‘We're ’istry’.

Who are ‘we’, and what history is being claimed here? On its surface, the statement asserts the rebels’ right to control and construct events according to popular rather than aristocratic prerogative; they'll ‘set London Bridge afire, and, if [they] can, burn down the Tower too’, erasing others’ history to clear ground for their own (2 Henry VI, 4.6.14–15). Colloquially, the phrase is an acknowledgement of mortality, even imminent death, and this meaning also had significant resonance in Boyd’s productions. Jack Cade’s entourage was composed of the animated corpses of characters who had been killed off earlier in this and previous plays, including Lord Talbot and his son John, Margery Jourdain and John Hume, the murdered Duke of Gloucester, and a headless Suffolk, led haltingly around by the elbow.