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An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems (review)

3.4 and not in F). Taylor’s introduction to the play is historically and critically astute. Orienting his discussion phenomenologically, he begins in 1592, when both Shakespeare and the Henry VI plays became objects of public appropriation and controversy. The opening sections relate Part One’s patriotic and protestant-nationalistic aspects to military and political developments of the 1590s, while drawing attention to Shakespeare’s curious decision to dramatize a remarkably dismal period in English imperial history. Taylor speculates engagingly about contemporary social factors and mental attitudes that may have prompted Shakespeare and his collaborators to do so. Two sections titled “Plays Popular” and “Plays Unpopular” survey Part One’s stage and critical reception in early modern and twentieth-century contexts respectively. Because Taylor mentions only major British stage productions, his awareness of the theater’s interpretive realization of the play is more limited than it need be. A section titled “Upstart Crows” deals evenhandedly with the meanings and effects of Joan’s radically disjunctive identity. He also argues that the play’s scenic choreography and martial pageantry subsume its diagetic elements, and he concludes with analyses of the play’s language, its interest in social and cultural memory, and a brief discussion of F and its underlying manuscript. Overall the introduction is enlivened by Taylor’s wry sense of humor. The commentary concisely synthesizes the views of recent editors and critics while generally avoiding idiosyncrasies. Taylor’s glosses focus especially on the play’s use of metaphor, noting where it is unclear or imprecise. Occasionally, however, he misses opportunities that seem to invite significant explanation (for example, Joan as an Amazon at 1.2.104). His record of critical reception and interpretation is mainly literary, with few remarks about how recent productions have staged particular moments or scenes. There is also small attention paid to the chronicle sources, either here or in the introduction, and this sometimes leads to mistaken claims about what Shakespeare found there (for example, the assertion that the chronicles provided him with only “faint hints” of Margaret and Suffolk’s adulterous relationship [227n]). While Taylor often notes at the beginning of a scene that it portrays events unhistorically, he offers no further independent discussion of how Shakespeare and his collaborators engaged critically with Hall or Holinshed (who are cited in such outdated and unreliable reprints as the 1809 edition of Hall). Taylor’s edition of the play gives the reader little sense of the received history it re-presents as drama. Not everyone is interested in such matters, but many who are will have to look elsewhere.