[In the essay below, Ricks examines the relationship between politics and history in Tudor—and in particular, Shakespearean—historiography, maintaining that Shakespeare's historiography was characteristic of his age in its didacticism.]

I. SHAKESPEARE AS A HISTORIAN

There has been some question as to whether Shakespeare wrote “history” plays or “political” plays. The truth is, of course, that neither adjective is by itself adequate. Social history, economic history, intellectual history, all are modern concepts; for the Elizabethans, history was political history. Louis B. Wright has shown, moreover, that in spite of Sidney's argumentative preference for poetry, for the Elizabethans “the reading of history was an exercise second only to a study of Holy Writ in its power to induce good morality and shape the individual into a worthy member of society.”¹ It is not necessary here to treat in detail the multiform varieties of Renaissance historical writing and their relevance to Shakespeare and the history play. F. E. Schelling long ago recognized that “the greatest vogue of the epic historical verse precisely coincides with the period of the popularity of the Chronicle Play,” and numerous recent studies have expanded upon the theme.² A few preliminary assumptions should be established, however.

First, most modern distinctions between literature and history have no bearing upon the study of Shakespeare's histories. When Shakespeare chose to write history plays, plays in which political virtue is the controlling standard of reference, and constructed them as political lessons applicable to his own time, he was violating no relevant conception of the function of literature. Rather, he was writing in a larger literary tradition encompassing almost all types of artful rhetoric, purely historical writing included. W. K. Ferguson has pointed out that the Italian humanists considered history “a form of literature, highly regarded by the ancients and presenting attractive opportunities for the exercise of style.”³ English humanistic history was not, of course, an exact mirror of the Italian. When it first began to take distinctive shape in the 1530's and 1540's, it was due, according to W. R. Trimble, “not to the influence of Renaissance historians on the Continent, but rather to the forces of religious change, political and military events, and a growing nationalism, which were unified by the strong leadership and exalted conceptions of the monarchy.”⁴ Nevertheless, Tudor historiography did learn from the Continent a vigorous secular didacticism and a sense of literary mission. Its purpose was to glorify England in general and the Tudor government in particular; to trace the errors of the past that they might not be repeated; to rededicate magistrates to their duty and subjects to their loyalty; and to define for Englishmen the ethical responsibilities of citizenship necessary in an ordered society. Moreover, Tudor historiography avoided the heresy of Machiavellian pragmatism by remaining firmly grounded in the medieval Christian philosophy of history; in addition to taking a secular stance, it continued to illustrate the operation of divine providence in the affairs, and especially the political affairs, of men. History, it was felt, provided flashes of insight into that divine plan which, in spite of a vastness and complexity which put it out of the reach of man's tainted understanding, nevertheless functioned in rationally guiding his destinies to a purposeful end.

Thus the works of the Tudor historians were very similar in essential intention to the works of the poets and dramatists who used them as sources. No very significant distinctions can even be made on the grounds of utile versus dulce. Artful rhetoric was an accepted standard for prose histories, and when Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and Thomas Heywood wrote history, when the contributors to the Mirrour for Magistrates and William Warner culled the past for instructive narratives, they told their stories in verse. And, as the present argument maintains, Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were working in the historical mode—as the Renaissance saw it—when they recreated upon the stage events from the past, when they gave life and speech and movement to the men and women who had participated in those events. As Ribner puts it, “in the history play the dramatic and historical intentions are inseparable. The dramatist's first objective is to entertain a group of people in a theater. When he goes to history for his subject matter, however, he assumes the functions of the historian as well.”⁵ It is, therefore, irrelevant and even misleading to require that Shakespeare's histories be evaluated in terms of some narrowly defined standard of “pure literature.” Literature they are, and of a very special kind—poetic drama—but they are also a part of the tradition which included the works of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, of Lord Berners, John Bale, John Stow, Richard Grafton, John Foxe, and Sir Walter Raleigh, as well as two other “great products of the high age of Elizabeth with a strong political intention: Spenser's Faery Queen and Sidney's Arcadia.”⁶

As has already been implied, when the dramatist accepted the role of historian he accepted with it the historian's responsibilities as teacher. Thus another issue enters in, that of didacticism in Shakespeare. The venerable tradition that Shakespeare is “the poet of all times” has too often included the corollary that he was the poet of no one time, and it has long been fashionable to exonerate him of the typical “faults” of his age either by insisting he rose above them, or, following the lead of Dr. Johnson, by explaining them as regrettable concessions to a simple and even barbaric audience. And no characteristic of the Elizabethan age has been subject to more suspicion than its taste for didactic literature. Early in this century H. H. Furness exclaimed, “I cannot reconcile myself to the opinion that Shakespeare ever made use of his dramatic art for the purpose of instructing, or as a means of enforcing his own views.” Twenty years ago John Palmer argued that Shakespeare created no truly “political characters,” that the expectations of his audience required him to write of the politically powerful in spite of his own interests. Even more recently, Clifford Leech insisted the assumption that Shakespeare's histories are a dramatic expression of the “simply didactic” sixteenth-century chronicles “is hardly compatible with a recognition of Shakespeare's status as a poet.”⁷

But Shakespearean didacticism—or Elizabethan, for that matter—is not something that needs to be explained away. The Golden Age of sixteenth-century literature owes much of its greatness to the confidence with which the writer could speak out, to his assurance that his purpose was the non-personal communication of the universal, the eternal, of the assumed. There were no Elizabethan poems exploring the nature of poetry (as there were to be in the nineteenth century); there were relatively few critical treatises, and with the exception of the Puritan attack, no significant critical polemic. The purpose of the literary artist was to dress up Truth in the “garment of style,” to give her “a local habitation and a name.” As Rosamond Tuve has said, “the Elizabethan thought of the poet's function as close to that of any other thinker—philosophers, preachers, and orators included. He did see the world as a world in which the ideas of human beings were paramount realities—and images convey a man's ideas movingly to others.”⁸

Thus there is no more point in denying Shakespeare's didactic stance than in denying his use of drama as a vehicle for political and historical materials. Only our own age, with its hypersensitive objectivity possibly born of a thoroughgoing scepticism, needs be embarrassed by an outspoken assertion of Truth. The Elizabethan, to the extent he thought about the matter at all, felt his rational powers were a divine gift intended to help him “repair the ruins of our first parents,” and he looked to literature as one of the teachers of rationality and good conduct.⁹

