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Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations

Wars of the Roses, 1965–66

See also individual entries for Henry VI, Part I; Henry VI, Part II; Henry VI, Part III; Richard III

This series of programs, focusing on Shakespeare’s history plays, was broadcast on the BBC in two different forms, first during 1965 and then again in 1966. The broadcasts were based on earlier theatrical stagings and starred many of the most prominent British actors of the day.

In their helpful 1988 critical anthology titled Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen quoted from a 1966 review by Alice Griffin, an early pioneering scholar dealing with Shakespeare on film. She called this series “the best television productions of Shakespeare’s plays”; admired the acting; appreciated the close-ups and the subtle facial expressions they revealed; noted that twelve cameras were used to record the performances; and observed that “[w]hen depicting a group, the camera wisely concentrated on a few, usually two, the speaker and the reactor. This was done with variety, with over-the-shoulder shots, or two actors in the foreground with others in the back,” commenting that “[s]ometimes, with telling effect, the camera stayed on the listener rather than the speaker.” She wrote that the “battle scenes were effective, though by the time Richard got to Bosworth Field, there seemed to be a sameness about the battles” (242).

Michael Manheim, in a 1994 essay titled “The English History Play on Screen,” suggested that this Wars of the Roses television series was “influenced by the 1960s passion for ‘absurdity’ as well as by a ‘pop existentialism’ associated with the work of Jan Kott and Samuel Beckett.” He argued that this emphasis conveyed, in the history plays, “a sense of arrogant, self-centered swagger in a senseless political maelstrom” (131). He praised David Warner’s performance as Henry VI but found it at odds with Shakespeare’s ultimate Christian ethos and called Ian Holms’s Richard III less a villain than an alien absurdist (132).

Cover of the play script, 1970.

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Image by screenplaystv.files.wordpress.com, via Wikimedia. [Fair use.]

In his 2019 book on screening productions by the Royal Shakespeare company (48–57), John Wyver discussed the genesis of the series and the practical challenges presented by attempts to film it, especially since it was not intended to be just a televised version of a stage play but a production intended for television (50–51). He wrote that it “was decided to record each play over three days, with two working days between each session, and that on each recording day the team would aim to achieve up to one hour of screen time.” Wyver also noted that “[n]ew equipment was manufactured especially for the production, including a ‘creeper’ camera mounting for floor-level shots, and a tower on wheels for a camera to operate at a height of sixteen feet. Perhaps the most distinctive technical innovation was the occasional use of a hand-held Ikegami camera, which was only very rarely employed in drama at the time” (52). According to Wyver, “One of the greatest glories of The Wars of the Roses as a television recording is that it captures an ensemble of astonishing actors giving exceptional performances,” so that viewers were “seeing some of the most glorious, intelligent and moving Shakespearean acting for the screen. The cast are working with a remarkably consistent televisual sense of delivery rather than the heightened effect that would have been necessary in the theatre. Almost all of the main characters,” he observed, “also speak direct-to-camera for their soliloquies and asides, achieving an intimacy with their confidences that establishes a disarming complicity irrespective of their villainy. At other moments, stage and screen fuse in a performative space that facilitates lengthy speeches to unfold within a single shot that develops by reframings and camera movement but that eschews cuts to alternative angles” (54). However, he also commented that the “unresolved sense of the production’s dramatic reality, along with the range of camera and editing techniques that resist cohering into a unified style, together disrupt the unity of the television The Wars of the Roses” (56).

Bibliography

1 

Bulman, J. C., and H. R. Coursen, editors. Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews. UP of New England, 1988.

2 

Manheim, Michael. “The English History Play on Screen.” Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television, edited by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, Cambridge UP, 1994, pp. 121–45.

3 

Wyver, John. Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History. Bloomsbury/The Arden Shakespeare, 2019.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Wars Of The Roses, 1965–66." Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2025. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSSF_0051.
APA 7th
Wars of the Roses, 1965–66. Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations, In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Salem Press, 2025. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSSF_0051.
CMOS 17th
"Wars Of The Roses, 1965–66." Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations, Edited by Robert C. Evans. Salem Press, 2025. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSSF_0051.