[In the essay below, Leech argues that while Shakespeare does honor sixteenth-century attitudes toward the value of history to some degree, the playwright also transcends—both in literary expertise and poetic insight—the chronicles he used as source material.]

Most of us to-day know that history does not repeat itself, that few things are more dangerous than responding to present circumstances as if they duplicated those that a previous generation had to cope with. Of course, some of our public men and some of our military strategists do exactly that, but the colder manner of contemplation, difficult to maintain in a position of power, makes us recognise a dynamic principle in men and society. Such a principle is incompatible with the notion of repetition. In the sixteenth century, however, men commonly saw the world as essentially static. Each man's life throughout history showed a conflict between an unchanging good and evil, and the threats to a society's health were similarly unchanging. In The Thre Bokes of Chronicles (1550) translated by Walter Lynne from the German of Johann Carion, it is argued that rulers must study history in order to see how disasters of the past may be avoided in the future, and this is buttressed by an assertion of constancy in the world's pattern. From a knowledge of past attacks on government, Lynne's readers are told, rulers:

maye learne to beware in theyr governaunce, lest any such lyke do befall: For such cases do dayly befall. Yea though the persons do sometyme chaunge in commune welthes, neverthelesse so much as is concernynge the qualytye of mattiers, the worlde is and alwayes abydeth lyke to hym selfe.

This view of the value of history underlies the historiography that Shakespeare knew, and for this reason it is common to find him giving utterance to a generalisation concerning a recurrent political condition. Thus in Part I of Henry VI on the danger that threatens when the King is a child and dissensions grow among the nobles:

’Tis much when sceptres are in children's hands;
But more when envy breeds unkind division:
There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.

(IV.i.192-4)¹

And his eight histories covering the sequence of events from the time of Richard II to the accession of Henry VII show certain events virtually repeated: Bolingbroke and the Percies rebel against Richard II; the Percies rebel against Henry IV, formerly Bolingbroke; Northumberland deserts the rebels in Part I of Henry IV, and again in Part II; Edward of York, on returning from exile in Part III of Henry VI, declares that he has returned only for his father's dukedom, not for the crown, exactly as Bolingbroke did in Richard II; and in Henry VIII we shall see that the substance of the play is a series of falls from high estate, with an implication that such a fall is part of a regular pattern of things. Of course, both Shakespeare's sources and his own observation told him that there was always an element of variation within any repetition, but the repetitive character of the action is emphasised and embodies the political lesson.

So simply didactic is historiography outside the drama in the sixteenth century, so obviously does Shakespeare depend on the sixteenth-century chroniclers in his history plays, that the assumption is often made that these plays are merely a dramatic exposition of the chroniclers' ideas, that, however much the didacticism may be enlivened by the judicious employment of stirring incident and characterisation and comic admixture, the writer's dominating purpose is to urge a political lesson on the dangers of civil dissension and the glories of national well-being. But such an assumption is hardly compatible with a recognition of Shakespeare's status as a poet. Whatever a major poet's intellectual starting-point may be—and, of course, in any age he may as a member of society adhere to a particular religion or political party—he will be characterised ultimately by his power to enter into an experience that he has directly known or deeply imagined, and by his ability to relate that experience to the sum total of the human story. In the Henry VI plays one of the characters that does most harm is Queen Margaret, the French princess who married Henry VI and became notorious for the major part she played in the disturbance of England's peace and the savagery with which she treated her adversaries. Yet, though Shakespeare shows all this, what we remember most sharply in his presentation of her is the scene in 3 Henry VI when she is finally defeated and her son Prince Edward, a prisoner of war, is stabbed to death by his captors. At this point she becomes a representative of suffering humanity, she is at one with that king-husband of hers whom she had despised for his gentleness and compassion and sense of powerlessness. What, in fact, impresses us most in Shakespeare's history plays, and what makes them much more than merely approximately accurate records of past events, is the presentation within them of struggling and suffering humanity. Of course, they also have an interest as enshrining much of the sixteenth-century attitude to history and its lessons, but that would not in itself give them high status as literature.

