In Chapter 5, on Yeats’s series of plays about the legendary warrior Cuchulain, I return to the early period to take up a thread of Yeats’s development as a dramatist in order to illustrate a crucial aspect of his worldmaking project. The legendary world that he envisioned in this series evolved out of his need to overcome the intransmissibility of indigenous Irish culture in anything like an original or authentic form, a problem that Yeats confronted when he considered the role of folklore and legend in a national literature. The plays are also well suited, by virtue of the temporal extension of the series – from the first production of On Baile’s Strand (1904) to the composition of The Death of Cuchulain (1939) – to convey Yeats’s developing sense of personality and the ethics of heroism. By transposing the heroic world of Cuchulain, particularly as described by Standish O’Grady and Augusta Gregory, to the contemporary stage, Yeats does not revive the past in the interests of preserving it in amber. His task, like that of the literary revival at large, was not just to express the vitality of the past and its ethos but to place both at the forefront of a modern national literary movement.

This chapter turns to female characters whose roles in the plays are more marginal. It uncovers a pattern of interactions that recur in minor female roles across almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays. These efforts take the form of resistance to marriages and efforts to forestall political events, often wars, frequently pointing to flaws in the male leaders’ plans. It highlights such inconclusive interventions as moments that demand engagement and interpretation by the audience, inviting spectators to unbalance the supposed didactic and moral purpose of the plays by attaching their sympathies to the characters out of power, rather than the kings who command them. Such imaginative potential is seen particularly clearly in the marginalised figures of lower-class female characters, as well as the women whose scenes are dismissed as ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ – in truth, scenes whose interactions depict the types of events unrecorded by traditional history but which are essential to the history play as a theatrical genre. The presence of these curtailed or unrecorded incidents, and their thematic importance to the plays in which they appear, suggests that the relationship of the plays to their chronicle sources is less one of direct adaptation than of querying and contestation.

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.

The concluding chapter takes a brief case study of performers’ experiences in various roles in the history play cycle performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2019. These performers’ voices both enrich and complicate the arguments made in the previous chapters and offer perspective on how the view of Shakespeare’s history plays put forward by this monograph might have practical use for artists but also point to areas of future study.

The introduction explores how a popular sense of ‘Shakespearean’ history continues to influence historical drama today, looking to the Broadway play and subsequent HBO drama All the Way as an example. I then introduce the key concepts I will use to interrogate standing assumptions about ‘Shakespearean’ history, including the framework for feminist Shakespearean analysis first proposed by Lisa Jardine (1989), who argued for drawing upon archival materials to combat misleading assumptions about the role of women in both the plays and the early modern period itself; Henry S. Turner’s ‘New Theatricality’ (2012), though I instead suggest the term ‘dramaturgy’, borrowed from the theatre to reflect the inextricability of literary analysis and staging practise; and Pascale Aebischer’s concept of ‘negotiated reading’, which ‘deliberately seek[s] out opaque signs, empty spaces, silences, marginalised sign-clusters and characters’ and proposes the utility of reading early modern texts alongside contemporary performance. Finally, I introduce my own key concept: historical dramaturgy, the process of adapting historical sources into dramatic form. Female characters, I argue, can provide the key for understanding how Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy works, and thus how he as a dramatist understood the form and purpose of history.

This chapter provides a survey of the most common scholarly assumptions about the nature of a history play – that it is tragic, historically accurate, relates to a broader nationalistic agenda and that exclusion of the female is fundamental to the genre – and looks at how reading plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their most prominent female characters troubles these preconceptions. It first explores how the sub-genre of romantic histories challenges the assumption that a history play is concerned with historical accuracy. Reading Shakespeare’s co-authored Edward III as an example of this genre demonstrates its influence on the rest of his canon. It then re-evaluates the stereotype that foreign characters – especially foreign female characters – are always a threat against which the English national identity can be defined by contrast. It takes Margaret of Anjou as a case study in reading female characters not as women but as dramatic devices. The final section looks again to the tone of the plays to unpick how scenes of overwhelming female emotion can be seen as essential features of the history play genre and part of what contributed to the genre’s popularity in the eras when it was most frequently performed.

This chapter examines Shakespeare’s dramaturgical “cuing the past” through spoken directives to recall things preceding the play’s chronology. His ingenious staging of “the tug of memory” – grounded in traditional mnemotechnic oratorical tactics – elicits and guides the audience’s affective response to some specific aspect of a character’s backstory. Special attention is given to “invention” and “memory” from classical rhetoric (where the relationship of affect to emotion is shown to function analogously to that of invention to invented text), by way of illustrating how the appositive yet complementary tropes of “augmentation” and “abbreviation” in Merchant of Venice and Comedy of Errors, for example, can be used to unpack the rampant play of proverbs in Henry V (3.7). Shakespeare’s affective cueing of the past sets memory to work, tugging at what is to be recalled and yanking it center stage for all to see and then factor into their judgment of the character.

