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The History Plays: Keys to Understanding
Many modern readers find Shakespeare’s history plays to be a little puzzling and very intimidating. With a few exceptions (Richard III, Henry IV – Part One, Henry V), they tend to not be staged very often, especially in America. Some of his early histories, like the three parts of Henry VI, which made his early reputation as a playwright and which were very popular with his contemporary audience, are hardly even read today. Having said all this, the history plays are rich tapestries of character development, combining comedy and tragedy with a wide sweep of portraying all of humanity. Our chosen play, Henry IV, Part One, stands as one of Shakespeare’s primary achievements, ranking with the great tragedies, and with the invention of the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare created his most wonderful character, who has only Hamlet as a rival.
But I am getting ahead of myself! Much like the “theories of comedy” document we used to prepare the ground for Midsummer, I want to develop, in this document, some background information and “theories of history plays” to help us navigate these treacherous yet rewarding waters.
We need to begin with history itself. By the late 1500s, history as a scholarly discipline was changing just like almost all fields were from an essentially medieval mode to what we can begin to recognize as a modern one. If one were to think about “the history of history” so to speak, one would see certain phases emerge, each with its own contributions to carry forward to new phases:
Mythology and Legend: All cultures have enduring stories, of origins, founders, heroes, villains, etc. as well as tales to explain the natural world and human nature. The study of history emerged from this nexus, as all of the earliest literate cultures: Egypt, Sumeria, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and others in India and China began to write down their orally preserved myths, legends, tales, and stories. Gradually, legend began to merge with fact, mostly in the form of chronicles – brief accounts of battles, notable disasters like floods, and the deeds of rulers.
The Hebraic tradition: One of the notable early developers of this method was the nation of Israel, which had a class of literate priests who began the process of compiling written texts of laws, myths, creation stories, heroic ancestors, and origin stories of how the tribes and groups of their society began. This tradition began to also chronicle (there are even two books in the Old Testament called Chronicles) the actual history (beginning roughly around 1000 BC) of the judges and kings of Israel. Of course, this historical work would come to form part of the Old Testament. English history writers always used the Old Testament as their authority for the earliest human history.
The Greek historians: The first writers who could be called “historians” in the modern sense of the term were the Athenians, Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom wrote in the 4th century BC. They, along with lesser known colleagues began the tradition of writing a more expansive kind of historical narrative that went beyond the brief chronicle traditions of earlier cultures. However, it is important to remember that even they relied on Homer and the other Greek myths as a starting point.
The Roman historians: Too numerous to mention, the Roman historians worked in a variety of methods, trying to create both accurate descriptions of Rome’s rise to world domination and to also build what today we would call “propaganda” concerning Rome’s utter superiority to all other societies. The Romans also developed a branch of history called historical biography; that is, history told via the detailed biographical stories of famous and powerful men. Plutarch (actually a Greek, but writing within the ambit of the Roman Empire) was the key writer here, and Shakespeare was particularly fond of Plutarch’s Lives of the Famous Greeks and Romans which he used extensively as a basis for many of his plays.
The Medieval Traditions: After the slow decline and gradual fall of Roman authority, the “successor states” to Rome in Europe, various Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and other peoples carried on with Roman models, but the emphasis of history became entirely religious. Medieval history is minutely detailed about the activities of bishops, saints, church councils, and doctrinal disputes. This was a result of monks and other churchmen (and a few women) being the only literate and educated members of society. Secular events, especially the activities of Kings, Dukes, and other nobles were still chronicled, but the emphasis was sacred. In England, this tradition was best exemplified by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a sprawling narrative maintained in various monasteries which contained terse year-by-year descriptions of English history from the about 450 AD (very unreliable and scattered) to well after the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Renaissance Traditions: Like almost every human endeavor, history was again transformed by the Renaissance rediscovery of the Classical historians of Greece and Rome. A new kind of history writing started to emerge, which applied the Greek and Roman methods to a narration of historical events; however, the emphasis remained very much focused on the deeds of kings and high ranking nobles. No one was writing a “People’s history of medieval England”!
