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ENGLISH

HISTORY PLAYS

The first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, known as the First Folio, divided the plays into three categories Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. At the end of the sixteenth century, plays about English history had been extremely popular on the London stage. The history play seems to be the vehicle by which the young Shakespeare first made his mark as a playwright. Three plays dealing with the reign of King Henry VI are among Shakespeare's earliest surviving works, and they are also the subject of the first references we have to Shakespeare as a London playwright. In Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, published in 1592, the university-trained playwright Robert Greene complained about `an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers'.

The `upstart crow' was probably William Shakespeare because, Greene continued, 'with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a
Player's hide, [he] supposes that he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only shake-scene in a country'.

The identity of Greene's target is indicated, not only by the epithet `shake-scene', but also by `his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide', which echoes a line`O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide' (1.4.138)from Shakespeare's Henry VI Part Three. This play, which was probably written for the 1590-1 theatrical season, was first published in 1595 in a version entitled The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth.

Greene must have assumed the play would be well-known among his readers; otherwise the insult could not have found its mark. And the play must have been successful: otherwise it would not have provoked Greene's animosity. Additional, more favourable, notice of Shakespeare's early success as a writer of English histories appeared in another 1592 publication, Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil, which claimed that 'ten thousand spectators at least had wept at the theatrical representation of John Talbot's death. Nashe was probably referring to the first part of Henry VI.

The uses of history It is not surprising that the young Shakespeare turned to English history for his subject matter. The plays he wrote were commercial products, designed to draw the largest possible audiences to the playhouse, and his dramatizations of English history were designed to appeal to the same interests that had already attracted a wide readership for books on that subject. One of the first books printed by William Caxton after he established the first printing press in England was The Chronicles of England (1480), and by 1530, the book had been published thirteen times. John Stow's Summary of English Chronicles, published in I565, had nineteen editions by 1618.

William Warner's Albion's England, published in 1586, went through seven editions during the next twenty years. Fabyan's Chronicles, which traced English history from the time of the Roman conquest to the end of the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century, had seven editions in fifty years. Many other historical works enjoyed comparable popularity among a large and diverse readership. A number of reasons have been suggested for this widespread interest in English history. For one thing, the study of history was highly esteemed by humanist scholars. Sir Thomas Elyot, for instance, made it the centre of his educational programme:

'there is no study or science ... of equal commodity and pleasure for a noble man. It includes 'all things that is necessary to be put in memory'. The need for a specifically English history was also recognized by the Tudor monarchs, who used it to legitimate their rather dubious claim to the throne. The Tudors were a new dynasty whose founder Henry VII, had acquired his crown, not by inheritance, but by defeating his predecessor, Richard III in battle. Henry VII turned to various historical figures to authorize his monarchy.

He claimed descent from the Trojan Brut, the legendary founder of Britain; he incorporated the red dragon of the ancient Welsh king Cadwallader (the last Welsh king to claim lordship over all of Britain) in the royal arms; and he named his first son after the legendary British King Arthur. Henry VII also sponsored the work of the Italian historian, Polydore Vergil, whose Anglica Historica traced Henry's ancestry to Cadwallader and suggested that his ascent to the throne was divinely ordained. Edward Halls 1548 chronicle went even further in constructing a story of ancient descent and providential purpose that reached its validating conclusion in the Tudor dynasty.

Hall's chronicle was entitled The Union of the Two Noble and
Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York Being Long in Continual Dissension for the Crown of this Noble Realm, with all the Acts Done in Both the Times of the Princes, Both of the One Lineage and of the Other, Beginning at the Time of King Henry the Fourth, the First Author of this Division and so Successively Proceeding to the Reign of the High and Prudent Prince King Henry the Eighth, the Indubitable Flower and Very Heir of Both the Said Lineages. In Hall's account, Henry IV's deposition of Richard II sowed the seeds for the Wars of the Roses, a prolonged dynastic struggle that was resolved only when the blood of Lancaster and York was finally united in the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York and in the person of their second son Henry VIII. But humanist scholarship and royal sponsorship alone could not account for the widespread interest in history in Tudor England.

The writing of English history not only helped to legitimate Tudor sovereignty and to define an emergent nation-state; it also served to validate the status and identity of individual subjects. Having a history was equivalent to having a place in the status hierarchy. As Hall remarked in the prefatory letter to his chronicle, 'What diversity is between a noble prince and a poor beggar if after their death there be left of them no remembrance or token?' Moreover, the use of history to ratify personal claims to a place in an increasingly unstable social hierarchy was not confined to noble princes. The hereditary nobility could look for the names of their ancestors in the Tudor chronicles, but ambitious men born without hereditary titles (William Shakespeare's father among them) provided a thriving business for the College of Heralds, who were empowered to create coats of arms that authorized new money in genealogical fictions of privileged ancestry.

