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‘Between the Red Rose and the White’: Staging Vegetal Materiality in the First Tetralogy

2023; Routledge; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450918.2023.2176192

1745-0926

Jason Hogue,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

ABSTRACTFocusing on 1 and 3 Henry VI, this essay analyzes the ‘vegetal’ performances of Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, informed by insights about the more-than-human world from the fields of new materialism and critical plant studies. Specifically, I argue that the roses the original performers wore onstage should be viewed as vegetal co-stars in Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the wars that bear their name. In close proximity to the players who wore them and mobilised them, the roses are at once highly objectified symbols and agential co-participants in the meaning-making of the plays constructed by both the players and the audience during performances. These roses were plant-agents among Plantagenets, exerting their own volitions and idiosyncrasies onstage, amidst the actors who wore them on their person. Thus, this essay intervenes in conversations about the agency of objects such as props and costumes on the Elizabethan stage, asserting a special place for objects that really should be viewed as subjects, this plant material representing the staged appearances of once living biological entities whose bodily idiosyncrasies could assert a material presence and even resistance to the humans with whom they shared the theatrical space.KEYWORDS: History playsfirst tetralogystagingmaterialityplantscostumes Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Richardson provides a useful overview of scholarship on material culture and Shakespeare for the first decade of the twenty-first century in ‘Shakespeare and Material Culture’. A few notable examples from this time include Stallybrass and Jones, Renaissance Clothing; Harris and Korda, Staged Properties; Sofer, The Stage Life of Props; and Richardson’s own Everyday Objects, edited with Hamling. More recent contributions in this area include Leland and Baragona, Shakespeare’s Prop Room; Barbieri, Costume in Performance; Castaldo and Knight, Stage Matters; Escolme, Shakespeare and Costume; and Gamboa and Switzky, Shakespeare’s Things.2 Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 20–21. On stage trees, also see Reynolds, ‘“Trees” on the Stage’ and Habicht, ‘Tree Properties’.3 Solomon, ‘All in a Garden Green’, 228, italics in original.4 The full title of the octavo is The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants. On this text and the other variants of 3 Henry VI, see Cox and Rasmusson, 148–76.5 In Cox and Rasmussen’s gloss of the stage directions, they explain that ‘these noblemen were dressed in Elizabethan costumes, which required officers to wear hats rather than steel helmets’ (185). In quoting the stage directions from The True Tragedy, I am using the Internet Shakespeare Editions, which features old-spelling transcription from the octavo facsimile.6 It is generally acknowledged that the term ‘Wars of the Roses’ did not become widespread until after the publication of Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein (1829), although the exact phrase used therein is ‘the wars of the white and red roses’ (74).7 On the fashion of wearing hats in Elizabethan England, see Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1–4. Hats before 1600, known as ‘bonnets’, were usually made of leather and had a narrow brim and a high, flat crown. Gurr also notes, ‘The higher the hat the higher the social status. A workman or servant wore a flat cap or bonnet, a citizen a taller hat with a small feather, a gallant or courtier a high hat with a long plume’ (244).8 All Shakespeare quotations are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, third series, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan.9 In the conclusion of this essay, I discuss the possibility and implications of the roses being represented by paper roses (or ‘rosettes’), but my concern for the most part is in thinking about roses onstage not simply as a theatrical material but specifically a plant-based material.10 Sofer, ‘Getting on with Things’, 674.11 Ibid.12 On the agency of ‘things’ as differentiated from that of objects, see Brown, ‘Thing Theory’.13 In critical plant studies, see the foundational work of Hall, Plants as Persons, and Marder, Plant-Thinking. More recent scholarship in the still-emerging field includes Gibson, The Plant Contract; Ryan, Plants in Contemporary Poetry; and Vieira, Gagliano, and