“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.

This discussion, devoted to close readings of the Henry IV plays, reflects upon the ways in which the performance of violence in all its forms can signal cultural decay and ethical failure at a personal and collective level. However, in this dramatic world where the British nations query any authoritative claim upon the English throne, blood-letting also yields up a peculiar community of interest: strategic forms of cooperation, individual empowerment and group identity. Ultimately, we are thrust into a realm groaning under the strain of constant civil war, where even the king, ‘this ingrate and canker’d Bullingbrook’, has more in common with the rebels than he cares to acknowledge. Shakespeare’s fifteenth-century England is characterised by moral and social dysfunction, and the insatiable appetite for violence, widely in evidence in both plays, unsettles the persuasiveness of any claim to political authority made onstage.

Shakespeare’s canon includes many military figures, but arguably none is more successful than Henry V. In the play, the key to success is shown to lie in the king’s ability to instrumentalize the vehement emotions necessary to wage war. Shakespeare presents anger in Aristotelian terms as a hierarchical emotion reserved for elite men tasked with military leadership. The king’s deft use of anger demonstrates his self-discipline from his decision to invade France until his overwhelming victory there. This self-discipline distinguishes him from the quarrelsome soldiers (like the choleric Fluellen) who serve under him. The efficacy of Henry’s anger becomes evident when juxtaposed with the contrast in 1 Henry IV between his father’s ineffectual coldness and the reckless tempestuousness of Hotspur. In Henry V, the cool performance of hot emotions makes Henry a modern man of wrath.

This chapter explores the theatre’s interest in the intersection of religion and emotion by focusing on two characters from Shakespeare’s history plays—Falstaff and Joan la Pucelle—who reference the real-life martyrs Jeanne d’Arc and John Oldcastle. Martyrdom was a cultural phenomenon with the potential for considerable dramatic impact on the stage, but the act of transforming it into theatrical representations had to be handled with exceptional care. Accordingly, the history plays walk a kind of tightrope, evoking Jeanne and Oldcastle through patterns of strategic indirection, including substituting minor characters for more controversial ones and killing characters off stage rather than on. Such techniques create crucial layers of distance that protect the audience from staring too closely at events already overloaded with meaning. Feelings of sympathy transmitted to the audience were thus carefully detached from real-life martyrs, interrupting and redirecting the cycle of religiously-charged emotional identification.

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.