SOURCE: “Truth and Art in History Plays,” in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 42, 1989, pp. 15-24.

[In the following essay, Hunter studies the way in which Elizabethans viewed the treatment of history in history plays.]

Since the First Folio says that Shakespeare wrote history plays I think there is a great deal to be said for assuming not only that he did so but did so in the plays thus designated and no others; let evidence precede definition. It is true of course that the evidence available is mixed; Elizabethan generic vocabulary is notoriously spongy: contemporary title pages give us such hybrids as The Tragedy of Richard II, The Tragedy of Richard III, The History of Troilus and Cressida, The True Chronicle History of King Lear, A Pleasant Conceited History called The Taming of a Shrew. The Folio's generic divisions seem to belong, however, to a different mode of discourse: F1 is a company volume, and I have no doubt that its division of plays into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies reflects company understanding of the repertory, and so, I take it, the understanding of that good company man, William Shakespeare.

Academic critics inevitably prefer definitions to be less blandly empirical, for what space for dazzling reinventions, for pulling rabbits out of hats, not to mention a name in lights, is left available by so preconditioning an acceptance? As professional systematizers we like to be seen to generate our definitions from general principles and our first chapters from titles such as ‘What is a history play? Some problems and answers’. Irving Ribner, for example, in what remains by far the most thorough treatment of the Elizabethan genre, starts by asking how the purposes of history were understood in the period and then calls any play that fulfils any of these purposes a ‘history play’, and so includes under the rubric such works as Gorboduc, Cambyses, and Tamburlaine—plays that can make no claim to appear in the Heminges and Condell list.

Heminges and Condell offer us no formal definition; what one can derive from their list is the sense that this genre must be defined, above all, by its subject matter: a history play is a play about English dynastic politics of the feudal and immediately post-feudal period—is, you might say, ‘a play about barons’. No doubt they had noticed that the audience in a theatre has a relationship to stories about its own national identity in the intelligible past which is different from its relationship to other stories.¹ Several much-quoted testimonies of the period confirm this view of the role of history plays in the culture of the time.² But little attempt has been made to interrelate the emotional effect on the Elizabethan or other self-consciously English audience, thus described, to the aesthetic structures of the plays themselves. The usual point made is that these are plays of patriotism—a patriotism that can be linked historically to a national mood following the defeat of the Armada in 1588. But the point would be more convincing if the plays were more than occasionally jingoistic and xenophobic, were not so largely concerned with the malignities and incompetences of English governments; patriotism is part of the story but it cannot be the whole story. A more satisfactory answer to the problem can be derived, I believe, from the general thought (contemporary and modern) that such historical narratives must be ‘true’, as against other kinds of plays which can be acknowledged and responded to as feigned or fictive.

The paradoxical idea of an invented true history is one that is difficult to get into focus, and there is some evidence from the sixteenth century of the unease that was generated by a genre that undoubtedly existed but could not be fitted into the categories or vocabulary available. The Induction to the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (printed 1599) shows us Comedy, History, and Tragedy in dispute for the possession of the stage. History enters the scene as if he has a role to perform, armed with the accoutrements of war (a drum and an ensign), but no space is provided in the play for the deployment of these signifiers. The axis of the dispute remains stolidly binary: to Tragedy the opponent is ‘slight and childish’ Comedy; for Comedy it is extremist and hysterical Tragedy. History is relegated to the unfortunate role of a neuter in a family quarrel; between the alternative trajectories of death and happiness no third possibility is allowed.³ The one Induction of the period which tackles the status of History in a more positive vein is, unsurprisingly, the one attached to an early history play, the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard III (printed 1594). This play begins with a conversation between Poetry and Truth:

poetry. Truth, well met!
truth. Thanks, Poetry. What makes
thou upon a stage?
poetry. Shadows
truth. Then will I add bodies to
the shadows.
Therefore depart and give Truth leave
To show her pageant.
poetry. Why, will Truth be a player?
truth. No, but Tragedia-like for
to present
A tragedy in England done but late
That will revive the hearts of drooping minds.(4)

What we seem to see here is a degree of self-consciousness about the claim that this history play is a ‘true tragedy’. Poetry can only (as in Plato) offer ‘shadows’, but Truth can give substance to poetic shadows by showing things that actually happened, what ‘the Chronicles make manifest’ (line 21). As a player or fictionalizer, Truth has to allow herself to appear ‘Tragedia-like’ in order to secure the effects described in the last line quoted, but the recentness of the events and faithfulness to the chronicles may serve to counteract the danger that poetry necessarily means lies.

