See also individual entries for Richard II; Henry IV, Part I; Henry IV, Part II; Henry V; Henry VI, Part I; Henry VI, Part II; Henry VI, Part III, Richard III, and The Henriad
The Hollow Crown was a special BBC television series broadcast from 2012 to 2016. Issued in two parts (The Hollow Crown and The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses) the broadcasts were based on two groups of Shakespeare’s history plays. The Hollow Crown adapted the so-called Henriad, otherwise known as the “Second Tetralogy” (Richard II, Henry IV, Part I, Henry IV, Part II, and Henry V), while The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses was based on Shakespeare’s “First Tetralogy” (Henry VI, Part I, Henry VI, Part II, Henry VI, Part III, and Richard III). The programs devoted to the Henriad starred such prominent British actors as Ben Whishaw, Simon Russell Beale, Jeremy Irons, and Tom Hiddleston and were overseen by such well-regarded directors as Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre, and Thea Sharrock. The programs devoted to the “First Tetralogy” featured such notable actors as Benedict Cumberbatch, Hugh Bonneville, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo, and Tom Sturridge and were directed by Dominic Cooke. Critics who have commented on these adaptations sometimes discuss them in terms of the individual plays (such as Richard III) of which the series is comprised, but sometimes they discuss them in terms of groups of plays, as below. For discussions of the individual plays as individual plays, please look up the titles of the particular plays as well as the entry on “The Henriad.”
Discussing the series in her 2022 book Shakespeare’s Contested Nations (94–127), L. Monique Pittman wrote that Series One of The Hollow Crown, “[b]owing under the weight of a celebratory and patriotic agenda” and exhibiting “the inherent conservatism of a naturalistic aesthetic” as well as “the traditionalism that Shakespeare’s authority provokes,” minimized the power of women and failed to treat the plays ironically enough (100). She also contended that ultimately the series “stakes British identity on a persistently white, masculinist monarchy even as questions arise about its necessity and even when the prime example of that institution is a female [Queen Elizabeth II] in her Diamond Jubilee year.” Pittman was particularly upset with what she called the “gender and race trouble of [the series’ version of] Henry V,” finding such problems “even more unaccountable given the fact that the film was led by … a female director laboring and creating in a male-dominated industry and who also had first-hand experience of Britain’s postcolonial economic and diplomatic alliances thanks to a youth spent living in Kenya.” Pittman felt that the “series resorts to a tabloidism of the male gaze and a racist character trope” that contradict the BBC’s promised “commitment to diversity.” She wrote that the series “neglects the ambivalent questioning of the plays, wedding Shakespearean authority yet again to traditional definitions of who writes, speaks, acts, and shapes British history” (118).
Michelle Dockery as Hotspur’s wife, Kate Percy, in The Hollow Crown.
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Photo via Alamy. [Used under license.]
Commenting on the second series of The Hollow Crown, subtitled The Wars of the Roses (128–56), Pittman related it to the 2016 national referendum concerning “Brexit” (a proposal that Britain should leave the European Union, as in fact it did). Pittman wrote that the “heavily documented xenophobia of the Leave campaign” could seem reflected in the new series’ emphasis on white actors and an uncomplicated nationalism. Observing that only one black woman figured as a truly major character in the series, Pittman argued that this fact seemed relevant to “the racist fears roiling under the surface of the Brexit vote, fears that the non-white intruder would undermine national sovereignty and economic independence.” Pittman suggested that, in “a move that endeavors to distance the production from the racism of the refugee debate, the film stresses analogues between the Vote Leave rhetoric” and the “increasingly paranoid insularity” exhibited by Richard III in Shakespeare’s plays, but she noted that ultimately the series’ version of Richard III “returns to white racial uniformity and leaves the Afro-British [Queen] Margaret an outcast in company with the dead of Bosworth.” Pittman additionally argued that “The Wars of the Roses also silences the conflicts and disaffections over class inequalities articulated by many of the Vote Leave electorate. In these ways,” she concluded, “Series Two of The Hollow Crown spotlights Shakespeare’s function as a barometer of 2016’s resurgent English nationalism” (131).
In her 2023 book Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen (21–53), Jennie M. Votava was particularly interested in The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, especially in the “presence of a Black actress, Sophie Okonedo, as Margaret of Anjou”—an example of “‘colour-blind’ casting” that Votava considered particularly intriguing and/or problematic (21). She considered the Wars of the Roses adaptation interesting not only because of “the histories’ relationship to British political identities” but also because of “past and present constructions of race, gender and disability” as well as such particular constructions as “whiteness, Blackness, masculinity and femininity as they intersect with constructions of nationhood” (23). Many of these issues, she thought, were relevant not only to Margaret but to Richard III (23). She contended that ultimately this televised series “epitomizes why an adaptation of Shakespeare’s histories can never be truly ‘colour-blind’” (24).
