SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Historical Imagination,” in Renaissance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, March, 1997, pp. 27-40.

[In the following essay, Dean compares Shakespeare's treatment of historical fact and politics in his history plays, focusing on Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.]

If there is one view about Shakespeare which can be said to be shared by most of the critics of the last ten years, it is that he is—and not just in the history plays—a political writer. But in this, it is argued, he has no choice: all literature is political, and all criticism, in consequence, ideological. A glance at the editor's introduction to the 1992 ‘New Casebook’ on Shakespeare's History Plays: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry IV’, aimed at an undergraduate readership, reveals how embedded such assumptions have become: in New Historicism, we read, ‘literature can be seen to enact a type of political discourse’, criticism being a ‘verbal and structural investigation of a range of rhetorical strategies’ aimed at laying bare ‘the conditions of cultural, ideological and political power’. Even this, however, has been felt to be insufficiently engagé by Cultural Materialism in its various forms, especially feminism, in which ‘a politics of culture operates in more or less direct relationship with a committed politics of social and economic action’. At the same time, thanks to the cross-fertilization of literary theory with the work of history theorists such as Hayden White, belief in the possibility of historical objectivity, of the distinction between fact and interpretation, and of historical narrative as a validly autonomous category of writing, has been shattered: ‘All writing is equally historical.’ Fortunately, as it turns out, Shakespeare foresaw all these developments, with the happy result that ‘Shakespeare's history plays are about history in the same way as post-modern thought is about history’.¹

Tom McAlindon has recently protested against such an approach, on the grounds that it:

seems at times to participate in the prevalent blurring of all generic distinctions to the extent of dissolving immensely complex artistic structures and consigning them to an amorphous continuum of ideology and discourse. Thus it is apt to evade a question of perennially absorbing interest: what constitutes the unique quality or singular greatness of this particular play?²

We should, I think, heed this caution—without denying that, from the beginning, Shakespeare's history plays show an awareness of a variety of ideological stances. There is a sense in which he is a postmodern historian, at least as such a figure was presented by Gertrude Himmelfarb in a Times Literary Supplement article in 1992:

Formerly, when historians invoked the role of imagination, they meant the exercise of imagination required to transcend the present and immerse oneself in the past. Today, it more often means the opposite: the imagination to create a past in the image of the present and in accord with the judgement of the historian.³

This seems to me a false antithesis. ‘Has justice ever been done to the power of his historical imagination?’ asks Blair Worden of Shakespeare in a recent essay.⁴ Shakespeare seems to me to combine both kinds of imagination distinguished by Professor Himmelfarb, and to think about time like a philosopher. Mindful, however, of the fact that Shakespeare the Philosopher may be as much of a falsifying abstraction as Shakespeare the Political Ideologue, I shall be taking the Henry IV plays and, to a lesser extent, Henry V and their theatrical political context as a test case, trying to work from particular details.

Another thing I find puzzling about Professor Himmelfarb's remarks is her assumption that ‘the imagination to create a past in the image of the present’ is a specifically modernist ploy. Those words describe historiography as practised by many classical, medieval, and Renaissance historians. Moreover, in the view of the greatest British philosopher of history in the twentieth century (who, however, underrated the sixteenth century's contribution to that discipline)—R. G. Collingwood—the ambition to ‘transcend the present’ is futile: the historian lives and thinks in the present, inescapably, and the life of history is in the historian's mind here and now. To imagine now a past which is our past, so as to make it alive for us now, would hardly have seemed aberrant to Virgil, Ovid, Boethius, Chaucer, Spenser—or Shakespeare. What we have in his work are neither events nor non-events but ‘counterevents’, events as the alchemical imagination has transformed them.⁵ He is engaged on nothing so banal as dramatizing the past, but on something more heroic and more awesomely difficult: on what Michael Dummett brilliantly calls ‘bringing about the past’.⁶

I

Of course, in the sense in which politics is about the organization of human beings into communities, hardly any of Shakespeare's plays lacks a political dimension; yet when everything is political nothing is; there must be distinctions. I cannot go to the other extreme, however, and agree with David Womersley that ‘the political interpretations we offer of Elizabethan literature ought to […] be reducible to, or re-statable as, narratives of potential or accomplished moves made by actual Elizabethan politicians’.⁷ Such austere rigour would leave hardly anything in the category of political literature. Shakespeare's history plays existed, of course, in a political context in their own day, and have been appropriated repeatedly for political—even, if we must use the word, ideological—purposes ever since. But the politics of the plays are not identical with the politics in them. Graham Holderness's contention that political interpretation only becomes meaningful when one takes sides, and hence that ‘a political criticism should then be a question of judging the political meanings literature generates, evaluating the political potentialities of specific works, and discriminating between reactionary and progressive forms of criticism’,⁸ misplaces the emphasis because it relegates criticism to the status of propaganda, a matter of partis pris rather than understanding, which is surely foreign to Shakespeare's methods of work. He was committed, not to this or that political position, but to the exploration of what it might mean to have—or to lack—a political position.

