Shakespearean Seriality: The ‘Hollow Crown’, the ‘Wooden O’, and the ‘Circle in the Water’ of History

Abstract The recent adaptation of Shakespeare’s tetralogies into a two-season television mini-series by the BBC gives new impetus to an age-old question: how do seriality and Shakespeare relate? In The Hollow Crown (2012) and The Wars of the Roses (2016), Richard II’s ‘scepter’d isle’ transforms into 2 Henry VI’s ‘fertile England’ before becoming ‘mad and scarred’ in Richard III. In this ‘swelling scene’ of Shakespearean seriality, ‘time jumps o’er’ from one episode to the next, inviting us to reconsider the spatio-temporal flows of serialized history in the theatre and on screen. Whereas both Shakespeare’s history plays, and television series in general, have often been thought to dramatize little more than the relentless progress of time as it marches forwards into history, this paper argues that The Hollow Crown and The Wars of the Roses systematically disrupt that process. Rather than moving along a simply linear trajectory, these connected series throw up fragile permutations of history that are contested over time. In tracking this process, this paper explores new methods for understanding the narrative processes that govern both the complex patterns of serialized television as well as the shifting flows of history in Shakespeare’s plays.