Large concepts of ‘the people’, even the ‘rights of all people’, were transmitted from late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages by learned culture, but smaller, self-defining kinds of community and uses of the idea of ‘the commons’ or ‘the common profit’ can be seen better in the later Middle Ages – thanks to expanding literacy and increasingly contentious claims about collectivities. The decades up to 1400 (it is argued) display a pivot in England, after the Black Death and following political and economic disruptions, between many traditional ideas of community and new concepts of collectivities. Literature shows this well – with the opportunity to consider Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and John Gower – as, more dramatically, do the Rising of 1381, the autocratic reign of Richard II, and the ‘redemptive’ coronation of Henry IV in 1399. Invocations of ‘the commonalty’ founded the new political world, but were as often manipulative as expressive of collective identities.

The fourteenth century saw the arrival of what is often described as the late medieval crisis. A period of famine, war, plague and death on an unparalleled scale – it is hardly surprising that many believed the apocalypse was upon them. Given these vicissitudes it is equally unsurprising that the challenges of kingship became especially acute in this period. The fourteenth century saw the first deposition of an English king by his own people, but it was not the last. Edward II’s fate would be shared by his great-grandson, Richard II, who was well aware that a dangerous precedent had been set. Indeed, Richard’s cognisance of the events of 1327 and his attempts to prevent them from being repeated proved utterly counterproductive.

The fourteenth-century poet John Gower was a prodigiously Ovidian author, especially throughout his Latin Vox clamantis and English Confessio amantis. It is in the Vox clamantis, and its first book the Visio Anglie, where Gower fully engaged with Ovid in exile, and where he became the Ovidian exile in the ways theorised in Chapter 4. While Gower did not experience exile or marginalisation in real life, in the Visio he inhabits Ovidian exile to respond to the 1381 Uprising. Menmuir firstly speculates how Gower might have read Ovid’s exile poetry. She also considers different theoretical approaches to Gower’s use of Ovid, including cento. Thereafter, the chapter progresses sequentially through the Visio, charting Gower’s range of approaches to the exilic Ovid. At the opening of the Visio, Gower compresses prevailing themes of the exile poetry. Chapter 16 of the Visio is the height of Gower’s Ovidian exilic inhabitation, where Gower shifts to speaking in a first-person voice. The storm at sea in the Visio is drawn from Ovid in exile. Finally, a voice from Heaven speaks to the Gowerian narrator but is in fact a mouthpiece for Ovid in exile.

Chapter 6 explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s Ovidian exilic voice. Scholarly thought has long held that Chaucer did not read or even know Ovid’s exile poetry, a contention which this chapter refutes. While Gower relied on explicit linguistic borrowing to inhabit Ovid in exile, Chaucer instead took an indirect approach, embedding Ovidian refrains, themes and concerns across his corpus. Menmuir discusses Chaucer’s linguistic references to Ovid’s exile poetry, which are our most direct pieces of evidence demonstrating that he was aware of the exilic works and knew how they could be effectively deployed. Direct quotations of Ovid, however, do not constitute Chaucer inhabiting an exilic voice. The latter half of the chapter argues that Chaucer became the Ovidian exile in the figures of Troilus and the narrator in Troilus and Criseyde; the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, where the narrator is an Ovidian exile responding to an irascible ruler; and in Chaucer’s ‘Retraction’, which closes The Canterbury Tales by appealing to Ovidian exilic ambiguity. These works show the extent to which Chaucer understood the fundamental concerns of Ovid in exile, adopting them for his own work and times, his own tense imperial relations and his own desire for poetic immortality.

This chapter reads Richard II’s garden scene in the context of early modern debates about sacramentalism and the created world. The garden scene reveals its awareness of these debates and the ways in which they occurred in genres both high (learned tracts, printed books) and low (oral cultures, cheap print). The gardener demonstrates his political and theological sophistication through his hands-on knowledge of gardening. In the same way, ordinary people off-stage participated in their culture’s most urgent controversies through popular genre that were frequently dismissed by their social betters.

