It is with The Merchant of Venice and its complex use of Shakespeare’s comic structure that, for the moment, we will leave our discussion of comedy and look at a parallel concern that from the 1590s Shakespeare developed in his dramatic writing: the English history plays, all of which raise a number of critical perspectives for a modern reader or audience.
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Critical perspectives 3: Reading history, writing history and the English history plays
We read or watch Shakespeare through our twenty-first century eyes. Shakespeare read history through his Tudor and, later, Stuart eyes and presented what he read as significant drama, creating popular plays from a range of historical sources. When we consider Shakespeare’s history plays, we are looking at successful plays designed to entertain audiences (and readers).
We know that Shakespeare used the historical sources available to him at the time, and each generation since then has come to appreciate the history plays almost as a means of providing an historical education about the turmoil and internecine strife of medieval and Early Modern England. However, we might like to consider the plays he created not as ‘histories’ but as plays for his time and for future times, both in interpretation and performance.
The Elizabethan fashion for history plays
The fashion for history plays had been stimulated in the 1580s by the Elizabethan government, and with the Queen’s Men in particular, who put on plays that reinforced the Protestant ethic at a time of increasing fear over Spanish invasion and Catholic ‘treachery’. The Government saw an opportunity to press home its championing of the reformed English Church and its Supreme Governor, the Queen. Such propagandist plays, however, were initially somewhat tedious in comparison with what was to come. It is speculated, for example by Katherine Duncan-Jones – but there is no firm evidence – that Shakespeare, as a young man wishing to enter the theatre, may, in the 1580s, have been a member of the Queen’s Men. If so, this could have inspired him to write plays on historical themes, in the 1590s, in which he amended and reduced the scale of the political polemic. Instead of it, he chose to explore character, theme and plot to produce an epic theatrical sequence of entertainments that spanned the last decade of the sixteenth century.
Shakespeare sticks fairly close to his sources. From Thomas More’s account of Richard III, for example, he would have found and accepted, perhaps, a Tudor, dynastic reading of history which depicts Richard as the murderer of the innocent princes in the Tower. He seems to have exploited the image of the crookbacked man whose physical appearance was popularly seen to be reflecting an evil Machiavellian mind. Modern historical research has questioned whether this reading of history was correct. The discovery in September 2012 of Richard’s bones, buried beneath a Leicester City car park in the remains of an old abbey, testify to Richard being deformed but also to the brutal manner of his death. Other historical research points towards a short reign that might not have justified the hostility against him. Also, historians continue to argue about whether the historical Richard was the instigator of the deaths of the young princes.
Key idea
History is a complex matter. Periodically, plays or films on historical subjects are roundly criticized as travesties of the truth. This occurred, for example, with the 2011 film on the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, Anonymous, and the 1984 film about Mozart, Amadeus.
In some cases, Shakespeare deliberately changed history or, perhaps, chose and manipulated his sources for specific dramatic effect. In terms of particular detail, he would have known from some of his sources, for example, that in 1 Henry IV Harry Hotspur, son of Northumberland, was not the same age as Prince Hal but significantly older. Shakespeare, however, follows Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) in his Civil Wars, who makes them contemporaries.
King Henry’s wish that Hal (young Harry) and Hotspur had been exchanged in their cradles is an anathema, even if you did believe in fairies!
Of my young Harry. O that it could be prov’d
That some night-tripping fairy had exchang’d
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine:
(1 Henry IV, 1.1.85–9)
Kenneth Muir, referring to Daniel’s Civil Wars, records that:
‘Hal saves the King’s life and fights with Hotspur in single combat, two points in which Daniel and Shakespeare improve on the chroniclers, although the dramatist might well have decided, without Daniel’s example, to end the rivalry between Hal and Hotspur foreshadowed in Richard II, with such combat. The historical Hotspur was 39 at the time of his death; Daniel and Shakespeare make him the same age as the prince.’
Muir, K. (1977: 93–4), The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays. London: Methuen
But, theatrically, to make them of similar age produces entertaining rivalry and an important thematic conflict to which an audience can respond.
King John (1595–7) was not for much of the twentieth century generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s most entertaining plays, although in earlier times it proved popular. It is based on an earlier Protestant polemical play, The Troublesome Raigne of King John (published 1591). Shakespeare still creates very much a Protestant-influenced play but he reduces the polemic in order to produce a more complex drama than its source would suggest, which, as the Shakespeare Globe Theatre production in 2015, for example, demonstrated, can engage, amuse and enthral a twenty-first-century audience.
While the King in Henry V can be seen as a heroic character, there are, as we will see, elements of that popular portrayal that are challenged by the dramatist. In 1 and 2 Henry IV, Falstaff is modelled on the historical figure Sir John Oldcastle but his name had to be changed to address the concerns of the Oldcastle family’s claim that the character had been unjustly defamed. Sir John Oldcastle, who had been a friend of Henry V, was hanged in 1417, having led a revolt against the King.
