[In the following essay, Braunmuller compares the accounts of Shakespeare's King John, Holinshed's Chronicles, and Sir John Hayward's writings, to discern Shakespeare's perception and treatment of historiography.]

Meercraft: By my ’faith
you are cunning i’ the Chronicle,
Sir.
Fitzdottrel: No, I confess I ha’t
from the Play-books,
And think they’are more authentic.
Engine: That’s sure, Sir.

—Ben Jonson, The Devil Is an Ass

Thinking about Renaissance English history plays, we typically but wrongly treat the chronicles as sources of a different color. Making Comedy of Errors from Menaechmi, or Measure for Measure from Promos and Cassandra, or a history play from Hall and Holinshed, Foxe and Stowe, are similar creative acts because Hall, Holinshed, Foxe, Stowe, Whetstone, Plautus, and their reified texts are, as sources, similar. Like the Elizabethans, we have trouble understanding that while we may be products of history, our histories are also products of history: the way we are determines our view of the way we or they were.

A scholar of Shakespeare's sources makes an illuminating distinction: 1 Henry VI is “not so much a Chronicle play as a fantasia on historical themes.”¹ The capital C is a nice touch: drama may be fantasia, but a Chronicle play has Historical—that is, factual and typographic—authority. I propose we admit that the chronicle, the fixed factual point in a still turning dramatic universe, is quite as much a Fantasia as 1 Henry VI. Chronicle and play differ most in the degree of cultural authority we, again like the Elizabethans, grant them: one a play, the other a History. Nowadays most of us know fifteenth-century English history almost exclusively from Shakespeare's plays; his fantasias now serve our culture much as the chronicles served him and his society. The works of early chroniclers or modern historians have become, handy-dandy, distant seconds to Shakespeare's “fantasias.” Everyone needs a place to stand, a moment's respite from the hermeneutic and circular dance, not least source-studiers, genre critics, or historiographers: thus we call Henry VIII a romance, Greene's James IV a comical or romantic history, 1 Henry VI a fantasia, Holinshed a Chronicle, and the writings of Camden or Bacon part of the Tudor-Stuart “historical revolution.”² Revolutions and continuities are in the eye of the beholder and the self-consciousness, often the self-promotion, of the perpetrators. Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's King John, Sir John Hayward's imbroglios at the turn of the sixteenth century, and their respective treatments in modern literary and historical scholarship testify to the truth, or at least the interest, of these propositions.

According to Thomas Nashe's familiar remarks, plays on subjects “borrowed out of our English Chronicles” have social utility: “our forefathers valiant acts” reprove “these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours.”³ Nashe ties his argument to a larger premise: “That State or Kingdome that is in league with all the world, and hath no forraine sword to vexe it, is not halfe so strong or confirmed to endure, as that which liues euery houre in feare of inuasion” (1:211). Nashe here invokes the well-worn “dangers of peace, benefits of war” topos, but he less conventionally asserts that only foreign threats surpass a history play (and, it seems, the chronicle material such plays enact and elaborate) as inducements to national unity and love of country.⁴ His dramatic examples are, consequently, England's triumphs over her dearest enemy: “braue Talbot (the terror of the French)” and Henry V “leading the French King prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to sweare fealty” (1:212-13).

Nashe wants to “prooue Playes to be no extreame; but a rare exercise of vertue” (1:212), and marginal notes (“The defence of Playes” and “The vse of Playes”) advance his campaign. He first associates plays with chronicles because he expects his readers to grant that chronicles possess unassailable moral and political value. Having transferred that value from chronicles to plays “borrowed out of our English Chronicles,” he predictably asserts that dramatic representation offers its subjects “most liuely anatomiz’d” (1:213). In short, we all agree that chronicles have certain positive public effects; plays based on chronicles will share those effects; let us now agree that plays enhance those effects. The final move in Nashe's argument has been debated since Plato, but the preceding step would have found wide agreement in the 1590s, not least among the playwrights and their defenders. Chronicles and history plays as Nashe presents them were similar in effect, and their procedures were roughly similar too.⁵ Moreover, their common effects were nationalistic, patriotic, and above all, political: they acted upon the populace at large, inculcating certain beliefs, in particular, loyalty to the monarch and nation rather than to local magnates and regions. With this political consequence came institutional surveillance. Capricious Elizabethan censorship may have been, but chronicles, other histories, and plays on historical subjects were frequent targets, and by 1608 the government had flatly prohibited plays on contemporary or near-contemporary foreign history and had thus denied, or tried to deny, the playwrights a rhetorically and even legally useful mask for political drama.⁶ English chronicles are national resources; they are government property. And the side door of the French wars of religion or the Dutch war of independence is slammed shut.

Summarily defining plays, Nashe employs the familiar Renaissance style-and-content, sweet-and-bitter dichotomy: “they are sower pils of reprehension, wrapt vp in sweete words” (1:213). His list of sour pills (the content of plays) sounds like a breathless chronicle: “all coosonages, all cunning drifts ouer-guylded with outward holinesse, all stratagems of warre, all the cankerwormes that breede on the rust of peace … the ill successe of treason, the fall of hastie climbers, the wretched end of vsurpers, the miserie of ciuill dissention, and how iust God is euermore in punishing murther.” Sixty years later, Thomas Hobbes drew a related distinction, this time between plays and histories:

In a good Poem, whether it be Epique, or Dramatique … both Judgement and Fancy are required: But the Fancy must be more eminent; because they [poems and plays] please for the Extravagancy; but ought not to displease by Indiscretion.