The Tudor rulers, Henry VII and Henry VIII, both saw another possibility: history could be “shaped” to favor their point of view, to paint their questionable deeds in a better light, and so on. Since they controlled the patronage of the scholars who would actually write the histories, they could control what those writers said about history! The best example of this was the massively successful Tudor project to vilify Richard III, the king whom Henry VII had defeated in battle in 1485 and replaced on the throne. Sure enough, Tudor historians created a portrait of Richard as a monstrous tyrant, responsible for the murder of his own nephews as children, etc. Modern historians know that Richard was actually a decent king who was no more violent than any barbaric medieval ruler, but his reputation was forever damaged by Tudor “spin.”
Although we can recognize Tudor history as the beginnings of modern thinking about history, there were many aspects of it that remained “medieval”:
The emphasis was still very focused on the individual stories of Kings and other highly ranked members of the church and the nobility. These individuals were the only ones who “come alive” in the historical writings or who seem to be fully human.
History was seen largely as the unfolding of God’s providential plan for the world, which, not surprisingly, was to culminate in England’s superiority over everyone. To us, Tudor history comes across as very provincial, biased, and unaware of other viewpoints. There is a constant assertion of English superiority over French, Spanish, and other European nations. English enemies at home, The Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish are treated as barely being human beings, and God is always on the English side! (of course, the history writing in every other nation did the same thing!)
History was “personal”: that is, it consisted largely of stories where kings and nobles talked to each other, fought battles, held councils, passed laws, and so on. There was no sense of history being a larger human narrative about everyday life and people and there was no concept that things like climate and environment, economics, or psychology had any effect on historical events.
The Two Most Important Tudor Historians: By Shakespeare’s day, there were two historians whose work was to form the source material for most stage plays about English history.
Raphael Holinshed (1529-1580): He was originally from Cheshire, but worked in London. He worked for a London publisher named Reginald Wolfe, who wanted to produce a full account of English history and commissioned Holinshed to write it. Holinshed’s Chronicles of the Kings of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published in 1577 (with a revision in 1587). The chronicle begins with Noah’s flood from the Bible and covers all of known English history (the early parts are mostly myth and legend). Shakespeare and many of his fellow playwrights would use Holinshed as their primary source material for chronicle history plays, although Shakespeare always enhances and embellishes the original material.
Edward Hall (1498-1547): He was an historian and lawyer who wrote The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancastre and Yorke (first published in 1547). Hall’s history covered the period from 1399, when Henry IV usurped the throne from Richard II, to 1547, when Henry VIII died. Hall was patronized directly by Henry VIII, so he was the primary initiator of a pro-Tudor spin to history. Since Shakespeare’s sequence of history plays deals with just this time frame, Hall became his other key source along with Holinshed.
But why did Shakespeare and his colleagues write history plays in the first place? It is an interesting question because the Classical and Renaissance models of the theatre tended to focus exclusively on comedy and tragedy as the two genres. We must begin by thinking about tragedy’s subject matter. Most of the model tragedies available to Elizabethan playwrights were basically stories from history (or legend) of powerful men who met tragic ends. So there is a sense in which history plays are a kind of tragedy. However, many of Shakespeare’s history plays are not actually tragic (that is, they don’t end, like Hamlet, with the protagonist and almost everyone else dead on the stage). Yet another aspect of tragedy, however, was the presence of outsized, larger-than-life personalities on stage. The chronicle histories of Hall and Holinshed were filled with Kings, Dukes, Earls, and Lords (and a few Queens and Ladies) who fit the bill exactly! Thus, there were ready made stories available to build upon.
English history was by no means the only (or even the most common) source material for the Elizabethan stage. Research into the surviving texts and other materials show that a vast plethora of plays that can be called “histories” were written and staged from the mid-1580s to the closure of the theatres in 1642: Greek and Roman history, the Bible, the Eastern tales of Persia, Egypt, and Babylon, Germanic and Celtic myth, Medieval history like the Crusades, ad infinitum, were all mined for plots and characters.
