Appendix: Shakespeare's Edward III 383
Henry V Henry VI
Chained Swan Chained Antelope
Edward IV and V Richard III
Falcon and Fetterlock White Boar
White Rose Red Rose Tudor Rose
The White Rose had long existed as a Yorkist badge; the Red Rose as the emblem of Lancaster seems to have been an invention of Henry VII. Shakespeare's garden scene is therefore not only imaginary but also an anachronism.
Introduction
My own introduction to Shakespeare's history plays took place when I was fifteen, and was taken by my parents to see the two parts of King Henry IV, in consecutive matinee and evening performances, at the New Theatre in London. We all loved Ralph Richardson's Falstaff and Laurence Olivier's blazing Hotspur, his hint of a stammer on every initial *w' giving a memorable impact to his last line; but my own chief delight, as I remember, was the feeling — for the first time in my life - of being transported in a time capsule back into the Middle Ages. These, I kept reminding myself, were real people — people of flesh and blood, people who had really lived, who were something more than figments of an author's imagination. But the question was already there in my mind: just how real were they? Where did history stop and drama begin? Twenty years later at the Aldwych, the miracle occurred again - with John Barton's and Peter Hall's superb The Wars of the Roses, spread now over two whole days. This time the feeling of transportation was even greater; this time too there was a magnificent programme, which included a full historical resume and, wonder of wonders, an immense Plantagenet family tree. Would that I still had it today; alas, it has vanished like so many other treasures, and it is, I suppose, in an attempt to replace it as much as anything else that I have written the book that you now hold in your hands.
Perhaps, if I were to be perfectly accurate I should have called it Some of Shakespeare's Kings, for it is nothing if not selective. It has no business with mythical monarchs like Lear, nor with pseudo-historical ones like Cymbeline. It does not even consider King John - a play which, for all its faults, is all, or almost all, the work of Shakespeare -or Henry VIII, the major part of which is probably by John Fletcher. Its subject is that unhappy line of Plantagenet rulers who inspired the nine greatest of the history plays, that tremendous series that begins with Edward III, continues through the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V and the three parts of Henry VI, and ends with Richard III. Two Kings, although part of the Plantagenet line, remain unmentioned. Edward IV, under whom the English people enjoyed a dozen of the happiest and most peaceful years they had known for a century, appears in the second and third parts of Henry VI and again in Richard III; but has no play of his own. Nor (less surprisingly, since he occupied the throne for only a few weeks) does his son, the fragile little Edward V - although, as the most pitiable monarch in English history, he plays an important part in illustrating his uncle's villainy.
The mention of Edward III may occasion some surprise; and I readily confess that if I had written this book a year earlier than in fact I did, it would never have occurred to me to include it. I had, I think, vaguely heard of it as an apocryphal play for which one or two nineteenth-century German scholars had tentatively suggested Shakespearean authorship, but I had certainly never read it; since it did not appear in the First Folio, nor indeed in any other multi-volume edition of Shakespeare's works, there seemed no particular reason to do so. But then, suddenly, it acquired a new respectability. In 1998 it found a place in the New Cambridge edition of the plays, and as I write these words I understand that a similar volume is now in preparation for the Arden edition. Readers must turn to these works to find the various arguments for and against its authenticity; suffice it to say that its acceptance into the two series which together represent the cutting edge of Shakespearean scholarship is good enough for me. Edward III may not be exclusively Shakespeare's work — how many of the plays are? - but the major part of it seems to be his, and there are a number of dazzling speeches which could surely have been written by no one else:
And never shall our bonny riders rest,
Nor rusting canker have the time to eat
Their light-borne snaffles nor their nimble spurs;
Nor lay aside their jacks of gimmaled mail;
Nor hang their staves of grained Scottish ash
In peaceful wise upon their city walls;
Nor from their button'd tawny leathern belts
Dismiss their biting whinyards, till your king
Cry out: 'Enough; spare England now for pity!'