The sense, clearly expressed in the Induction to The True Tragedy of Richard III, that truth has to be invoked to justify history plays, appears as a recurrent feature of the word as it turns up among Elizabethan play titles. I have discovered thirteen uses of the word ‘true’ among titles of plays published between 1573 and 1616, four times attached to plays about English history, four times to plays about Ancient British history (always as ‘true chronicle history’), three times to plays about Roman history, and twice to plays about recent notorious murders (both called ‘lamentable and true’).⁵ Of course the word ‘true’ found in such contexts is, like other words in title pages, a piece of advertising copy, not a scientific description; what I take to be significant is therefore only the fact that this was the word found recurrently appropriate for advertising plays about history. The word is significant only because it designates a set of claims against a set of received expectations. ‘Truth’ in these terms may be said to be a word that indicates the rhetorical precondition or mode of history.

A reader today, given the anti-positivist slant of modern thought, might expect that truth of this kind would require a characteristic formal structure before the plays involved could impose their values on the audience. If the Heminges and Condell implication of a third genre is to be sustained in terms of a particular theatrical effect, then the cause (‘truth’) of that effect can hardly be left as an inert slice of chronicle subject matter unaffected by the shaping process which alone will allow it to achieve the telos proposed. Setting the genre side-by-side with Tragedy and Comedy makes this issue particularly hard to avoid. For these others are genres marked by well-known and recurrent formal characteristics. Can the history play justify its place in this row by its possession of comparable qualities requisite to convey its claim to ‘truth’, its particular hold on an audience's attention, its mode of catharsis?

Most twentieth-century criticism has sought to deal with such questions by allegorizing both history and the mimetic process. The Tudor understanding of history, we are often told, turned individual reigns and individual successes and failures into exemplary instances of the intervention of God (or of the Capitalist System—God under another name) in the daily affairs of men. In particular, the eight plays of Shakespeare that run a continuous course from Richard II to Richard III are said to present a pattern of divine punishment for national apostasy in which the Tudor audience could identify itself as the final inheritor of God's forgiveness once the pattern had been completed. Inside the plays of the sequence, consequently, we must look through individual lives and personal relations so that we may understand their places on the giant wheel of historical necessity (Jan Kott's ‘Grand Mechanism’).⁶ ‘Truth’ in these terms is identified as the shape of the divine purpose. That there is something of this in the plays need not be denied; but the experience of seeing or reading Shakespeare's history plays, or (more pertinently) of being deeply moved by them, owes very little to this mode of conceptual organization. And this is not, incidentally, what Elizabethan title pages mean when they use the word ‘true’, which refers there rather to the ‘truth’ of factual detail, authenticated by the witness of the Chronicles.⁷

Modern scholars usually tell us that the Chronicles (particularly Edward Hall's) are marked by an overall design that controls their presentation of detail. But to read continuously in the Chronicles is to discover that they exemplify less the grand historical design than the complexity, dispersal, randomness, even incomprehensibility of actual happenings. We are regularly told about the genealogical tree on the title-page to Hall's Chronicle as a kind of aerial map of the dynastic conflict that ‘explains’ the history of this period. But when we turn over the page and actually begin to read in Hall (or better still in Holinshed) word by word and page by page, then we must descend from the hot-air balloon of theory that floats above history and see events from the level of the human eye, share in the bemusement and mistakennness that characterizes the ‘truth’ of historical experience as here retailed. In his dedication to Burghley Holinshed says that the reading of his volumes will ‘daunt the vicious’—I find that the reading daunts nearly everyone—and ‘encourage worthy citizens’. But in telling his story Holinshed fails to show that history points a moral in either of these directions. And when he does risk causal moralization, that too appears random and particular rather than generally explanatory. Thus when Edward IV arrives at York and swears on the sacrament that he has invaded England only to claim his rightful dukedom of York, Holinshed comments as follows:

For this wilful perjury (as has been thought) the issue of this king suffered (for the father's offence) … And it may well be. For it is not likely that God, in whose hands is the bestowing of all sovereignty, will suffer such an indignity to be done to his sacred majesty and will suffer the same to pass with impunity.⁸

The tentativeness of the judgement here, as well as the limitation imposed on the connection made, are both entirely characteristic of the author. What Holinshed wrote was, in his own phrase, a ‘collection of histories’; the pluralism attaches both to the variety of sources drawn on and to the collaborative effort that went into the production, and both these point away from explanatory clarity. We are much indebted to all these authors for the legal documents that they report in extenso, giving the actual statements drawn up for Humphrey of Gloucester or Jack Cade (for example). But the authentic words given represent only what these men wanted to be believed, tendentious opinions contradicted by the equally ‘true’ or authentic documents prepared in rebuttal by Henry Beaufort or the government of Henry VI. The wie es eigentlich gewesen ist is nowhere invoked as a unifying perspective, and indeed one might say that the closer the chroniclers bring us to the documentation of the past the more obscured becomes the overview.

The chroniclers' annalistic method of year-by-year accounting further reinforces the general effect of one-thing-after-another randomness. In this mode the idea of an individual's purposive career is difficult to sustain; even though Holinshed sometimes signals ahead with ‘as will hereafter appear’ and similar locutions, his ‘hereafter’ is, like God's, mostly invisible. What is entirely and continuously obvious is that life in feudal England is most adequately represented as a series of individual raids on the inarticulable: a castle is besieged here or there and then retired from when a larger army appears on the horizon; the Scots do their annual thing, try to burn Carlisle or Berwick, drive away cattle, then give up when the weather gets too bad (or too good); the price of wheat rises and falls, a high wind destroys houses, people try to avoid taxes and get hanged, drawn, quartered, beheaded, burned, massacred—random events suffered by individuals continually trying to derandomize them, including Holinshed himself, who offers us the guidance of ‘some say’, ‘others allege’, ‘it is reported that’, but makes little or no sustained effort to assess accuracy or probability. And when the absence of explanatory connection is particularly blatant he throws up his hands in a gesture that might be despair or might be piety, as when he says of the usurpation of Bolingbroke that he cannot make sense of it: ‘But … the providence of God is to be respected and his secret will to be wondered at … For as in His hands standeth the donation of kingdoms, so likewise the disposing of them consisteth in His pleasure.’⁹ Or again when, after the second battle of St. Albans, he notes that all the advantages seemed to lie with the Lancastrians: ‘But what Man proposeth God disposeth’.¹⁰ In such cases a providential pattern emerges, but not as an overall explanation, only as a justification for the humanly inexplicable.

A dramatist who makes his way through such actual chronicles—and we should remember that Shakespeare could not lay his hands on a copy of Shakespeare's Holinshed—has to achieve his design by means of rigorous exclusion and reshaping. But if I am right in assuming that the ideal of truth to the experience of life in the past remains a defining quality of the Elizabethan history play, then the process of streamlining a watertight cause-and-effect kind of structure can easily carry the history play beyond its telos, for the demonstration of Art inevitably diminishes our acceptance of Truth.¹¹ And this takes us back to the comparison between Comedy, History, and Tragedy with which I started. Tragedies and Comedies operate inside efficient and well-tested modes of artful unification. It has sometimes seemed as if the history play could not achieve such unity unless it fell into the artful mode of one or the other of its siblings. This was an agreed and probably an inevitable view among neoclassical critics, whose respect for Art allowed variations from the canon of Tragedy and Comedy only as consequences of ignorance or boorishness (‘common … among our rude ancestors’, Dr Johnson assumed).¹² The earliest systematic critic of Shakespeare, Charles Gildon, is interestingly specific on this issue.¹³ He calls history plays ‘draughts of the lives of princes, brought into dialogue’, and goes on to note that ‘since these plays are histories, there can be no manner of Fable or Design in them’. Dr Johnson seems to defend history plays from the full rigour of such neoclassical rules: ‘his histories, being neither comedies nor tragedies are not subject to any of their laws’; but by agreeing with the principles of the neoclassical position he leaves little or nothing worth defending. He calls the history plays ‘a series of actions with no other than chronological succession and without any tendency to introduce or regulate the conclusion … a history might be continued through many plays; as it had no plan it had no limits … Nothing more is necessary … than that the change of action be so prepared as to be understood … no other unity is intended, and therefore none is to be sought.’¹⁴ In the jargon of the Russian Formalists and their acolytes, such plays exhibit fabula but no sjužet: they are mere transcripts of chronology, and chronology provides the only articulation they possess.

