Theatre to stage adaptation of Henry VI series, the subject of disputes over authorship

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

William Shakespeare almost certainly did not write Henry VI Part 1 – but it doesn’t matter, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director has said.

On Tuesday Gregory Doran announced details of the RSC’s 2020 winter season, which will include staging The Wars of the Roses, a two-part conflation of Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3.

How much Shakespeare wrote of Part 1 is open to question and conspiracy theories abound as to how much he truly wrote of many of his plays and sonnets.

“Who wrote Shakespeare? I don’t care,” said Doran. “Ultimately we’ve got this fantastic body of plays and I don’t care who he, she or they were in a way because we’ve got them.

“I think there is a degree of snobbery about who could have written them. I think he was running a stable of writers, like a Hollywood stable turning out films, they were turning out plays.”

Doran said demand was so high for the plays that Shakespeare had to be working with other writers. “In the 1593-94 season at the Rose they did, I think, 32 plays – 21 of which were new plays … people were writing and sharing and collaborating more than we actually recognise.”

Henry VI Part 1 is an anomalous play in that it was not written first. Scholars believe part 2 was the original Henry VI and part 3 was its sequel.

They were so successful, said Doran, that “in Spielberg fashion” Shakespeare and his collaborators decided to write a prequel.

“We don’t think Shakespeare wrote much of the prequel … it’s the one with Joan of Arc, Talbot etc. But it is a great anarchic playground of a play.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gregory Doran, left, with the actor Mark Quartley. Photograph: Dan Wooller/Rex/Shutterstock

Doran said Thomas Nashe was the likeliest writer of a lot of part 1 but we will never know for sure. “The point of collaboration in Shakespeare’s day was that you covered up the cracks. You didn’t show who had written one bit and who the other.”

The Wars of the Roses will be directed by Doran and Owen Horsley and staged in a reconfigured Swan theatre at the RSC’s base in Stratford-upon-Avon. There will be grandstand-type seating to give the space more of “a bearpit” feel, said Doran.

In the other main space, the company will continue its tradition of a Christmas family show with a musical adaptation of the children’s novel The Magician’s Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo.

Doran said he was optimistic that this year’s family show, The Boy in the Dress, an adaptation of David Walliams’ book with music by Robbie Williams, would transfer to the West End.

The new season was launched at the RSC’s rehearsal space in Clapham, south London, where Doran and his colleagues spoke of the wide range of work carried out offstage.

That includes the “RSC gym” where performers can do Shakespeare workouts to make sure everybody “has the iambic pentameter in their bloodstream … how to look for the clues that Shakespeare writes in to the plays”.

This is increasingly important, he said, with the decline of the regional theatre rep system and the training of actors becoming more focused on preparing them for television and film.

“People coming out of drama school often have less experience of the classic texts. It’s something we want to engage with,” Doran said.

“We have to just be careful that the craft does not diminish or get lost so we keep on making sure that post-drama school, while they are here, we are a sort of training ground.”