This chapter explores the contrast between Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement as a natural experiment in comparative policing. I look at the different roles played by police within the larger historical dynamics of these two events. My goal is to distinguish the democratic qualities of Taiwanese policing from the more authoritarian qualities evident in Hong Kong. I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing this distinction by combining Peter Manning’s idea of police dramaturgy with Victor Turner’s theory of social dramas and Carl von Clausewitz’ approach to violent politics. This perspective, I argue, helps illuminate how the democratic qualities of police action in response to unsettling events can influence the longer historical/structural patterns linking what comes after to what went before.

The Thompson-Chesson family represent how, across three generations, nineteenth-century reformers cultivated habits of performance critique to improve the efficacy of their political work. Across various domains, and utilising many organising techniques and expressions, liberal activism was forged in this milieu. By investigating how men and women built networks and forged more effective practices, liberal convictions take form as activist practices.

Just before his death, Hamlet bids Horatio “to tell my story.” However, immediately after Fortinbras's arrival, when Horatio wants to perform this task and “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about”, Fortinbras interrupts him, claiming “some rights of memory in this kingdom” for himself, and commands his men to “Take up the bodies” and “Go bid the soldiers shoot.” These final moments of Shakespeare’s play initiate the dramaturgical process for future generations to recount the events which led to Hamlet’s death, reconsidering, re-enacting as well as resisting his and the play’s legacy in constantly shifting forms and constellations. This chapter reflects on how this dramaturgical process is established in the play itself bringing together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. Highlighting the performative link between virtue and virtuosity, dramaturgy connects research and practice and is designed to develop and enhance creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis is to open up new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by illuminating these texts from innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for stage interpretations of the text.

Molière’s life and works offer numerous parallels with the commedia dell’artie, which goes some way towards explaining the profound singularity of his plays and scenic practices in the context of seventeenth-century French theatre. For roughly fifteen years, Molière rubbed shoulders with the Italians and undertook various adaptations of original works derived from the commedia dell’arte, as is demonstrated by several of his plays that are based on famous soggetti. Molière also borrowed a number of his characters from the commédia dell’arte, reproducing both their names and their behaviour. The similarities are not only textual but also in his acting style: physical and verbal virtuosity, and above all the use of facial expressions to demonstrate his characters’ emotions. Molière’s plays were constructed around such lazzi, which gave him a certain flexibility in the elaboration of his shows. Finally, it is in his qualities as an author, actor and company leader, and also in his way of practising theatrical activity as a true entrepreneur that Molière can be seen to have been influenced by the commedia dell’arte more generally.

In this constellation of playwriting and new writing cultures in Poland, Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska argues that the playwright occupies a central position in twentieth-century Polish culture. In the interwar period, she charts heated dramaturgical disputes over the country’s path to modernisation. Guderian-Czaplińska proposes the term ‘ariergardist’ – artists who forfeit or reject the notion of progress inherent in the avant-garde, before analysing major writers of the postwar and contemporary periods. Marcin Kościelniak takes up Paweł Demirski’s manifesto, calling for a change in interpretive and aesthetic criteria to account for artistic innovation, to articulate contemporary forms of collaboration between writer and director, and to contest the literary associations of playwriting cultures and the modernist notion of ‘autonomous art’. Ultimately, he declares that the term text for staging offers a more accurate designation of writing and directing collaborations than ‘play’ or even ‘text for theatre’.

W. B. Yeats began work on his theory of theatre in the early 1900s in his writings for the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey, and these included a series of precepts for dramaturgy that encompassed character, action, and language.For Yeats, dramatic character was not simply a mimetic representation of a personality; instead, it was a set of human possibilities defined by an action.Yeats would ultimately relate this theory to his wider understanding of personality and action developed in his poetry, and in writings such as A Vision.Likewise, his theories of the language appropriate to drama, and the techniques that should be used to capture the quality of speech, are closely related to his own development as a poet.Indeed, there is an argument to be made that all of his poetry from about 1900 onwards is theatrical, in the sense that it implies a voice.Collectively, Yeats’s writings on theory constitute a coherent treatise on dramatic construction.

In this chapter I bring together the findings of the five case studies to offer answers to the research questions about the distribution of authority in statistical systems. I also outline the implications of my study for our understanding of practices of knowledge production and utilisation in policymaking, as well as the role of experts in contemporary liberal democracy. Finally, I consider directions for future research stemming from my study findings.

This introduction sets the context for my study of the governance of official statistical agencies in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and United States of America. It presents the theoretical framework used in the study, based on dramaturgical sociology. The research approach is discussed, including the selection of case study countries, the use of in-depth interviews and the dramaturgical approach to data analysis. An overview of the argument of the book is provided along with a summary of the remaining chapters.