It takes very little reading in Shakespeare's historical sources to learn what nonsense this is. But the general issue is not so easily disposed of. History plays are not shaped by the formal closures of death or marriage; they allow the open-endedness of history itself to appear—when one king dies another king emerges; time and politics grind on with a degree of indifference to the life-cycles of individuals. But to say that Richard II, Richard III or King John are simply tragedies that are poorly unified because open-ended is clearly inadequate as a description. The dialectical relation between Art and Truth seems central enough to require a further effort to define the conditions of history plays, preferably in their simplest and most unsophisticated forms, whether as Shakespeare employed them or as Shakespeare inherited them.

F. P. Wilson has famously remarked that ‘there is no certain evidence that any popular dramatist before Shakespeare wrote a play based on English history’.¹⁵ If that is to be believed, then Henry VI is, however sophisticated in itself, the great originating event in the history of the history play. But should one believe it? There are in fact two extant Elizabethan history plays with a powerful claim to anticipate Henry VI—one (Dr Legge's Richardus Tertius) clearly dated 1579, the other (the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V) probably to be dated before 1588; and it seems reasonable to argue (I intend to do so) that these plays give us a glimpse of dramaturgical control of history in the process of formation. Legge's play is not, of course, that of a ‘popular dramatist’ and so by definition may be excluded from Wilson's chronology, but the idea that it cannot therefore tell us anything about popular drama seems much too categorical. As for The Famous Victories of Henry V, Wilson does refer to it but seems to be denying it a place in the story by the curious argument that it is too bad a play to count. He calls it ‘a play of incredible meanness in the form in which it has come down to us, written in bad prose, one imagines, because the compiler could not rise to bad verse’.¹⁶ Even bad plays, one is bound to respond, can influence good dramatists. And as for ‘certain evidence’ in the matter of Elizabethan theatrical chronology, if this is our criterion we had better cede the territory as quickly as possible, for there is no ‘certain’ way of defending it.

My aim here is not, however, to argue for or against chronology or to specify influences on Shakespeare or even to deny Shakespeare's originating power, but only to question his power to originate ex nihilo—a question, I note in passing, that even God cannot always avoid. In what follows I wish to use these plays only to illustrate the conditions attached to history playwriting outside the Shakespearian orbit, to exemplify what I have called the central dilemma in the genre—the contradiction (or at least tension) between truth to the experience of the past and the fictional or artful means by which such material can be unified and so given general significance.

Dr Legge, unsurprisingly, given his status as Master of Caius and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, undoubtedly found his material (the reign of Richard III) convenient on at least two counts. The reign of Richard III was one of the few reigns that could be presented in political detail without offending the Queen: and Vice-Chancellors, as we all know, have to be very tender of the susceptibilities of their political mistresses. More important from our point of view is the fact that this material lent itself very easily to the formal literary organization that current scholarly opinion most heartily approved. Tyrant-tragedy provided the staple of the Senecan and Italian Humanist tragic repertory. Both the pseudo-Senecan Octavia Praetexta (then accepted as genuine) and the Ecerinus of Albertino Mussato (usually called ‘the first modern tragedy’)¹⁷ deal with the careers of recently dead tyrants (Nero and Ezzelino da Romano) seen from the point of view of the subsequent administration, in modes of formal and political organization that could easily be adapted to fit the case of Richard of Gloucester. Indeed this process of aestheticization or adaptation had begun to be applied to Richard soon after his reign ended. Sir Thomas More, in his Suetonian history of the English Nero copied by all the chroniclers, presents a system of explanation for the events of Richard's kingship that Legge did not have to modify. In More he could find that everything in Richard's reign happened as it did because of the kind of person Richard was. His will, or rather his obsession, his manipulative drive, undiverted by social loyalties to brother, mother, wife, benefactor, comrade-in-arms, can be shown directing the passive world around him to the ends he alone foresees. All the others, Hastings, Brackenbury, the Queen Mother, Buckingham, are cajoled, bribed, terrified, deceived, magnetized into compliance; in themselves they seem to lack positive aims or understandings and therefore must be destined to be victims. In these terms we have a quasi-Senecan scenario already in place.