One important qualification must be made, however. Shakespeare was not “simply didactic.” His history plays constitute no more shallow dramatic version of the 1574 homily Against Disobedience and wilful Rebellion than the Faery Queen is just a book whose end is “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” No other artist has been more aware of the complexities of man's ethical predicaments, and none has more effectively molded his genre into an expression of those complexities. Recently Alfred Harbage correctly, if perhaps too apologetically, explained how Shakespeare “reckons with the craving for justice in moral mankind”: “in some of his plays evil misses its mark and is disarmed: the result is happiness. In others the issue is undetermined: such plays present single acts in the larger drama of history which is always unfolding and in which mingled good and evil bring in their train mingled joy and sorrow. There is justice in all these plays in the largest sense, a satisfying concatenation: unhappiness is never the product of good, and happiness never the product of evil.”¹⁰ Harbage, however, is oversimplifying; he is assigning to plot alone the didactic function. (Only one result is his reading of the “justice” of the histories as something lying outside the plays.) The Shakespearean play additionally carries a very real, if seldom obvious, complex of ethical meanings in the juxtaposition of its scenes and characters, in the strategic placement of its rhetorical amplifications, in the emotional coloring of its image patterns, even (for the scholar) in what was adopted and what omitted from its sources, and above all in the general impression made by its structure. Shakespeare's judgments upon his material are everywhere implicit, and his plays cannot be interpreted as “a new organ of thought” unless it is first granted that the kind of thinking they embody is essentially moralistic.

Two additional matters need to be discussed concerning Shakespeare as a historian: first, the significance to his own age of his political “message,” and second, the extent, as far as it can be estimated, of his historical knowledge.

The details of Shakespeare's political thought will be discussed in the next section of this chapter. For now it is sufficient to say that in broad outline his central political theme was simply this: social stability, a manifestation of the universal order which was reflected in the hierarchy of rank and degree and crowned by God's lieutenant on earth, the anointed monarch, had to be strictly maintained if the nation was to avoid total anarchy. The fact that Shakespeare's was only one of the many voices vigorously defending the status quo and portraying the horrors of internal dissension attests to the psychological undercurrents of the time. As Reese suggests, “the Elizabethans never really knew security,” and “only a century so persistently troubled by fears of rebellion and a disputed succession would have needed to evolve such a rigid theory of obedience and to proclaim it so frequently.”¹¹

The threats to order and stability seemed to come in many forms. Thanks in part at least to Henry VIII's grandiose notions of his own destiny, there was at various times during the sixteenth century the possibility of French or Spanish invasion, or worse yet, of mass attack by a much-feared though never formed league of Catholic powers. Under Elizabeth, England was but on the threshold of becoming a European power, and although the victory of 1588 assured Englishmen that their navy, the radically new war machine designed by Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, was an effective shield (and one probably more dependable than Elizabeth's international coquetries), the intensity of the English exuberance following the defeat of the Armada is perhaps symptomatic of the nation's fearful anticipation of invasion and of the deep-seated doubts it had had about its ability to defend itself.¹²

Foreign aggression, however, in spite of the emotion with which its possibility was treated in much of the literature, was for most Elizabethans the lesser danger of the time. A country united had some hope of withstanding external pressures, but the internal dynamics of a nation in sweeping transition produced constant possibilities for intense cleavages at home. The Tudor dynasty was born of a quarter century of civil war, and not until well into the sixteenth century could Englishmen feel secure that Bosworth had been the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. There were, however, other battles: between 1486 and 1601 the Crown had to put down a full dozen armed rebellions, three of them (counting the Irish) in Elizabeth's reign. J. K. Lowers has pointed out that the first uprising Elizabeth faced, the one in the North in 1596, was portrayed in the ballads, tracts, and pamphlets throughout the reign as a “mirror” imaging the immorality, destructiveness, and inevitable failure of armed revolt.¹³

To the tenor of the age was added, moreover, multiple factions seeming to threaten imminent organized resistance. The question of the succession, left unsettled by Elizabeth almost up to her death, made any pretender, legitimate or not, a potential rallying point for dissidents, as evidenced by the two political enigmas of Elizabeth's later years, Mary Queen of Scots and Essex. Agrarian discontent, an ominous rumble throughout the century, seemed poised to follow any lead which promised its remedy. Finally, the deep gulf between the religious extremes appeared to presage the most bitter conflict. The Elizabethans probably overestimated the seriousness of the Roman Catholic threat; the differences between Hapsburg and Valois were too far-reaching for mere religion to settle, and the Jesuits smuggled into the country were neither as multitudinous nor as militant as portrayed. But Englishmen had, under Mary, smelled the smoke from Smithfield, and the stringency of the recusancy acts and the summary execution of Campion and his fellows, as well as the urgency of the current anti-papist propaganda, are indicative of the underlying fear of a Catholic revival. Nor were the Puritans considered harmless; moderate Elizabethans thought they recognized in the Puritanism of their own day potentialities for insurrection that were not to be realized for another half century. As Brents Stirling points out, in the polemical literature “the Puritan movement, a moderate one which resulted in a ‘middle class’ revolution, was characterized persistently and quite sensationally as a program of mass rebellion dedicated to leveling of social gradation and even to ‘Anabaptistical’ communism.”¹⁴ The emotional intensity generated by religious conflict in the Elizabethan age cannot be overestimated. In the words of Christopher Morris, “bitterness was all the more inevitable because sixteenth-century conflicts were conflicts about the eternal verities. The Reformation … ensured that for well over a century our political parties were not mere factions and that their struggles were not solely for place and power and interest but for rival conceptions of human character and purpose.”¹⁵

Hence Shakespeare's history plays should be read against the background of an age which saw itself as living from crisis to crisis. Hindsight suggests the sixteenth-century Englishman exaggerated the tensions of his time. The moderation of Elizabeth's settlement provided a broad religious path which could be easily followed by all but the most intense; her ingenuity, flexibility, and even at times compassion served to quiet most of the economic and social unrest; and her Machiavellian diplomacy kept the Continental powers constantly off balance. But the citizen of the day could not of course see the larger pattern. For him the constant change, and worse yet, what seemed to be the ever-present threat of unpredictable upheavals in the immediate future, boded ill for life and property. Karl Brunner probably overstated his case in suggesting that the early histories speak in the voice of “the conservative elements in the population—the old landowners, the well-to-do citizens—just the class from which Shakespeare came.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, the early plays do proclaim the message which that class wanted to hear: rebellion against the throne is rebellion against God and will be punished in Heaven as well as on earth; the collective judgment of the establishment, however inadequate and fallible, is far preferable to the ephemeral whims of the rebellious and the ambitious; and, in the words of the often quoted speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida,

Take but degree away, untune that string;
And hark what discord follows.

