SOURCE: Coursen, H. R. “Theories of History in Richard II.” Upstart Crow 8 (1988): 42-53.

[In the following essay, Coursen examines the competing views of history associated with Gaunt, Richard, and Bolingbroke in Richard II.]

I do not believe that Shakespeare's history plays emerge from a theory of history, either providential or Marxist. A theory of history would tend to reduce the plays to thesis or allegory. The plays work their way out, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, on darkling plains “where ignorant armies clash by night.” I will grant that Richmond's victory at Bosworth Field does signify an allegorical ending to decades of civil butchery, but that exception occurs, in Shakespeare's career, before his profound examination of the sources of the Wars of the Roses in the Second Henriad. If Shakespeare has a theory of history, it expresses itself in two ways: a) the meaning of an event cannot be known until its ramifications have worked their way outward across the years, and b) even the most powerful politicians usually function only in response to the ramifications of their own actions. If Henry the Fifth seems to be the exception to the second premise—and he is, to some extent—we must remind ourselves that his French War represents a fulfillment of his father's advice to “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2HIV, IV. v. 213-214)¹, that the goal of the Cambridge Conspiracy was to replace Henry with Mortimer, the heir Richard II had named long before, that Henry would just as soon not fight at Agincourt, and that he prays the “God of battles” would not remember “the fault / My father made in compassing the crown!” (HV, IV. i. 290-291). The victory at Agincourt may represent an heroic expiation for the death of Richard. The marriage of Henry and Katherine may seem almost a “comic ending” to this historical sequence. But the Wars of the Roses wait in the wings, as the final Chorus to Henry V warns.

One could argue that Cranmer's blessing of the infant Elizabeth at the end of Henry VIII (V. vi. 15-63) represents the final step in the teleological thrust of Shakespeare's vision of history. Cranmer's prophecy hearkens back to that delivered to Elizabeth's grandfather, then the young Richmond, by Henry VI (3HVI, IV. vi. 68-76). Tempting as that thesis may be in its pressure towards a restoration of sacramental monarchy in England, it seems to me to make the history plays too cohesive, too much the function of a single creative act. And I speak as one often accused of seeing the Second Henriad just that way. Shakespeare had to function out of his own history, and it may be that Will Kemp's departure from the company in 1599 meant that Falstaff could not “die of a sweat” in France (2HIV, Epilogue. 28).

Whatever Shakespeare's theory of history may or may not have been, his characters do have theories of history. Three primary theories of history exist in Richard II, and several secondary viewpoints emerge in response to these primary theses. It could be argued that all theories of history in the play are reactive, in that they respond to actions Richard has already taken—his commissioned murder of Gloucester, for which no motive is given, although motives abound in the sources, and his leasing out of royal lands—or that Richard takes within the dramatic context. Competing theories of history in Richard II, regardless of their origin, create the conflicts that make the play dramatic, in other words, that make it a play.

The three primary theories are those of Gaunt, the sacramentalist, Richard, the master of ceremonies, and Bolingbroke, the pragmatist—pragmatism being a theory that denies the value of theories, as in a way, Richard II does, qua play.

Gaunt's England is a timeless zone which constantly returns the energy of the grace of God and within which benevolent context the kingdom lives. It is an “other Eden, demi-paradise” (II. i. 42), a generator of chivalric combat and of crusades to “the sepulcher in stubborn Jewry / Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son” (II. i. 55-56). England, for Gaunt, is itself a sacramental entity, a visible manifestation of the invisible power and grace of God. But the land has been debased from inestimable quality to commercial quantity, “is now leas'd out … Like to a tenement or pelting farm,” and Gaunt dies “pronouncing it” (II. i. 59-60).²

Richard has denied the sacramental continuum to himself and his royal plurality. The exchange of positive energy between England and God has been cut off by Richard's spilling of Gloucester's “sacred blood” (I. ii. 12 & 17) and by his reducing “this blessed plot” (II. i. 50) to “rotten parchment bonds” (II. i. 64). Ritual—or God-contacting activity—cannot occur in Richard's kingdom. That does not mean, as I have been accused of arguing, that a mass is necessarily inefficacious because conducted by a corrupt priest. It does mean that “God's substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight” (I. ii. 37-38) has committed sacrilegious acts which prevent him from being a channel through which God's positive energy can flow into England. If Gaunt's argument to the Duchess of Gloucester in I. ii. is correct, only God can resolve the issue of England's alienation from His benevolence. For man to attempt to do so will compound the problem. Gaunt's positive thesis is never allowed to materialize. His negative adumbration does, it seems, come true.