Yet in dealing even with so well digested a tract of modern history Legge faced methodological problems. Evidently he found it impossible to ignore the un-Senecan modernity of the political forces present in Richard's reign, the complex of voices, resistancies, uncertainties that More reveals. The Senecan form is not only static but also heavily retrospective; it is this that gives emotional density to the exchanges of the small family groups, whose shared life together stretches back through history into myth and legend, accumulating the crimes and resentments that eventually explode in the present. But Legge's history must be prospective. His play cannot end in Senecan mayhem and Stoic acceptance of a malign universe but must carry us through the complex web of English political life and show how it slips out of Richard's manipulative control, so leaving space for Henry Tudor, the Christian deliverer, to descend from the flies and take over the system.

In rendering modern political conditions with a degree of documentary truth Legge is, in fact, obliged to betray the unifying formalism of classical tragedy. The vast extent of his three-part play, the mass of its characters, its geographical range across the English landscape, the continual improvisation the protagonist has to engage in to answer new unexpected resistances—all these factors point away from the form he sought to imitate. The play thus becomes significant in the context I am sketching less as an achievement than as a model of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the genre, especially that contradiction between desire to fulfil the trajectory of the protagonist's plot (in the classical manner) and acceptance of the random points of resistance and diversion that his drive was bound to find in any ‘true’ picture of modern politics.

My second model play—The Famous Victories of Henry V—deals with the same issues from a totally different angle. In Richardus Tertius the chorus civium is shown as disbelieving, reluctant, sullen, and needing to be manipulated, in this de haut en bas treatment, by dazzling displays of rhetoric and chicanery. In The Famous Victories on the other hand the ruler's power is seen as operating not from above but from below; it is presented as a natural outgrowth from the life of the Folk, so that his rhetoric is simply their rhetoric played back to them, with appropriate magnification. The Cambridge play invites its audience to a distanced observation and analysis of political techniques. The popular play offers no such distance: it invites its audience to identify with a man like themselves, with the same emotions and values, though with more space to deploy them. To make this point the author, in a move that must remind us of Shakespeare, shows us Henry V first of all as a down-to-earth Hal, as a bully-boy gang leader who eventually becomes a bully-boy national leader, not too much change of attitude being required. The famous ‘conversion’ of Hal into Henry, his embracing of the Lord Chief Justice and turning away his riotous companions suggests that here, as in Shakespeare, the action is divided by a change of viewpoint and a new set of values into two distinct and differentiated parts, and critics often tell us that this is how we ought to look at The Famous Victories. But a reading of the play in its own terms rather than those of Shakespeare gives us a different profile. It is true that the newly crowned king turns away his evidently well-born boon companions, Ned, Tom, and Jocky Oldcastle. But these are not the figures who represent the ‘true’ underworld of The Famous Victories, which is carried not by deboshed gentlemen but by the genuine proletariat of Dericke, John Cobler, and Cuthbert Cutter (usually known as ‘The Thief’). Ned, Tom, and Jocky disappear from the play after Henry comes to the throne, but for Dericke and company the underworld ethos has never represented a holiday in the slums that can be put behind one, but is life itself. Their inevitable mode of existence is simply transferred, when Henry becomes king, from petty criminality in London to the equally criminal milieu of the private soldier in a foreign war (shades of Brecht!). It is true that the Lord Chief Justice is established in England; but the rest of the cast meanwhile removes to France, and there king and commoners carry on with the old populist pleasure of exploiting the formalistic, the smug and self-satisfied, the self-important, by a witty if brutal realism. The exploitables are now French aristocrats rather than London moneybags, but the attitude of the exploiters remains the same. Dericke and the Cobler end their war by retailing their Schweik-like capacity to minimize fighting while maximizing booty. They share with us their ingenious plan to use the funeral procession of the heroic Duke of York as a foolproof method of getting their stolen goods back home. Clearly we are not meant to be shocked but rather amused by their cynical exploitations of convention. When they get home, they tell us, they will show what they have learned in France by burning down Dericke's house, preferably with his wife inside. At the same time, and in a not altogether different vein, we see a ferociously genial King Henry backslap his ‘good brother’ the French king, his nobles, and his daughter into surrender and matrimony. This is overhand, not underhand; but the same sense that it all grows out of the anti-formalist or ‘realist’ English way pervades both social levels.