(I.iii.109-110)¹⁷

That Shakespeare, even as early as the Henry VI plays, was growing into a more philosophic conception of the doctrine of order than the one in the minds of his average contemporaries does not in the least dilute the practical relevance to his audience of his political theme. The product of his age, he was voicing what at the time seemed to be some of the most vital of the verities; and in so doing he was fulfilling the responsibilities assigned to the literary artist.

One final point relevant to Shakespeare as a historian needs to be made, and that briefly. Contrary to the old tradition, long since disproved, that Shakespeare was the unlearned “poet of nature,” it is quite evident he knew enough about history to write history plays as the Elizabethans conceived them. This last qualification is of course important. As has already been suggested, in the sixteenth century historiography was not bound by the standards of objectivity and accuracy implicit in the modern term “social science.” The historian was not expected to record facts (although that seems to have been the function of the antiquaries such as John Leland) or even to interpret them objectively; rather, he was supposed to construct from historical data a subjective and moralistic argument. Thus when Shakespeare violates strict chronology, mingles several historical events, misplaces historical characters by several decades, or seems to completely misinterpret historical causes, he in most cases can be charged with only the bias which was expected of him, not with ignorance.¹⁸ Recently V. K. Whitaker insisted that when writing the early histories, “Shakespeare was, to put it bluntly, profoundly ignorant of English history but a very good dramatist.”¹⁹ However, Whitaker's unquestionably sound thesis—that over the years Shakespeare's learning and intellect matured concurrently with his artistry—commits him not only to proving how much Shakespeare learned, but also to suggesting how little he knew to begin with; and the dangers inherent in such a method are obvious. Shakespeare of course knew more in 1605 than he had known in 1590, but that is not to say he was totally uninformed when he wrote his early plays. On the contrary, he had apparently thoroughly digested, when he wrote the Henry VI plays, Hall's The Union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and York, and was well acquainted with Holinshed's Chronicles as well. Moreover, the concern with political themes in Titus Andronicus and Comedy of Errors suggests he had meditated deeply upon matters of history and politics even before he started writing plays. Yet even such a firm defender of Shakespeare's knowledge as Tillyard, who argues that “Shakespeare … had much the same general equipment of learning as his more highly-educated contemporaries, Sidney and Spencer for instance,” feels constrained to add, “though it may have been less systematic, less detailed, and less derived from books.”²⁰ But recent investigations into Shakespeare's sources have collectively uncovered evidence of probably vast reading on his part, and although many of the claimed “analogues” may be but coincidental echoes, it has become increasingly clear that Shakespeare was stimulated in his work by wide reading, and that he “read any relevant book on which he could lay his hands.”²¹ His erudition was considerably greater than that of the average well-informed middle class citizen, and although he may have been somewhat deficient in the classical learning in which some of his contemporary dramatists took pride, he had absorbed most of what was important in his native culture.

The first section of this chapter has been an attempt to elucidate some assumptions about the nature of Shakespeare's history plays which will be implicit in the structural analyses to follow in later chapters on the three parts of Henry VI. What these assumptions add up to is simply this: the plays were written by a dramatist essentially knowledgeable of English history who was working in close harmony with the energetically didactic literary-historical tradition of his age, and, moreover, their political themes were those that seemed of utmost importance to the Elizabethans. To this a further postulate of special relevance to the Henry VI plays should be added: that when Shakespeare was a beginning dramatist just starting to explore his own powers and to find his way in his genre, he was more self-consciously didactic, more obvious in stating his message, than he was to be later when he wrote with the confidence of experience and maturity. The starting point for analyzing the Henry VI plays is, rather deceptively, right on the surface; Shakespeare is at times almost embarrassingly explicit in his thematic statements. There is already complexity in the early plays, certainly, but subtlety and suggestiveness are as yet infrequent.

Before the Henry VI plays themselves can be considered, however, two further preliminary matters remain to be discussed in this chapter: first, the details of Shakespeare's political theme; and second, the various ways in which the total achievement of Shakespeare's ten history plays has been described.

II. SHAKESPEARE'S POLITICS

Some thirty years ago Alfred Hart asked, with obvious embarrassment, “why did the poet give so much prominence to doctrines favoured by authority and to a system of government which, a quarter of a century after his death, led to a prolonged civil war and the temporary downfall of the Stuart dynasty? Did he believe in the doctrine of the divine rights of kings?” Hart's rather strained answers were that the doctrine is “as logically defensible as the modern worship of a majority,” that Shakespeare “probably thought the principle itself and the system of government based upon it not unsuited to the people of his times,” and that after all, the companies of actors depended upon the favor of the sovereign and her court for their very existence.²² Hart's quandry is suggestive of the thinking of a long line of critics who found distasteful the idea that Shakespeare may have written of mere politics, and even worse, the evidence that he held to markedly undemocratic biases. Armed with a theory of literature disallowing such mundane concerns and with a theory of history requiring of all sensitive thinkers sympathy with the long struggle of the masses against oppression, they attacked problems of interpretation by assuming Shakespeare shared their own enlightenment and would therefore be likely to say the things they wanted to hear; and they easily outmaneuvered history and politics by defining them as the subordinate vehicle for a more aesthetic investigation of human principles.²³ Nor is this tradition dead; recently Clifford Leech wrote: “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.”²⁴

Such criticism, however, unduly minimizes the significance of those concerns in the Shakespearean history plays which are now called political. As Hardin Craig has suggested, Shakespeare's originality seems to have been partially expressed in his ability to find in his sources “great significant patterns” and to synthesize and amplify them into structured drama.²⁵ And in the prose histories, especially Edward Hall's, treating of the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare found great significant patterns: patterns of political chaos and rebellion, of destructive ambition and pride, of political crime and the inexorable retributive justice which followed. In the histories he explored man's public role in an ordered society, the problems of power and its uses, of discord in the body politic, of national destiny and the providence of God. If such matters are ephemeral and unliterary, then Absalom and Achitophel, Essay on Man, Idylls of the King, and Leaves of Grass, to mention only a few possibilities, can be given but qualified praise.

