The Oxford Shakespeare Topics series provides “students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.” Janette Dillon’s Shakespeare and the Staging of English History makes a very good contribution to the understanding of Shakespearean staging and dramaturgical practice likely to be unfamiliar to twentieth-first century undergraduate students. Quoting Alan Dessen, Dillon asserts that her objective “is to recover … ‘a theatrical vocabulary accessible, even obvious, then [to Shakespeare, his fellow players and his playgoers] but easily blurred or eclipsed today’” by highlighting “particular scenic units (both whole scenes and shorter units of action) which are especially recurrent and familiar to the genre” (5).

In chapter 1, for example, Dillon interprets the “theatrical vocabulary” of the opening funereal scene of 1 Henry VI to illustrate what a Shakespearean audience, and Shakespeare’s actors, might have understood instinctively: the proper placement of actors representing the royal mourners shockingly breaks down with the quarrel between Winchester and Gloucester. This scene presents visually the collapse of English unity at the death of Henry V. Subsequent chapters address other visual practices readable by Shakespeare’s audiences but perhaps lost in later centuries. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the pageant and choric presenter relating them to the visual and narrative nature of Elizabethan historiography to reveal ways that points of view were embedded within Shakespeare’s chronical sources. Choric or presentational commentary seen in earlier histories that had been relegated to minor characters in the early history plays (for example, Iden in 2 Henry VI or the Gardener in Richard II), shift in the later histories to more important characters such as Falstaff who often comments upon and inappropriately mimics aristocratic behavior. For Dillon, these pageant or choric scenes are in fact “different modes of representation” intended to “change the way the audience views the play” (15–16). Shakespeare intends audiences to reflect upon the uses and even the manipulation of history to better understand the “way history is constructed, itself a written narrative” (17) like the plays themselves. Dillon notes that like his chronicle sources, Shakespeare selects and invents pageant and choric commentators to offer different views of the history being presented theatrically.

In chapters 3 and 4, Dillon explores the horizontal and vertical visual symmetry Shakespeare uses to convey shifts in power and competing perspectives on the history being reenacted; for example, the horizontal balance on stage at the appearance of the ghosts near the end of Richard III and the verticality of Richard’s descent into the “base court” in Richard II. Later chapters focus on ceremony, especially ways that truncated or disrupted ceremonies would have been read critically by Shakespeare’s spectators. She turns then to domestic scenes and soliloquies, most of which are Shakespeare’s inventions, intended to humanize the powerful and reveal characters’ internal thoughts, and then to providential speeches that function “as though the action pauses for the voice of an implicit chronicler to emerge” (99). Included in this group are Gaunt’s paean to England in Richard II, the blessings and curses of the ghosts before the battle of Bosworth near the end of Richard III, and the “apotheosis of Queen Katherine” in act four of Henry VIII (109). Dillon’s final chapter is an extended reading of the presence of the throne in Henry VIII, which she argues would have remained on stage throughout the performance as a readable symbol of the use and abuse of state power.

This short book would be very useful to instructors who emphasize Shakespearean performance in their classrooms, but would greatly profit from the inclusion of illustrations. Terms such as stage left or right are elemental to the proscenium stage but may not be as applicable to the Globe. And although Dillon specifically avoids discussion of twentieth- or twenty-first century production, it might have been helpful to include some reference to dramaturgical discoveries that have evolved from practice at the New Globe in London.