Henriad

In Shakespearean scholarship, the Henriad refers to a group of William Shakespeare's history plays depicting the rise of the English kings.

[3] The term Henriad was popularized by Alvin Kernan in his 1969 article, "The Henriad: Shakespeare’s Major History Plays" to suggest that the four plays of the second tetralogy (Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V), when considered together as a group, or a dramatic tetralogy, have coherence and characteristics that are the primary qualities associated with literary epic: "large-scale heroic action involving many men and many activities tracing the movement of a nation or people through violent change from one condition to another."

In this context Kernan sees the four plays as analogous to Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, Voltaire's Henriade, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

The action of the Henriad follows the dynastic, cultural and psychological journey that England traveled as it left the medieval world with Richard II and moved on to Henry V and the Renaissance.

When considered as a group they contain a narrative pattern: disaster, followed by chaos and a battle of contending forces, followed by the happy ending—the restitution of order.

[19] The theories that consider the eight plays as a group dominated scholarship in the mid 20th century, when the idea was introduced, and have since engendered a great deal of discussion.

[23] In Algernon Charles Swinburne's book A Study of Shakespeare (1880), he refers to three plays, Henry IV pt.

2, and Henry V, saying "taken together the three plays form a Henriade, a trilogy, whose central figure is the hero of Agincourt, whose subject is his development from the madcap prince to the conqueror of France".

This is not universally accepted, but it is the first time a major critical edition of Shakespeare's works has listed Marlowe as a co-author.

Gorboduc (1561) is considered the first Senecan tragedy in the English language, though it is a chronicle play written in blank verse; it has numerous serious speeches, a unified dramatic action, and its violence is kept off-stage.

[31][32] In his book, Shakespeare’s History Plays, E. M. W. Tillyard's mid-20th century theories regarding the eight-play Henriad, have been extremely influential.

The argument against Tillyard's theory is that when these plays were written Elizabeth was approaching the end of her life and reign, and how her successor would be determined was causing the idea of a civil war to be a source of concern, not glorification.

(In the event, James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth as English monarch in 1601 without any opposition or conflict, but it was of course impossible for 1590s Englishmen to know this.

[37] Numerous inconsistencies exist between the individual plays of the first tetralogy, which is typical of serialized drama in the early modern playhouses.

The author does not define the word, but indicates that the plays in which the character, Mistress Quickly, hostess of the Boar's Head Tavern, appears include "The English Henriad" as well as The Merry Wives of Windsor.