Moreover, critics who, like Leech, would subordinate the politics in Shakespeare's histories err in attempting to sort the literary ingredients into the relevant and the irrelevant, into those having application to the human condition generally and eternally and those which are but the accretions of the particular time and place. The drawing of such distinctions, so tempting to the critic treating the literature of a past age, rarely stands the test of modern analogy. Few would agree, for example, that Faulkner's novels could be passed through a critical screen which would neatly separate the “presentation of struggling and suffering humanity” from its matrix of “sociological” tensions in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. The “history” can no more be detached from Shakespeare's history plays than the humours can be removed from Jonson's earlier comedies. Each of the plays depicts political characters materialized in a series of political actions, and Shakespeare's judgments upon those characters and actions are expressed in the dramatic structure. That he chose to write ten such plays, to expend over one-fourth of his creative energies on questions of politics, is sufficient evidence of their importance to him and to the reading of his plays; and the intensity with which they are realized in the artistic shape is sufficient evidence of their literary value. The scepticism later times have developed toward man's political organizations is irrelevant.

Nor should it be disturbing that Shakespeare failed to foresee and to sympathize with the French Revolution. The “class struggle” of the sixteenth century, as far as that term can even be applied, had very different ramifications from what it was to have later. It is often forgotten that traditional democratic thought objects not so much to monarchy per se, but to the potentialities for tyranny inherent in monarchy, and the so-called “Tudor despotism” never realized those potentialities to any great extent. Its centralization of power in fact seems to have increased the freedom of the average Englishman. It made the local authority of the justice of the peace a mere echo, although usually an efficient one, of far-off London, and at the same time diluted the immediate power of the neighborhood aristocrats. Likewise, the frequently castigated Star Chamber, in spite of the casual nature of its justice, gave even the peasant the right of appeal to a disinterested court outside the local power structure. “Democracy,” on the other hand, meant for Shakespeare's contemporaries little more than anarchic mob rule in the tradition of the medieval peasant revolts, and the Puritan demands for “freedom of religion,” so staunchly denied by Elizabeth, were recognized as efforts to acquire the power with which to deprive others of religious choice (as the American colonies were soon to witness). Elizabeth's government was, by modern standards, tyrannic in its censorship, in its persecution (if that word can be applied to the reign following those of Edward and Mary) of religious dissent, and in its summary handling of those suspected of political unorthodoxy; but at the time, the seemingly vicious character of the real or imagined opponents of established authority seemed not only to justify extreme measures, but to make them necessary. In Elizabethan England the protection of individual freedom was an issue, but what appeared to need defending was the productive well-being of the kind of people represented by Arden of Feversham, not the mindless anger of the aroused mob or the fanaticism of the nonconformists. Thus the political context and value structure of Shakespeare's histories are totally different from those of any recent or modern set of concepts. When the plays unsympathetically portray the unthinking violence of the mob or assert the necessity for constituted authority, they are not arguing for the power of the few over the many but for the broad center's right to protection from the irrationalities and ambitions of the fringe.

Yet Shakespeare's histories stand as much more than a pragmatic argument for political stability in a time of threatened disorder. The psychological undercurrents detectable during Elizabeth's reign may have contributed to the urgency which can be sensed here and there in the tone of the plays, especially that of the earlier ones, but the questions Shakespeare explored were as large as mankind itself. He lived, in the words of Reese, “in an age which believed a man's social relations to be, next to his relations with God, the most important thing about him; which, in fact, found the value of the state in the value of the individual. A man was most intensely himself when moving and acting in society: and to the eye of a poet, public life might be only a symbol of the private life, and enquiry into government merely a way of describing a man's efforts to order his nature.”²⁶ What needs to be discussed, in other words, is not whether Shakespeare wrote political plays, or whether he was sympathetic with the right or the wrong side in the class struggle, but what he chose to say about the responsibilities of man in a cosmos whose lineaments were figured forth in the body politic. The remainder of this section will be devoted to adumbrating that complex of themes.

Shakespeare's political thought of course took shape within the frame of what Tillyard has called the “Elizabethan world picture.” This set of first premises is now well-known and needs no summary.²⁷ It does require considerable qualification, however, before it can be used analytically. First, the warning of Alfred Harbage should be heeded: “we are all familiar with the tendency in others (and ourselves) to apply colors recklessly to any part of a canvas depicting the lusty age of Elizabeth. Enthusiastic brushwork transforms human beings into Elizabethans.”²⁸ In sixteenth-century England, in other words, the essential eternality of the human animal was not interrupted by a temporary mutation resulting in a sudden abundance of naiveté and adrenalin; simplicity and sophistication, dullardry and enthusiasm, dogmatism and flexibility, all were as current then as now. So when “Elizabethan thought” is described, the best that can be hoped for is a rough approximation of a few of the central assumptions held in common by something approaching a majority of Elizabeth's subjects. Similarly, when treating the thought of any individual Elizabethan it must be further granted that at least ninety percent is irretrievable and the remainder too complex to be outlined in clean, unequivocal strokes.

Second, and of special importance to literary analysis, such things as the Great Chain of Being, the Macro-Microcosm, or even the medieval Wheel of Fortune are not concepts. They are metaphors imaging concepts. And they picture to the eye only a small part of the complexity the sixteenth-century Englishman conceived. It is quite likely that many Elizabethans, whose thought seems to have been more inclined to figures than our own, often failed to distinguish between the picture and what it stood for; and in argument both poetic and scholastic the images were frequently manipulated just as if they were themselves the actuality. However, the metaphors were but the manifestation of an amorphous body of thought characterized by considerably more subtlety and far less consistency than is often supposed.

All that can be done, then, is to study the recurrent ideas, the automatic responses, the repeated assertions, assumptions, and prejudices to be found in Elizabethan writing of all kinds and qualities—the sermon and the broadside as well as the epic and the stage play, the pedestrian as well as the inspired—and set them beside those patterns of thought discoverable in Shakespeare's plays. When all this is done the result is a rough sketch of an exceptionally sensitive mind which seems to have run in approximately the same channels as those of his intelligent and informed contemporaries, and which was, like theirs, neither simple nor static. “Shakespeare's political thought,” L. C. Knights insists, “is not a body of abstract principles to be applied and illustrated. It is part of a continuous exploration and assessment of experience: it grows and develops.”²⁹ So when that part of Shakespeare's thought of particular relevance to the history plays is considered, about all that can be defined with any confidence are a few intellectual and emotional reference points which appear to remain in relatively constant focus. The three most significant of these seem to be Christian teaching, the doctrine of order and degree, and the spirit of patriotism.