Let us consider a familiar set of circumstances. In 1599 a prohibition was issued against the printing of any more English histories without the permission of the Privy Council. Some authors, such as Grenville and Raleigh, reacted by self-censorship, while others, such as Jonson and Hayward, got into trouble, for Sejanus and The Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII respectively. Shakespeare's Richard II was famously hijacked by the Essex faction just before the ban was imposed. Shakespeare, who had acted in Sejanus, no doubt wryly recalled the scene in which Cremutius Cordus is condemned to death by the Senate for writing the wrong kind of history, adulating Brutus and Cassius who are non-persons in Tiberius' Rome. One of Tiberius' toadies, Afer, alleges that Cordus is making a veiled attack on Tiberius. In vain does Cordus plead that discussion of a remote period of history cannot reasonably be construed as a commentary on contemporary events: the Senate is as unconvinced by him as the Council was by Jonson. Cordus, like some modern innocent surrounded by literary theorists, discovers that he is simply not allowed to be apolitical, and that his apparently straightforward historical narrative is perceived to have a subversive ideological subtext. Such paranoia was a living force in Renaissance English society. It was, after all, a play on Antony and Cleopatra, not on an English historical subject, which its author Greville burned out of fear that it was ‘apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors, and government’;⁹ Raleigh, languishing in the Tower, reflected ruefully that ‘whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heel, it may happily strike out his teeth’;¹⁰ while the second part of Hayward's History of Henrie IIII remained unpublished until 1991.¹¹

By 1599, the new school of ‘politique history’, which grew up following the publication in 1591 of Sir Henry Savile's translation of Tacitus, was well established and had superseded the earlier Tudor—really late medieval—view of history as a storehouse of universal moral exempla. Tacitus and Machiavelli had replaced Cicero and Livy as the models to imitate. (We may see a parallel in the development of Shakespeare scholarship itself in recent years, with a reading of the Histories as Ciceronian ‘mirrors for princes’ replaced by the radical-political approach I have already mentioned.¹²) This replacement entailed an important change in the understanding of causation. History was still referred to the Divine Will, but was more often scrutinized in terms of purely human agents; God remained the First Cause, but there were now also Second Causes. Plotting is to playwrights what causation is to philosophers,¹³ and to the history playwright this shift in the causal concept obviously has supreme importance.

It was also in 1599, of course, that Henry V was acted, and in that play Shakespeare presents a concept of historical imagination explicitly, through the chorus. This too has its context, for the role of imagination in history had received attention during the movement from early to late Tudor thought. A world of intellectual development separates the statement, in the Henrician translation of Polydore Vergil's Anglia Historia, that ‘an Historie is a full rehearsall and declaration of things don, not a gesse or divination’,¹⁴ from Raleigh's devotion of a chapter of his History of the World (bk. I, ch. 21: 6) to a plea for the ‘liberty of using conjecture in Histories’, and Raleigh's conception of the role of imagination in historiography has been compared to that of Collingwood.¹⁵ Blair Worden makes effectively the same point in remarking how the careers of Jonson, Greville, and Daniel ‘remind us of how far historical insight rested […] on a historian's doing what a dramatist does: ask himself how a given character would have thought and acted in a given situation’.¹⁶ By 1599 the creative artist's interpretative freedom with historical materials hardly needed defending. Shakespeare's Henry V is a notoriously difficult character to interpret, but this difficulty is built into the play; it is an aspect of our task as well as Shakespeare's, for the Histories typically, as Phyllis Rackin puts it, ‘cast their audiences in the roles of historians’.¹⁷ Repeatedly the Chorus implores us to supplement what we see (the historical events dramatized) with our own creative powers, to produce not a synthesis but a complementarity:

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them …

(Prologue, 23-6)

Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege …

(Act III, 0, 25)

                                                                                                                        Yet sit and see,
Minding true things by what their mock’ries be.

(Act IV, 0, 52-3)

                                                                                                                        But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought …

(Act V, 0, 22-3)

Notice how these passages insist upon the imagination as a visual faculty: we see physically and with our mind's eye, and the two visions—the representation and the truth it figures—together are the act of imagining. The Chorus, in fact, exhorts us to do what Shakespeare had to do as he worked on his source materials, altering, supplementing, reordering, and filling out—performing acts of imagining which were acts of interpretation.