Richard can only preside over ceremonies drained of their significance, like the aborted trial-by-combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray. That combat does not occur, of course, but even if it had, it would not have rendered the judgment of god. God's justice, if it exists at all, indicts Richard, who would pretend to preside over an adjudication of his own crime. Richard can only cancel the trial with makeshift and transparent politics:

And for we think the eagle-winged pride
Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts,
With rival-hating envy, set on you
To wake our peace, which in our country's cradle
Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep;
Which, so rous'd up with boist'rous untun'd drums,
With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray,
And grating shock of wrathful iron arms,
Might from our quiet confines fright fair peace
And make us wade even in our kindred's blood. …

(I. iii. 129-139)

Here, peace frightens peace.³ Richard is like Neville Chamberlain, waving a “rotten parchment bond” with Hitler's signature upon it, and speaking of “peace in our time”—in 1938. Richard is correct at some unconscious level of his rhetoric. His hastily crafted compromise will fright fair peace from England for generations to come. But, then, Richard is already compromised.

Later, drawing on his self-selected role of martyr, Richard will dictate a devastating anti-ceremony calculated to show Bolingbroke and England that the all-important intangibilities of kingship are now as meaningless as images in a mirror, indeed, lie “crack'd in an hundred shivers” (IV. i. 290). “God save King Henry, unking'd Richard says” (IV. i. 221). Richard forces a reluctant Bolingbroke into a mime that captures the latter's rise to power: “Here, cousin, seize the crown” (IV. i. 182), and tells everyone just what such a seizure is worth: “God pardon all oaths that are broke to me! / God keep all oaths unbroke are made to thee!” (IV. i. 215-216). But Richard's was the antecedent disruption of continuity—in his arrogant confiscation of Bolingbroke's inheritance—and Richard must find himself “a traitor with the rest” (IV. i. 249). Later, Pistol will reiterate the loss of intrinsic value in the kingdom in a line that also glances at the emptiness of sacrament: “For oaths are straws, and men's faith are wafer cakes” (HV, II. iii. 50).

While it can be argued that both Richard II and Henry V preside over kingdoms devoid of the most significant intangibles, that each admits as much, and that both represent a version of “the cult of personality,” Henry V masters the hollow crown he inherits. He knows how to marshall power and his own superb manipulative and rhetorical skills into his ceremonies, but not how to restore those ceremonies to ritual significance. His attribution of his successes to God is merely another evidence of his political skill. Henry obviously knows how to enlist public support for his war of aggression. George Jacobson, a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam during the 1968 Tet offensive draws this conclusion in a recent Newsweek interview: “the moment you learn your country is not 100٪ behind you, you get the hell out—no matter what the losses may be.”⁴

I don't hold with current revisionist opinion that the American public was somehow responsible for the Tet offensive. It seems to me that it was General Giap's idea and that the offensive emerged from a nation 100٪ behind the concept of its own liberation. Richard II, on the other hand, is in no position to conduct a foreign war:

The commons hath he pill'd with grievous taxes,
And quite lost their hearts; the nobles hath he fin'd
For ancient quarrels, and quite lost their hearts.

(II. i. 246-248)

If he does wish to “deck our soldiers for these Irish wars” (I. iv. 62), he must, anticipating Lyndon Johnson, order the self-destructive seizure of the Lancastrian estates.