The authentication of Edward III - a complete early version of which will be found as an appendix to this book - came to me as a godsend. For Edward was the royal patriarch, from whose loins all the subsequent rulers in our story directly or indirectly sprang. Virtually nothing in Shakespeare's mighty epic - not the Hundred Years War nor the Wars of the Roses, not the deposition of Edward's grandson Richard II nor the murderous ambition of his great-great-grandson Richard III - can be properly understood without going back to him. His story had somehow to be told; now, through Shakespeare, I could tell it.
But although a discussion of what we may now consider the dramatist's thirty-ninth play1 enables us to set the scene for much of what is to follow, we are still left with an awkward gap to be filled — a gap of nearly half a century. Edward III stops effectively in September 1356, with the appearance of the Black Prince and his prisoner John II of France after the battle of Poitiers. The next play, Richard II, opens in April 1398 with the quarrel between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke, and coven only the last year and a half of Richard's unhappy reign. This creates what has always seemed to me a major problem: watching the play, we never quite understand what the King has done to deserve his dethronement. He has admittedly been unjust to his cousin in confiscating his estates - though another ruler might easily have executed him - but this hardly explains how Bolingbroke was able to rally virtually the whole country to his banner and seize the crown, while scarcely a voice was raised in opposition. Why was Richard already so dangerously unpopular? Why, in his last years, could he never look to his subjects for their support? Only when we follow the progress of his reign from its outset do the answers to these questions begin, all too clearly, to emerge.
To those readers, therefore, who are looking exclusively for a historical commentary on the plays, Chapters 2 to 4 must be considered as an extended exercise in scene-setting by which the unfolding drama is - I hope - made more comprehensible than it might otherwise have been. Only with Chapter 5 do we rejoin Shakespeare and continue with the second purpose of the book. For Shakespeare's Kings is not
1. If we include Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Two Noble Kinsmen, which generally figure in the most recent collected editions, though neither appear in the First Folio.
concerned simply to tell a story; it is also an attempt to hold up the plays, scene by scene, to the light of history, in order to establish where that light shines through unclouded, where it is shaded or refracted, and where - as only occasionally occurs - it is blocked out altogether. This is not always an easy task. Before we can accuse Shakespeare of departing from the historical truth, we must ourselves know precisely where that truth lies - and this is not easy either. Like him, we must rely very largely on the contemporary evidence, collected and collated in the early chronicles. True, in the four hundred years since the plays were written much new material has come to light whose existence he can never even have suspected; none the less these chronicles remain, for us as for him, our fundamental authorities.
The scholarly editions list some half a dozen or more sources for each play, but by far the most important are the chronicles of Jean Froissart (for Edward III and possibly Richard II), of Edward Hall and of Raphael Holinshed, whose names recur again and again in the following pages. Froissart was born at Valenciennes around I333.1ni36ihe came to England, where he remained for the next eight years, travelling extensively round the country under the protection of Qu
een Philippa, who was herself from Hainault. Returning to France in 1369, he set to work on the first of the four volumes of his Chroniques, a vivid and racy account of the Hundred Years War of which the English translation, made in 1523—5 by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, was certainly well known to Shakespeare. A born writer, Froissart is I fear the only one of the three chroniclers who can be read with real pleasure today.
The two Englishmen are plodders by comparison. Edward Hall, a government official under Henry VIII, began The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York around 1530; it was first published in 1548, the year after his death. Raphael Holinshed, whose birth date is unknown but who died around 1580, was initially given by his employer, the publisher Reginald Wolfe, the formidable task of writing a history of the world from the Flood to the time of Queen Elizabeth. Not surprisingly, he never completed it; but a small portion of the work appeared in 1577 as The firste volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande . . . conteyning the description and chronicles of England from first inhabiting unto the Conquest. In fact, it continues to the writer's own day. It is not always easy reading, but it constitutes the first authoritative account in English of the whole of the country's history. Shakespeare used the second, enlarged but mildly censored edition of 1587, not only for his major history plays but also for Macbeth, King Lear and Cymbeline.