Not that Shakespeare, in enlisting our co-operation, abnegates his responsibility or licenses any subjective fantasy; what is on the stage is really there. Yet ‘really’ is a slippery word here: it is really the case that certain actors are speaking certain words and performing certain physical movements; but it is not really the case that we are witnessing the battle of Agincourt. We are witnessing an attempt to represent that battle, and the attempt is real: but it is in the nature of an attempt that it must succeed or fail, and must therefore be supplemented by someone's being convinced or not convinced by it. The reality of the attempt (its ‘truth’ if I dare use another slippery word) is not enough: our acceptance or rejection of it is needed before it can be evaluated. This is the logic behind the speeches of the Chorus. I am, of course, aware that widely differing accounts have been given of the function of these speeches,¹⁸ but in a sense their ambivalence is the point; the work of historical imagining is like that, a matter of contradictions, elusive, tricky, baffling. Shakespeare would have recognized much in Collingwood's celebrated chapter on ‘The historical imagination’ in The Idea of History—as when, for instance, Collingwood says that ‘The historical imagination […] is properly not ornamental but structural’, or that ‘the imaginary, simply as such, is neither real nor unreal’, or that the historical imagination is an active heuristic force, ‘a self-dependent, self-determining, and self-justifying form of thought’.¹⁹

II

Henry IV is a natural choice for testing the hypothesis that Shakespeare's imagination transcends party ideology while encompassing what it is to have such an ideology, since, manifestly, it was shaped by political considerations in more than one sense of the term. Designed as in some way a response to the earlier play The Famous Victories of Henry V, its portrayal of Sir John Oldcastle as Prince Hal's disreputable companion led to protests from the Oldcastle family, the substitution of ‘Falstaff’ for ‘Oldcastle’ as the character's name, and a counter-play, Sir John Oldcastle, in two parts, of which the second is lost.²⁰ The relationship between these three plays depends on an amalgam of topical satire, political censorship, and religious polemic (the historical Oldcastle was a leading Protestant martyr). Oldcastle in The Famous Victories is so called only once, on his first appearance; he is not a major character, and, as Gary Taylor has pointed out, Shakespeare took some trouble to align the characteristics of his Oldcastle more closely with those of the historical figure, so that ‘the parallels demonstrate that the name of the character, his historical identity, forms a part of the meaning of the extant text’.²¹ In Sir John Oldcastle itself the Prologue is careful to distinguish the protagonist from a certain ‘aged counsellor to youthful sins’ (line 7). With a striking irony, the name ‘Falstaff’ in Sir John Oldcastle has become the name of a ‘historical’ person separate from Oldcastle: King Henry V, walking abroad disguised, as his namesake had done in Shakespeare's play, muses, ‘Where the devil are all my old thieves that were wont to keep this walk? Falstaff, the villain, is so fat he cannot get on's horse’ (x. 53-5) while the criminal priest he encounters, called Sir John (but nothing can be made of that—it was a conventional name for a priest),²² grumbles that the King, when Prince of Wales, once robbed him, ‘when that foul villainous guts, that led him to all that roguery, was in's company there, that Falstaff’ (x. 82-3). Recurring to the point about ‘reality’ I made in the previous section, we can say that, just as the reality of the historical Oldcastle must be distinguished from that of his stage representation, so the reality of Falstaff as a character in Shakespeare's play must be distinguished from the reality of ‘Falstaff’ as a referent in Sir John Oldcastle, a character external to the play but assumed to have a corresponding reality in the minds of the audience.

It could be argued without undue paradox that both The Famous Victories and Sir John Oldcastle are more entitled to be called historical plays than Shakespeare's,²³ for they both stick quite closely to what were thought to be the historical facts of the personal development and public career of Henry V—so closely, indeed, that Shakespeare had to omit direct treatment of what they had dramatized if he was not to fall into repetitiousness. The network of relationships between these plays again shows the intricacy with which drama, politics, and history interact in the Elizabethan period. However, Shakespeare is exceptional, not only in his remodelling of the facts into a more complex structure, but also in his interest in history as an abstract process as well as a repository of plot material. The other two plays have a political-theological interest: Shakespeare alone, it would seem, seized the implications of the fact that a history play is an event in time which is also an event about time, and hence has a philosophical dimension which we apprehend through the dramatic structure. This is one of the marks of his historical imagination, a quality none of his contemporaries possesses in the same way. I shall lead up to a fuller definition of it by way of an apparently minor bibliographical puzzle, which I hope to show has far-reaching consequences.