In a good History, the Judgement must be eminent; because the goodnesse consisteth, in the Method, in the Truth, and in the Choyse of the actions that are most profitable to be known. Fancy has no place, but onely in adorning the stile.⁷

Judgment, for historical playwright or narrative historian, lies in selecting “actions that are most profitable to be known” (Nashe's sour pills), although the poet will allow Fancy (source of Nashe's sweet words and of dramatic invention) a greater role than the historian should. When playwrights upset this defensive equilibrium—between sour pills and sweet words, between Judgment and Fancy, between actions profitable to be known and extravagancy—they write history plays that are, as Chapman said about one of his historical tragedies, “not truth, but things like truth.”⁸ When the truth-test becomes secondary, dramatic invention flourishes. No longer following the chronicle closely nor seeking only to achieve its effects, the playwright independently creates persuasive agents-in-action and a plausible causal sequence. Plays can exist with little more of either than the chronicles provide, and the less they add the more smoothly they dramatize chronicle material and become a kind of Holinshed marionette show. The more a play provides in excess of, or independent of, a chronicle's agents and motives, the more likely it is that the play will reconceptualize the chronicle. More openly and self-consciously than a chronicle, a play will dramatize “the interaction of incompatible views of historical reality.”⁹

With King John, Shakespeare rewrote Holinshed in just this way, and from such moments we can learn something about Shakespearean dramaturgy and about late Elizabethan attitudes towards historical texts. My examples are two: the consequences of Shakespeare's having invented (some say reinvented) the Bastard in King John, and his handling (some say mishandling) of the means of Arthur's near-torture and death.¹⁰

Declared the illegitimate son of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, the Bastard (formerly Philip Faulconbridge, now dubbed Sir Richard Plantagenet, and still later “Philip” again) soliloquizes on his new station, the respect he will command, and the disdain he will dispense.¹¹ He summarizes his situation and his way forward:

But this is worshipful society
And fits the mounting spirit like myself;
For he is but a bastard to the time
That doth not smack of observation,
And so am I whether I smack or no;
And not alone in habit and device,
Exterior form, outward accoutrement,
But from the inward motion to deliver
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth,
Which though I will not practise to deceive,
Yet to avoid deceit I mean to learn,
For it shall strew the footsteps of my rising.

(1.1.205-16)

The Bastard plays with literal and figurative meanings of illegitimacy. “Observation” means both “paying attention” and “paying court.” “A bastard to the time” fails to participate in, or take advantage of, the way things are. He fails to notice the way the winds of patronage and advancement are blowing. The latter half of this passage initiates the Bastard's characterization as satiric commentator and disingenuous analyst, a character he will keep through the end of act 3. He threatens to become a “bastard to the time” by self-consciously behaving like a stereotypical literary bastard and offering the world the sweet poison—of praise and deceit, hypocrisy and feigned subservience—it wants.

Faulconbridge is Time's bastard in yet another way: he doesn’t appear in Time's register, the historical sources available to Shakespeare. Or rather, he does, but so transiently as to seem a wraith, not the vital and compelling figure of Shakespeare's play. Holinshed once mentions “Philip bastard sonne to king Richard” who “killed the vicount of Limoges, in reuenge of his fathers death,” and Shakespeare does partially dramatize (in act 3, scene 2) the Bastard's killing of Austria, who incorporates Limoges.¹² Persuasive historical models for Shakespeare's character have, however, been impossible to find; the Bastard is almost completely a dramatic invention, or reinvention, if we suppose that Shakespeare knew The Troublesome Reign of King John (anonymous, first printed in 1591), where a very dissimilar bastard son to Richard I plays a prominent role.¹³ “Bastard to the time” has a semiallegorical meaning; the Bastard's words and example invite us to acknowledge that any character in any history play becomes ahistorical through appearing in the dramatic medium. (As we shall see, the agents in a chronicle are themselves ahistorical because they are embedded in a text, not a time.) Dramatic demands may put greater or lesser pressure on the figure recorded in a supposedly factual chronicle, but any dramatic personage's “character” diverges radically from the human agents represented in a chronicle's very different textual environment. The Bastard's origin differs in degree and explicitness, not kind, from that of all the other characters in King John or in any play whose characters happen to have historical names.¹⁴ They’re all bastards by the tests of either historical or textual legitimacy Holinshed stands for.

Most of the time, Shakespeare can serve two masters, the nominally factual chronicle and the dramatization of that chronicle. He insinuates invention into the rifts Holinshed left him. Invention, of course, accounts for the Bastard's very existence, and Shakespeare makes us understand that the Bastard is “born” or “reborn” in the play's first scene both within the dramatized representation (his parentage debated, his name changed) and within the nominally ahistorical sphere of aesthetic creation (the making of King John as Shakespeare conceived it). Thus invented, created, or born, the Bastard, historically a phantom, appears in a crowd scene like the Battle of Angers (act 2), which Shakespeare bases upon Holinshed's account of the Battle of Mirabeau. Even here, the dialogue admits the Bastard's historical unreality when he interrupts to add himself—“Bastards and else”—to John's army of “Twice fifteen thousand hearts of England's breed” (2.1.275-76). That army of thirty thousand does appear in Holinshed (168b; P4v), albeit two years and several pages later than the Battle of Mirabeau/Angers, but here the Bastard scribbles his name in the chronicle's, and the play's, margin. Alternatively, the Bastard can dominate a scene Holinshed does not stage, like his defiance of the Dauphin Louis and the English nobles in act 5, scene 2.

John's reign, like Henry IV's, was a politically sensitive subject in late Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare conceals his play's potential “application” and deflects the censor's gaze by creating a character whose ahistoricity guarantees him safe. Were he required to defend King John before the Privy Council, Shakespeare might reasonably plead that the Bastard could never threaten usurpation and could never encourage it in an audience of the 1590s because the Bastard never existed. Shakespeare thus opens a space in the historical record—as Tudor audiences and politicians conceived that record—where he may dramatize issues of legitimacy and rule with less risk than any historian bound to use publicly endorsed names and chronology.

This arena of invention and meditation has a limit, precisely the limit of John's death, Henry III's succession, and the French withdrawal from England—in short, the end of the play. Here the imaginary bastard turns up in a real historical garden. Critics have found the ending politically (or “historically”) inconclusive and the future course of events puzzlingly indeterminate.¹⁵ To some extent, any play on a historical subject will seem inconclusive because it has no “natural”—no formal or culturally endorsed—termination before the present moment, but the Bastard's centrality to the dramatic action, coupled with his absence from the historical scenario here (re)enacted, conspire to make King John's conclusion particularly ambiguous. Characterization and plot have propelled the Bastard into military and de facto political command of England, authority he does not hold in Holinshed's text and never could have held (so far as we believe) in 1215-16. Fictional Bastard and allegedly factual Holinshed collide immediately after John's death. The Bastard rallies the newly loyal English nobles for an attack on the French:

Now, now, you stars that move in your right spheres,
Where be your powers? Show now your mended faiths
And instantly return with me again
To push destruction and perpetual shame
Out of the weak door of our fainting land.
Straight let us seek, or straight we shall be sought;
The Dauphin rages at our very heels.

