curs 5- history plays

7/27/2019 Curs 5- History Plays

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ENGLISH

HISTORY PLAYS


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The first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, known asthe 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 areamong 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'.


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The `upstart crow' was probably William Shakespearebecause, Greene continued, 'with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a

Player's hide, [he] supposes that he is as well able to bombast out ablank 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 wrappedin a Player's hide', which echoes a line`O tiger's heartwrapped in a woman's hide' (1.4.138)from Shakespeare's

Henry VI Part Three.

This play, which was probably written for the 1590-1theatrical 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.


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Greene must have assumed the play would be well-known

among his readers; otherwise the insult could not have foundits 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 another1592 publication, Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penniless hisSupplication 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 thefirst part ofHenry VI.


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The uses of historyIt is not surprising that the young Shakespeare turned to

English history for his subject matter. The plays he wrotewere 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 forbooks 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 hadbeen published thirteen times. John Stow's Summary of

English Chronicles, published in I565, had nineteen editions

by 1618.


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William Warner'sAlbion's England, published in 1586, wentthrough seven editions during the next twenty years.

Fabyan's Chronicles, whichtraced English history from thetime 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 comparablepopularity 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 esteemedby humanist scholars. Sir Thomas Elyot, for instance, made

it the centre of his educational programme:


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'there is no study or science ... of equal commodity and

pleasure for a noble man. It includes 'all things that isnecessary 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 claimto 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 authorizehis monarchy.


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He claimed descent from the Trojan Brut, the legendaryfounder of Britain; he incorporated the red dragon of the

ancient Welsh king Cadwallader (the last Welsh king to claimlordship 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'sancestry to Cadwallader and suggested that his ascent tothe throne was divinely ordained.

Edward Halls 1548 chronicle went even further in

constructing a story of ancient descent and providentialpurpose that reached its validating conclusion in the Tudor

dynasty.


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Hall's chronicle was entitled The Union of the Two Noble andIllustrious Families of Lancaster and York Being Long in Continual

Dissension for the Crown of this Noble Realm, with all the Acts Done inBoth 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 thisDivision and so Successively Proceeding to the Reign of the High andPrudent 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 seedsfor the Wars of the Roses, a prolonged dynastic struggle that wasresolved 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 oftheir second son Henry VIII.But humanist scholarship and royal sponsorship alone could notaccount for the widespread interest in history in Tudor England.


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The writing of English history not only helped to legitimate Tudorsovereignty and to define an emergent nation-state; it also served tovalidate the status and identity of individual subjects.Having a history was equivalent to having a place in the statushierarchy. As Hall remarked in the prefatory letter to his chronicle,'What diversity is between a noble prince and a poor beggar if aftertheir death there be left of them no remembrance or token?'

Moreover, the use of history to ratify personal claims to a place inan increasingly unstable social hierarchy was not confined to nobleprinces.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 thrivingbusiness for the College of Heralds, who were empowered to createcoats of arms that authorized new money in genealogical fictions ofprivileged ancestry.


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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, andeconomic change, Shakespeare's contemporaries looked to history,the study of change itself, to rationalize their changing world and todiscover foundational narratives that could legitimate innovative

cultural structures.As a result, England's medieval past was often idealized as a time ofstable values and national glory.The nostalgic appeal of this imagined medieval world gave rise to avariety of cultural productions, ranging from the deliberate archaismsin the poetry of Edmund Spenser to the elaborate reconstructions ofmedieval tournaments staged each year in celebration of QueenElizabeth's Accession Day.


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The historical past also constituted one of the chiefattractions 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 ourEnglish chronicles, wherein our forefathers' valiant acts (that have lainlong buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books) are revived, and they

themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead theiraged honors in open presence; than which, what can be a sharper reproofto 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. Iteven seems to inform the structural links that bind the plays

together into a connected story.


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In the First Folio, the plays were printed in the order inwhich 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 IIproceeding through the troubled reign of Henry IV to the

triumphs of Henry V, the disastrous reign of his son Henry VIand the bloodbath of Richard III and ending with theaccession 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 VIare linked together in a sequence that ends with

Richard III.


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Because these four plays were composed earlier than theother history plays and because they can be read as a

connected sequence, scholars often refer to them as the firsttetralogy.

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 beread as a connected sequence, the historical events theydescribed actually preceded those depicted in the earlier

plays.

Although the reasons for this order of composition areunknown, the final Chorus ofHenry Vdefines 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


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that the subsequent history has been already shown on theirstage:

Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned kingOf France and England, did this king succeed,Whose state so many had the managingThat 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 withHenry's death; for just as Henry Vends by predicting Henry's

impending death, the first part of Henry VI begins with his

funerals .

f


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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 ofHenry Vhad already described the playhouseas 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 playalso marks an absencethe heroic past that the name of Henry Vdenotes.

SHAKESPEARES EARLY HISTORY PLAYS

The three plays depicting the reign of Henry's son, Henry VI, portraythe destruction. of his father's legacy.Human exemplars of the heroic, chivalric, civic, patriotic, and ethicalvirtues associated with the reign of Henry V (such as John Talbot andthe dead king's venerable brothers, Bedford and Gloucester) are clearlymarked as representatives of an older, better world, and as they die,

the virtues they exemplify seem to die along with them.


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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 threeplays as the England they depict sinks increasingly into chaos andbarbarity.Yorkists and Lancastrians compete with each other in treachery and

atrocity, authority is effaced, power becomes an end in itself, and thecrown becomes a prize of war, tossed from one head to another at thewhim of brute force and blind fortune.Thomas Nashe had celebrated the history play as offering a 'reproofto these degenerate, effeminate days of ours' by reviving on stage themartial valour of England's medieval 'forefathers', but the Henry VIplays depict the reign of 'an effeminate prince' (Henry VI Part One, 1.135), where the best warriors are often women.


