Shakespearean history

Besides proposing other categories such as romances and problem plays, many modern studies treat the histories together with those tragedies that feature historical characters.

These include Macbeth, set in the mid-11th century during the reigns of Duncan I of Scotland and Edward the Confessor and the legendary King Lear and also the Roman plays Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Shakespeare's historical plays focus on only a small part of the characters' lives, and also frequently omit significant events for dramatic purposes.

The 'York myth' saw Edward IV's deposing of the ineffectual Henry VI as a providential restoration of the usurped throne to the lawful heirs of Richard II.

[3] The later chroniclers, especially Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, were not interested in 'justifying' the Tudor regime by asserting the role of Providence; instead they stressed the lessons to be learned from the workings of Providence in the past, sometimes endorsing contradictory views of men and events for the sake of the different lessons these suggested, sometimes slanting their interpretations to draw a parallel with, or a moral for, their time.

Consequently, though Hall in his Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548) saw God's curse laid upon England for the deposing and murder of Richard II, God finally relenting and sending peace in the person and dynasty of Henry Tudor, and though Holinshed's final judgement was that Richard, Duke of York and his line were divinely punished for violating his oath to let Henry VI live out his reign, the chroniclers tended to incorporate elements of all three myths in their treatment of the period from Richard II to Henry VII.

[13] (Kelly dismisses the view of E. M. W. Tillyard and A. S. Cairncross of Margaret as the diabolical successor to Joan of Arc in England's punishment by God.)

[23] The Yorkist claim is put so clearly that Henry admits, aside, that his own is weak[24]—"the first time," notes Kelly, "that such an admission is conjectured in the historical treatment of the period".

[29] Rebellion is presented as unlawful and wasteful in the second tetralogy: as Blunt says to Hotspur, "out of limit and true rule / You stand against anointed majesty".

[31] In short, though Shakespeare "often accepts the moral portraitures of the chronicles which were originally produced by political bias, and has his characters commit or confess to crimes which their enemies falsely accused them of" (Richard III being perhaps a case in point),[32] his distribution of the moral and spiritual judgements of the chronicles to various spokesmen creates, Kelly believes, a more impartial presentation of history.

His Richard III, Faulconbridge in King John, Hal and Falstaff are all Machiavels, characterised in varying degrees of frankness by the pursuit of "Commodity" (i.e. advantage, profit, expediency).

Danby argues, however, that when Hal rejects Falstaff he is not reforming, as is the common view,[35] but merely turning from one social level to another, from Appetite to Authority, both of which are equally part of the corrupt society of the time.

[36] In Julius Caesar there is a similar conflict between rival Machiavels: the noble Brutus is a dupe of his Machiavellian associates, while Antony's victorious "order", like Hal's, is a negative thing.

By the time he reaches Edmund, Shakespeare no longer pretends that the Hal-type Machiavellian prince is admirable; and in Lear he condemns the society which is thought to be historically inevitable.

Against this he holds up the ideal of a transcendent community and reminds the audience of the "true needs" of a humanity to which the operations of a Commodity-driven society perpetually do violence.

Patriotic feeling at the time of the Spanish Armada contributed to the appeal of chronicle plays on the Hundred Years' War, notably Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, while unease over the succession at the close of Elizabeth's reign made plays based on earlier dynastic struggles from the reign of Richard II to the Wars of the Roses topical.

[43][44] The deposition scene in Richard II (IV.i.154–318), for example, almost certainly part of the play as it was originally written,[45][43][46] was omitted from the early quartos (1597, 1598, 1608) and presumably performances, on grounds of prudence, and not fully reinstated till the First Folio.

The chronicle play, as a result, tended ultimately to endorse the principles of 'Degree', order, and legitimate royal prerogative, and so was valued by the authorities for its didactic effect.

[51] B. M. Ward pointed out (1928) that the elaborated, unhistorical and flattering role assigned to an earlier Earl of Oxford, the 11th, in The Famous Victories of Henry V (c. 1587), was designed as an oblique compliment to a contemporary financial backer of chronicle plays.

The scholar H. B. Charlton gave some idea of their shortcomings when he spoke of "the wooden patriotism of The Famous Victories, the crude and vulgar Life and Death of Jack Straw, the flatness of The Troublesome Reign of King John, and the clumsy and libellous Edward I ".

[55] Under the influence of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, however, c. 1587, with its lofty poetry and its focus on a single unifying figure, of Shakespeare's Contention plays, c. 1589–90, and of the machiavels of revenge tragedy, chronicle-plays rapidly became more sophisticated in characterisation, structure, and style.

[56][57] In Edward II, c. 1591, he moved from the rhetoric and spectacle of Tamburlaine to "the interplay of human character",[58] showing how chronicle material could be compressed and rearranged, and bare hints turned to dramatic effect.

[66] Argument for possible Shakespearean authorship or part-authorship of Edward III and Thomas of Woodstock[67] has in recent years sometimes led to the inclusion of these plays in the Shakespeare cycle.

[68] Uncertainty about composition-dates and authorship of the early chronicle plays makes it difficult to attribute influence or give credit for initiating the genre.

Pitcher argued that annotations to a copy Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke that was discovered in 1940 (the volume is now in the British Library) were probably written by Shakespeare and that these are very close to passages in the play.

[75] Everitt and Sams also believed that two early chronicle plays based on Holinshed and dramatising 11th century English history, Edmund Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends, written c. 1588–89, and its lost sequel Hardicanute, performed in the 1590s, were by Shakespeare.

"[79] Chronicle plays based on the history of other countries were also written during this period, among them Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, Chapman's Charles, Duke of Biron, Webster's lost Guise, and Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Several causes led to the decline of the chronicle play in the early 17th century: a degree of satiety (many more chronicle plays were produced than the surviving ones listed below); a growing awareness of the unreliability of the genre as history;[80] the vogue for 'Italianate' subject-matter (Italian, Spanish or French plots); the vogue for satirical drama of contemporary life ('city comedy'); the movement among leading dramatists, including Shakespeare, away from populism and towards more sophisticated court-centred tastes; the decline in national homogeneity with the coming of the Stuarts, and in the 'national spirit', that ended in civil war and the closing of the theatres (1642).

[101] Jonson, misunderstanding the genre, had "confined himself to the dramatization of recorded fact, and refused to introduce anything for which he did not have historical warrant", thus failing to construct a satisfactory plot.

[102] According to Park Honan, Shakespeare's own later Roman work, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, carefully avoided "Sejanus's clotted style, lack of irony, and grinding moral emphasis".