In regard to Christian thought, the histories have many times been interpreted as demonstrations of the doctrine of divine providence. Ribner uses Shakespeare's plays to illustrate the function of the “providential scheme” as “the most important aspect of medieval historiography which we find in the Elizabethan history play”; and he adds that “one of the most important historical purposes of many Tudor dramatists was to show the logic and reason in God's control of political affairs.”³⁰ In addition, E. M. W. Tillyard (as will be discussed in more detail later) sees Shakespeare's whole historical canon as a structured exposition of God's providential punishment of an England which had sinned and which had to undergo a long series of disasters before it could be restored to divine favor. However, there seems to be no real evidence in the history plays themselves that the doctrine of providence was a central concern. As Michael Quinn argues, Shakespeare even in the earliest plays had a more complex and subtle view of the doctrine of providence than did most of his contemporaries. That is, providence for him was not merely “miraculous or arbitrary interventions by God,” although he probably would not have denied such things were possible; rather, “God's normal mode of working is to allow the wicked to be caught up in the ‘mechanism’ of general providence which ensures that dissension breeds murder, revenge, civil war, and ultimately, tyranny, and that this process includes the punishment of the wicked.”³¹

Thus first causes are dimly seen only in the background, or even outside the plays in the mind that created them and in the assumptions common to the audience that viewed them. What is portrayed upon the stage are the secondary causes to be found in the motives and actions of men. That the men represented by the dramatic characters will get their just deserts on earth as well as in heaven or hell is not questioned; but what they do to earn these deserts, and more important, the effects their actions have upon the society in which they live, make up the ethical core of the history plays. The essential relevance of Christian thought to Shakespeare's histories is, therefore, that the plays were written by a Christian, though not one as doctrinally intense as a Milton or a Bunyan. Their author, in the words of R. M. Frey, “emerges as an intelligent and maturely informed layman, whose citation of theological doctrines for purely dramatic purposes shows an easy and intimate familiarity with Christian theology;” however, Frey insists throughout his study, Shakespeare “never treats these doctrines as ends in themselves, but always makes them subordinate to his development of character and action.”³²

The doctrine of order and degree cannot of course be treated as something separate from religion. The Elizabethans thought in terms of a God-centered universal order in which the heterogeneity of the perceptible world was given coherence and meaning by a system of rank and degree reflecting the higher organization of the spiritual world. Because the monarch was conceived as God's earthly counterpart and, in a sense, His local administrator, the doctrine of order was of both religious and political significance. Thus a corollary, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, was not simply a convenience in justifying the existing political and social structure; it was an admission of the heavenly origins of civil government. Nor was the doctrine of order as superficial and naive as its metaphoric expressions would suggest. No one would have hesitated to cut down an oak or kill a lion for fear of disturbing the universe. In the words of Knights, “order—especially order dependent on absolute rule and unargued acceptance of the powers that be—was not for Shakespeare a simple and unquestioned value: essential order, simultaneously political and more-than-political, was something that needed his full mature powers to define and assert”; and as Knights says in another context, as a result of our experience of the histories “we are inevitably prompted to a clearer recognition of the fact that a wholesome political order is not something arbitrary and imposed, but an expression of relationships between particular persons within an organic society.”³³

Moreover, the doctrine contributed to the history plays just as firm a set of ethical principles as Christian teaching. As Reese says, “the feeling for order and stability everywhere evident in Shakespeare's plays was an expression of his deepest moral convictions. The point to be made is that they were moral convictions, for society, as he and his age understood it, was a moral idea. He never divorced ‘politics’ (a word he did not use) from the larger context of society and human relationships.”³⁴ For Shakespeare the doctrine of order and degree was, in other words, a fertile realization of the universe in its totality. It gave him a means of interpreting men and their actions in terms of simultaneous values both divine and worldly. Yet it must be added the doctrine serves the same function in the ethical structure of the histories as Christian morality. That is, it is a part of the moral assumptions underlying the plays, not the proposition of an argument they are constructed to prove. If it were, critics would not be so dependent upon Ulysses' famous speech in Troilus and Cressida (I.iii. 75-137) for evidence of Shakespeare's assimilation of the doctrine. Those lines are the only extended and positive declaration of the principle in the Shakespearean canon. Elsewhere, and especially in the earlier history plays, the doctrine is realized in the dramatization of its violation; order is the assumed ideal, disorder the portrayed reality.

The third, and for dramatic purposes the most important, of the major reference points suggested by the fabric of Shakespeare's histories—the spirit of patriotism—is characteristic of the literature of the period generally. The famed “Elizabethan patriotism” had far deeper roots than the jingoistic exuberance generated by the defeat of the Armada. Taking intellectual justification and literary expression from English humanism, and direction and fervor from Protestantism, it motivated the multitude of chroniclers, topographers, and antiquarians as well as the poets and dramatists who were writing in the last half of the sixteenth century. The constant focal point of this patriotism was the figure of the monarch, and when in Elizabeth that figure combined the romantic aura of the Virgin Queen and the more mundane appeal of efficient government, the resulting attitude is best described by Shakespeare himself:

She shall be lov’d and fear’d. Her own shall bless
her:
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow. Good grows with her;
In her days every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.
God shall be truly known; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.

(Henry VIII, V.v.30-38)

A leitmotif throughout Shakespeare's plays, in the comedies and tragedies this patriotism is frequently exhibited in irrelevant intrusions, such as the praise of English drinking capacity in Othello, or in unnecessary amplifications, as in Cymbeline:

                                                            Our countrymen
Are men more ordered than when Julius Caesar
Smiled at their lack of skill, but found their courage
Worthy his frowning at: their discipline,
Now mingled with their courages, will make known
To their approvers they are people such
That mend upon the world.

(II.iv.20-26)

In the history plays, however, patriotism seems to be the moving force. Apparently in Shakespeare's mind the conception of the ordered Christian society took tangible form in the face of England, and “Respublica” became the symbolic hero of the plays.³⁵ As Reese says, “the histories lie uniformly within a comprehensive vision which determines plot, argument and characterization in sole reference to the safety of England and the political qualities that minister to it.”³⁶ The evidence is everywhere. In King John a principle, echoed in dozens of speeches in other plays, is given forthright statement:

Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

(V.vii..157-158)

Woven into the plays from 1 Henry VI on are image patterns reflecting plant productivity—cultivation, fertility, ripeness, harvest—as a measure of the damage done by rebellion and misrule to “the world's best garden.” The action of Henry IV traces Prince Hal's maturity into not responsible manhood alone but into English kingship, and the charged tone of Henry V is a response to the nation's achievements under his dedicated and heroic rule. The crux of Richard II results from the insoluble simultaneity of two issues of vital national importance—the anointed but ineffectual king and the need of the commonwealth for unselfish leadership.³⁷ And the suggestions of individual personality which tend to soften the political outlines of the characters (and to mislead critics) in these later histories are almost nonexistent in the Henry VI plays. There the complete measure of each character is taken according to the extent his motives and actions are contributory to or destructive of the national welfare.