Shakespeare’s creation of Falstaff gives an alternative perspective on the world, in which he uses him to satirize established political conventions and yet maintain a relationship with them. His portrayal of an Elizabethan underworld was so well received that the character of Falstaff was later recreated in a comic play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the satire emanates from and encompasses the Saturnalian figure. In resurrecting him for The Merry Wives, Shakespeare was writing possibly to the Queen’s demand and certainly to the market’s.
History or tragedy?
What is the difference between a history play and a tragedy? Why is Macbeth a tragedy when clearly it is based on historical figures? Why does the frontispiece to the Second Quarto of Hamlet refer to the play as ‘tragical history’? What of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus (which for the purpose of this book I’ve grouped as Roman plays, placing my consideration of Titus Andronicus elsewhere)? The generalized boxes in which Shakespeare’s plays are placed are somewhat arbitrary. Is, for example, Cymbeline a tragedy, as claimed in the plays in the First Folio edition of 1623, or actually an experiment by the dramatist in tragicomic form? Is the term ‘tragicomedy’ a helpful one or merely the creation of another pigeonhole? Let us start by asking: what do we make of the English history plays as histories?
Kiernan Ryan, in tackling Shakespeare and history, asks:
‘What is the relationship between the reality of history and its creative representation, between the world of the past and the work’s account of it? What is the political role of the work in its own world: to shore up or shake the foundations of power? Can the literature of the past speak only of the past, or has it secrets to reveal to the present and appointments to keep with the future?’
Ryan, K. (2002: 38), Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Critical questioning
In questioning notions of history as drama and drama within the history of its inception, we come to certain fundamental issues about how we read or understand Shakespeare. U
ntil the later decades of the twentieth century, Shakespeare’s English history plays were seen by mid-twentieth-century critics as two tetralogies, based on what E. M. W. Tillyard termed ‘the Elizabethan world picture’ in his book of that title (1943) and discussed in his book Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944). In this interpretation, the plays, taken together as part of one continuous narrative, represented the stability of an Elizabethan philosophy that allowed Shakespeare to work towards the presentation of a perfect King, Henry V, followed by the disruption of civil war that followed his death.
The tetralogies, however, were in this respect written in the wrong order as Shakespeare wrote the Henry VI plays before Richard II and the three remaining plays within the second tetralogy, starting with 1 Henry IV. Further, he probably wrote 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI before 1 Henry VI with the title of 3 Henry VI originally being The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the original title of 2 Henry VI being The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster. With all three, it is probable that there were varying degrees of limited collaborative authorship. Consequently, any idea that he set out to write a theatrical dissertation on monarchy does not neatly square with the facts as we have them. It is more likely that Shakespeare realized the demands and market opportunities that these plays offered, and he responded to popular demand to keep the momentum going by writing in this genre through the 1590s. He wrote these plays in parallel with other plays, such as the Seneca-influenced tragedy Titus Andronicus, the experimental tragedy Romeo and Juliet and the Roman historical tragedy Julius Caesar, as well as a number of comedies.
The Tillyardian view, however, was understandable in the context of the mid-twentieth century when, for a time, Britain had stood alone against the might of Nazism. The plays can be read in such a way as to display a historic viewpoint that emphasized a prevailing ideology that Tillyard identified as being part of an English tradition and that influenced his own critical viewpoint. He transported into his own ethos a series of his ideological meanings whose efficacy, he claimed, might provide some comfort in the face of external attack. By the 1980s young left-wing intellectuals found Tillyard’s approach inadequate because it was inaccurate in that it represented only a part of a larger, much more complex historical narrative, and that it was itself ideologically distorted.
‘Tillyard’s world picture, to the extent that it did exist (in Shakespeare’s day), was not shared by all; it was an ideological legitimation of an existing social order, one rendered more necessary by the apparent instability, actual and imagined, of that order.’
Dollimore, J. and Sinfield, A. (eds) (1985, 1996, 2nd edn: 5), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Within literary studies, new historicism, led by the American scholar Stephen Greenblatt, developed one of a number of correctives to the Tillyardian approach. Greenblatt (1985), in an influential essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V Plays’, sought to construct an historical context that ‘swerved’ from the text by drawing attention to historical material outside the text that exerted an influence on the text itself. This essay, published under the shorter title ‘Invisible Bullets’ in his book Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), was included in a seminal collection of cultural materialist and new historicist essays brought together by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore in 1985 under the title Political Shakespeare. Like Dollimore’s influential book Radical Tragedy (1989), this book openly declared a series of materialist renderings of the Shakespearean texts.