III

Two Quartos of 2 Henry IV were printed in 1600, and the first one does not contain what is in modern editions Act III, scene i, the soliloquy of the insomniac King and his conversation with Warwick. Several explanations for this omission have been offered. Until recently it was assumed to be due to compositorial oversight, but in 1987 John Jowett and Gary Taylor argued that the scene was an afterthought on Shakespeare's part.²⁴ Two subsequent editors of the play have disagreed. Giorgio Melchiori argues that the scene was part of what he called the ‘ur-Henry IV’, the original single play which, in his view, Shakespeare expanded into two: while Thomas L. Berger finds this over-speculative, and believes that the scene must have been part of the original conception because, without it, two comic scenes would succeed one another, and this is contrary to Shakespeare's usual practice.²⁵ Several different issues are involved here, but the one which most interests me is the clues to the workings of Shakespeare's historical imagination provided by the debate—the debate in the scene, that is, as well as the one about it. It can hardly be denied that the scene in question raises the discussion of history to a plane of abstraction hardly paralleled elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, and nowhere in Elizabethan historical drama outside it. It is no overstatement to say that Henry and Warwick discuss questions now associated with the philosophy of history.²⁶ Warwick articulates a Neoplatonic idea of time as a ‘necessary form’ whose archetypal nature enables us to ‘create’ the future in our imaginations, to ‘guess’ but to guess perfectly. The King's question ‘Are these things then necessities?’ is unanswered; all we can do is to act as if they were. As Westmorland later advises Mowbray, we must ‘construe the times to their necessities’ (2 Henry IV, IV. i. 102). Such historical imagining produces, not ‘the truth’, whatever that may be, but a balance of probability, a reasonable conjecture, issuing in political decisions which are also acts of faith.

As noted above on the Henry V choruses, there are instructive parallels, I believe, between the historical imagining in the scene and the historical imagining of its author as he felt his way into the material.²⁷ Jowett, Taylors and Melchiori point out that, without III. i, the end of what is now II. iv and the beginning of what is now III. ii would echo each other verbally:

Come—She comes blubbered,—Yea, will you come Doll?
Come on, come on, come on, sir

This, they suggest, supports their view that III. i was not present in the original scheme of the play. But the final words of II. iv are themselves in dispute, since they occur in Q but not in F; and, even if we allow them, III. i opens, ‘Go, call the Earls of Surrey and of Warwick, / And ere they come …’, which also picks them up, and it ends, ‘where these inward wars once out of hand, / We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land’, which is in turn picked up by III. ii, ‘Come on, come on, come on, sir, give me your hand, sir, give me your hand, sir’. If we are going to go by verbal echoes there is no reason why the scene should not have stood where it is from the beginning. Moreover, on a larger scale, its depiction of a monarch plagued by insomnia comes between Falstaff's ‘the undeserver may sleep, when the man of action is called on’ (II. iv. 378f) and Shallow's ‘An early stirrer, by the Rood!’ (III. ii. 2f). Whether the scene was an afterthought or not, these echoes indicate the workings of an imagination which could pass apparently instinctively from verbal to conceptual interconnections as it brooded over what the prose chronicles called ‘the unquiet time’ of Henry IV.

‘Are these things then necessities?’ Perhaps we make them so, by our choices. Shakespeare seems to show, in the Histories, and above all in the figure of Prince Hal in Henry IV and Henry V, something contrary to the determinism of contemporary theory: that it is what we do and wish to be which shapes the universe we live in. The time which people experience is, in a weird way, like the people who experience it. Hal is such an uncomfortable figure to many people, both other characters and modern readers, because he is a man who embodies the principle of teleology in a world which is otherwise dominated by contingency. That becomes plain in the ‘I know you all’ speech in Part 1, I. ii. Professor Melchiori wants this to be a later insertion too: he says, on no evidence at all, that it ‘has the air of being an after-thought’.²⁸ But why should it not have the air of being a forethought? It is where it is for a purpose, in order to affect the whole balance of our subsequent relationship with Hal and his relationship with other characters.