The specific emphasis on English history probably had several motives. The more educated audience members (from the aristocracy and from the law courts) would have learned English history in school and university and thus were ripe to appreciate plays based on it. There was also a growing sense, especially in London, of Englishness as a concept of nationalism in the sense that we think of it today. This was leading to a great sense of pride in being English, which carried with it a strong desire to know the story of English history, which the theatrical companies, ever alert to commercial opportunities, were quick to capitalize on.
Once the genre of the English chronicle history play was established, it started to develop conventions and methods that were easily identifiable and appreciated by the audience. A good analogy is to think of the Western in American film and TV: across several decades of production, audiences came to expect certain plot points, characters and so forth. Theatrical audiences in Shakespeare’s London quickly came to expect similar methods, plots, and characters from history plays.
In my mind, however, perhaps the key appeal of the history play was a more subtle one: because of the apparatus of state censorship which pervaded Tudor (and especially Elizabethan) politics, it was dangerous if not impossible to comment on contemporary politics on the public stage. When playwrights did, as when Ben Jonson and several colleagues wrote an infamous satire called The Isle of Dogs, the results were unpleasant, including prison and even torture for the writers and actors involved! But, if one could write about the events of 100-300 years in the past, one could draw inferences, make comparisons, and otherwise speak about the present while seeming to speak only about the distant past!
The best example of this is from Shakespeare’s own experience (which I have also covered in earlier documents). In 1601, when the Earl of Essex decided on a desperate attempt to overthrow Elizabeth’s government, his agents commissioned the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to present a special performance of Richard II, Shakespeare’s play which featured Henry IV usurping the throne from his cousin Richard II. When Essex’s plot failed utterly, the Chamberlain’s Men were hauled in for questioning. Everyone involved knew that the deposing of Richard II from the throne as depicted in the play could be interpreted as a call for Essex to depose Elizabeth! Shakespeare and Company were barely able to escape unscathed by convincing Elizabeth’s ministers that they had done it “for the money” (having been paid £50 for their performance).
So what about Shakespeare’s personal involvement with the history play genre? It began almost as his entire career as a playwright began. To recap material from earlier documents, Shakespeare’s earliest known forays in play writing were history plays and the first mention of him by another writer, Robert Greene, in 1592, mentions him as the author of an immensely popular play about Henry VI. In fact, Shakespeare wrote 10 plays about English history (actually more if we consider plays like Macbeth, Cymbeline, King Lear, and so forth to be about ancient British history; however, they are more properly considered tragedies which happen to have an historical English/British setting)
Two of them are kinds of one offs that stand alone and are unconnected to any others: King John, written in 1596-96 (and probably a revision of an earlier, anonymous play) and set in the early 13th century. And Henry VIII, co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher in 1613, at the very end of his career and actually more of court masque than an actual history play.
At the very outset of his career, in the late 1580s and early 1590s, Shakespeare wrote a sequence of four history plays about events from 1422-1485 that occurred during and right after the long and troubled reign of King Henry VI. The plays are today called Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. This was a turbulent period in English history which included the sad end of the Hundred Years’ War with France and the even sadder Civil War between the Lancaster and York branches of the Plantagenet royal family. It was also the period that ultimately culminated in Tudor England, because Elizabeth’s grandfather, himself a Lancastrian, defeated and killed the Yorkist Richard III and then married the daughter of Richard’s older brother, King Edward IV, thus finally ending the conflict and uniting the two warring families. The three Henry VI plays were immensely popular during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but are little studied today; however, Richard III remains very popular because Richard himself is one of Shakespeare’s greatest yet most comic stage villains.
A Few years later, after the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and beginning in 1595, Shakespeare returned to English history for a second “tetralogy” (group of four) plays:
Richard II: Shakespeare dips back earlier in time, to 1398-1400, to cover the final days of the troubled reign and even more troubled personality of Richard II, a fascinatingly flawed king, who allows Shakespeare to create a lyrical but ultimately tragic portrait of a man ill-suited for the throne. Richard is overthrown by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV.