NOSTALGIA FOR A LOST PAST


The historical past was also an object of sentimental veneration. Living in a time of rapid and often bewildering social, political, and economic change, Shakespeare's contemporaries looked to history, the study of change itself, to rationalize their changing world and to discover foundational narratives that could legitimate innovative cultural structures. As a result, England's medieval past was often idealized as a time of stable values and national glory. The nostalgic appeal of this imagined medieval world gave rise to a variety of cultural productions, ranging from the deliberate archaisms in the poetry of Edmund Spenser to the elaborate reconstructions of medieval tournaments staged each year in celebration of Queen Elizabeth's Accession Day.

The historical past also constituted one of the chief attractions of the English history play. Defending plays based on 'our English Chronicles', Thomas Nashe stated:
Nay, what if I prove plays to be no extreme, but a rare exercise of virtue? First, for the subject of them, (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English chronicles, wherein our forefathers' valiant acts (that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books) are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honors in open presence; than which, what can be a sharper reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours?

In Shakespeare's history plays, this nostalgic longing for a better past is expressed in various ways, large and small. It even seems to inform the structural links that bind the plays together into a connected story.

In the First Folio, the plays were printed in the order in which the kings for which they are named reigned, starting with King John and ending with Henry VIII. The eight intervening plays tell a connected historical story, beginning with the deposition and murder of Richard II proceeding through the troubled reign of Henry IV to the triumphs of Henry V, the disastrous reign of his son Henry VI and the bloodbath of Richard III and ending with the accession of the first Tudor monarch Henry VII. However, this is not the order in which the plays were first produced. The plays designated in the First Folio as the three parts of Henry VI are linked together in a sequence that ends with Richard III.

Because these four plays were composed earlier than the other history plays and because they can be read as a connected sequence, scholars often refer to them as the first tetralogy. The four plays that deal with the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V are known as the second tetralogy, because they were composed later; although they can be read as a connected sequence, the historical events they described actually preceded those depicted in the earlier plays. Although the reasons for this order of composition are unknown, the final Chorus of Henry V defines it as a story of loss. Predicting Henry's premature death and the disastrous reign of his son, the Chorus ends by reminding the audience

that the subsequent history has been already shown on their stage:
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king Of France and England, did this king succeed, Whose state so many had the managing That they lost France and made his England bleed, Which oft our stage hath shownand, for their sake, In your fair minds let this acceptance take.

The reference here to the Henry VI plays bends the linear progress of the history Shakespeare took from the Tudor Chronicles into a theatrical cycle, beginning and ending with Henry's death; for just as Henry V ends by predicting Henry's impending death, the first part of Henry VI begins with his funerals .

The circle is joined at the point that represents the moment of loss the death of the most heroic of Shakespeare's English kings. The opening Chorus of Henry V had already described the playhouse as a wooden O, inadequate to contain the magnitude of Henry's achievements. Like the image of the empty 'wooden O', the final Chorus of the play also marks an absencethe heroic past that the name of Henry V denotes.

SHAKESPEARES EARLY HISTORY PLAYS


The three plays depicting the reign of Henry's son, Henry VI, portray the destruction. of his father's legacy. Human exemplars of the heroic, chivalric, civic, patriotic, and ethical virtues associated with the reign of Henry V (such as John Talbot and the dead king's venerable brothers, Bedford and Gloucester) are clearly marked as representatives of an older, better world, and as they die, the virtues they exemplify seem to die along with them.

The Henry VI plays have often been faulted by critics for their loose, episodic structure;
There is, however, a persistent theme of degeneration in all three plays as the England they depict sinks increasingly into chaos and barbarity. Yorkists and Lancastrians compete with each other in treachery and atrocity, authority is effaced, power becomes an end in itself, and the crown becomes a prize of war, tossed from one head to another at the whim of brute force and blind fortune. Thomas Nashe had celebrated the history play as offering a 'reproof to these degenerate, effeminate days of ours' by reviving on stage the martial valour of England's medieval 'forefathers', but the Henry VI plays depict the reign of 'an effeminate prince' (Henry VI Part One, 1. 135), where the best warriors are often women.

The idealized medieval England that was an object of sentimental veneration in Shakespeare's time is notably absent in these plays, but the disordered realm they depict is framed by two emblems of royal perfection, English triumph, peace, and prosperityHenry V at the beginning and Henry VII at the end. Although we see his funeral at the beginning of Henry VI Part One, Henry V never appears on stage in any of these early plays, and Henry VII appears only at the end of Richard III and only as Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, not as the ideal king that he will become. Both, therefore, serve to mark the absence of the idealized England that is always already lost in all these early plays.