Nor is this sense of interconnectedness confined to individual scenes. It can occur between quite disparate scenes. Consider, alongside the scene just discussed, the beginning of II. i in Part 1, the conversation between the two Carriers. In dramatic terms the exchange is redundant, but it serves to establish atmosphere and, in its attention to apparent trivia, conveys a sense of the quotidian occupations of the insignificant people of England: we hear of the ‘new chimney’ of the inn, of the enfeebled condition of one of the horses, of the chaos that has come to the management of the inn ‘since Robin [Ostler] died’, of the flea-bites the Carriers have suffered, of the lack of a chamber-pot and the consequent inconveniences, and so on. In its beautiful inconsequentiality the dialogue looks forward to the greater achievement of the Gloucestershire scenes in Part 2, which have been justly compared to Chekhov²⁹ and which revel in reminiscence where the King is troubled by painful memory. Scenes like these, which are the polar opposites of that between the King and Warwick, are essential in creating the illusion of a three-dimensional ‘ordinary’ world in which political action takes place. Yet the Carriers, Shallow and Silence, Henry and Warwick also represent complementarities, and no account of Shakespeare's historical imagination can be fruitful which does not hold both types of scene in mind. We are not helped to appreciate this by occasional failures of imagination on the part of editors. The First Carrier tells us that Robin Ostler ‘never joyed since the price of oats rose; it was the death of him’ (II. i. 12f). Professor Bevington is ready with his note: ‘This ostler […] was ruined by an inflation in costs that outpaced his revenue. The price of oats more than doubled between 1593 and 1596-7, after which it again fell.’ But this is the kind of information we both need and do not need to know. It explains the allusion of the remark while leaving its mysterious poetry completely untouched. People like the Carriers live in a world where time can be measured fairly precisely—‘an it be not four by the day, I’ll be hanged’—but also by things like the installation of new chimneys or by changes in the prices of things which affect them. The King's method in Part 2 is different: within the space of a few lines we have ‘’Tis not ten years gone […] and in two year after […] It is but eight years since’ (III. i. 52, 54, 55). It is beside the point for Professor Melchiori in his note to correct the arithmetic with the comment ‘Shakespeare is deliberately manipulating historical time’. Yes indeed, but more profoundly he is asking what ‘historical’ time is, and is returning two answers: it is the external framework of chronology and it is time as internally experienced. Silence knows that it is ‘fifty-five year ago’ that Shallow arrived at Clement's Inn; but when Falstaff says that he and Shallow ‘have heard the chimes at midnight’ (2 Henry IV, III. ii. 207, 211f) he is not evoking a particular passing from one day to another day, but savouring a generalized memory of revelry and youthful energy that lives now only in his memory—and also, perhaps unconsciously, thinking ahead to death (compare Falstaff's mysteriously evocative ‘I shall be sent for soon at night’, V. iv. 87f). This is both beautiful and unbearably sad, but it is inevitable and at least evidence of the persistent reality and continuity of experience. Every act of remembering and recreating, Shakespeare's included, is an exercise of the historical imagination which is the act of fitting, to echo a celebrated distinction of Collingwood's, the insides of events to their outsides.³⁰

Sooner or later, writers on the Henry IV plays have to consider the question of their genesis. I do not find this question a particularly gripping one insofar as it retreats from understanding the plays we have to trying to reconstruct hypothetically plays we do not have. Modern discussions of the matter derive from Harold Jenkins's lecture The Structural Problem in Shakespeare's ‘Henry IV’ (1956) and very few of them add much to his conclusions. The most innovatory theory has come from Professor Melchiori in a number of studies now collected and extended in his book Shakespeare's Garter Plays, which develops, sometimes in a boldly conjectural way, Jenkins's original proposals.³¹ I accept Jenkins's conclusion that Shakespeare did indeed intend to write a single play in which the dual victory of Hal over Hotspur and Falstaff would be shown, but that this schematic plan was jettisoned, probably during the writing of Act IV, and a new ending devised which would make a self-contained play while still leaving open the possibility of a sequel if the piece proved popular. When it did, Shakespeare incorporated the remaining chronicle material, which was less than had been available for Part 1, obliging him to expand the comic episodes. No one can seriously maintain that the result is a single ten-act play, and the arguments urged in support of that view by Tillyard and Dover Wilson seem to me simply untenable. The structural parallels between the two parts, as Jenkins shows, make an artful compromise between crude repetition and developed variation. In his words, ‘The two parts are complementary; they are also independent and even incompatible.’³² What needs emphasizing is that, whether or not there may be a ‘structural problem’ for us, there certainly was one for Shakespeare, and that the concept of overlapping was his solution. He had to fit Part 2 to Part 1 to some degree, and this imposed a number of constraints upon him. Like Hal, he was working within a teleological frame in which the end was known, and in which details had to be organized to lead up to that end. I like to think that he reflected upon the ways in which his own freedom of creative action had been shaped by his previous decisions; and if I were really going to speculate I should make a connection between this and that midnight conversation with which I began this section. For, of course, Shakespeare employed the liberty of conjecturing counterevents as well as the Sidneian ‘bare was’ of historical record.³³ He not only altered historical facts in Henry IV (by making Hal and Hotspur the same age, for example); he invented Falstaff. And when, in Act V, scene iv of Part 1, ‘Sir John riseth up’, the freedom to counterfeit (a key word in that scene) in its etymological sense, creating something opposed to something else, rises with him. ‘Fact’ and ‘fiction’ share a common root, in Shakespeare's imagination as in etymology: something done, something made about what was done, reflect upon each other ceaselessly. The references to Henry V at the beginning of 1 Henry VI, and to Henry VI at the end of Henry V, make of Shakespeare's career as a history playwright what they make of history itself: a perpetuum mobile between glory and chaos.