(5.7.74-80)

Salisbury, speaking now for Holinshed, intervenes:

It seems you know not, then, so much as we.
The Cardinal Pandulph is within at rest,
Who half an hour since came from the Dauphin,
And brings from him such offers of our peace
As we with honour and respect may take,
With purpose presently to leave this war.

(81-86)

Despite this deflating reply—“within at rest” is a crushing domestic detail—the Bastard speaks as his dramatic representation requires: “He [the Dauphin] will the rather do it when he sees / Ourselves well sinewèd to our defence,” and Salisbury has the unpalatable task of making the Bastard look like Time's, or Holinshed's, fool:

Nay, ’tis in a manner done already,
For many carriages he hath dispatched
To the seaside and put his cause and quarrel
To the disposing of the Cardinal,
With whom yourself, myself, and other lords,
If you think meet, this afternoon will post
To consummate this business happily.

(89-95)

There is no good answer to this factual rebuke, and with a brief “Let it be so,” the Bastard turns to his final rhetorical and dramatic task, the loyal endorsement of Prince Henry as king and the famous patriotic effusion of the play's final lines.¹⁶

The Bastard serves Shakespeare well. Through selection, emphasis, and fabrication, Shakespeare uses him to shatter the chronicle's shape and impose another one, but the Bastard finally disappears back into the same factual vacancy that permitted his creation. The challenge of making drama from chronicle is almost the reverse in the matter of Arthur. Holinshed says hardly anything about the Bastard; he says too much about Arthur. Here, Shakespeare's principal source did not make up its mind and jumbled together a series of inconsistent explanations of Arthur's death. Instead of choosing from this embarrassment, Shakespeare uses some of everything and thereby gives the editors notes to write and the critics fun to poke.

In the late spring of 1202, Holinshed says, “a rumour was spread through all France” of Arthur's death, and various nobles

began to leuie sharpe wars against king Iohn … whereupon it was reported, that king Iohn through persuasion of his councellors, appointed certeine persons to go vnto Falais, where Arthur was kept in prison, vnder the charge of Hubert de Burgh, and there to put out the yoong gentlemans eies.

(165a-b; P3)

Hubert de Burgh and one of the executioners, moved by Arthur's “lamentable words,” spared their prisoner, but “caused it to be bruted abroad through the countrie, that the kings commandement was fulfilled, and that Arthur also through sorrow and greefe was departed out of this life” (165b; P3). Collecting all the rumors and admitting his own ignorance, Holinshed summarizes:

But now touching the maner in verie deed of the end of this Arthur, writers make sundrie reports. Neuerthelesse certeine it is, that in the yeare next insuing [1203], he was remooued from Falais vnto the castell or tower of Rouen, out of the which there was not any that would confesse that euer he saw him go aliue. Some have written, that as he assaied to haue escaped out of prison, and proouing to clime over the wals of the castell, he fell into the riuer of Saine, and so was drowned. Other write, that through verie greefe and languor he pined awaie, and died of naturall sicknesse. But some affirme, that king Iohn secretlie caused him to be murthered and made awaie, so as it is not throughlie agreed vpon, in what sort he finished his daies: but verelie king Iohn was had in great suspicion, whether worthilie or not, the lord knoweth.

(165b; P3)¹⁷

From these sundry reports, Shakespeare made several inconsistent selections and added a few puzzling details of his own. In act 3, scene 3, John inveigles Hubert into agreeing to kill Arthur: “He shall not live” (3.3.67). In act 4, scene 1, Hubert shows Arthur a paper, evidently a royal warrant (4.1.6), commanding that his eyes be put out with hot irons (4.1.39). In act 4, scene 2, Pembroke, looking at a silent Hubert, asserts

This is the man should do the bloody deed;
He showed his warrant to a friend of mine.
The image of a wicked heinous fault
Lives in his eye. That close aspect of his
Doth show the mood of a much troubled breast,
And I do fearfully believe ’tis done,
What we so feared he had a charge to do.

(4.2.69-75)

“Bloody deed” and “wicked heinous fault” are just vague enough to include blinding rather than murder, but Pembroke immediately specifies that he suspects “the foul corruption of a sweet child's death” (81). At the beginning of act 4, scene 3, we see Arthur, inexplicably disguised in a “ship-boy's semblance,” jump to his death from a “wall” onto “stones.”

Even without the puzzling disguise, which may derive from Holinshed's reference to drowning, John's responsibility for Arthur's death is quite confused.¹⁸ Did John command murder orally? Did he seal a warrant for Arthur's blinding? Did he seal a warrant for Arthur's murder? Stephen Booth has tried to rationalize this confusion within the larger problem of how Holinshed evaluates John's character. Noting the “dizzying concentration of contrary evaluations and responses” in Holinshed, Booth finds that while Shakespeare simplifies events and John's “many moral identities,” he substitutes “dramatically more efficient devices that make the events … as difficult to think about comfortably as those” in the chronicle. Booth concludes that Shakespeare “seems to be trying to do to his audience what the Chronicles do to their reader. He succeeds, and the play therefore inevitably fails.”¹⁹

In short, Shakespeare deliberately reproduces Holinshed's confusing folly and thus produces a failed drama. Booth's explanation saves the canonical appearances: while these appearances can’t be saved, they are really Holinshed's, not Shakespeare's. On the contrary, two explanations, one political and one dramatic, may be found. First, both Holinshed and Shakespeare had reason to obscure John's responsibility. Holinshed is, for instance, similarly obfuscatory when he recounts the murder of Richard II, and as early as 1559 Worcester's ghost explained why in A Mirror for Magistrates:

But still it fares as alway it did fare,
Affection, feare, or doubtes that dayly brue,
Do cause that stories [histories] never can be true.
          Vnfruytfull Fabyan folowed the face
Of time and dedes, but let the causes slip:
Whych Hall hath added, but with double grace,
For feare I thinke least trouble might him trip:
For this or that (sayeth he) he felt the whip.
Thus story writers leave the causes out,
Or so rehears them, as they wer in dout.
          But seing causes are the chiefest thinges
That should be noted of the story wryters,
That men may learne what endes al causes bringes
They be vnwurthy the name of Chroniclers,
That leave them cleane out of their registers.
Or doubtfully report them: for the fruite
Of reading stories, standeth in the suite.(20)

To avoid partisanship (“Affection”) or censorship, the chronicler and the dramatist have two choices: leave out causal explanations as Fabyan did, or include too many causes (Hall's “double grace”) and avoid choosing among them. Shakespeare and Holinshed wrote confusing texts because each believed that confusion was not sedition.