While Bolingbroke becomes Richard's victim as the latter's theatrics describe an empty crown, Bolingbroke emerges the consummate opportunist. An ambitious young man, scion of a virtual principality within the kingdom, Bolingbroke poses first as justicer, usurping the king's abandoned role, listening to the blood of Gloucester crying to him like “sacrificing Abel's” (I. i. 104). Bolingbroke knows what he is doing, even if his immediate goal is to create fissures of unrest within which he can maneuver. He has discussed all of this with his father, as we learn at the beginning of the play. We learn in the play's second scene that Gaunt has command of the facts the first scene obscured: Richard, “God's substitute, … Hath caus'd [Gloucester's] death” (I. ii. 37-39). Bolingbroke himself becomes the victim of injustice, of course, but engages in legalisms upon his return to England, elevating himself within a world where other names are reduced or erased: “As I was banish'd, I was banish'd Hereford. / But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (II. iii. 113-114). He quickly takes retribution for the erasure he has suffered, telling Bushy and Green that they have

From my own windows torn my household coat,
Ras'd out my imprese, leaving me no sign,
Save men's opinions and my living blood,
To show the world I am a gentleman. …

(III. i. 24-27)

Reassuming the role of justicer, this time for wrongs done to him, he orders his enemies “dispatch'd” (III. i. 35) by his hatchetman, Northumberland.

Bolingbroke is, of course, reacting—against Gloucester's unpunished murderers and to the seizure of his inheritance. His reactions, however, seem to have a personal goal which his pose of righteous indignation does not obscure. He moves blithely ahead, embracing his motives as they present themselves, defining his goals only when they are virtually within his grasp, responding to the cues that even Richard provides:

Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?
Yes, my good lord.

(III. iii. 208-209)

York admonishes him: “Take not, good cousin, further than you should / Lest you mistake the heavens are over our heads” (III. iii. 16-17). In responding, Bolingbroke does not claim exactly to be an agent of God's will. He breaks off before his need for instant intelligence: “I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself / Against their will. But who comes here” (III. iii. 18-19)?

Again, Bolingbroke knows what he is doing. If power no longer derives from above, it must be developed from a system of contracts. We observe Bolingbroke employing his as-yet-unattained wealth almost like a character in Vanity Fair, engaging in agreements that build a base that belies his disclaimers, as when Ross and Willoughby offer their services to him:

Evermore thanks, the exchequer of the poor,
Which, till my infant fortune comes to years,
Stands for my bounty.

(II. iii. 65-67)

The feudal contract was hardly a new concept in the early 15th Century, but represents the reinvention of the only model available to Bolingbroke. Geographical considerations alone would argue that the linkage of Lancaster and Northumberland represents more than merely a feudal contract.

A conservative defender of the ancient right of inheritance, Bolingbroke finds himself leading a revolution based upon the principles of a prior age. But he is falling into the historical trap of which York warned Richard:

Take Hereford's rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not tomorrow then ensue today.

(II. i. 195-197)

Soon, as Henry IV, Bolingbroke is compromised by Mortimer's superior claim, and dismisses his already disgruntled supporters with caustic complaints about majesty's inability to “endure / The moody frontier of a servant brow” (1 HIV, I. iii. 18-19). Bolingbroke's ability to “make history” is severely limited. He repeats Richard's mistake by undermining the already shaky premises of his kingship. Even after having Gloucester killed, Richard was still king “by fair sequence and succession,” as York tells him (II. i. 199). Even after having Richard killed, Bolingbroke remains king de facto. He had posed originally as a redresser of grievances, but that course forced him to enormities—usurpation and regicide—which made power the sole premise of kingship and elicited a seemingly endless sequence of rebellions. His attempt to behave as an absolute monarch, in neglect of many contracts and covenants—including the increasingly specific and troublesome Oath of Doncaster (cf. I HIV, V. i. 41-46)—mirrors Richard's desperate summoning of the divine and legal principles he has himself violated. But Bolingbroke is a better politician than was Richard. “This new world,” as Fitzwater calls it (IV. i. 79), is both made by and made for Bolingbroke. Much as he would enjoy the sanctions and continuities that Richard inherited and destroyed, Bolingbroke learns that his crown is the focal point of a “common 'larum bell” (2 HIV, III. i. 17) and that all he can do is to confront “necessities” (2 HIV, III. i. 93) in the sleepless middle of his nights.