Christianity, order, and patriotism are the three constant premises of Shakespeare's political thought. Behind the history plays stands the image of the “sceptered isle,” of an English nation in which king and subject are organically fused into the Christian commonwealth ruled by natural law. The king bears the heavy responsibility of giving focus and direction, by means of his own dedication and self-mastery, to the constructive energies of his people. They, likewise, are charged with following, not with servility and fear but with enthusiasm and religious purposefulness, his lead in the realization of national greatness.

III. THE “EPIC” UNIT

Heminge and Condell were clearly correct in separating the history plays from the comedies and the tragedies in the Folio. Richard III was titled a “Tragedy,” and the Life and Death of Richard II has tragic overtones in its portrayal of a potentially noble king whose character fails to meet the demands made upon it; but both plays are quite distinct in effect from Macbeth and Lear, also dramatizations of the downfall of historic British monarchs. Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, and perhaps Hamlet as well, are studies in the conflict between the private man and his political responsibilities, but the distribution of dramatic emphasis within each sets them apart from King John and 1 Henry IV. The difference between Shakespearean tragedy and Shakespearean history lies, L. B. Campbell suggests, in “the distinction between private and public morals.” “Tragedy is concerned with the doings of men which in philosophy are discussed under ethics; history with the doings of men which in philosophy are discussed under politics.”³⁸ And Campbell is essentially correct, although as Ribner warns, no definition of the history play based solely upon the separation of history and tragedy into “mutually exclusive categories” will stand the test of close examination.³⁹ The histories differ from the tragedies in their concern with suprapersonal values, in their emphasis upon themes pertaining to man as a participant in that part of the universal moral order reflected in the structure of the society rather than that part reflected in the shape of the individual psyche.

But the histories also stand apart from the rest of Shakespeare's plays by virtue of a characteristic unity all their own. The tragedies and comedies are of different times and places, different situations and characters, but the histories (excluding King John and Henry VIII, which have been seen as the “prologue” and the “epilogue” to the others) are a more or less coherent dramatization, with no significant gaps, of English history through the consecutive reigns of six kings. Their central action, involving more than two hundred characters (many of which are carried over from play to play), traces the dynastic conflicts of the Wars of the Roses from what for Edward Hall was their first cause, the banishment of Bolingbroke in 1396, to their cessation in the “union of the two noble houses” following the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Since Schelling it has been fashionable to describe this broad sweep loosely as “epic,” but the exact nature of Shakespeare's total achievement in the history plays has resisted definition.

According to the traditional view epitomized by Una Ellis-Fermor, Shakespeare in writing the histories was merely groping his way toward tragedy.⁴⁰ As a beginning dramatist, Ellis-Fermor argued, he chanced to write or was assigned to write one or more plays depicting the reign of Henry VI. In portraying the disasters of that reign he discovered they resulted from the lack of some vital “element of kingliness” in the pious but politically and militarily inept Henry VI. Thus he became interested in the requirements necessary to the ideal statesman-king and set out in an artistic quest for them by experimenting, in subsequent plays, with “a vast, closely articulated body of thought imaged always in terms of actual character, yet completely incorporated in no one character.” Working carefully and “choosing out by trial and error” the qualifications necessary for ideal kingship from a dozen or more political characters, both positive and negative, Shakespeare finally arrived at the epitome, Henry V. But, having “built the figure with such care, out of the cumulative experience of eight plays,” he “begins to recoil from it. … he rejects its findings as invalid before the deeper demands of the less explicit but immutable laws of man's spirit.” For Shakespeare discovered, when he had finally created his ideal, the ideal was not human; its humanity had been sacrificed to the demands made by the body politic for unwavering dedication and efficiency. Thus the history plays constitute, according to Ellis-Fermor, “a magnificent plea … for the supreme claims of the individual spirit,” and Shakespeare turned from them to tragedy in order to explore those claims.

This traditional view, with its subordination of history to tragedy, proceeds from the implicit principle (already questioned in this study) that matters of mere politics are somehow unworthy of artistic expression. But as Tillyard, Campbell, and Reese all insist, the political theme in Shakespeare's histories exists in its own right. As Reese points out, the re-direction of Shakespeare's efforts after Henry V, in addition to whatever practical reasons there may have been for it, does indicate new personal and artistic interests. “Where the only test is political, a political failure is just that and no more; the dramatist has no freedom to consider its personal implications, and throughout the histories Shakespeare had been prevented by his artistic discipline from developing the tragic potentiality of his characters.” However, Reese insists, the historical themes remained valid: “the great political virtues of obedience, love and disciplined dedication have a strength and permanence that carry them triumphantly through the disordered world of Shakespearean tragedy.”⁴¹ It is worth noting that the four great tragic protagonists—Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello—fail politically as well as personally, and for the same reasons. Shakespeare certainly learned from writing the histories (if it is to be supposed he did not already know) that there is often a deep conflict between the self-fulfillment of the individual and his responsibilities to the social order; but it is upon such discrepancies that art is built, and there is no reason to believe Shakespeare's turning from the consideration of the world to the investigation of the psyche constitutes a renunciation.

In addition, the older critics (along with many recent ones, including Tillyard and Reese) seem to have distorted the shape of the histories by reading them through the glass of “kingship.” The tetralogies do seem to follow parallel patterns in this respect. Both begin with kings who are, in differing ways, weak; each of these is overthrown by an equivocal figure, the moderately bad Edward IV and the moderately good Henry IV; and each of these in turn is succeeded by an epitome—the murderous tyrant Richard III and the glorious Henry V. When to these are added the various protectors, aspirants, and line-of-successioners—such as Humphrey of Gloucester, Richard of York, Clarence, Mortimer, and Hotspur—the history plays emerge as a veritable laboratory for the study of kingship.