Shakespeare is also selectively nonselective. From Holinshed's plethora he chose now one, now another, “fact,” assertion, or inference according to a dramatic plan. However logically confusing, the warrant has great theatrical power: ordering that Arthur's eyes be burned out, it is the last thing Arthur will see. Hubert intensifies this pathos by asking, “Can you not read it?” and by punning, “Is it not fair writ?” (4.1.37). Beyond its impact as a prop, the warrant links John's command to kill Arthur with the dying king's description of himself as “a scribbled form, drawn with a pen / Upon a parchment” (5.7.31-32), shrinking against the fiery poison in his bowels. Caroline Spurgeon has shown that King John contains a very high proportion of imagery drawn from “the body and bodily action”; in the middle of the play, “eyes” and “seeing” become especially pronounced, as Pembroke's remark on seeing Hubert's fault living “in his eye” and John's synecdoche of “eyes” for “nobles” (4.2.2), for example, testify.²¹ Finally, Shakespeare's added detail of the “stones” that cause Arthur's death identifies the dead boy with English earth; the Bastard will soon describe lifting the body as taking “all England up,” and John later merges himself with his kingdom:

And none of you will bid the winter come
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,
Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course
Through my burned bosom, nor entreat the north
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips
And comfort me with cold.

(5.7.36-41)

When images of the body, of seeing, and of writing converge, they produce the customary Shakespearean vision of the body-as-text: “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange matters” (Macbeth 1.5.61-62), for instance. Anticipating John's “form … / Upon a parchment,” Philip describes young Arthur:

Look here upon thy [John's] brother Geoffrey's face.
These eyes, these brows, were moulded out of his;
This little abstract doth contain that large
Which died in Geoffrey, and the hand of time
Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

(2.1.99-103)

Legitimacy and inheritance, the processes of time, growth, and writing (scripting, drawing, tracing) are metaphorically united, and an implicit claim might be that time and the writing of a volume (adult) from a brief (child) confer, or confirm, legitimacy. Later, John excuses his attempt to have Arthur killed by blaming the text he read in Hubert's face:

                                                            Hadst thou not been by,
A fellow by the hand of Nature marked,
Quoted, and signed to do a deed of shame,
This murder had not come into my mind.

(4.2.220-23)

Each of the adjectives—marked, quoted, signed—could mean simply “noted” or “identified,” but the phrase also suggests a sequence: noted; written down or enrolled; ratified by signature. (“Signed” might also mean “distinctively marked,” as Cain was.) This passage illustrates the play's (and Shakespeare's) typical inversion of seeing and seen. John's sight creates what he sees rather than passively receiving external stimuli, as he soon explains:

Forgive the comment that my passion made
Upon thy feature, for my rage was blind,
And foul imaginary eyes of blood
Presented thee more hideous than thou art.

(4.2.263-66)

When the sight finds the signs it needs or wants to see, we are close indeed to Rosalind's complaint to Duke Frederick: “your mistrust cannot make me a traitor” (As You Like It, 1.3.55). Innocent or guilty, no chronicler or dramatist could invent a better challenge to censorship.

One critic finds in John's image for himself Shakespeare's tacit recognition that “both the ‘historical’ John and the fictional Bastard are ‘scribbled’ forms, characters in a play drawn with Shakespeare's pen,” although the historical and frugal Shakespeare presumably never literally used parchment.²² At the least, the image systems—which often have their own momentum independent of any immediate dramatic concerns—strongly suggest that the history play confers its own fictional-historical legitimacy, that the play is, as I said before, an arena of invention and meditation.²³ Thus the double determinants of the Elizabethan history play—contemporary cultural issues as expressed in censorship or the threat of censorship and the aesthetic project of transforming chronicle into drama—cannot be separated here because the drama itself both claims and denies the censor's authority. It claims the power to create or cashier historical personages and realities, to rewrite the (hi)story just as the censors manifestly did, while simultaneously denying that it is anything other than a play, a scribbled form, jesting poison. This exchange of techniques could produce self-censorship, or the involuntary submission to a perceived ideological formation.

Like Holinshed, Shakespeare has confused the issue enough to escape political reprisal. Dramatic and theatrical demands have also led to logical inconsistencies, and Shakespeare was fortunate in having Holinshed's ample list of causes and means to choose from. In the matter of Arthur, images and image systems supersede causal logic, just as in a different way Shakespeare pursued the Bastard's characterization to the point of making him look slightly ridiculous in the face of historical “fact.” Shakespeare's choices are not a bungled or unself-conscious dramatization of Holinshed. Holinshed and Shakespeare worked to different plans and produced different kinds of texts that anticipate and create different audiences.

Holinshed's account of the reign and Shakespeare's King John raise a central question about late-Elizabethan attitudes towards the national chronicles. What kind of texts did Elizabethans think they were? Unlike many modern source-studiers, thoughtful Elizabethans probably did not suppose that the chronicles were, or were trying to be, an objective record of past events or personalities that once existed. Undernourished as he may have been historiographically, even Holinshed might have balked at this claim. First, he understood that his sources were themselves already shaped to make a point. Holinshed complains when his sources promote an interpretation he does not share, and he can grow quite restive before lapsing into a safe if mealy-mouthed complaint:

But such was the malice of writers in times past, which they bare towards king Iohn, that whatsoeuer was doone in preiudice of him or his subiects, it was still interpreted to chance through his default, so as the blame still was imputed to him, in so much that although manie things he did peraduenture in matters of gouernement, for the which he might be hardlie excused, yet to thinke that he deserued the tenth part of the blame wherewith writers charge him, it might seeme a great lacke of aduised consideration in them that so should take it.

(161b; P1; my italics)²⁴

Second, he was as aware as Worcester's ghost that he wasn’t simply recording the past, aware, indeed, that there is no such thing. He created a politically volatile text in the present. Thomas Nashe implied as much when he argued that the principal use of the chronicles was the encouragement of national self-consciousness and unity against foreign foes. They had a special social role because Renaissance rhetorical and literary theory treated their apparent truth-status as an important, perhaps an essential, ingredient in their persuasiveness and effectiveness. Yet Nashe implies, accurately, the chronicles were used not as repositories of fact, but as narratives claiming facticity. Consequently, I think it is false to say, “Some plays simply presented the facts for their own sake, as a certain type of prose chronicle continued to do.”²⁵ Neither chronicles nor plays present facts “for their own sake”; more often than not, the “facts” are simply what need saying or are required to be said at a given moment.