In spite of the coming and going of its large cast of characters, the indeterminacy of the many social levels it contains, the disjointed and episodic nature of its action, The Famous Victories of Henry V is, tonally speaking, a remarkably unified play. We may not like the tone—F. P. Wilson has eloquently registered his distaste for it—but we must allow that by assimilating the king and the national destiny to the life of the Folk this play solves the contradiction that appears in Richardus Tertius between the personal career of the monarch (dramatic) and the political life of the nation (historical). For the public life of the country is treated in The Famous Victories as a simple extension of the (shared) private life of camp and tavern. On the other hand we may well feel that the unification of muthos and ethos has been bought here at too high a price. And it is true that political life, as presented in this version, has not enough complexity to challenge our imagination or to represent the problems that a real politician must face.

In their startlingly different ways then, one clinging to the mode of high tragedy, the other to that of low comedy, both Richardus Tertius and The Famous Victories of Henry V show the problem of linking historical ‘truth’ to a seriously unified plot, in both cases one controlled by a dominant monarch whose will and ambition create the context within which historical development is to be understood. But neither author can be said to have secured that very delicate balance between such opposites in a history play—a balance that may be as much social as aesthetic—where the potentials for tragedy and comedy are combined in a manner that transcends both. What both plays can convey to the modern reader is rather the nature of the coordinates within which a history play must exist (and will exist), vectors moving on one axis through the ‘truth’ of content towards formlessness, and on the other axis moving through the necessities of form and order towards unhistorical fictional closure. Like other kinds of art, the history play advances by playing ‘true’ disorder against the promise of an order that can only emerge as fiction.¹⁸ Where the history play differs from more traditional forms, such as tragedy and comedy, is mainly in the nature of the balance it sets up between these two opposed forces. In comedy and tragedy the knowledge that the life depicted does not exactly fit into the artful pattern, is not resolved by the artful closure, is only a minor though recurrent counterpoint, an enrichment of the dominant harmony. In the history play, however, the awareness that life cannot be resolved by art is much more powerful. Here in consequence the power to control and complete that pattern is held at a much more tentative level; the authorial or interpretative stance must be more heavily infected by irony, as has been pointed out by David Riggs in his admirable account of the Henry VI plays.¹⁹

And so we reach Shakespeare. What I take to be genuinely creative and originating in the Henry VI plays (creative, that is, in generating all the other weak-king plays of the early nineties) is the perception that only by placing an inadequate monarch in the centre of the play can this ironic or detached viewpoint be used to fulfil the tragicomic potential of modern history's indeterminate and destabilized worlds. Only so can an audience enjoy both a detached analysis of political activity (as in Richardus Tertius) and the pleasure of participating in the world of The Famous Victories where (as a recognizable truth) things are liable to happen without anyone anticipating them.

And having reached Shakespeare it is time to stop. My purpose has been to set out the generic conditions within which the texts that Heminges and Condell call history plays can exist. To show how these conditions are exploited is a larger task which belongs to another time and no doubt to another person.

Notes

1. Coleridge, I find, has made the same point in an uncharacteristically succinct manner: ‘In order that a drama may be properly historical it is necessary that it should be the history of the people to whom it is addressed’ (Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), vol. 1, p. 138).