But, if Shakespeare's plays transcend, not merely in literary skill but in poetic insight, the chronicles that he used in his quest for material, it is still important to see his work in relation to those sources. Englishmen of the sixteenth century were profoundly interested in the history of their own nation, and this interest was ministered to by a whole series of writings and compilations. The most important of these were Edward Hall's The Union of the two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), which more directly than any other piece of sixteenth-century historiography devoted itself to demonstrating how the establishment of the Tudor monarchy in 1485 had rescued England from the long period of disturbance ensuing on the deposition of Richard II in 1399, and Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande (1577; second edition, used by Shakespeare, 1587), which was a compilation incorporating much of the earlier history-writing of the century. Underlying all such historiography is not only the growing thirst for information of all kinds that characterised the men of the Renascence but the desire to understand the present through a knowledge of the past.

History became material for narrative poetry as well. A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; seventh edition, 1587) demonstrated through its title the informing notion that rulers could learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. William Warner's Albion's England (1586-89), Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars (1595-1609), and Michael Drayton's The Barons' Wars (1603) show how, at the apex of English literary achievement, the poets went to history for their material. It cannot surprise us that in the last decade of the sixteenth century many dramatists looked in the same direction. New plays in quantity were needed for the recently built theatres and their growing audiences. In English history as presented by the prose chroniclers and the contributors to A Mirror for Magistrates there was material both immediately available and sure to command the interest of Elizabethans. In addition to Shakespeare, Marlowe and Peele and Heywood were among the writers who contributed to the history plays during the years immediately preceding 1600. After that date the play on an English historical theme became much rarer, although Shakespeare contributed Henry VIII in 1613 and Ford's Perkin Warbeck came about twenty years later than that. It appears that the popular concern with the country's recent past was at its height in the second half of the sixteenth century, and that the drama (as often, a consolidating rather than a pioneering force) ministered to that concern in its final phase.

In the First Folio of 1623, the title-page indicates a three-fold division of Shakespeare's plays into comedies, histories and tragedies, and the plays are arranged in these three sections. By ‘histories’ were meant the plays on English historical themes of comparatively recent date—not plays on Roman history or on stories taken from the chronicles of Britain but set in very early times (e.g. Macbeth, Lear, Cymbeline). The history-section of the Folio therefore comprised ten plays, arranged in chronological order of subject-matter, beginning with King John and ending with Henry VIII. In the present series of essays on Shakespeare, it has been decided to make a somewhat arbitrary division between ‘chronicles’ and ‘histories’: ‘chronicles’ is the term used for the plays on the reigns of Henry VI, Henry IV and Henry VIII; ‘histories’ is used for King John, Richard III, Richard II, Henry V. The division is not chronological, either in composition or in subject-matter: Henry VI was the earliest of Shakespeare's histories, Henry VIII the last; the historical sequence runs from King John to Henry VIII. Nevertheless, the plays we shall be concerned with in the present essay have certain features in common which distinguish them from those that will be dealt with separately as ‘histories’. Henry VI is in three Parts, Henry IV in two Parts: both of them have therefore an amplitude which makes possible the incorporation of a greater range of incident, and facilitates a longer time-sequence, than we find in the other plays. Henry VIII is a single drama, but we shall see that its construction is such as to bring it in some measure closer to Henry VI and Henry IV than to the other historical plays: it has not the integrated action of Richard III or Richard II, for example, but surveys in turn the fate of a variety of the King's subjects, approaching the manner of an historical pageant rather than a sequence of events governed by a cause-effect relation.

We can thus say that this essay is concerned with Shakespeare's ‘open-textured’ historical writing, the kind of drama in which there is not a persistent consciousness of an ineluctable march of events. It is writing which incorporates some incidents almost haphazardly, like the bogus miracle at St. Alban's in 2 Henry VI or the Gadshill robbery in 1 Henry IV; in Henry IV, moreover, this kind of writing can make use of fictitious characters along with historical ones, and these creatures of the imagination can take on a life of their own, can be felt as having an existence outside the historical frame. Shakespeare, in response to popular and perhaps royal desire (for there is a legend that it was the Queen who suggested the idea to the dramatist), could even transport his Sir John Falstaff from the reign of Henry IV to his own times and put him in a play set in Elizabethan Windsor. The fact that the present essay will include a brief comment on The Merry Wives of Windsor will underline the ‘open-textured’ character of the historical writing in this group of plays.…

Notes

1. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Tudor Shakespeare, edited by Peter Alexander. Line-references are to the Globe edition.