‘Between the Red Rose and the White’: Staging Vegetal Materiality in the First Tetralogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Focusing on 1 and 3 Henry VI, this essay analyzes the ‘vegetal’ performances of Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, informed by insights about the more-than-human world from the fields of new materialism and critical plant studies. Specifically, I argue that the roses the original performers wore onstage should be viewed as vegetal co-stars in Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the wars that bear their name. In close proximity to the players who wore them and mobilised them, the roses are at once highly objectified symbols and agential co-participants in the meaning-making of the plays constructed by both the players and the audience during performances. These roses were plant-agents among Plantagenets, exerting their own volitions and idiosyncrasies onstage, amidst the actors who wore them on their person. Thus, this essay intervenes in conversations about the agency of objects such as props and costumes on the Elizabethan stage, asserting a special place for objects that really should be viewed as subjects, this plant material representing the staged appearances of once living biological entities whose bodily idiosyncrasies could assert a material presence and even resistance to the humans with whom they shared the theatrical space.