When considered individually, however, the plays do not support such a conclusion. The significance of Henry VI's character seems not to be his weak leadership itself, but the consequent hiatus in central authority which allows unhindered political anarchy, the true matter under investigation in the Henry VI plays. Richard III is the epitome not so much of tyranny rampant as he is of tyranny relieved; the depiction of his physical and moral deformation and his brutal political crimes but leads up to his destruction and the restoration of the natural order under Henry VII. What is defined in Richard II is not the failure of royalty in Richard, but the boundary between weak rule that must be tolerated and misrule that may be overthrown. And if the sub-plot of 1 Henry IV is Hal's “imitation of the sun,” it must be remembered that the main plot is political rebellion. For Shakespeare the office of king was an order-symbol that was sufficiently complex to require exploration; but its definition does not seem to have been the unifying artistic motive of the histories.

The more recent, and for the last twenty years the most generally accepted, critical synthesis of Shakespeare's histories is that of Tillyard, who sees the plays as a purposeful dramatization of Edward Hall's theme in the Union of the Two Noble Houses. That is, England as a national entity was caught up in the providential scheme of punishment for sin when the natural order was violated by the deposition and murder of Richard II. Her punishment was a long series of external disasters and internal dissensions—primarily the loss of France and the Wars of the Roses—which could end only when the normal order was restored by the union of Lancaster and York effected by the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York.⁴² Tillyard's view is very attractive, primarily because it is so neat. It explains the “historicity” of the plays: the dramatization of consecutive reigns, the building of characters throughout a series of plays, the carefully written links coupling the end of each play with the beginning of the next, and the recapitulation of events occurring in previous plays. It also explains our reaction to the apparent unity of the plays by making that unity the conscious creation of Shakespeare rather than the accident of his use of historical sources.

However, Tillyard's synthesis does contain a number of weaknesses. For one thing, it does not correspond to the order in which the histories were written. If Shakespeare set out to dramatize Hall's theme, why did he begin in the middle of the story with the Henry VI plays? He opened Richard II at the exact historical point Hall's Union began—the argument between Mobray and Bolingbroke—but that was some five years and five history plays later. Tillyard tried to plug this obvious gap in his argument by postulating “earlier versions” of Richard II, Henry VI, and Henry V which Shakespeare later “recast” into the plays we now have, but he is not very convincing. Nor have his subsequent attempts to explain “what he really meant” helped to strengthen his thesis.⁴³ Either the history plays are a dramatization of Hall's theme, or they are something else; something, it should be added, which could certainly contain Hall's theme in addition to much more.

This postulate leads to the second objection to Tillyard's view: it is too simple. As A. P. Rossiter has colorfully put it, “there is more in the dark glass than the moral history of the Lancastrian House of Jeroboam and the happy ending in the dawn of Tudarchy.”⁴⁴ Although Hall's tract probably contributed to Shakespeare's general view of the Wars of the Roses and to the energy of his artistic denunciation of civil discord, it seems to have stimulated him in his own exploration, not committed him to a single conclusion.

Moreover, and this is the third objection, each of the eight plays is too individually distinct to have been conceived as an increment of a larger whole. Working from probably the best possible evidence—a viewing of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre's 1951 presentation of the Lancastrian plays as a structured tetralogy—Richard David concluded: “Though every effort was bent on making the four plays coalesce, the effect of each is so distinct, so complete in itself, their styles are so divergent, their loose ends so uncompromisingly resist all attempts to marry them, that no single, comprehensive impression emerges. Not only do Richard II and Henry V insist on standing out from the main block, but even the two parts of Henry IV seem to spring asunder and proclaim their independence of each other.”⁴⁵ The same, this study is intended incidentally to establish, would be the case with a production of the Yorkist tetralogy. Each of the Henry VI plays, in spite of their abundant similarities, upon close examination takes shape as a unique dramatic structure. In addition, their emphasis is upon the sins committed during the reign of Henry VI, not upon the earlier crime against Richard II, so Hall's theme stands at one remove at least.

Nor does the theatrical situation in which Shakespeare began writing suggest his first efforts would take the direction of an epic cycle. It is difficult to imagine either the Elizabethan companies, busy as they were exploring the possibilities of a new form of public entertainment and at the same time trying to judge the tastes of the admission-paying audience, or the audience, which for the most part had not had enough experience of its own to have even discovered its tastes itself, thinking in terms of tetralogies, or even more sophisticated, double tetralogies. Shakespeare is not necessarily answerable to such limitations, of course; the contradictory images of him as businessman-playwright and as independent genius can almost always be resolved in favor of genius. But it is doubtful he would have been so sweepingly original in the early nineties when he was attempting to get started. The primary problem of the young dramatist must have been much the same then as now: he needed to get something into production which would draw an audience. That his probably first play, 1 Henry VI, is distinctively different in its structure from anything written up to that time would seem to be a sufficient claim to originality, even for Shakespeare; it seems too much to look for an incipient epic also.

Thus there are a number of reasons for doubting that Shakespeare's histories form some sort of single entity. Yet there is no denying visible relationships between the plays. There are, to begin with, certain conspicious transitions. As R. A. Law has pointed out, the opening scene of each of the eight plays either dovetails with the action of the final scene of the preceding play, or else it contains a speech which echoes something said at or near the end of the preceding play.⁴⁶ These transitions, however, are mere connective filaments when compared with the massively cumulative patterns which result from the recapitulation of symbols; from the sustaining of characters and conflicts through two, three, or even four plays; from the accumulation of extended historical narration in which past causes of present events are carefully explained; and from the recurrent use of predictions and foreshadowing. It is not sufficient to say that when Shakespeare pulled from his sources the roots of his stories the soil of history clung to them and gave to his plays an unintended coherence. He invented the more obvious links, and many of the others are amplified beyond the needs of the immediate dramatic context.

What synthesis then can be made of the histories? Individually the eight plays stand quite distinctly apart, yet they are connected at many points. R. W. Law thinks they “are carefully coupled together like separate coaches of a railway train,”⁴⁷ but such a description does not explain very much. Ribner offers a more thought-provoking suggestion: “the gap of years between his two historical tetralogies is an important factor. When he came to write Richard II, Shakespeare had developed both as a dramatic craftsman and as a thinker, and he could examine political problems with new insight.”⁴⁸ If the problem is approached from this direction, it would seem Shakespeare wrote four history plays when a neophyte dramatist and four more after he had accumulated considerable experience, and each tetralogy is coherent within itself because it represents the consecutive efforts of the same mind upon a linear historical sequence. The similarities between the two tetralogies, however, are attributable only to the continuity they of necessity achieve from history and to the fact that Shakespeare, though more mature when he wrote the later tetralogy, continued to believe in the same basic principles of political morality and historical causation.