SHAKESPEARE'S LATER HISTORY PLAYS

In the second tetralogy, Shakespeare moves back in time to trace the succession of kings from Richard II to Henry V, but even here the idealized England of nostalgic longing continues to elude dramatic representation. Richard II, the opening play in that sequence, depicts the deposition and murder of the last of the medieval kings who could trace their succession back to William the Conqueror. A secular analogue to the Biblical Fall, Richard's deposition is staged as the end of the idealized feudal world that constituted the object of sixteenth-century nostalgia. The opening scene, set in Richard's court, is replete with ceremonial gestures and elaborately rhymed speeches that give it the air of a medieval tableau.

Even the play's opening line'Old John of Gaunt, timehonoured Lancaster'exploits this nostalgia, reminding the audience that they are about to enter the world of Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt (1340-99), who was indeed 'timehonoured' by the time the play was produced. And before the first act ended, the audience was treated to all the formal preliminaries to a medieval trial by combat, complete with trumpets, two heralds, a Marshal, and armed combatants. The trial by combat was founded on the belief that God would give victory to the party who was in the right. The kings maintained control over the practice, and it came to be reserved for cases affecting royal interests, such as serious criminal cases or disputes over land.

The spectacle must have had enormous appeal for Shakespeare's original audiences, many of whom would have also flocked to see Queen Elizabeth's Accession Day tilts which were open to the general public. Tilt a medieval sport in which two mounted knights with lances charged together and attempted to unhorse one another. In Richard II, the nostalgic appeal of the spectacle would have been reinforced by the fact that it was a trial by combat, a ritual that evoked an imagined medieval world where divine providence legitimated earthly justice. Shakespeare loads enormous emphasis on the trial by combat, deferring it and emphasizing its importance in the represented action.

The opening scene depicts Richard's attempt to resolve the quarrel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray about who was responsible for the murder of Richard's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. Richard is eager to lay the dispute to rest, since the responsibility was ultimately his, but he cannot persuade the disputants to give it up, so the scene ends with his order that they meet in a formal trial by combat where divine justice will determine who is telling the truth. Next comes an invented scene between John of Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester, aged holdovers from an earlier world where power and legitimacy were united.

The Duchess pleads with Gaunt to avenge her husband's murder, but Gaunt argues that there is no way a good subject can avenge the crime without opposing the will of God, since Richard, the culprit, is God's anointed king. Faced with this irresolvable dilemma, Gaunt and the Duchess finally agree to await the trial by combat. `God's is the quarrel', Gaunt argues (1.2.37), and only God can resolve it. The trial itself, however, never takes place. Richard himself aborts the proceedings, cheating the playgoers of the spectacle they have been led to anticipate from the end of the opening scene. Here, as in much of the play, Richard is depicted as the destroyer of the idealized medieval England he inherited,

and the object of nostalgic desire is pushed even further back into the past, into the time of Richard's glorious predecessors who are recalled to mark the extent of Richard's shortcomings. The most powerful and explicit expression of that nostalgic ideal comes in the famous set speech delivered by John of Gaunt just before he dies in the opening scene of Act Two, which invokes the glory of this lost England to mark the present degradation he attributes to the misrule of the youthful King Richard II. Gaunt calls his idealized England 'This other Eden', associating it with the archetypal focus of nostalgia, the perfect original home that is always already lost.

However, he describes England not as a garden but as a 'fortress', the sea that surrounds it as 'a moat defensive to a house'in short, as an idealized medieval landscape. Equally idealized, its rulers are described as medieval crusader-kings,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home For Christian service and true chivalry As is the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son.

(2.1.53-6) After Gaunt dies, his aged brother, the Duke of York, now the last surviving son of Edward III, explicitly details the contrast between Richard and his royal ancestors whom he glorifies as heroic warriors abroad and ideal rulers at home:

In war was never lion raged more fierce, In peace was never gentle lamb more mild.... ... when he frowned it was against the French, And not against his friends. His noble hand Did win what he did spend, and spent not that Which his triumphant father's hand had won. His hands were guilty of no kindred blood, But bloody with the enemies of his kin. (2.1.174-84)
Replicating and reduplicating the nostalgia that drew the

audience to the playhouse, the historical figures represented on stage repeatedly look back to an even more distant past as a lost time when things were better.

