Doubling and Resurrection Across the Henriad

Whenever a leading actor took on multiple roles within a play on the early modern stage, audiences undoubtedly would have taken note of the doubling, making connections, and drawing contrasts between the actor’s juxtaposed parts. Theatre historians, however, have been unable to come to any degree of consensus about how early modern doubling practices actually worked, which is especially unfortunate for those of us interested in reconstructing the phenomenology of early modern audience response. This chapter comes at the question of doubling from a new angle, by considering Elizabethan serial drama and the strategies that playing companies might have employed in deploying their leading actors across multi-part plays. In particular, it focuses on the plays in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, looking for telltale signs in their dramaturgical design that might signal the “resurrection” of various characters in the series, instances where an actor dies in one role and returns in another.