The other characters in Richard II either resist the advent of “this new world” or go with its flow, as does the opportunistic Northumberland. In a world in which time is no more than money, Northumberland, a modern “communicator,” can claim, “only to be brief / Left I his title cut” (III. iii. 10-11). York replies, “The time hath been, / Would you have been so brief with him, he would / Have been so brief with you to shorten you, / For taking so the head, your whole head's length” (III. iii. 11-14). But that time is no more. It is Bolingbroke who is taking heads. The play's two duchesses argue on the familial grounds that both Gaunt, in the cases of both brother and son, and York, in the case of his son, reject. Bolingbroke cannily employs the argument by reminding York of his son and telling York what Gaunt would have done for Aumerle had he been wronged as Bolingbroke has been (II. iii. 125-128). Aumerle and his party take the sacrament to seal their conspiracy to kill the king at Oxenford. The most sacred of rituals sanctifies the most heinous of crimes. But the murder would occur in the name of a rightful claimant to the throne, as would the assassination of Henry V by Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey at Southampton.

York can only catalogue his patience—it is too late for anything but such rationalizations—as he objects to Richard's act of confiscation. York argues that time is the context which gives meaning to human activity. We are in a different world than that imaged by Gaunt, a world like that described by Michael in Book XII of Paradise Lost. York's, however, is still a world in which the microcosm can disturb the macrocosm. To interfere with one sequence—that of lawful inheritance—is to disrupt the rhythm of time itself. If Gaunt argued England's cooperation with positive supernatural powers, York argues an equally valid, if diminished, principle. Time is a manifestation of a nature prior to and superior to any action that even a king may take. York espouses a theory which, belatedly, argues that man's law is a codification of natural law. York is ignored, of course, and, later, in a frantic burst of loyalty towards Bolingbroke—perhaps a compensation for York's failure to save Richard—insists on the execution of his own son.

Hotspur, who is “Percy” in Richard II, has no theory of history. Nor does he develop one. He accedes to Bolingbroke's neo-feudalism, but soon rebels, to become an agent of disorder within an already unsettled commonwealth. His personal code of honor is narrow and selfish. A great warrior, he cannot lead other men, as we may be reminded when we hear Henry V before Agincourt: “if it be a sin to covet honor, / I am the most offending soul alive” (HV, IV. iii. 28-29). Henry dusts off the old concept, holds it aloft for admiration, then generously bestows it upon his “band of brothers” (HV, IV. iii. 60). Hotspur is a magnificent anachronism, a Black Prince living a century too late. He can sneer at Prince Hal's brand of chivalry:

His answer was, he would unto the stews,
And from the common'st creature pluck a glove,
And wear it as a favor, and with that
He would unhorse the lustiest challenger.

(V. iii. 15-18)

But Hotspur describes Prince Hal's subsequent career and his own demise. The combat at Oxford is cancelled because of the threat of regicide. Politics override the chivalric arts and “The better part of valor is discretion,” as Falstaff says (I HIV, V. iv. 119-120). If Hotspur learns the lesson, the revelation lies in phrasing just beyond the sentence Hal completes for him. A theory of history other than anarchism might not have saved him. But without one he is doomed. “If we live, we live to tread on kings” (I HIV, V. ii. 85) is a call to chaos, not to arms.

Mowbray is a special case. He believes that the confession he made to Gaunt “'ere [Mowbray] last receiv'd the sacrament” (I. i. 139) has cleared him of an intended crime. In the excellent BBC-TV version of the play, John Gielgud's Gaunt nodded as Richard Owen's stalwart Mowbray turned to him. The banished Mowbray lives out England's crusading past ironically, an existential sliver of Gaunt's embracing vision of what all of England once was:

Many a time hath banish'd Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens;
And, toil'd with works of war, retir'd himself
To Italy, and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colors he had fought so long.