IV

Where, it may be asked, does this leave Shakespeare the political thinker, the dramatist of ideology? Before addressing that question we ought to acknowledge that our understanding of Renaissance politics is still being formed and cannot be predicated upon the politics of our own time. I referred at the beginning of this article to David Womersley's work on political readings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. He has made a formidable case against assuming that modern understanding of political transactions and preoccupations can simply be read back into the writings of Renaissance scholars: we need to recognize the alien character of their thought-processes rather than to acclaim them as familiar and anticipatory of our own.³⁴ Working from the Folio categories, G. K. Hunter proposed to define a history play as ‘a play about English dynastic politics of the feudal and immediately post-feudal period’.³⁵ ‘About’, of course, is a relative term. I think a valid distinction may be drawn between the kinds of political exploration we see in the two tetralogies. It does make sense to talk about the Henry VI trilogy as ‘about’ dynastic politics, as Michael Hattaway has shown in his New Cambridge editions. He is absolutely right to stress the plays' secular vision of political behaviour, their demystification of monarchy, their opposition of dated chivalry to ‘modern’ feudalism, and their preference for efficient to final causes, and to characterize their ‘radicalism’ etymologically as ‘an ability to root out the causes of political dilemmas, to demonstrate the partiality of contesting explanations of particular events’.³⁶ As he also points out, their scepticism about teleology or providence (tellingly given an exceptionally ineffectual champion in the person of Henry VI himself) leads to a rich multiplicity of causalities and representational modes, with allegory, mythography, emblem, and carnival prominent aspects of the dramatic technique. They move only gradually towards psychological inwardness and then (even in Richard of Gloucester) in a way which looks primitive when set against the second tetralogy, where the distribution of emphasis is so different. There are one or two places where I cannot share Professor Hattaway's views, notably when he writes that Shakespeare's art in the Henry VI plays is one of ‘demonstration, rather than, as it had been in the hands of medieval chroniclers, an art of interpretation’.³⁷ I find this very surprising given the care with which he has shown the resourcefulness and scope of Shakespeare's interpretative skills, and conversely his rejection of any reading of the plays which makes them doctrinaire. They are as much products of historical imagination as any other plays by Shakespeare. Nor can I accept his parallel between the Cade and Falstaff scenes as offering a ‘vision both of the limits of government and of the consequences of aristocratic factionalism’.³⁸ Cade, while more complex than is sometimes allowed, can never move or disturb us as Falstaff can, nor can we ever warm to him. By the time Shakespeare created Falstaff he had left such relative simplifications behind.

Structural differences between the two tetralogies are a significant pointer to their varying outlooks on political behaviour. The Henry VI trilogy, as Professor Hattaway says, has a processional character which looks back to the medieval mystery cycles,³⁹ while ‘the liaison des scènes is figurative rather than causal’.⁴⁰ The Henry IV plays do not regress to providential explanations (Henry V does, but not unironically), but their structural sophistication is remarkable⁴¹ and, in my view, connected to a new direction in Shakespeare's thinking about imagination. Politics ceases to be a matter of factions or class divisions and becomes rooted in individual psychology. If David Womersley is right to claim that ‘political transactions in the reign of Elizabeth seem in the first instance to have been transactions between individuals’ and to conclude that ‘in England in the late sixteenth century there was no public domain of politics’,⁴² one has to say that Shakespeare had reached a similar conclusion. Politics, a gestural activity in his early work, is a mental activity in his later. I have tried to make the case for him as an inclusive thinker whose historical imagination works by overlapping units of construction large and small, playing off opposites against each other until the whole of Henry IV resembles a spectrum in which continuity and differentiation are simultaneously perceptible.