Henry IV, Part One: Shakespeare continues the story, picking up the narrative in 1403, where King Henry faces an explosion of rebellion against his rule. Obviously, since we are reading this play, I will cover it in great detail in other documents.
Henry IV, Part Two: We are not sure of whether Shakespeare wrote the two parts at the same time more or less, but considered it too long to be a single play, or whether the success of Part One led him to write Part Two (the strategy had worked a few years earlier with the three parts of the Henry VI plays). This play continues with the characters and plot of Part One and covers a wider time range, from 1405 to Henry IV’s death in 1413 and the coronation of Prince Henry, his son, as King Henry V.
Henry V: Shakespeare concluded his vast story with a play about Henry V’s invasion of France in 1415, focused especially on the famous battle of Agincourt where his greatly outnumbered company defeated a huge French army. The play skitters ahead to 1420, where a treaty grants Henry the hand of the French King’s daughter in marriage with the provision that their son will rule England AND France. That son, Henry VI, was only 1 when Henry V died in 1422, and Shakespeare had already written the three earlier plays about his tragic life and reign.
History Play Sequencing: These 8 Plays together cover a time period from 1398 – 1485
Richard II [1596]: Begins in 1398, when Richard has been king for 21 years [he was only 31, having been crowned at age 10]; the play ends with Richard’s death in Pontefract Castle in February of 1400.
Henry IV, Part One [1597-98]: Begins in 1402 when King Henry IV hears that Owen Glendower has captured the Earl of March and Hotspur has defeated the Scots at the Battle of Homildon Hill; the play covers a period of rebellion against Henry that lasted from October of 1402 to July of 1403 and the play ends with Hal and King Henry victorious over Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403.
Henry IV, Part Two [1598]: Begins in 1405, with a second rebellion against Henry by Henry Percy (Hotspur’s father), Owen Glendower, and Edmund Mortimer – joined by the Archbishop of York (Richard Scroop); the action of the play ranges widely (but in compressed form) from the 1405 rebellion to the death of Henry IV on 20 March 1413 and the coronation of Henry V on 9 April 1413, which is where the play ends.
Henry V [1599]: Begins in 1415, with the newly crowned King Henry V preparing to invade France; most of the play covers this campaign – the siege of Harfleur and the Battle of Agincourt; the final scene, which seems to take place right after the battle, actually occurred in1420.
Henry VI, Part One [1592]: begins with Henry V’s death in 1422, covers the troubled period when the kingdom is ruled by regents (Henry VI was only one year old when Henry V died) and also covers the last period of the Hundred Years’ War, when Joan of Arc leads the French to victory (although the English burn her as a witch [in the play]); the play ends in 1453 with the death of Lord Talbot at the Battle of Cantillon
Henry VI, Part Two [by 1591]: begins slightly before the end of Part One, in 1445 {with the marriage of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou} and covers the opening events of the so-called Wars of the Roses, where Henry VI and his Lancastrian forces are challenged by his cousins the Yorkists and Civil War erupts; the play ends at the first Battle of St. Albans on May 22, 1455.
Henry VI, Part Three [by 1591]: begins in 1460 with the Battle of Northhampton and covers the second part of the Wars of the Roses, in which the Yorkists triumph; the play ends with the Battle of Tewkesbury on May 4 1471, where Richard III (not king yet) kills the Prince of Wales and, later, Henry VI is killed at the Tower of London.
Richard III [by 1593] begins with Edward IV’s Coronation in 1471 as the first Yorkist king; the play covers his brother Richard’s terrifying rise to power, which culminates in his murder of Edward’s two sons (his own nephews) and Richard’s seizure of the throne when Edward dies; the play ends with the Battle of Bosworth Field and the Death of Richard III on August 22 1485. In the play Henry VII (Elizabeth’s grandfather) personally kills Richard in the battle, but this is not historically accurate (although he was the last English king to die in battle).