(IV. i. 92-100)

Carlisle describes a solitary warrior whose entire career is played out during a few brief and brutal months of English history. The point, of course, is that, while Hotspur should have lived in a former age, Mowbray does live in a different time, in that zone described by Gaunt which itself has suffered banishment from England. England's time is dictated by a politics no longer marching under “the ensign of the Christian cross.”

Bolingbroke might wish to revert to the world his father, Gaunt, described, and go

As far as to the sepulcher of Christ—
Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engag'd to fight.

(I HIV, I. i. 19-21)

Even as he speaks, however, he knows that “Therefore we meet not now” (I. i. 30) and that he “must neglect / Our holy purpose to Jerusalem” (I. i. 100-101). Richard lies “breathless” (V. vi. 31), and while Henry does not repeat his need for personal expiation, “frighted peace” in England has found no “time … to pant” in the year since Richard's death. Bolingbroke's speech is merely political, a pious facade thrown up in front of the pressure he is beginning to feel from Mortimer and the rival faction. Bolingbroke's former rival, Mowbray, has already achieved—within another concept of time and of history—the goal that, for Bolingbroke, becomes increasingly unattainable. Even when all the logistics and deputations necessary to his project are ready, Bolingbroke has fallen into his final illness, the want of more than “a little personal strength” (2 HIV, IV. iv. 7). His strength has drained out into “this debate that bleedeth at our door” (IV. iv. 2). The purpose of Bolingbroke's regime has been to subdue the civil strife that his accession engendered and to keep the kingship within the Lancastrian grip. Bolingbroke comes to recognize as much. Whatever may be said of him, he does the job.

Carlisle is a prophet “Stirr'd up by God” (IV. i. 134) who shares the vision of that “prophet new inspir'd,” Gaunt (II. i. 31). But Carlisle does not look back to “This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings” (II. i. 51). Carlisle looks ahead:

The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act;
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels. …

(IV. i. 138-140)

The magnificent career of Mowbray, which Carlisle has just described, plays ironically against the crucifixion of a nation he now predicts:

Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.

(IV. i. 141-148)

This prophecy reaches deeper than do Richard's self-serving comparisons of himself with Christ. Carlisle incorporates both the Wars of the Roses which Shakespeare has already depicted and the warnings of the New Testament: “For if a kingdome be devided against it self, that kingdome can not stand. / Or if a house be devided against it self, that house can not continue” (Mark: III. 24-25. Geneva Version). If Gaunt's vision of history is sacramental and relatively static, Carlisle's is biblical and negatively dynamic. Unlike the fall of Adam and Eve, which opens into the bloodbath of human history but ultimately to “New Heav'ns, new Earth, Ages of endless date / Founded in righteousness and peace and love, / To bring forth fruits Joy and eternal Bliss” (Paradise Lost: XII. 548-550), the fall Carlisle predicts is not fortunate. That is, of course, unless we accept Cranmer's blessing of Elizabeth as the positive culmination of the ways of history as the Archangel's promises to Adam are the ultimate justification of “the ways of God.”

In the BBC-TV production, as Clifford Rose's Carlisle was led off under arrest, the camera dollied back to include Charles Gray's York, looking at Carlisle in dumbfounded admiration. It was a moment that linked two characters who have no direct contact in the play, but who have objected to crucial actions and have predicted their results.

Although he can hardly be called a prophet, Richard himself demonstrates an accurate grasp of coming events in his admonishment of Northumberland:

The time shall not be many hours of age
More than it is, ere foul sin gathering head
Shall break into corruption. Thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half,
It is too little, helping him to all;
He shalt think that thou, which knowest the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne'er so little urg'd, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.
The love of wicked men converts to fear,
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.

(V. i. 57-68)

Having fomented a social jungle as vicious in its way as that explored in King Lear, Richard provides a precis of that later play and, more immediately, an account of what is about to happen in England. Perhaps one of the corollaries of Shakespeare's sense of history—as it works out in Richard II—is that only the powerless, like the workers in the Queen's garden, can define clearly the results of any action that power dictates. The powerful are blind to consequences. The powerless must become Cassandras.

