‘Watch Out for Two-handed Swords’: Double-Edged Poetics in Howard Barker's Henry V in Two Parts (1971)

Summary

Among the many contemporary pretenders to the throne of Shakespeare, Howard Barker (born in 1946) has often been regarded either as one of the most convincing contestants or as ‘a charlatan, a poseur and a prig’. Although the latter view has found ample support in reviews of his plays, Barker has gained increasing credit from both academics, actors and directors, and a powerful champion in Sarah Kane, who claimed in an article published shortly before her death that, misunderstood though he was in his own time, ‘in two hundred years’ time Howard Barker [would] be thought of a bit like Shakespeare’, an opinion that has been widely circulated since then. Aside from a debatable similarity of style and compositional practices, there is ground for such a claim. Barker has devoted most of his writing, both dramatic and theoretical, to a generic refashioning of tragedy into what he has called the Theatre of Catastrophe, a transformation that has necessarily taken into account Shakespeare's contribution to our understanding of tragedy. Moreover, his attempt to re-create a poetic and lyrical language for the stage has often been termed, notably by actors, Shakespearian. Shakespearian. Two of Barker's best known plays, Seven Lears (1989) and Gertrude – the Cry (2002), use Shakespeare's tragedies as their main source and testify, along with his rewriting of Middleton's Women Beware Women (1986), to his interest in Renaissance drama, an interest which he has also manifested in choosing to locate several of his plays in this period, most notably Brutopia (1993) and The Seduction of Almighty God (1997), set during the dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s.