Ryan, The Mind of Plants. On early modern plant studies, see especially postmedieval 9, no. 4 (2018), eds. Barrett and Nardizzi.14 Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 6. Laroche and Munroe draw on the work of various new materialist theorists such as Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett, among others.15 Ibid., 116.16 Ibid., 115.17 For a range of approaches to eco-dramaturgy, see the special issue ‘Eco-Shakespeare in Performance’, in Shakespeare Bulletin, eds. Martin and O’Malley.18 Laroche, ‘Ophelia’s Plants’, 212.19 Ibid., 220.20 Thomas and Faircloth, Shakespeare’s Plants, 29621 Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture, 250.22 In modern productions of plays in the first history tetralogy, actual roses are sometimes worn by actors as well, as I discuss in the concluding section of this essay.23 Jusserand, A Literary History, 21; Feuillerat, Documents Relating, 327.24 Jusserand, 21.25 Jusserand quotes Feuillerat, Documents Relating, 164. This particular entry from 1572 relates that the cost of ten crown garlands of roses was 15 shillings and 8 pence; the cost of the ten bushels of roses was 13s 4d (these figures not including wages). Not nearly as many roses would be needed for a single performance of a play in the tetralogy, and presumably roses could be re-used and re-appropriated as needed if the plays were performed in a series over a number of days. And, as discussed below, the easy access to nearby rose gardens at the Rose Theatre may have greatly deferred the cost of procuring roses if they were used in the performances of Henry VI there.26 Dugan, Ephemeral History, 62.27 There are some inconsistencies and ambiguities in Henslowe’s diary, but it appears that the play ran that spring/summer at the Rose from 3 March 1591–19 June 1592, for at least thirteen individual performances and possibly a couple more. (Despite the convention of the new year beginning on 25 March at this time, Henslowe continued to use 1591 until 24 April of 1592.) Henslowe records one performance of ‘harey’, without a subsequent numeral, as well as a single instance of ‘harey the v’, both conceivably intended to refer to 1 Henry VI. After a short hiatus at the theatre resulting from the plague, production resumed in December 1592, and two more performances of the play were recorded in January (no possibility of real roses), then apparently discontinued. Could the popularity of the earlier run have had something to do with the presence of roses in bloom, so near the theatre and possibly on stage?28 Richardson, ‘Shakespeare and Material Culture’, 431.29 See Laroche, ‘Roses in Winter’, on the unsustainable and unreasonable demands put onto garden lands via the abundant calls for roses and rosewater in early modern recipes (emblematised in a recipe titled ‘How to make roses grow in wynter’) and the idealised status ubiquitously placed onto roses in the wider cultural imagination, leading to unrealistic desires for extended growing periods for roses.30 A few examples of work in this area include Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows; Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green; Wohlleben, The Heartbeat of Trees; and Simard, Finding the Mother Tree.31 Marder and other theorists in critical plant studies have argued that plants in the history of Western culture and philosophy have been marginalised, obscured, ignored, and universally denigrated in status below that of humans and animals.32 As Taylor notes in ‘Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?’ 1 Henry VI is among the plays that all attribution specialists generally regard as collaborative; 2 and 3 Henry VI are also strong contenders for not being sole products of Shakespeare’s authorship. As author attribution is not my focus here, this debate is not one in which I engage. I acknowledge the role of collaborators here but retain the use of ‘Shakespeare’ throughout as a convenient shorthand for the purpose of brevity.33 Taylor and Loughnane (‘The Canon and Chronology’) date Shakespeare’s adaptations of 1 Henry VI in a range of 1592–9, with their best guess at 1595, with an original date of March 1592 (coinciding with the Rose performances), initially composed by Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, and one other unknown author. Taylor and Loughnane date both 2 Henry VI (or the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster … ) and 3 Henry VI (The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York), on the other hand, to 1590 or earlier. They put Richard III around 1592. See also Sokol, ‘Manuscript Evidence’, in which Sokol argues