ABSTRACT
Theatre historians often credit John Barton and Peter Halls's The Wars of the Roses (1963--4) with helping to define the modem performance values of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Perhaps the most important way it did so was to normalize the practice of relating Shakespeare's history plays to contemporary political issues. Taking up the Kottian imperative to make Shakespeare relevant and modem, Hall and Barton dismissed the stainedglass attitudes of traditional productions to reclaim the histories as forums for cultural debate - in their case the protest of an anti-paternalistic, nihilistically minded younger generation towards the political sclerosis and social malaise of post-war Britain, mingled with a paradoxical nostalgia for lost heroic authority. Hall and Barton likewise confirmed the practice of presenting the histories as cycles, so that patterns of action, theme and character could be seen to relate and evolve intricately, yet coherently, over the course of several plays. Dame Peggy Ashcroft's much-lauded performance as Margaret of Anjou was one of the main beneficiaries of this approach, since she appears in each play of the First Tetralogy. Reviewers praised her for rediscovering a 'new' tragic heroine and one of the great Shakespearean female roles because of her convincing growth in psychological complexity, emotional range and rhetorical power over the course of Hall and Barton's condensed and rewritten versions of Henry VI and Richard III. Moreover, realizing the full stage potential of Margaret's multi-play personality also encouraged a critical reappraisal of the First Tetralogy, with feminist scholars in particular bringing gender-specific analyses to bear on the women characters who participate in, and struggle against, the masculine power structures of their political worlds. 1 After Ashcroft's searching re-interpretation and the critical legacy it helped to inspire, there appeared to be no going back to the older stage tradition - what Lynda Boose has termed the 'dramatic Salic Law'2 - in which
Margaret's role, like those of other women in the histories, was marginalized, and her story troped according to familiar stereotypes such as sexually and political dangerous foreigner, and hysterical crone.3