The late-Elizabethan example of John Hayward shows the dark side of this use. In his case, the government attacked a history not because it was false, but because the truth it claimed to convey contradicted supervening institutional claims. Chronicles, true or false, are good when they support contemporary authority, bad when they do not. Consequently, the chroniclers and historians censored themselves. Self-censorship is literary invention, invention guided not by the desire to present “fact,” but by the desire to present a politically satisfactory (and hence politically effective) text. Tillyard's much-disputed claim about the providential bias of Shakespeare's history plays was a thoroughly Elizabethan claim: it assumes political utility shaped the composition of both chronicles and plays.²⁶

A corollary of these views is that the events and “characters,” or represented agents, in the chronicles are themselves ahistorical. Historians and readers join in a retrospective conspiracy to invent and accept fictitious but plausible human causes for the relatively few dated occurrences they now—in 1577 or 1587 or 1987—take to be significant. Many assumptions, or interpretative conventions—concepts of human psychology, theories of society, political convictions—determine what readers and writers, or spectators and playwrights, will regard as plausible, or true, or coherent (hi)stories at any given moment, but when the assumptions change, so do the histories, and when the histories change, so do the facts (the events and agents) they purvey.²⁷ Comparing a play with its chronicle source, we compare two imaginative and invented texts, not one factual and one fictive work.²⁸ We measure differences between fictions, we compare rhetorical strategies. Moreover, Holinshed, Nashe, and Shakespeare knew it. Chronicles and plays apply their tests differently and engage different standards of plausibility, but the differences can be and have been exaggerated. If they do not want to forfeit the cachet of the Renaissance's theoretical approval of “true history,” and hence forfeit their cultural use-value (and profitability), neither a chronicle nor a history play will fiddle certain brute “facts” or widely cherished myths—the sequence of English monarchs, for example, or the winner of Bosworth Field, or Thomas More's characterization of Richard III.²⁹ Sir John Hayward's work demonstrates that virtually anything else is open to imaginative reshaping.

Hayward's method as a historian straddles the Tudor chroniclers' approach and the techniques of historians influenced by such Continental writers as Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Bodin. Hayward's histories were, as F. J. Levy has written, “the first realization in England of a history in which the causes of events were seen in terms of the interrelationship of politics and character rather than in terms of the working out of God's providence.”³⁰ Hayward was caught between two models of historiographic plausibility, caught between two paradigms of what his audience construed as “true history.” Unfortunately for Hayward but happily for us, government censorship arrested him in mid-straddle, and Sir Edward Coke twice (July 11, 1600, and January 22, 1601) forced him to explain his methods.

Elizabeth's ministers objected to Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII. (1599) because, in Margaret Dowling's words, they “suspected Hayward of prophesying the failure of Essex in Ireland through a description of Richard II's ill-starred efforts in that country”; Hayward naturally “refused to admit he told past history in the light of contemporary politics.”³¹ (Of course, the government itself wanted history told in the light of contemporary politics, but Hayward's book told the wrong story.) Hayward had two principal defenses. The first was an argument for a kind of infinite historical plasticity. Hayward claimed the historian could reshuffle the deck of historical events ad lib, and he took it “to be lawfull for any historiographer to insert any hystorie of former tyme into that hystorie he wright albeit no other hystorian of that matter have meued the same” (216). If an event occurred sometime, then it might be claimed to have happened at another, earlier time. When the chronicle source is silent, matter may be inserted because there is no positive evidence to disprove it. Shakespeare took a similar if not quite identical liberty in King John. Hayward had, in fact, rashly compared Richard II's spend-thrift ways and failure in Ireland with Henry II's more lenient methods of taxation and greater military success, and he had antedated the use of benevolences as a means to raise revenue from Richard III's reign to Richard II's.³² Hayward's justification obscures, perhaps deliberately, the difference between the two charges: in the first, he drew a politically explosive, but arguably accurate, analogy; in the second, he violated chronology and administrative history as he knew it.

Hayward's second defense asserts the historian's ancient prerogative to invent historical occasions, rather than to rearrange (often by centuries) preexisting historical accounts. It “is a libertie vsed by all good wrighters of historie to adde & to invent reasons & speaches according to the matter” (217). Here, Coke's charge turned on an inflammatory speech attributed to Thomas Arundel, the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury. Hayward gives Arundel a speech (“in these words, or to this sence following”) requesting that Henry Bolingbroke depose Richard II and offering examples of successful usurpations: “The like examples are not rare (as you affirme) nor long since put in practise, nor far hence to be fetched.” Having listed some “like examples,” the speech concludes, “these are not all, and yet enough to clere this action of rarenesse in other countries; & noueltie in our [sic].”³³ Coke recorded Hayward's rather intricate defense:

he [Hayward] confessed that the stories mencioned / in the Archb[ishop's]. oration tendinge to proue / that deposers of kings and princes haue / had good successe, were not taken out / of any other chronicle, but inserted by / himselfe, but said that after in the / history the Bishop of carlile confuteth / the same, but for the confutation the B[ishop] / was committed to the [Earl] marsh[all]: and the / whole plem^t concluded against the B[ishop's] opinion / and in troth in 1 h 4 the B[ishop]: of carlile was / attainted of treason.³⁴

Coke did not dispute the truth of the “stories … tendinge to proue that deposers of kings and princes haue had good successe.” Truth and falsehood have no place in this argument. The issue is one of technique and, consequently, of effect.

Responding to this charge, Hayward offered two explanations, one rhetorical and dramatic, the other historical and pragmatic. First, he wrote neatly balanced speeches, one for, the other against, deposing Richard; Hayward's device has ample classical precedent and apes the Renaissance educational practice of making students compose speeches in utramque partem.³⁵ The historian personifies the issues, whether or not he can specify a historical individual who actually spoke “in these words.” This defense is a rhetorical and dramatic one. Hayward's second justification is cleverer and enlists the pragmatic outcome of the Bishop of Carlisle's bravery. The real bishop lost the invented debate.³⁶ Henry IV did replace Richard II as king, the Bishop of Carlisle was imprisoned and attainted. Better yet (for Hayward), Parliament endorsed the position he assigns to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Inferentially, then, someone, indeed many someones, must have been thinking the thoughts voiced in Hayward's imaginary speech, and he has therefore created an accurate, albeit unprovable, scene. Doing so, Hayward not only makes the record of past experience rhetorical, but both conceives and transmits that very experience as text.