Chapter four argues these processes of marginalisation represent a feminine, not solely female, mode of storytelling by demonstrating that male characters who are disempowered in explicitly feminine terms are endowed with the same historiographical powers as female characters. I first explore characters like Hotspur and Richard II, who explicitly have their legacies relegated to the histories disseminated by women, thus posthumously becoming the stuff of feminine history. This chapter argues that Falstaff and Henry IV also trace a parallel pattern of feminised disempowerment across the course of the second tetralogy. In contrast are Henry V and Henry VIII, both of whom affirm their masculinised legacies by explicitly avoiding entrusting their histories to female voices. Turning to earlier history plays, shifting gender positions of Queen Margaret and King Henry VI complicate a clear correlation between dramaturgical gender and character gender and demonstrate how certain characters continually renegotiate their relationship to masculine history. Finally, I consider the malleable and unstable position of boy characters, whose ability to shift between identification as young men and feminine boys, and the parallels their embodied presence draws to the boy players in female roles around them, renders them particularly vulnerable to feminised erasure by history.

The third chapter explores how female characters narrate history within the plays themselves, particularly when they appear to transgress the boundaries of historical possibility through curses, prophecy, or describing events they have not seen – extra-historical powers enabled by their marginalisation from political power. It proposes the concept at the heart of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy: that marginalisation from political power gives way to other types of insight enabled by the medium of the theatre, a specifically feminine relationship to historical narrative that I call Shakespeare’s feminine historiography. Beginning with an analysis of the connection between mourning and cursing, the chapter explores the ‘genealogies of loss’ that permit female characters to articulate their own versions of dynastic history. I then turn to other ways that female characters are marginalised from the centres of historical power, and the clarity of historical vision that their outsider position grants them, rendering them simultaneously suppressed and empowered by their exclusion. Finally, this chapter considers how genre itself operates as a force for this exclusion, exploring scenes which seem to defy the tonal and generic boundaries of their plays, suggesting Shakespeare’s awareness of the limitations of the history play genre for containing certain types of female stories.

Pater published three essays on Shakespeare, and probably considered a longer series, possibly to culminate in a book. His attention in the completed essays is directed towards plays that were relatively unpopular in his own day, and in the case of two of these he can be said to occupy an important position in the history of their reception. Modern critics of Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost still regularly, if cursorily, cite Pater as a milestone. But Pater’s contribution to Shakespearean criticism more generally is rarely remembered or appraised. This chapter attempts to estimate and characterise the influence Pater has had on subsequent criticism of Shakespeare, sometimes in unexpected places, and also to draw out some of the insights of which later criticism takes less notice. Each of Pater’s Shakespeare studies attempts to formulate relations between ethics and aesthetics, and many of their central terms – fineness, justice, grace, etc. – are used with both moral and aesthetic significance. By examining these essays in the context of other Shakespearean criticism and of Pater’s wider work, it is possible to arrive at some idea of what Shakespeare meant to him.

The introduction sets out the aims and methodology for this study of ‘Wartime Shakespeare’. It proposes that wartime theatre is mediated by networks of production and reception that control meaning and impact. It outlines in detail theatre’s production agents, reception agents, and structures of control that collectively constitute the methodological framework for this study. The introduction argues that a recognition of these networks necessitates a reappraisal of wartime theatre and the critical terminology used to discuss it, including the relevance of binary labelling, such as pro-war/anti-war or conservative/radical. Wartime performances of Shakespeare, rather than offering ‘fixed’ or clear-cut applications to conflict, are malleable and can accommodate a range of different uses and interpretations. This book’s approach is relevant not just for Shakespearean theatre, but for wartime theatre more broadly and, with some adjustment, to theatre during peacetime. The prologue also considers the ‘origins’ of wartime Shakespeare by offering a short account of what is probably the first documented occasion during which one of Shakespeare’s plays was used in direct application to a wartime crisis: the performance of the ‘deposyng and kyllyng of Kyng Rychard the Second’ on 7 February 1601 at the Globe Theatre during the Nine Years’ War (1593–1603) with Ireland.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, the journal The Sphere published a two-page spread showing the ‘Shakespeare Cliff’ with the well-known ‘This England’ speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II, alongside other images connecting England to Shakespeare’s work. Related to the image are many writings of the First World War, including editions of the plays, the life of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and warfare, the Tercentenary of his birth, and the relation between Shakespeare and German literature. An article in the popular John O’London’s Weekly argued that Shakespeare had been a soldier, and suggested that Englishmen should follow his example and fight for their country.

