Shakespeare's Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays by L. Monique Pittman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays by L. Monique Pittman Allison Machlis Meyer Shakespeare's Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays. By L. Monique Pittman. New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 248. Hardback $170.00. In Shakespeare's Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays, L. Monique Pittman provides a thoughtful and necessary examination of high-status British productions of Shakespearean history during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Pittman's six chapters carefully trace the ways these ostensibly progressive performances actually display a postimperial nostalgia that rejects Britain's multiculturalism in favor of a very narrow vision of both nationhood and Shakespeare. In a robust and compelling introduction, Pittman outlines the history plays' potential both to instantiate the exclusionary mechanisms of nationhood and to interrogate those mechanisms. Shakespeare's Contested Nations argues that modern productions have repeatedly failed to take up the history plays' textual invitations to query the violence and constructed nature of nation-building and have too often staged an "exclusionary national historiography" (26) instead. Pittman situates these performance choices in the context of growing nationalism marked by a set of political developments and cultural displays: a conservative backlash to the New Labour government's adoption of multiculturalism as a national policy, crystalized in media responses to the release of The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000); the nation-building of the Cultural Olympiad accompanying the UK's hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games; and the anti-immigrant narrative of the Brexit referendum (2016). Within this context of a Conservative-led government's rejection of multiculturalism and movement toward nativism, Pittman finds that "the cultural capital of Shakespeare operates in the third millennium to define, reinforce, and occasionally, facilitate critique of British nationhood" (10). In chapter two, "Staging the Multiethnic Nation: Boyd and Hytner at the Millennial Threshold," Pittman examines a set of six history play productions at the beginning of the new millennium—including Michael Boyd's Henry VI cycle (2000–2001) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Nicholas Hytner's Henry [End Page 329] V (2003) for the National Theatre—that, she argues, "instantiate provocative experimentation with the rules of colorblind casting and visual codes of race" (39). Reading these productions alongside negative public response to The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain's call for broadened artistic representation of British multicultural identities, Pittman asserts that this suite of plays prefigured a postimperial national nostalgia that emerged even more stridently in later productions. Pittman sees Boyd's and Hytner's productions as well-meaning attempts to present the history plays as sites in which "the transhistorical erasure of non-white citizens and subjects from the stories of a nation" (55) can be redressed, through the casting of Afro-British actors in leading roles (David Oyelowo as Henry VI and Adrian Lester as Henry V). However, Pittman argues that these productions ultimately demonstrate the pitfalls of poorly theorized colorblind performance that does not adequately attend to the significations of gender, class, and race on stage. Boyd's production, according to Pittman, missed opportunities to "spotlight Britain's painfully racist past and present" and additionally failed "to account for intersectional identities" (59) through its sexist treatment of a doubled Joan de Pucelle and Margaret of Anjou and its reduction of the play-text's attention to legitimate class grievances through a clownish portrayal of the Cade rebellion. Hytner's Henry V sought to "disrupt the play's mythologized past" through its casting of the title role and through aesthetic details that engaged with contemporary wars in the Middle East (69). While the production sympathetically and intentionally illuminated the cost of war upon women, Pittman argues that its "avoidance of Arab voices and the fullest possibilities of the contemporary context" revealed the limitations of its shallow nontraditional casting and weak political engagements (69). In Pittman's view, Hytner's 2005 offerings, 1 and 2 Henry IV, retreated from even the "imperfect experiments" of his Henry V, casting no people of color in lead roles, activating racial stereotypes through an inattention to the semiotics of...