This explanation is not completely satisfactory, for it leaves too much to happenstance and too little to artistry; but it accounts for most of the relationships between the plays and seems to be a good starting point. Perhaps Shakespeare's achievement in the history plays can be conceived only by analogy: perhaps fifteenth-century England was his Yoknapatawpha County. He found in it both the violation and the realization of those political concepts he most deeply felt were of prime importance to the human condition, and he explored its three dimensions by expanding upon the inherited techniques of dramatic expression. It thus provided him with material for eight independent plays, and at the same time it gave him rich opportunities to express the overflow of his creative energies in synthesizing, but artistically gratuitous and not wholly consistent, links of character, action, and symbol. Richard II does not have to be read before the concatenation Richard III can be appreciated, nor does the recognition of anarchy in the Henry VI plays depend upon familiarity with the picture of order in Henry V, but when all the history plays are read in sequence they project a satisfying impression of architectonic structure, and each complements the others in being a part of the organic comment genius has made upon the affairs of men.

Notes

1. Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), p. 297.

2. Felix E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902), pp. 38-39. Other relevant studies are E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, 2nd ed. (New York, 1962) Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories” (San Marino, 1947); Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957); and M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (London, 1962).

3. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1948), p. 5.

4. William R. Trimble, “Early Tudor Historiography, 1487-1548,” JHI, XI (1950), 40. Another valuable study of this subject is Leonard F. Dean, Tudor Theories of History Writing, Univ. of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, No. 1 (1941), p. 23.

5. Ribner, p. 26.

6. Tillyard, p. 108.

7. H. H. Furness, Jr., ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Life and Death of King John (Philadelphia and London, 1919), p. xii. John Palmer, Political Characters in Shakespeare (London, 1945), p. viii. Clifford Leech, Shakespeare: The Chronicles, Writers and Their Work, No. 146 (London, 1962), p. 8.

8. Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), p. 190.

9. See, however, Richard H. Poplin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, Netherlands, 1960), especially Chapters I and II.

10. Alfred B. Harbage, As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality (New York, 1947), pp. 161-162.

11. Reese, pp. 29 and 33.

12. As to the often suggested relevance of the defeat of the Armada to the patriotic tone of Elizabethan literature, see Garrett Mattingly, The “Invincible” Armada and Elizabethan England (Ithaca, 1963), pp. 31 ff. Mattingly argues that “there does seem to have been an effervescence of patriotism (or chauvinism, or jingoism, call it what you will) in Elizabethan literature. But it is hard to find much evidence for it before 1595, and it would appear to be connected rather with the resumption of a vigorous naval offensive and Essex’ capture of Cádiz than with any earlier event.”

13. James K. Lowers, Mirrors for Rebels: A Study of Polemical Literature Relating to the Northern Rebellion, 1569, Univ. of California Publications, English Studies, No. 6 (Berkeley, 1953).

14. Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York, 1949), p. 99.

15. Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (Oxford, 1953), p. 4.

16. Karl Brunner, “Middle-Class Attitudes in Shakespeare's Early Histories,” Shakespeare Survey, VI (1953), 36.

17. Citations from Shakespeare in this study are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow, 1951).

18. As to anachronisms (such as the cannon in King John) and the occasional failure to distinguish between history and English mythology, the confusion must be laid to the historical credulity of the age itself, not to Shakespeare alone.

19. Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, 1953), p. 52.

20. Tillyard, p. 15.

21. Kenneth Muir, “Source Problems in the Histories,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, XCVI (1960), 63. See also Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. III (New York, 1960); and, of course, the classic work on this subject, T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latin & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, 1944).

22. Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne, 1934), pp. 74-75.

23. Brents Stirling says the “standard exemplars of [this] orthodox view are Coleridge, Dowden, Bradley, Tannenbaum, R. W. Chambers, Wood, Thaler, and Palmer.” The Populace in Shakespeare (New York, 1949), p. 81.

24. Clifford Leech, Shakespeare: The Chronicles, Writers and Their Work, No. 146 (London, 1962), p. 9.

25. Hardin Craig, “Motivation in Shakespeare's Choice of Materials,” Shakespeare Survey, IV (1951), 26-36.

26. Reese, p. 135.

27. See especially E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943), and Shakespeare's History Plays, especially Chapter I; Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass (New York, 1935); and Theodore Spencer; Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2nd ed. (New York, 1949).

28. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (New York, 1941), p. 138.

29. L. C. Knights, Shakespeare's Politics, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1957, p. 122.

30. Ribner, pp. 23-24.

31. Michael Quinn, “Providence in Shakespeare's Yorkist Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), 45-52.

32. Roland Mushat Frey, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963), pp. 13 and 271. See also Robert Stevenson, Shakespeare's Religious Frontier (The Hague, 1958).

33. L. C. Knights, William Shakespeare: The Histories, Writers and Their Work, No. 151 (London, 1962), p. 15; and Shakespeare's Politics, pp. 123-124.

34. Reese, p. 91.

35. Tillyard, p. 185.

36. Reese, p. 121.

37. For a study of the political crux of Richard II see Ernest William Talbert, The Problem of Order (Chapel Hill, 1962), especially Chapter VI.

38. Campbell, p. 17.

39. Ribner, pp. 11-12.

40. The following summary is of Una Ellis-Fermor's “Shakespeare's Political Plays,” The Frontiers of Drama (London, 1945), Chapter III.

41. Reese, p. 334.

42. See Tillyard, especially pp. 51-62. See also Reese, pp. 51-58.

43. See E. M. W. Tillyard, “Shakespeare's Historical Cycle: Organism or Compilation?,” Studies in Philology, LI (1954), 34-39. Tillyard's article is accompanied by a rejoinder by R. A. Law, pp. 40-41.

44. A. P. Rossiter, “Ambivalence: the Dialectic of the Histories,” Angel with Horns: And Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York, 1961), p. 44. See also Ribner, p. 12.

45. Richard David, “Shakespeare's History Plays—Epic or Drama?,” Shakespeare Survey, VI (1953), 132.

46. R. A. Law, “Links between Shakespeare's History Plays,” Studies in Philology, L (1953), 196.

47. Law, p. 187.

48. Ribner, p. 110.