Chapter 2 argues that the early modern theater’s techniques for the production of narrative suspense emerged from its cultivation of spectators’ phenomenological uncertainty. Attending to moments of temporal suspension in history plays, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, William Shakespeare’s Richard II, and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, the chapter shows that theater practitioners regularly aimed to resist the unrelenting forward momentum of live performance by grinding dramatic time to a halt. Narrative suspense was especially hard to come by in the history play, which emerged as a new genre in the 1590s by dramatizing well-known chronicles of English kings. But the playgoers who flocked to theaters to see these stories of succession were living through a succession crisis of their own, for Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir rendered England’s dynastic future crucially opaque. The theatrical invitation to unknow England’s past trained spectators in speculative thinking oriented toward their own politically uncertain future. History plays transformed the anxious wait for Elizabeth’s successor, that is, into the pleasure of theatrical possibility.

Shakespeare builds on virtue ethics’ concern with basic cognitive functions linking attention and intention to sociability and future-oriented deliberation. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, stressing the cultivation of habitual attentiveness to avoiding excess and deficiency is consonant with archaic Greek poetry’s depiction of the divine, human, and natural realms as three mutually interpenetrative orders, each characterized by hierarchical reciprocities whose balancing of forces and claims constitute sociable ecosystems. Similar presentations of mutually interpenetrative, ecosociable divine, human, and natural realms shape the presentation of virtue in Sanskrit epic and African, Australian, and Amerindian oral traditions. In his “Complaint of Peace,” Erasmus recuperates ecosociability for early modernity in the guise of nature infused by divine love. Its instantiation in moral-social life demands a virtue ethics interfusing shrewdness (metis) and righteousness (themis), as in Hesiod. Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II how failures of virtue rooted in thinking of the state as a possession or entitlement rather as an ecosociable order yield both monstrousness and chaos, while in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare probes the extent to which what is lost by such failures in familial life may be retrieved.

Although the dominant meaning of virtue today concerns human ethical capacity, the word had a much broader scope in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and in early-modern herbal and agricultural literature. This chapter tackles this ecological sense of “vertue” (as it was often spelled in the period), unpacking the resilient force it named in natural matter and the skill and virtue of stewardship it solicited from the humans entangled in its management in household, garden, or apothecary. As this chapter shows through readings of examples from Shakespeare, early modern practical texts, and modern environmental thinking, stewardship and resilience promise to capture the skills and virtues of household management in its broadest sense, to include care for the oikos shared by human and nonhuman creatures and systems – especially, in contemporary settings, in times of catastrophe. As keywords of contemporary environmental ethics, however, they have also been criticized for individualizing environmental virtue, undermining necessary structural change in favor of personal care and tenacity. This chapter suggests we might clarify this debate through a return to early modern vertues, by engaging the powers of nonhuman virtues and the legacy of these mixed and distributed agencies in the present.

The focus of this chapter concerns the performance of legitimacy, or rather its opposite, the performance of usurpation and tyranny.1 Medieval and early modern political theory has been recently magisterially synthesized by Francis Oakley. However, the influence of the Great Western Schism on political theory has been largely ignored, outside discussions of concilarism.2 The following will engage the Schism with the issue of legitimacy and eventually tyranny and tyrannicide. After discussing medieval concepts of tyranny, this chapter will examine if contemporary authors considered schismatic popes to be tyrants. Once established that in fact they did, the chapter will investigate further the consequence of the latter, looking at contemporary cases of so-called tyranny, with accusations against Richard II and Louis of Orléans.