Arundel's speech bedeviled Hayward at his second trial, as it had at the first. When he elaborates what it means to “invent reasons & speaches according to the matter,” Hayward proposes a plausibility test: “There can be nothing done be it neuer so ill or vnlawfull but must have a shadowe / and eu’ry councell must be according to the action” (218). Any action has a “shadowe,” a justification, a rationale, a motive; any debate or advice (“councell”) leading to that action must logically conform to the outcome. If the Bishop of Carlisle represented certain views and suffered for them, then others (the victors, his persecutors) must have held other views. If we know what action occurred, we may justifiably infer its motive and invent a speech articulating that motive.

However much Hayward's practice resembled a playwright's, he hesitated to acknowledge the similarity. In his history of Edward VI (first published in 1630), he “described the career of Somerset in terms of the acts of a tragedy,” but in his preface to Roger Williams's eye-witness history of military affairs in the Low Countries (1618), Hayward attacked the “partiality” of those who “in the Histories of their owne Countries … extoll, depresse, depraue immoderately; making things seeme not as they are, but as they would haue them; no otherwise almost then Comedies and Tragedies are fashioned by their Authours.”³⁷ Hayward evidently planned to incorporate Williams's text into his own projected contemporary history, just as he had incorporated earlier chronicles (including Holinshed) into his Life of Henry IV, and the (re)creative fit was still upon him: Williams's text “comming to mee in a ragged hand, much maimed, both in sense, and in phrase: I haue restored it so neere as I could, both to the stile and the meaning of the Authour.”³⁸

Despite Hayward's sneer at native-history-as-drama, Richard II and to a lesser degree even King John probably influenced his own history writing.³⁹ The likelihood that Hayward recouped Shakespeare's debt to Holinshed shows how closely Hayward's practice approaches Shakespeare's. A satisfactory (re)imagining or (re)enactment of the past is worth stealing or imitating, even if it comes from a play. As Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights moved away from dramatizing the chronicles toward the kind of drama King John is trying to be, they were joined by historians like John Hayward treading the same path, defensively and self-servingly admitting that plausibility (the coherence of invented motive with historical result), not fact and truth, are the only pertinent, the only available, tests of history writing. They are also dramatic tests.

Shakespeare dramatized the disparate “historical” details of Holinshed's Chronicles through inventing a psychological entity (the Bastard) and then, like Hayward, attributing motives and speeches articulating motive to that character. Holinshed's own method usually looks quite different. His text asserts its authority by appealing to chronological sequence, by reproducing documents (Papal bulls, royal letters), and by recording peripheral details that mingle the quotidian and the marvelous. Among the latter details, Holinshed and the committee that expanded the 1577 into the 1587 edition favor economic digressions on taxes and food prices, tidbits of local history, and fabulous events—multiple moons, ominous nocturnal noises, strange creatures fished from the sea. To demonstrate Holinshed's self-consciousness is to pursue an ignis fatuus, so well does his prose homogenize the antagonistic biases of his sources, sources he frequently cites in text or margin. Yet Holinshed sometimes pauses over the why and not just the what of events, most frequently when his sources offer conflicting data or when they fail to fit his own, largely unannounced, agenda. At these moments, his irritable complaints or reluctant neutrality bespeak his effort to manufacture a text simultaneously claiming authoritative truth and meeting present social and political demands.

It is customary to regard Holinshed and his fellow chroniclers as “naive,” the Haywards, Camdens, and Bacons who succeeded him as “sophisticated” and part of a rather late-arriving European revolution in historiography. Our histories of historiography, and more especially the literary critics who simplify them, have tidied up the problem by invoking explanatory dichotomies (naive vs. sophisticated, providence vs. politics and character) that inevitably connote value. These explanations of history-writing are not different in effect and origin from the explanations a Holinshed or a Hayward created in their historical texts. Ours are as culturally inscribed as theirs, and our histories, like our histories of history and our literary criticism, conform to other changes in cultural self-explanation between the late sixteenth and the late twentieth centuries.

Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's King John, and Hayward's Life of Henry IV share a similar textual status. Holinshed reimagined the earlier chronicles, Shakespeare reimagined Holinshed, Hayward reimagined Holinshed, other chroniclers, and probably Shakespeare, each by removing text from its original (fictive) conceptualization and embedding it in a new one. Literary critics have had a hard time recognizing this feature in Holinshed and his ilk, where they find only “unmanageable detail”; yet the chroniclers' techniques—chronology, agglomeration, division by reigns—are just as artificial as Shakespeare's telescoping, compressing, and (re)arranging.⁴⁰ Of the three, only Hayward articulated his methods, but they are methods used by Shakespeare and Holinshed as well, however diversely we now judge their respective goals. The texts have distinguishable forms (chronicle history, drama, “politic” history), and the causal paradigms each employs are also different, but the way the three writers generated their texts and the oblique relations each text has to wie es eigentlich gewesen are very like. The essentially fictive or recreative is present in all three, and all three operated under similar cultural constraints and threats of censorship or worse.

Notes

1. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957-75), 3:25; the whole sentence reads, “The footnote references to the play and the following summary should help the reader to see how fact [i.e., the chronicles of Hall, Grafton, and Holinshed] and fiction blend, how incidents are transposed and altered, until it seems that 1 Henry IV is not so much a Chronicle play as a fantasia on historical themes.” Bullough's assumption echoes Francis Bacon's distinction between a chronicle and the different history he wished to write. In a manuscript preface to his biography of Henry VII, Bacon complained: “yet the [biographer's] travel [travail] must be much greater than if there had been already digested any tolerable chronicle as a simple narration of the actions themselves, which should only have needed … to be enriched with counsels and notable particulars”; see Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding et al., 15 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1861-64), 11:35.

2. See F. S. Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580-1640 (London: Routledge and Paul, 1962). Some early reader of the British Library copy of Greene's James IV has crossed out the historical claims of its full title and written “or rather fiction of English and Scottish matters comicall.”

3. Pierce Penilesse (1592) in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. ed. by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958; reprint, 1966), 1:212; subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.

4. On the familiar topos, see Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare's Military World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956), chap. 5.