2. Nashe praises historical subject matter ‘wherein our forefathers' valiant acts … are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence: than which, what can be a sharper reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours?’ (The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1904), p. 212). Heywood says: ‘What English blood, seeing the person of any bold Englishman presented, and doth not hug his fame and honey at his valour … as if the personator were the man personated? … What coward, to see his countrymen valiant would not be ashamed of his own cowardice? What English prince, should he behold the true portraiture of that famous king Edward the Third … would not be suddenly inflamed with so royal a spectacle, being made apt and fit for the like achievement?’ (E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), vol. 4, p. 251).

3. In many ways this Induction can be seen to pick up and sharpen the generic implications of an earlier Induction—that to the anonymous Soliman and Perseda (1590)—where Death, Fortune, and Love conduct a very similar dispute, Death demanding a tragic conclusion, Love demanding comic happiness and Fortune (the process of change) appearing as an unstable intermediary between the other two.

4. Malone Society Reprint, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1929), lines 7-16.

5. The relevant title-pages are as follows:

   1592 The Lamentable and True Tragedy of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent.

   1594 The Wounds of Civil War. Lively set forth in the true tragedies of Marius and Sylla.

   1594 The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York.

   1594 The True Tragedy of Richard III.

   1600 The First Part of the True and Honourable History of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle.

   1602 The True Chronicle History of the Whole Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell.

   1605 The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters.

   1606 Nobody and Somebody: with the true chronicle history of Elydure.

   1607 The Tragedy of Claudius Tiberius Nero … Truly represented out of the purest records of those times.

   1608 M. William Shakespeare: His True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters.

   1608 A Yorkshire Tragedy. Not so new as lamentable and true.

   1608 The Rape of Lucrece. A true Roman tragedy.

   1615 The Valiant Welshman, or the true chronicle history of … Caradoc the Great.

   One may add to these two later history plays where the word has a continuing but somewhat more oblique function:

   (1) Shakespeare's Henry VIII—apparently known when first performed (1613) as All Is True.

   (2) Ford's The Chronicle of Perkin Warbeck: A Strange Truth (1634).

6. See Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski (New York, 1964).

7. See particularly the title-page of The Tragedy of Claudius Tiberius Nero cited in note 5 above.

8. The Third Volume of Chronicles [London, 1587], p. 680.a.65ff.

9. Holinshed, p. 499.b.64ff.

10. Holinshed, p. 661.a.31.

11. For a general discussion of this issue see Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London and New York, 1968).

12. Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand Bronson and Jean M. O’Meara (New Haven, Conn., 1986), p. 226.

13. ‘Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare’, printed in vol. 9 of Rowe's edition of Shakespeare (London, 1710), pp. 302-3. He further remarks that it is ‘the misfortune of all the characters of plays of this nature that they are directed to no end, and therefore are of little use; for the manners cannot be necessary, and by consequence must lose half their beauty. The violence, grief, rage and motherly love and despair of Constance [in King John] produce not one incident, and are of no manner of use; whereas if there had been a just design, a tragic imitation of some one grave action of just extent, both these characters being formed by the poet [Constance and Falconbridge] must have had their manners directed to that certain end, and the production of these incidents which must beget that end.’

14. Rowe, ‘Remarks on the Plays’, pp. 16, 22.

15. Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Oxford, 1953), p. 106.

16. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare, p. 106.

17. Edited by L. Padrin (Bologna, 1900). There is a serviceable translation by Joseph R. Berrigan: Mussato's ‘Ecerinus’ and Loschi's ‘Achilles’ (Munich, 1975).

18. Compare Philip Edwards's Threshold of a Nation (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 112-13, where, discussing the Epilogue to Henry V, he speaks of the dramatic resolution of the play's tensions as ‘belonging to the experience of art’, concluding ‘Shakespeare reminds us of the existence of the two worlds, art and history, without compromising either.’

19. Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: ‘Henry VI’ and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). Riggs notes: ‘What finally distinguishes the early histories from their antecedents is the fact that only Shakespeare manages to accept the contradictions between individual aspiration and ethical convention in a spirit of conscious irony’ (p. 29); and again (speaking of the episodic structure of Henry VI), ‘the sequence of episodes provides us not with a conventional plot based on historical materials, but rather with a continuous commentary on an irreducible set of historical facts’ (p. 95).