Medieval monarchs feared political sorcery as a form of treason, but monarchs themselves were also accused of using magic, and several kings became intensely interested in the political and financial potential of occult traditions. Beginning in the twelfth century, rulers began to show interest in the political potential of astrological prognostications, although it was not until the fourteenth century that accusations of political sorcery first burst onto the scene in England. A succession of occult royal advisers, including Roger Bacon and George Ripley, attempted to assume the mantle of Merlin and counsel England’s kings, while Richard II went beyond other monarchs in defining himself as a royal magus. Medieval kings attempted to draw on occult knowledge for both warfare and financial aid in the Hundred Years’ War. Alchemists strove in vain to cure Henry VI of mental illness, while accusations of magic against the wife of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester destabilised the nation. During the Wars of the Roses, politically motivated accusations of sorcery played a key role in the rise of Richard III. The chapter highlights the ambiguity of magic and occult traditions in medieval politics, and their uses both positive and negative in the arts of politics.

No-one has yet quite agreed what to call it: livecast, live from, simulcast, alternative content, cinecast, cinemacast, streamed transmission, outside broadcast, digital broadcast cinema, ‘live’ theatre broadcast, captured live broadcast, event cinema, theatrofilm. But the phenomenon of cinema broadcasts, live, delayed and encore, is a new and striking area for the experience of Shakespeare theatre productions. Their various forms of transmission and consumption mark out crucial questions about the distribution and audiences for the event-object, whatever name we give it. The chapter looks at the techniques for filming live performance and the ways it makes meaning. It then examines examples from the National Theatre in London or from other theatres whose Shakespeare productions it distributes (under the label National Theatre Live), as well as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry V, and 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI might be thought to be nostalgic simply because they are history plays, reimagining and restaging a past that is, by definition, lost. Loss is certainly one of their central concerns: the loss of France, of land, of friends and family, and of identity, especially kingly identity. Versions of a lost and longed-for Eden can be found in all of these plays, and the heroes of the past are always greater than the protagonists (and actors, and audiences) of today. But as history plays, their nostalgia is also aesthetic, both cultivating and fulfilling a desire for a consistent, coherent vocabulary of symbols, discernible, stable points of origin, intelligible relationships of cause and effect, and even readily comprehensible design choices: the histories very often come to us in red and white, blue and gold. Perhaps above all, the histories feed our nostalgia for a past that is vivid, fixed, and whole, and therefore able to be understood.

This chapter presents a history of the emergence and ideological uses made of the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’: the figure of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. The normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is defined through exclusion of what it is not, and this is what the figure represents. Deriving from verbal descriptions linked to the first visual portraits of an Englishman, the figure acquires gender and class inflections and woven into a historical narrative charged with an implicit future project of a ‘true’ (protestant) commonwealth of ‘true’ (pious, ‘plain’ and temperate) Englishmen to be achieved through its exclusion. The centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is dissociated from the male elite at court, perceived as effeminate and of extravagant foreign habits. It is in this context that the four instances of the figure in the Shakespearean canon are discussed. While the first three are shown to resist the turn by which the ‘true’ Englishman becomes a function of normative cultural habits, the fourth, in All’s Well that Ends Well, is shown to be more ambivalent, an ambivalence that may be linked to the political watershed of 1603

Geoffrey Chaucer lived and wrote his poetry during a period of unprecedented political instability in late medieval England. Parliamentary crises, baronial rebellion, popular revolt, disastrous foreign war, weak government, authoritarian rule and, finally, outright deposition made the years between c.1370 and c.1400 both momentous and dangerous times to witness. Chaucer was not immune to these events and his career as a servant of the crown can be seen to have suffered. Yet, political commentary – overt or indirect – is curiously absent from his work. Scholars have traditionally explained this in terms of his keen and calculated sense of self-preservation, but I suggest that Chaucer was displaying an ambiguous and detached political stance that was commonplace amongst his contemporaries. Scholarly attention on the polarised nature of the late fourteenth-century polity ignores the fact that most people looked on the political conflicts of these years with deep anxiety, mixed with a determination to remain steadfastly neutral. In this, Chaucer – the man and his work – was wholly representative of his age.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.