The other, less important sources are listed and described at length in the Arden and New Cambridge editions. The only one, I think, worth mentioning here is the work of Shakespeare's fellow poet Samuel Daniel, whose First Fowre Bookes of the cruile warns between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke were published in 1595. This was to be part of a still longer epic poem which was to carry the story down to the reign of Henry VII, but after he got as far as the wedding of Edward IV Daniel decided to write a prose history of England instead. At his best, he was a superb poet - some of his sonnets are among the loveliest in the language - and in 1604 he was appointed Licenser of the Queen's Revels. There can be no doubt, therefore, that he and his work would have been well known to Shakespeare, and his influence can certainly be traced in the later plays of the canon: Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, and Henry V.
Although Shakespeare remains faithful to his sources for much of the time, there are - predictably enough - a good number of divergencies. From time to time he may have had to cope with an objection from the censor; a shortage of actors may sometimes have made it necessary to eliminate some minor character and attribute his actions to another. There are even moments when the root of the trouble seems to have been nothing more than plain carelessness. But in the vast majority of instances when Shakespeare departed from historic truth he did so for the best of all reasons: to make a better play. He was, after all, a playwright - first, last and always. To him the cause of the drama was of infinitely greater importance than the slavish observance of historical truth. He was young and inexperienced — the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III are among the first plays he ever wrote, while the entire canon was finished before his thirty-sixth birthday - and the challenge of moulding what is still today one of the most turbulent periods of English history into a coherent series was a formidable one indeed. No wonder he took liberties; no wonder he frequently combined two or three different events, which in fact occurred months or even years apart, into a single scene. The miracle is that he was able to stick as closely to the truth as he did, weaving together all the various strands to create a single epic masterpiece which, for all its minor inaccuracies, is almost always right when it really matters. A would-be student of the period with only the plays to help him might draw a number of false conclusions; but the overall picture received - including that of the reign of Richard III - would not, I believe, be very far wrong.
After Richard II the action, though inevitably episodic, is fairly continuous; continuous enough, indeed, for it to come as something of a surprise to learn that the nine plays were written in so haphazard an order. Dating is always a problem with Shakespeare, but it is now generally agreed that he began with the three parts of Henry VI. These seem to have been written consecutively, with Part I begun probably in 1589, Part II in 1590 and Part III completed in 1591, which also saw the writing of Richard HI. Next in time came Edward III, which dates from 1592-3, after which there is a short break, during which appear The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona and King John; only in 1595 does Shakespeare return to his series with Richard II. Another break gives us Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice; then, in 1596 and 1597 respectively, the two parts of Henry IV. These gave rise to the third - but very different — Falstaff play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, so it was not until 1599 that the canon was completed with Henry V.
And Henry V is unlike all the others. Though by no means the greatest of Shakespeare's histories, it is the only one which ranks as a true epic: a patriotic paean celebrating England's only royal hero, the triumphant conclusion of a nine-part work that had taken the author the first decade of his active life. How the Queen would have loved it - knowing, as she must have known, that such a play could never have been written before her own day. When she had ascended the throne - in 1558, at the age of twenty-five - England had been a poor country, both its army and navy small and ill-equipped. Just thirty years later and thanks largely to her, it had become a great nation: one that had defeated, in the Spanish Armada, the most formidable armed expedition ever launched against its shores without losing a single vessel in the process. America, discovered less than a century before, had proved a source of riches beyond her subjects' wildest dreams. The English felt themselves reborn, and filled with an unfamiliar confidence and pride: pride in their Queen of course, but pride also in their strength, their courage, their seamanship - and their language, which had suddenly and dramatically burst into the fullness of its flower.