5. Arguing this expansive technical claim would require a long digression, but it is a minor theme of Matthew H. Wikander's first chapter in The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986); see, for instance, 25: “The evocation of moral patterns and rhetorical lessons [as in Holinshed] is more straightforward and less qualified in Shakespeare's earlier [pre-1 Henry IV] history plays.” Publishers did not distinguish narrative chronicles from dramatic histories too carefully; many plays were True, many were The [True] History of, and some were even The [True] Chronicle [History] of (for this last category, see, for instance, the full titles of Peele's Edward I, the “old” Leir, Thomas Lord Cromwell, and Nobody and Somebody).

6. George Chapman's Byron plays sparked the prohibition; see the discussion in my A Seventeenth-Century Letter-Book (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1983), 435-37, and the studies cited there. James I (or his ministers) invoked this prohibition in attacking Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624); see R. C. Bald's edition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1929), 19-25 and 159-66. For censorship of the 1587 edition of Holinshed, see Elizabeth Story Donno, “Some Aspects of Shakespeare's Holinshed,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 229-48.

7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), 1.8, p. 33.

8. George Chapman, epistle dedicatory to The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) in T. M. Parrott, ed., The Tragedies of George Chapman (London: G. Routledge, 1910); Chapman here defends inventing Clermont D’Ambois, a fictional brother for the historical Bussy D’Ambois. Argument about invented personages in noncomic drama extends back to Aristotle, Poetics 1451b15 ff., where he approves the practice.

9. Herbert Lindenberger, writing of Shakespeare's first tetralogy in Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), 111. As the example of John Hayward illustrates, this distinction cannot be simply explained as the difference between a narrative historian's single viewpoint and the multiple viewpoints present in most dramatic representations, history plays or otherwise. On “coherence” as an attribute of historical narrative, see C. Behan McCullagh, “The Truth of Historical Narratives” and Jerzy Topolski, “Historical Narrative: Towards a Coherent Structure” in “The Representation of Historical Events,” History and Theory, Beiheft 26 (1987): 33 and 76-77, respectively.

10. Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Humanities Press, 1982), considers inconsistencies of expectation and fulfillment, especially within the plot; here, I study moments of stress or torsion between the play Shakespeare creates and the history Holinshed tells.

11. King John, 1.1.182-216; the play is quoted and hereafter cited parenthetically from my forthcoming edition in the Oxford Shakespeare; other plays of Shakespeare are cited from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, gen. eds., Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).

12. Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, beginning at Duke William the Norman … (1587), 160b; O6v; reference, hereafter parenthetical, is by page and column (a or b) and by signature.

13. For speculation on historical and literary models, see the commentary in H. H. Furness's variorum edition of King John (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919), W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare's Holinshed (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), 48-50, and E. A. J. Honigmann's Arden edition of King John (London: Methuen, 1954), xxii-xxv. For a discussion of the “imaginary character” vs. an enacted historical personage, see Stephen Bann, “The Odd Man Out: Historical Narrative and the Cinematic Image” in “The Representation of Historical Events” (note 9): 64-65.

    Shakespeare and the author of The Troublesome Reign referred independently to Holinshed's account, and while The Troublesome Reign may have shown Shakespeare how interesting a bastard could be, it gave him little that he used when creating the character in King John. I therefore omit the vexed debate about the relation between the two plays; whatever the chronology, it has no serious application to my argument here.

14. See Lindenberger (note 9): “the actions of most historical dramas can be described as attempts to provide semblances of order which can disguise (and also legitimize) the chaos and barbarism which characterize the various struggles for power” (160). In “‘To Set a Form upon that Indigest’: Shakespeare's Fictions of History,” Comparative Drama 17 (1983-84): 1-16, David Scott Kastan makes Lindenberger's point about Shakespeare's histories and King John in particular; see esp. 15.

15. See, among others, William H. Matchett, “Richard's Divided Heritage in King John,” Essays in Criticism 12 (1962): 251; Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 121; David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982), 54.

16. These lines are part of the play's tribute to post-Armada jubilation, and like the Bastard's ahistoricity, they divert attention from the play's potentially subversive treatment of succession and legitimacy.

17. These possibilities omit one early chronicler's claim that John accepted his counselors' persuasion that Arthur should be blinded and castrated; see Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicum Anglicum, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: Longmans, 1875), 139. Ernst Honigmann suggested Ralph as a source for the play; see his edition, xvii-xviii and 163-67, and the refutation in Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), 80-83.

18. Ship-boy's garb and castration (see previous note) have been seen as evidence of a homosexual strain in the play; see Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984). In his edition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936), xxii-xxiv, John Dover Wilson regards these confusions as evidence of Shakespeare's having revised The Troublesome Reign too hastily.

19. Stephen Booth, The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1968), 78-79.

20. Tragedy 15 (John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester) in A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. L. B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1938), 198. The last stanza makes the endlessly repeated didactic defense of history, a defense as endlessly made of the drama. Nashe says the same (1:213), but the Mirror stanza admits, as Sidney memorably argues in The Defense, that the chroniclers undertook contradictory, perhaps irreconcilable, tasks when they sought to join morality with truthful historical accounts.

    Of Richard II's murder, Holinshed notes that “some haue said, he [Henry IV] was not priuie to that wicked offense” (516b; 3D4v) and introduces the anecdote about Henry sighing for a “faithfull freend which will deliuer me of him, whose life will be my death” with an exculpatory phrase, “One writer, which seemeth to haue great knowledge of king Richard's doongs, saith, that king Henry …” (517a; 3D5).

21. C. F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), 245.

22. Kastan, “Shakespeare's Fictions of History,” 15.

23. On the way images regularly appear in predictable “clusters,” see Edward A. Armstrong, Shakespeare's Imagination, rev. ed. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963), esp. part 2.

24. Holinshed also explicitly complains about Roman Catholic bias against John in the monastic chronicles (196a; R6v). It is worth recalling that the Chronicles, especially in the 1587 edition Shakespeare read, were a collaborative venture. While Raphael Holinshed was largely or perhaps exclusively responsible for the English section of the 1577 Chronicles, the later text has numerous additions and interpolations, many by Abraham Fleming, who had naggingly moralistic and strongly Protestant biases of his own. The recension contains internal contradictions and inconsistencies just as its sources do. The Chronicles consequently lack even the illusory coherence supposedly conferred by a single author.

25. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London: Arnold, 1961), 76.

26. Providential interpretations may, of course, be found in the chronicles Shakespeare read. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto, 1944), and, for debunking, H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970).