convincingly that large-scale renovations at the Temple Hall gardens in 1591 probably inspired Shakespeare’s inclusion of the famous garden scene.34 On the opposition of the colours red and white in the literature of the Elizabethan period, influenced by the historiographical iconography of the Wars of the Roses, see Risden, ‘Red and White’. See also Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture, 192–98; 247–55.35 Ichikawa, The Shakespearean Stage Space, 112–14.36 Griffiths and Wilson, ‘Sweet Musk Roses’, 66.37 Ibid.38 Ibid.39 OED, ‘canker’ n. I.3. See also Archer, Turley, and Thomas, ‘The Autumn King’, 534–35, on the term ‘blast’, an infectious disease of cereal crops associated with mildew. The term ‘canker’, to add yet more to audiences’ potential confusion, from about 1582 could also refer generally to an uncultivated wild rose, or more specifically to the dog rose, Rosa canina, or even to the fruit (rose ‘hips’) of this plant (OED, ‘canker’ n. II.8.b.). Dugan discusses this usage of ‘canker’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 54 (Ephemeral History, 47–48). That Plantagenet refers to this canker as ‘consuming’ Somerset’s rose plant (2.4.71) establishes its usage here.40 On aspects of ‘the symmetrical arrangement of actors on stage’ that 3 Henry VI likewise requires, see Saccio (‘Images’, 14), and my discussion below. Saccio refers to the 1983 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Wars of the Roses to illustrate this need for a staged symmetry in the play, in Elizabethan times as in ours.41 On the notion of an ‘assemblage’, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. They ask in the introduction to this book, ‘What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily?’ (4).42 Henslowe’s diary includes mention of various crowns, so the assumption is that Shakespeare’s players would have worn them as well, especially considering how many kings he depicted. See Leland and Baragona, Shakespeare’s Prop Room, 24–34; and Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 4–5.43 In theory, the performer might have ‘ac-scented’ themselves and the surrounding stage area even further with a complementary rosewater or an essential oil derived from roses. Dugan champions the damask rose in particular as the pinnacle of perfumery, positioned ‘at the epicentre of the English Renaissance’ (Ephemeral History, 46), but early ‘receipts’ (recipes) for rosewater also included a number of rose varieties, including water for ‘rose alba’ (ibid., 53). Today, the white Rosa x alba is still known for being highly fragrant, with one specialist supplier describing its essential oil as ‘a dusky and mysterious fragrance. A favourite with men and an especially spiritual and beautiful oil’ (Hinde).44 Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture, 248.45 Ibid., 187.46 The phrase ‘the red rose and the white’ coincides with the phrasing from 1 Henry VI, at 2.4.125. As a reference to the Wars of the Roses, the phrase first appears in a 1571 treatise by John Leslie, which defends the right of Mary Tudor, Queen of Scots, to the crown of England (A Treatise Concerning the Defence, 39).47 On the continuity of Shakespeare’s early history plays operating as a four-part tetralogy, see Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays.48 Gerard, The Herball, 1259.49 Ibid., 1260.50 In Bodily Natures, Alaimo outlines ‘human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world … the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’ (2).51 See Feerick, ‘Groveling with Earth’. Feerick investigates the Renaissance commonplace that human flesh is composed of a common substance, derived from the soil, and thus is comparable to plants enrooted in the soil, both types of bodies capable of ‘bleeding’ when they are wounded.52 A performance of Henry VI at the Rose Theatre would often take place within a few days of its last performance. Assuming that cut roses last for about a week (and of course assuming roses were actually used), this scenario is plausible. During rose season, however, the close proximity of the rose gardens may have obviated the need for repeat rose performances.53 An image of this scene may be viewed on the RSC website at the following URL: https://www.rsc.org.uk/learn/schools-and-teachers/teacher-resources/henry-vi#&gid=1&pid=4. The photo credit belongs to Ellie Kurttz.54 Laroche and Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory, 122.55 Monk, ‘Human Remains’, 360.56 Monk, The Actor in Costume, 23.57 Videos of complete performances of this production are available to watch on YouTube on the channel Shakespeare on Screen, as of this writing.