From this new and unexpected standpoint, it was surely only natural that they should ask themselves just what had happened. England was, after all, an ancient nation: saving only the Papacy, the oldest political entity in Europe. Already more than 500 years had passed since the Norman Conquest, and the land had been ruled by kings for more than five centuries before that. Since Edward Ill's day, however, it had been increasingly disunited. The rot had started under his grandson Richard, had increased dangerously with Richard's dethronement, and after a brief period of remission under Henry V had finally spread out of control under Henry's idiot son. The Wars of the Roses had continued, though intermittently, till Richard Ill's death at Bosworth. And then, with Henry Tudor, had come deliverance. After a century of chaos, the Tudors had forged a modern state which, by the time William Shakespeare was born on St George's Day 1564,1 was both peaceful and prosperous. But precisely what sort of transformation had been achieved, and how? How could a monarch transform a nation? And what was a monarch, anyway?
These were important questions, and in the sixteenth century they could be answered most effectively through the drama. Books were still expensive luxuries, largely the preserve of scholars and wealthy intellectuals; the theatre on the other hand appealed to every class of society and could be afforded by all but the very poorest - the majority of whom would have taken little interest in it anyway. And besides, what a story there was to be told: a dazzling opportunity, even if also a formidable challenge, to any ambitious young playwright. No wonder, as the sixteenth century drew to its close, that history plays became so popular. Before, let us say, 1585 there had been only one worthy of the name: King John, written not by Shakespeare but by John Bale, a Suffolk man who became Bishop of Ossory in Ireland, shortly before 1536; but that was an isolated instance. It was only in the last decade of the century — when, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the feeling of national exhilaration was at its height - that such plays began to appear in any quantity. They included (to name but a few) an
1. 23 April is at least the traditional date. The parish register records his baptis
m on 26 April, and in those times of high infant mortality baptism normally followed only a day or two after birth. But he certainly died on St George's Day 1616, and there is a pleasant symmetry in the idea that he both entered the world and left it on the feast of England's patron saint.
anonymous drama based on Bale, The Troublesome Raigne of King John, which was almost certainly the inspiration for Shakespeare's own version; The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, also anonymous; Sir Thomas More and The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon (whom the principal author, Anthony Munday, chose to identify with Robin Hood); and Edward I, by George Peele. Some, obviously, are better than others; but only one, it can safely be said, can be mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare's, and could be - indeed has been - successfully staged in our own day: Christopher Marlowe's dark and majestic tragedy of Edward II.
In the four centuries since it was written, the Shakespearean canon has enjoyed varying fortunes. Of Edward III we know practically nothing. Printed in 1596, its title page describes it only as having been 'sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London'. Since then its only recorded stage productions have been one in 1986 at the Globe Playhouse in Los Angeles and one in the following year by the Welsh Theatr Clwyd, which, having opened in the little town of Mold, went on to Cambridge and then, rather surprisingly, to Taormina in Sicily. We can only hope that after 400 years of obscurity the play's new promotion to Shakespearean rank will encourage other theatre companies to try it out, and give audiences the chance to judge it for themselves.
Richard II, too, has had a curious history. After its opening on 7 February 1601 — the eve of the Earl of Essex's abortive rising — it was not apparently performed again until 30 September 1607, when it was put on by members of the ship's company of HMS Dragon off Sierra Leone - a safer if less probable venue, as it turned out, than the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where a version by Nahum Tate was suppressed in 1681 after only two performances, despite Tate's tactfully having changed the names of all the characters and retitled the play The Sicilian Usurper. But the deposition of a king was always a delicate subject, and Charles II can hardly be blamed, in the circumstances, for his sensitivity. Only in the nineteenth century did Richard II finally achieve the popularity it deserved, with Edmund Kean and his son Charles; Charles Kean's production of 1857, with its tremendous set piece of Richard's woeful entry into London in Bolingbroke's victorious train was, we are told, never forgotten by any who saw it.
Shakespeare's Kings Page 2