Tetralogy thinking

In its Summer 2000 programme, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the staging of Shakespeare's two tetralogies as a cycle called This England. The programme made a distinctive break with the past by conceding that the plays were 'originally conceived by Shakespeare at different times and written in non-chronological order', but, in order to preserve the integrity of the history play cycle, the programme went on to argue that the separate plays together 'form a collage of one man's insight into England's history'. No one authorial vision, or even one directorial vision, would dominate this cycle, and the plays were to be staged in all the different theatre spaces of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As a self-styled 'national' theatre, the RSC was swimming with the currents of the time, matching national devolution with a form of artistic devolution in which its various, disparate spaces were reconstellated as an architectural metaphor of the United Kingdom, with unity is sustained only through the acknowledgement of difference. In this way, the This England cycle both accepted that the plays are not a unified, complete work and presented an authorial, legitimate way of seeing the plays as a set of works on a shared theme.