Shakespeare had understood what A. N. Whitehead was to perceive early in this century: that time as we experience it is not a mechanical framework but a continuum of durations. When I visit, say, York Minster, my experience occupies a certain amount of clock-time but it overlaps with the experiences of other visitors, with my own experiences of earlier visits, and, on the theological plane, with the experiences of thousands of visitors down the centuries. Time, as Marjorie Grene puts it in her exposition of Whitehead, ‘is not one dimension, but a host of them’ which ‘overlap in an undetermined and, for any single knower, non-determinable number of ways’; and she adds that in any one event there may be ‘thousands of intricately interlacing temporal rhythms’.⁴³ This reverberant phrase might well be applied to Shakespeare's history plays. The concept of process familiar to him from The Faerie Queene (it goes back, of course, much further than that) was of nature as at once a stable order and as a kaleidoscope of change, and he seems to have conceived of time in a similar way. Consider two moments in which his monarchs reflect upon time. In 3 Henry VI, II. v. he shows Henry longing for the security of a completely mechanistic system of reckoning time, individual minutes aggregating into a whole life, and, conversely, dreaming of dividing up a single day into so many hours for its appointed tasks. ‘So minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, / Pass’d over to the end they were created, / Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave’ (lines 38-40). Now consider Richard II, V. v. Richard moves from time as musical rhythm to time as the rhythm of ‘the music of men's lives’, a music he has turned into discord: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, / For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock’ (lines 41-50). The clock is no longer a machine, it is Richard's physical body, his emotional distress figured as the tolling of the bell. To pass from Henry VI to Richard II is to pass from time as external mechanism to time as felt experience—Richard does not experience just time but ‘my time’ (line 58).⁴⁴ The Henry VI plays, and their interest in overlapping, are the fruit of that realization of time as process.

Marjorie Grene concludes her discussion of Whitehead with the observation that ‘time itself, as lived time, is telic’—as it is for Hal. We are the creatures of our past, so far determined but also free to create, building on that past, the future which beckons us but which we also draw toward ourselves by what Grene finely calls ‘the protensive pull of our transcendence which is the core of conscious life’.⁴⁵ That, I think, is how Shakespeare went about creating the political world of his history plays and it is also the most important thing he shows in them.

Notes

1. Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare's History Plays: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’ (London, 1992), 11, 13, 10, and 22.

2. Tom McAlindon, ‘Tragedy, King Lear and the politics of the heart’, Shakes Surv, 44 (1992), 85-90.

3. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Telling it as you like it: postmodernist history and the flight from fact’, TLS, 16 October 1992, 14. Mary Warnock makes analogous criticisms of postmodernists from a philosophical point of view in her Imagination and Time (Oxford, 1994), 95-6.

4. Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and politics’, Shakes Surv, 44 (1992), 8.

5. I borrow the term ‘counterevent’ from Paola Pugliatti, ‘“More than history can pattern”: the Jack Cade rebellion in Shakespeare's Henry VI, 2’, J of Med and Renaiss Stud, 22 (1992), 455. Sec, further, her book Shakespeare the Historian (London, 1996), which appeared after my own paper was completed.

6. Michael Dummett, ‘Bringing about the past’, Philos Rev, 73 (1964), 338-59, reprinted in Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath (ed.), The Philosophy of Time (Oxford, 1993), 117-33.

7. David Womersley, ‘Sir Henry Savile's translation of Tacitus and the political interpretation of Elizabethan texts’, Rev Engl St, NS 42 no. 167 (1991), 340.

8. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (London, 1992), 43.

9. Quoted by Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628: A Critical Biography (London, 1971), 30.

10. Raleigh, Selected Writings, ed. Gerald Hammond (Manchester, 1984), 149.

11. The First and Second Parts of John Hayward's ‘The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII’, ed. John J. Manning (Camden Fourth Series, vol. 42; London, 1991). The editor's introduction gives a detailed and illuminating account of the Privy Council's treatment of Hayward and other suspected partisans of Essex. See further David Womersley, ‘Sir John Hayward's tacitism’, Renaiss Stud, 6 (1991), 46-59.

12. This point is made by Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (London, 1991), 35. Her first chapter (pp. 1-39) is an outstanding discussion of the development of historical thought in Renaissance England, with full reference to previous work. See also Manning's edition of Hayward, pp. 34-42.

13. I have discussed this matter more generally in ‘Shakespeare's causes’, Cahiers Elis, 36 (1989), 25-35.

14. Polydore Vergil's English History, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1844), 26.

15. Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles (Yale, 1973), 135-6. Collingwood is also invoked by Wilbur Sanders in his excellent chapter ‘Literature as history: with some questions about “historical imagination”’, in The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1968), 1-19. Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian, 31, notes Hayward's interest in narrative technique and his apparent acceptance, with Raleigh, of the historian's interpretative liberty in the cause of art.

16. Worden, ‘Shakespeare and politics’, 8.

17. Rackin, Stages of History, 28.

18. For a recent discussion, taking in earlier views, see Andrew Gurr's edition of Henry V (Cambridge, 1992), 6-16.

19. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 241, 249.

