Shakespeare and the Gawain-poet

Last weekend, I saw Henry IV at the Folger (a great production, by the way, that's running for about another month), and I have to confess that I went into it with pretty minimal knowledge of most of Shakespeare's histories. It was the perfect time for me to be immersed in one of them though, particularly this one, because I had just written my essay on the Gawain-poet and read a good deal about members of noble households in the late fourteenth century. The play takes place in 1402-3 (near the beginning of Henry's reign) and really brought home for me the sort of martial existence that many English nobles lived. We've talked in class about the fact that warfare was their responsibility in society, but it is sometimes easy to lose track of what that really meant, especially during some of the more lighthearted parts of poems like Gawain. Also, while the play deals pretty minimally with both women and the Welsh, it also really illuminates the complex relationship nobles had to both. On the one hand, the Welsh are sort of demonized, and certainly portrayed as sort of barbaric, but on the other, English nobles intermarried with them, not unlike what we saw in Gawain. The scene in which Hotspur's wife demands to know why he is leaving and he refuses to tell her also really reminded me of the power struggles between Gawain and Bertilak's lady, in that it was difficult to tell who really had the upper hand.

I found it really fascinating that a play written several generations after the turn of the fifteenth century but over 400 years ago still addressed many of the same issues that come up when we read works from that time period, and really enjoyed looking at the era from a slightly different perspective than the one we have now.