The critical question, then, was whether being open about your ideology, or using historical texts that were at best tangential to Shakespeare’s work and at worst embarrassingly irrelevant, made radical critics more incisive or reliable than those who subscribed to a different ideology. In the arguments that followed, even Dollimore’s term ‘radical’ came under attack:
‘Evidence is bypassed. Or, to put it another way, conclusions are generated theoretically and not empirically. It is difficult to call such a procedure history…to do history means to follow certain rules for generating conclusions from evidence – above all, it means following procedures that allow for the testing of theories and concepts. New historicism systematically evades such procedures.’
Burgess, G. (1996: 14), ‘Shakespeare’s Political Context’, in Klein, H. and Wymer, R., Shakespeare and History. New York: Edwin Mellen Press
Sharp diffractions of light in Shakespearean studies
Other critics – including Graham Bradshaw (1993), Brian Vickers (1995) and Kiernan Ryan (2002) – pointed out what they considered the fallacies of the avowedly politically oriented cultural materialists and new historicists, with Rowland Wymer, for example, claiming that their desire to ‘return to history’ deviated from ‘the main currents of contemporary historical debate about the Tudor and Stuart periods’ (Klein and Wymer [1996: 1]).
What had occurred was an apparent fracturing of Shakespearean studies between traditional liberal humanist approaches to literature and what John Drakakis termed ‘Alternative Shakespeares’, proposed initially in an influential collection of essays published in 1985 and subsequently reissued, and which inaugurated further volumes that have since appeared under that title.
On both sides of the critical divide, a richness of interpretation developed and continues today. There are in Shakespearean studies sharp diffractions of light, but they reflect the richness of debate about Shakespeare’s texts and their history. Chapter 24 provides definitions for various critical and historical movements, which you may find useful.
At both conscious and unconscious levels, our own ideologies lead us to see Shakespeare’s texts with the ‘part’d eye’, but in doing so we need empirically to recognize that the history plays are dramas, not objective historical accounts, and the society for which they were first written was very different from the one in which we now live. However much we may strive to recreate the Shakespearean text in Elizabethan/Jacobean performance or replicate the responses of their first audiences, we cannot succeed. We are not, and we cannot become, Elizabethans or Jacobeans, nor is enjoyment of Shakespeare confined to the ‘English’, even though he may have helped to cultivate an ‘English identity’ under Elizabeth. But even that claim, as James Shapiro has demonstrated (1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear), changes in Shakespeare’s plays to one of being ‘British’ in line with the political and cultural changes that took place following King James’s desire for the union of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. Today, however, Shakespeare is recognized as a global author, attracting audiences across the world.
History and politics
The name of the father of the academic subject of history, a Greek, Herodotus (c.480–425 BCE), was one synonymous with enquiry into the events of the past. Whereas Greek historians saw a relationship between literature and factual history, the Roman historians were more politically inclined, influencing the later Italian Renaissance humanist historians such as Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who were read by the Elizabethan dramatists and who influenced their work.
In England, chroniclers such as Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall, alongside Scottish political theorists such as George Buchanan, also provided material for Shakespeare, and throughout their work we can find critiques – sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit – of monarchical authority through Elizabethan/Jacobean eyes. This appears to have led to a political satire found, for example, in the plays by John Marston (1575?–1634), but present also in Shakespeare who some believe may have influenced Marston’s writing.
Further, through the Reformation the theological principle of a divine purpose that contrasted with the disjointed political and social actualities of human history created a tension that, as we will see, is displayed in Shakespeare’s history plays. The depiction of Bolingbroke, for example, in contrast to Richard II, may be indicative of the shift in political, s
ocial and religious perception during a Tudor dynasty when Protestants were brutally executed by Queen Mary or Roman Catholics by Queen Elizabeth. Both monarchs were uncertain of the stability of their authority, especially the way the Divine Purpose was interpreted. Henry VIII’s break with Rome sent out ripples across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that could overwhelm individuals, including even his own Chancellor Thomas More, beheaded because of his loyalty to Catholic Christian authority. This humanist was caught between loyalties to his King and to the Divine: ‘I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.’
Shakespeare’s court of Richard II has to be considered primarily through the prism of Tudor history, but we bring our current perspectives to bear on Shakespeare’s play, as is the case also with regard to Marlowe’s much more controversial study of monarchy and its inadequacies in Edward II (c.1590). Both these kings are shown by their respective playwrights to be influenced by homosexuality. When Tillyard was writing his critiques of the English history plays, homosexuality was still a criminal offence in the United Kingdom. A sexual revolution has now taken place and, in a Western world freed from prejudice against same-sex love, we may perceive these plays or Shakespeare’s sonnets in different ways from critics of earlier times, although we should note along the way that homosexuality was a criminal offence in Elizabeth I’s reign, punishable by death.
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 15