A Little Touch of Harry in the Daylight and Candlelight: Henry V at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

This chapter uses the inaugural performance of Henry V at the London Globe in 1999 as the basis for reflections on how the participatory dynamic of open-air amphitheatre performance can influence audience responses to the nationalistic politics of the play. Given the continuing (seemingly unending) influence of the new-historicist model of subversion and containment that Greenblatt introduced decades ago, I revisit Greenblatt’s argument about Henry V to argue that he does not take fully into account how much authority can be conferred on the audience in amphitheatre spaces, and thus how much the meaning of a play can be released from authorized interpretation. Ultimately, I argue that one crucial element of modern responses to the play in an “ersatz” amphitheatre space is self-consciousness about the relationship between participatory spectatorship and hero worship; as such, I suggest further that the ironies involved in attending a performance in a replica Globe may echo some self-consciously skeptical responses to authority that early-modern writers feared from Elizabeth’s subjects. To round out the chapter, I pursue the ideas in relation to a performance of the play in 2023 at the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.