For a time it seems that Bolingbroke can conduct kingship as farce, as in the frantic gage-gathering scene (IV. i.) which he closes with stern control, and in the “Beggar and the King” (V. iii. 80) sequence in which he pardons Aumerle. But the problem of his “living fear” (V. iv. 2) remains. His wordless suggestion that Exton kill Richard is an acquiescence to his inability to control the forces that are pressing him into a position more vulnerable than was Richard's at the outset.

Bolingbroke's calculated magnanimity in pardoning Carlisle is dashed by Exton's entrance with Richard's corpse. Bolingbroke can make a “Cain” (V. vi. 43) of Exton, as he would have done to the murderers of Abel (I. i. 105), but the new King knows that the blood is on his hands and that it is the blood of a king. The matter of Gloucester's death, now irrelevant, drifts away into its mystery. Bolingbroke will project a crusade that picks up increasingly political colorations as it is reiterated. He will not lead his crusade, of course, but does accept his destiny with final piety. Warwick informs Henry that the room in which he fainted is “call'd Jerusalem” (2 HIV, IV. v. 233). “Laud be to God!” Henry responds,

                    Even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years
I should not die but in Jerusalem,
Which vainly I suppos'd the Holy Land.
But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie.
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.

(2 HIV, IV. v. 235-240)

However destructive the history that Henry has unleashed by stepping into the vacuum that Richard created, Henry himself seems to surrender willingly at the last to the diminished rhythms of the world he has shaped.

Finally, we notice how history changes as it emerges from the profound matrix of Richard II and reflects the ad hoc quality of “this new world.” Young Mowbray and Westmoreland debate at Gaultree Forest, each crafting a different ending to the untold story of the combat between Bolingbroke and the elder Mowbray (2 HIV, IV. i. 117-139). The debate predicts that Gaultree Forest will also end short of combat, as Mowbray and his compatriots find themselves short of heads. While Gaunt's grandson, Prince John, can claim of his Realpolitik that “God, and not we, hath safely fought today” (2 HIV, IV. ii. 121) his manipulation has been transparent. When his brother, Henry V, unmasks the Cambridge conspiracy and elicits from Scroop an admission that “Our purposes God justly hath discover'd” (II. ii. 151), Henry can make a far more credible treason “lurking in our way / To hinder our beginnings” (II. ii. 184-186). That claim is undermined, however, by the rationale for what Henry is beginning. Bolingbroke's apparent piety in announcing a crusade “To wash this blood from off my guilty hand” (V. vi. 49) at the end of Richard II becomes the purely political “purpose now / To lead out many to the Holy Land, / Lest rest and lying still might make them look / Too near unto my state” (2 HIV, IV. v. 209-212) which his son has translated into an invasion of France. Henry V is shrewd enough to make the events he has generated seem like the will of God, once they have gone his way. But he is a poor prognosticator. He believes that he and Katherine will “compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard” (HV, V. ii. 208-210). But if, as he says, his father “was thinking of civil wars when he got me” (V. ii. 226-227), we must wonder what Henry V was thinking of when he got Henry VI.

In “this new world,” words and even events themselves change in the face of “necessity.” Bolingbroke's slight revision of Richard II's indictment of Northumberland erases ambition and emphasizes kinship. What Richard said was, “Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal / The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne …” (V. i. 55-56). What Bolingbroke, later, has Richard say is “‘Northumberland, thou ladder by the which / My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne …’” (2 HIV, III. i. 70-71). And Pistol, pondering his cudgelling by Fluellen, says, “patches will I get unto these cudgel'd scars, / And swear I got them in the Gallia wars” (HV, V. i. 86-87). In a world which can rewrite history, Pistol writes his own. He will quote Henry V and say, “‘These wounds I had on Crispin's day!’” (HV, IV. iii. 48).

Notes

1. Quotations accord with The Complete Works of Shakespeare, eds. Hardin Craig and David Bevington, Third Edition (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980).

2. For an extension of this argument, see my The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), particularly Chapter 1.

3. Cf. Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 151-152.

4. Newsweek (15 April, 1985), 68.