27. Modern versions of John's reign include Magna Carta, but that version dates only from the earlier seventeenth century, when Magna Carta was first used in a politically effective way. Similarly, the Elizabethan succession crisis inspired a good deal of new history. Roman Catholic sponsorship of the Infanta, for example, led Peele to rewrite the reign of Edward II; see Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 101-2, and my George Peele (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 96-97.

28. Compare Hayden White's definition of “historical discourse”: “a verbal artefact serving as a model or icon of nonverbal structures and processes” (“Rhetoric and History,” in Theories of History [Los Angeles: W. A. Clark Library, 1978], 6), and Wikander's (note 5) assertion that the “self-conscious theatricality” of Henry V “results in a sense [for both Elizabethan and modern audiences, it seems] of the essentially fictive quality of historical endeavor itself” (29).

29. Renaissance writers and readers were familiar with plays and prose narratives that placed known historical figures in imaginary situations; Robin Hood plays (which include various kings of England) are a good example, as is Robert Davenport's King John and Matilda or the second part of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me. Modern analogues include “what if” thrillers like Len Deighton's SS-GB (New York: Knopf, 1979), which posits a successful Nazi invasion of Great Britain.

30. F. J. Levy, “Hayward, Daniel and the Beginnings of Politic History in England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 2-3. Levy provides a wide and illuminating historiographic and political context for my few examples from Hayward. See also S. L. Goldberg, “Sir John Hayward, ‘Politic’ Historian,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 6 (1955): 233-44.

    Through the not very paradoxical workings of ambition and court favor, Dr. John Hayward the Elizabethan, who evidently propounded deposition and election in the case of Richard II-Henry IV, became Sir John Hayward the Jacobean, who supported divine-right and absolutist doctrines. For this later Hayward, his “new” ideas, and his success under James I, see Brian P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England 1603-1641; A Political Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), passim, esp. 113-15 and the biographical summary, 237-38.

31. Margaret Dowling, “Sir John Hayward's Troubles over His [sic] Life of Henry IV,” The Library, ser. 4, 11 (1930-31): 215-16; parenthetical page citations of extracts from Hayward's examination (now in the Public Record Office) refer to this article. The book's popularity might well have alarmed Elizabeth's ministers; when they examined its printer, John Wolfe, they learned “Never any boke was better sould or more desired that ever he printed, than this boke was” (quoted from documents in the Public Record Office by H. R. Plomer, “An Examination of Some Existing Copies of Hayward's ‘Life and Raigne of King Henrie IV,’” The Library: A Quarterly Review of Bibliography and Library Lore, n.s., 3 [1902]: 15). The first printing seems to have been about 1200 copies; the Stationers' Company seized and destroyed Wolfe's second printing of 1500 copies (see Plomer, 16). The revised Short-Title Catalogue documents the numerous seventeenth-century reprints of Hayward's book; these reprints used false title-pages and purported to be from the original 1599 edition, although ownership of the copy was regularly and openly transferred in the Stationers' Register.

32. See, respectively, Sir John Hayward, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII. (1599), 55-56, and Dowling, 215-16. Levy (note 30) has a different explanation of Hayward's excuse (18).

33. Hayward, Life, 61, 66-67.

34. Dowling, 214, with my bracketted expansions; “plem^t” means “Parliament” and “1 h 4” refers to the first year of Henry IV's reign. The Bishop of Carlisle's speech and its sequel appear in Hayward's Life, 101 ff.; Hayward drew upon the French politique Jean Bodin for many of his arguments (see F. J. Levy, “The Earl of Essex as Intellectual Center,” lecture, Institute of Historical Research, London, 1981).

35. For classical practice and its rhetorical and narrative effects, see, for instance, Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), chap. 1, and the same author's more detailed contribution in To Tell A Story: Narrative Theory and Practice (Los Angeles: W. A. Clark Library, 1973), 77-98; for the educational use of speeches on all sides of a question and the practice's impact on drama, see Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Ideas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978). On balanced oppositions in Hayward's style and narrative, see Goldberg (note 30), 243, and Hayward's preface to Roger Williams, The Actions of the Lowe Countries (1618), where the requirements of history-writing are listed as “Order, Poyse, and Truth” (recto of unsigned leaf following ¶3).

36. The speech Hayward put in Carlisle's mouth had a long life. Accepted as historical fact, or ostensibly presented so, it was reprinted for more than a century at crucial moments in the monarchy's history. See: A Pious and Learned Speech … [1642]; The Bishop of Carlile's [sic] Speech … 1679; The Character of Thomas Merks … Together with his speech … [?1689]; The Late Bishop of Carlisle's Speech … 1714. In a wonderful and significant confusion of historiography with fact, Donald Wing's Short-Title Catalogue, 1641-1700 and the Catalogue of the British Library credit these documents not to John Hayward but to Thomas Merk(e), or Merks, the individual who held the see of Carlisle in 1399. Only one reprint (from ?1689) even mentions that the speech “is recorded by Sir John Hayward, in the first Part of the Life … of K. Henry IV.”

37. Levy (note 30), 6 and n. 11; Hayward, preface to Williams (note 35), A1r-v. I suspect Hayward's hostility here is part of a broader attempt to professionalize the writing of history, to break down the very union of chronicle, drama, and national spirit Nashe had praised a quarter-century earlier.

38. Hayward, preface to Williams, A2r-v.

39. See Dowling, 220, and Levy, 19-20 and n. 53; in my edition of King John, I propose that Hayward's The Beginning of the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth (written by late 1612, printed with his Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth, 2nd edition, 1636) borrows language from King John.

40. Bullough (note 1), writing of Hall's chronicle, 8:352; the standard contrast with Shakespeare follows on the next page. See the passage from Francis Bacon quoted in note 1, and compare Booth (note 19) on Holinshed's tolerance for contradictory accounts: “Holinshed presents his reader with incongruous behavior and incongruous responses that can be no more comfortably perceived than they could be in actual experience. The same is true of Shakespeare” (43).

    These chroniclers' techniques have a history; there’s nothing “natural” or even especially “primitive” about them. See F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1967), chap. 5.

Draftier versions of this essay were presented to a seminar of the Shakespeare Association of America and to the Renaissance Studies Seminar, University of Reading. I am also grateful for the criticism the essay received from R. W. Dent, Elizabeth S. Donno, R. A. Foakes, Jonathan Goldberg, Victoria Hayne, and Stephen Orgel.

For books printed before 1750, place of publication is London; in quoting from them I have modernized the long s, and where a passage is predominantly in italic with roman for emphasis, I have reversed the fonts.