17415 Hauptseminar

Manfred Pfister

Player Kings: Richard III, Richard II, Henry V (auf Englisch)

Donnerstag, 14-16 Uhr
Gosslerstraße 2-4, Raum 208

Beginn: 19. Oktober 2005

maximal 35 Teilnehmer

This seminar will focus on one crucial aspect of Shakespeare’s history plays: the roles and the performances of kingship. Any king never just is a king, he also is an ordinary mortal playing at being a king and thus defining his regal role in and through performances. Shakespeare, staging English history in, and as, a series of powerful or weak, impressive or pathetic kings, foregrounds this performative aspect of authority by offering to the critical scrutiny of his audience regal performance to the second power, i.e. as the theatrical performance of a political performance. In this sense, all his kings are ‘Player Kings’ (James Winny, The Player King: A Theme of Shakespeare’s Histories, 1968), but we have selected three plays in which the respective king’s awareness of performing like an actor in a play is particularly acute. In that Shakespeare’s kings resemble the current monarch on the English throne, Queen Elizabeth, who also saw herself as a royal actor.

We shall study Shakespeare’s theatrical kings in the context of the contemporary debate about regal authority, drawing into our discussion visual and musical representations of Tudor kingship as well as the ways in which modern films have dealt with the theatricality of kingship.

Participants will have read the three plays in advance (either in one of the New Arden or Oxford Shakespeare editions or in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt) and, having had too many bad experiences with unprepared classes in the last terms, I may well check! For introductory critical reading I recommend:

• James Winny, The Player King: A Theme of Shakespeare’s Histories (London, 1968)
• James Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’ (Berkeley, 1979)
• Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (London, 1986)
• Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays (London, 1992)
• Andreas Höfele, “’The Great Image of Authority’: Königsbilder in Shakespeares Dramen”, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 133 (1997).