20. The Famous Victories and Sir John Oldcastle are now conveniently available in Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (eds), The Oldcastle Controversy (Manchester, 1991), from which I quote.

21. Gary Taylor, ‘The fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakes Surv, 38 (1985), 96. That Shakespeare's character was intended to evoke precise historical resonances is also argued by E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Sir John Oldcastle: Shakespeare's martyr’, in John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton (eds), ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins (London, 1987), 118-32.

22. Corbin and Sedge (eds), The Oldcastle Controversy, 17, argue that this Sir John is ‘a surrogate “Oldcastle/Falstaff” vice-figure’. Richard Helgerson, in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), 236, seeks to distinguish between Falstaff as surrogate father to Hal, and Oldcastle and Wrotham as victims of monarchy: but Falstaff is ultimately a victim too.

23. A comparable conclusion emerges from Helgerson's brilliant discussion of the Elizabethan history play, which makes clear the divergence between Shakespeare's preoccupations and those of the authors of The Famous Victories, Sir John Oldcastle, and other ‘populist’ dramas: Forms of Nationhood, 195-245.

24. John Jowett and Gary Taylor, ‘The three texts of 2 Henry IV’, Stud in Biblio, 40 (1987), 36.

25. The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge, 1989), 3, 5, 9-12, 201; The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, 1600, ed. Thomas L. Berger (Oxford, 1991), xiii-xiv.

26. I repeat here some remarks from my essay ‘Forms of time: some Elizabethan two-part history plays’, Renaiss Stud, 4 (1990), 428.

27. The same suggestion is made by Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian, 126-30, whose discussion of the whole episode is excellent.

28. King Henry the Fourth, ed. Melchiori, 12.

29. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama (London, 1988), 106; Barbara Everett, ‘The fatness of Falstaff: Shakespeare and character’, Pr Br Acad, 76 (1991 for 1990), 127.

30. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 213. Warnock, Imagination and Time, has some pertinent remarks on Proust's distinction between ‘the artificial meaning we give to the past when we deliberately attempt to recall it’ and ‘the significance it has when we relieve the past through spontaneous memory. Then and only then, according to Proust, the meaning of the past comes with our recollection and shows us the truth’ (pp. 137-8).

31. Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare's Garter Plays: ‘Edward III’ to ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ (Newark, N.J., 1994), 21-73.

32. Harold Jenkins, ‘Structural problem’, reprinted in G. K. Hunter (ed.), ‘King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2’: A Casebook (London, 1970), 171.

33. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965), 110.

34. Besides Womersley's articles cited above, notes 7 and 11, one should also note his ‘Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III: a new theory of the English texts’, Renaiss Stud, 7 (1993), 272-90, with its reservations about the ‘reductive and distorting influence’ of some recent scholarship on sixteenth-century historiography in ‘its tendency to distract scholars from the study of historical writing to the study of that beguiling abstraction, “historical thought”’ (289 n. 61).

35. G. K. Hunter, ‘Truth and Art in History Plays’, Shakes Surv, 42 (1990), 15.

36. The Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge, 1991), 7.

37. Ibid. 7.

38. Ibid. 20.

39. The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge, 1990), 9; see also Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977), 31-56.

40. First Part of Henry VI, ed. Hattaway, 8.

41. See the fuller account in Dean, ‘Forms of time’, 426-30.

42. Womersley, ‘Sir Henry Savile's Tacitus’, 335.

43. Marjorie Grene, The Knower and the Known (Calif. 1966), 246. This inspirational work first suggested to me the importance of overlapping as a concept. Once again, my argument complements that of Paola Pugliatti, who calls attention to the importance of the image of the border—and of its transgressions—in the narrative and construction of the Henry IV plays (Shakespeare the Historian, 108-9).

44. Compare the extraordinary scene in Woodstock, ed. A. P. Rossiter (London, 1946), in which Richard discovers that he has reached the age of majority when he hears his own birthdate read out of the ‘English Chronicles’ as 1365: ‘KING: 1365 … What year is this? GREEN: ‘’Tis now, my lord, 1387.’ (II. i. 109-10). If the author was not joking, this is an embarrassing piece of clumsiness, almost Hollywood standard, which makes an instructive contrast with Shakespeare's Richard's internalized growth to maturity.

45. Grene, The Knower and the Known, 245, 252.

This article is a revised version of a paper given to the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at York University in February 1993 at the kind invitation of Professor Jacques Berthoud. I am most grateful to him and to Dr John Roe for their comments on that occasion.

All Shakespeare quotations are from the one-volume Oxford Complete Works, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1988).