Living kings can never live up to the ideals represented by their dead predecessors. Even Richard II, although he never manages to emulate his heroic forefathers' example, imagines at the end of the play, after he has been deposed and shortly before he is murdered, that he too will be transmuted by death into a focus for nostalgic recollection. 'Think I am dead', he tells his queen:
In winter's tedious nights, sit by the fire With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages long ago betid; And ere thou bid goodnight, to quit their griefs Tell thou the lamentable fall of me, And send the hearers weeping to their beds (5.1.40-5)

Despite the evidence throughout the play of Richard's inadequacies as a ruler, his death will transform his deposition and murder into a melancholy tale of a lost and lamented past.

Here, as in all of Shakespeare's history plays, the focus for nostalgia is the reign of a dead monarchical figure. Those kings, like the Edenic England they ruled, are always already lost in Shakespeare's history plays. In King John, Richard the Lionheart never appears on stage, but his death and divided legacy initiate the contention between his son John and his grandson Arthur for a throne which no longer has a clear and undisputed occupant. In Richard II, both Richard's grandfather, Edward III, and his heroic father, Edward the Black Prince, are dead before the action begins, but both are invoked as ideal figures from the past to mark the nature and extent of present degradation.

In Henry VIII, the only one of the history plays written during the reign of James I, the absent object of nostalgic desire is Queen Elizabeth I. Represented as Henry's most important achievement ('Never before / This happy child did I get anything' (5.4.64-5), Elizabeth appears in the play only in the final scene and only as a new-born infant.
Cranmer's prophecy depicts her reign as an ideal time, but it also extends beyond her death, reminding Shakespeare's Jacobean audience that she was as inaccessible to them as she had been to the Henrician characters represented on stage ('few now living can behold that goodness' (5.4.21).

The reign of Henry VII occupies a similar position in Richmond's speech at the end of Richard IIIthe object of the characters' hopes for the future but also of the audience's nostalgia for a halcyon (golden/flourishing) time that lies just beyond the bounds of dramatic representation. The most persistent focus for nostalgic idealization in Shakespeare's history plays is the figure of Henry V. His image hovers just beyond the frame of both tetralogies. Henry is the lost heroic presence that the entire historical project seems designed to recover. The Henry VI plays depict the losing struggle to preserve his legacies of French conquest and national unity. The figure of Henry V hovers behind the entire second tetralogy as well.

Always elusive, he is first mentioned in Richard II when his newly crowned father demands, 'Can no man tell of my unthrifty son? / 'Tis full three months since I did see him last' (5.3.1-2), but the audience does not see him either until the Henry IV plays, and even there he plays a series of roles designed, as he tells the audience from the beginning, to conceal his true nature. `I know you all', he says in a soliloquy early in Henry IV Part One, 'and will a while uphold / The unyoked humour of your idleness' (1.2.173-4). Within the play, the 'you' refers to the disreputable crew of lowlife characters with whom the Prince consorts in the Eastcheap tavern;

but it also refers to the playgoers themselves, the idle crowd who have come to the playhouse to be entertained. Prominent among those entertainments, as advertised on the title page of the play's first published edition, were 'the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff'. The Prince we see in the first Part of Henry IV spends more time with Falstaff than with his father, adopting a variety of disreputable but entertaining disguises, including those of a robber and a serving-man in a tavern. He plays a prominent part in the fictional comic subplot peopled by a cast of anachronistically modern characters, which repeatedly interrupts and parodies the historical action.

At the end of Part One Hal appears to appropriate Hotspur's chivalric honour, paying tribute to his rival's honours, killing him in single combat, and then completing Hotspur's dying speech to speak in his 'behalf' (5.4). Here, as in his opening soliloquy, the Prince recalls the heroic figure denoted by the name of Henry V, but in Part Two, the first time we see him, he is again consorting with his low companions, acknowledging that 'these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness' (2.2.11-12). His apotheosis is again deferred until the end of the play, where he announces that he has 'turned away my former self' along with his lowlife companions in dissolute pleasure (5.5.56-7).

Just as the first tetralogy looks back to Henry V as an emblem of lost glory that shows up the inadequacy of his son's failed reign, the second looks forward to his glorious accession, the anticipated reward that will compensate for his father's crimes and justify his own riotous behaviour as Prince Hal. But when Shakespeare finally turns in the last play in the second tetralogy to the glorious reign of this once and future king, all that longingly remembered and eagerly anticipated glory evaporates in ambiguity, as the heroic words of the Chorus are repeatedly contradicted by the events enacted on stage and challenged by the irreverent voices of vulgar theatrical clowns. Even in the play that bears his name, Henry V is never fully present.

The progress of the two tetralogies is a progress back in time to a dead hero and a lost heroic age that evaporate in ambiguity as soon as they are reached.

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