Describing debates about the casting of Okonedo to play Margaret (25ff), Votava noted both similarities and differences between the films’ presentations of Margaret and of Joan of Arc (29ff), Votava wrote that “[r]ather than revealing Margaret as Joan’s substitute, one French femme fatale to replace another, [the] joint representation of these two characters ultimately constructs Margaret as an other whose likenesses to and differences from Joan, as well as those to and from the society she is about to join, are almost impossible to parse” (32). Margaret, in other words, emerges as an immensely complicated figure, partly because “Okonedo’s skin colour is not invisible,” so that her presence “necessarily calls attention to intersections of race and gender in both the adaptation and the source text” (35). Votava also argued that the films’ “emphasis on the sexuality of a character played by a singular Black actress in a mostly white cast resonates with the contemporary ‘Jezebel’ stereotype of Black female promiscuity” (39). Votava felt that the “demonization of Margaret reaches its pinnacle in the battle when the queen tortures and kills the Duke of York” (41). Calling Margaret’s role “pivotal” to the whole Wars of the Roses series, Votava contended that “[b]y acknowledging the marginalizing effect of the defeated queen’s Blackness and presenting her character as increasingly sympathetic and ultimately heroic as a marginalized figure, the third and final episode of the trilogy broadens the scope of the English histories to offer a more inclusive vision” (45). According to Votava, despite the series’ “attempt to construct a unified yet multicultural, multiethnic British nation,” that attempt is “unsuccessful” because the programs continually reveal the importance of various kinds of difference and overlapping sorts of intersectionality (53).
Turning next to the first season of The Hollow Crown, Votava was now concerned not only with “non-normative structures of race, gender, sexuality and time” but also with “queer seriality.” She commented in particular on two different figures in this series’ Richard II: “the Bishop of Carlisle, played by British-Tanzanian/Zimbabwean actor Lucian Msamati, and Richard II himself, played by white British actor Ben Whishaw with inspiration from twentieth-century pop cultural icon Michael Jackson” (58). But she also noted the “significant presence” of “Black actor Paterson Joseph … as the Duke of York, a character largely invented” by the filmmakers (58). Discussing at length another character identified as “the Boy” (58ff), Votava suggested that his eventual death is not only “essential to his elevation to white Englishness” but “also paradoxically ensures his futurity—a white futurity—by non-reproductive means. Through his death the Boy achieves a symbolic whiteness propagated not through his own progeny but through his queer, theatrical status” (62).
Having first discussed one part of the Henriad, Votava now turned to the “entirely ‘traditional,’ all-white casts” of director Richard Eyre’s Henry IV, Part I and Henry IV, Part II, saying these segments of the series “stand out—not only in relation to the other episodes of The Hollow Crown’s first season but also with respect to a conflated adaptation of the same plays released the same year. That is Lennix, Quinn and Thompson’s H4,” which “its creators describe as ‘the first black Shakespeare film ever done’” (87), which includes a “white, British Falstaff” whom she contrasted with “Simon Russell Beale’s version of the same character in The Hollow Crown,” writing that “the implications of each character’s disability, whiteness and national identity are quite distinct” (88). She argued that “Beale presents a Falstaff whose girth is a mark of disease rather than a symbol of festivity,” suggesting that, “[a]long with his diminutive height, this Falstaff’s fatness designates a social dispossession that intersects in multiple ways with ideas about Englishness, masculinity, disability and class. Meanwhile, in H4, Macfadyen’s Falstaff is a figure of the white colonization of the Black American subject as represented, in part, by Shakespeare’s persistent cultural capital in the United States” (89). Falstaff, she noted, has persistently been presented as a white, British character (92ff), although she reported that in The Hollow Crown’s version of Henry VI, “Henry receives a physically and morally healthier Black best friend to replace the degenerate fat old white knight” (108)—a change suggesting that “nostalgia for ‘merrie old England’” is now insufficient in “twenty-first-century Britain” (108).
Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III in The Hollow Crown.
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Image via Alamy. [Used under license.]
Bibliography
Pittman, L. Monique. Shakespeare’s Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays. Routledge, 2022.
Votava, Jennie M. Shakespeare’s Histories on Screen: Adaptation, Race and Intersectionality. Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Publishing), 2023.