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The idealized medieval England that was an object ofsentimental veneration in Shakespeare's time is notably

absent in these plays, but the disordered realm they depict isframed 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 VIPart One, Henry V never appears on stage in any of theseearly plays, and Henry VII appears only at the end ofRichard

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.


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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 longingcontinues to elude dramatic representation.

Richard II, the opening play in that sequence, depicts the

deposition and murder of the last of the medieval kings whocould 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 thatconstituted 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.


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Even the play's opening line'Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster'exploits this nostalgia, reminding the

audience that they are about to enter the world of Chaucer'spatron, John of Gaunt (1340-99), who was indeed 'time-

honoured' 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 armedcombatants.

The trial by combat was founded on the belief that God

would give victory to the party who was in the right. Thekings 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.


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The spectacle must have had enormous appeal forShakespeare's original audiences, many of whom would have

also flocked to see Queen Elizabeth's Accession Day tiltswhich 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 wouldhave 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.


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The opening scene depicts Richard's attempt to resolve thequarrel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray about who was

responsible for the murder of Richard's uncle, the Duke ofGloucester.

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 thatthey meet in a formal trial by combat where divine justice willdetermine who is telling the truth.

Next comes an invented scene between John of Gaunt and

the Duchess of Gloucester, aged holdovers from an earlierworld where power and legitimacy were united.


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The Duchess pleads with Gaunt to avenge her husband'smurder, but Gaunt argues that there is no way a good subject

can avenge the crime without opposing the will of God, sinceRichard, 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 resolveit.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 ofthe opening scene.

Here, as in much of the play, Richard is depicted as the

destroyer of the idealized medieval England he inherited,

d th bj t f t l i d i i h d f th b k


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and the object of nostalgic desire is pushed even further back

into the past, into the time of Richard's glorious predecessorswho 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 thepresent degradation he attributes to the misrule of theyouthful King Richard II.

Gaunt calls his idealized England 'This other Eden',

associating it with the archetypal focus of nostalgia, theperfect original home that is always already lost.


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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. Equallyidealized, its rulers are described as medieval crusader-kings,

Renowned for their deeds as far from homeFor Christian service and true chivalry

As is the sepulchre, in stubborn JewryOf the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son.

(2.1.53-6)

After Gaunt dies, his aged brother, the Duke of York, nowthe 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:


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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 handDid win what he did spend, and spent not thatWhich 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 representedon stage repeatedly look back to an even more distant pastas a lost time when things were better.

Li ing kings can ne er li e p to the ideals represented b


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Living kings can never live up to the ideals represented by

their dead predecessors. Even Richard II, although he nevermanages to emulate his heroic forefathers' example,

imagines at the end of the play, after he has been deposedand 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 fireWith good old folks, and let them tell thee talesOf woeful ages long ago betid;And ere thou bid goodnight, to quit their griefsTell 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'sinadequacies as a ruler, his death will transform his

deposition and murder into a melancholy tale of a lost and

lamented past.


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Here, as in all of Shakespeare's history plays, the focus fornostalgia is the reign of a dead monarchical figure. Those

kings, like the Edenic England they ruled, are always alreadylost 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 fora throne which no longer has a clear and undisputedoccupant.

In Richard II, both Richard's grandfather, Edward III, and

his heroic father, Edward the Black Prince, are dead beforethe action begins, but both are invoked as ideal figures from

the past to mark the nature and extent of present

degradation.


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In Henry VIII, the only one of the history plays writtenduring 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 asshe had been to the Henrician characters represented on

stage ('few now living can behold that goodness' (5.4.21).


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The reign of Henry VII occupies a similar position inRichmond's speech at the end ofRichard IIItheobject of the

characters' hopes for the future but also of the audience'snostalgia 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. Hisimage 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 preservehis legacies of French conquest and national unity. The figure

of Henry V hovers behind the entire second tetralogy as well.


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Always elusive, he is first mentioned in Richard II when hisnewly crowned father demands, 'Can no man tell of my

unthrifty son? / 'Tis full three months since I did see himlast' (5.3.1-2), but the audience does not see him either

until the Henry IVplays, 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 crewof lowlife characters with whom the Prince consorts in the

Eastcheap tavern;


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but it also refers to the playgoers themselves, the idlecrowd who have come to the playhouse to be entertained.

Prominent among those entertainments, as advertised onthe title page of the play's first published edition, were

'the humorous conceits ofSir John Falstaff'.

The Prince we see in the first Part ofHenry IVspends more

time with Falstaff than with his father, adopting a varietyof disreputable but entertaining disguises, including thoseof 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


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At the end of Part One Hal appears to appropriate

Hotspur's chivalric honour, paying tribute to his rival'shonours, 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 withhis low companions, acknowledging that 'these humbleconsiderations 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


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Just as the first tetralogy looks back to Henry V as an

emblem of lost glory that shows up the inadequacy of hisson's failed reign, the second looks forward to his glorious

accession, the anticipated reward that will compensatefor 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 andfuture king, all that longingly remembered and eagerlyanticipated glory evaporates in ambiguity, as the heroic

words of the Chorus are repeatedly contradicted by the

events enacted on stage and challenged by the irreverentvoices of vulgar theatrical clowns. Even in the play that

bears his name, Henry V is never fully present.


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The progress of the two tetralogies is a progress back intime to a dead hero and a lost heroic age that evaporate

in ambiguity as soon as they are reached.

curs 5- history plays

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