SOURCE: “Introduction 2: History,” in Shakespeare's History, Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1985, pp. 14-39.

[In the essay below, Holderness maintains that many of Shakespeare's plays, especially the English history plays, were intentional acts of historiography. In particular, Holderness analyzes the second tetralogy (Richard II through Henry V) and argues that the historiography offered in these plays was a new, emergent form with a bourgeois viewpoint.]

The argument of this book could, and ideally should, be applied more broadly than the scope of the enterprise allows. Although it is based on an underlying hypothesis that most of Shakespeare's plays were conscious and deliberate acts of historiography, it adheres to that group of plays categorised as ‘Histories’ as early as the First Folio of 1623, and uncontroversially acknowledged as ‘English History Plays’ ever since. From the whole range of Shakespeare's drama of national history (the series of eight plays which together constitute a dramatised chronicle of English history from 1398 to 1485, plus the early King John and the late Henry VIII) I have chosen to concentrate the first part of the argument on the familiar ‘second tetralogy’ (Richard II-Henry V), focusing with even more selectivity on Richard II and Henry IV Part One. Henry V and the earlier ‘first tetralogy’, Henry VI-Richard III, are used to illustrate the history of ‘Shakespeare’ reproduction in the second part of the book. Methodologically this selection is entirely arbitrary and based on pragmatic rather than theoretical distinctions. As historiography the English chronicle plays are no different in kind from other plays grounded in written historical sources: Macbeth, for example, or the Roman plays based on Plutarch's Lives. This particular point would not be widely disputed: modern critical studies frequently link the English history plays with plays conventionally assigned to other genres (though the intention is, as often as not, to subsume the category of history into some mythical or metaphysical conception of reality, rather than to clarify the nature of historical drama).¹ The category can be broadened considerably by abandoning excessively rigid and limiting concepts of what is and what is not ‘historical’ writing: if we accept, for example, the mode of legendary history, dislodged by some humanists and by the antiquarian school, as a legitimate exercise of Renaissance historical consciousness, then King Lear is a history play; and if we were prepared to acknowledge the sociological precision and historical particularity with which Shakespeare drew his images of Venetian society in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, they too would become historical drama—not an empirical ‘history of the times deceas’d’, but an analytic and sociological ‘pre-history of the present’.

The foregoing theoretical introduction will already have suggested some practical reasons for concentrating on the second tetralogy: the plays remain current, constantly reproduced, consistently privileged, held firmly in place in the hierarchy of literary value by the rigid structures and conventions of the educational system. They are also the principal foundation on which the most influential historicist theories of Shakespearean historical drama have been constructed: the organicist and providential arguments of E. M. W. Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell, L. C. Knights, though widely disputed today, have nonetheless successfully imposed their own ideological colouring on the plays and on subsequent criticism, and still exercise enormous influence over the practices of teaching and examining in institutions of education, especially secondary schools. These plays offer an appropriate ground for the exercise of this study's two main objectives: to engage with the residual constrictions of the old Tillyardian orthodoxy, which is partly a matter of analysing the history of reproduction, and to interrogate some of the counter-orthodoxies offered from within bourgeois criticism; and to situate the plays into a more genuinely materialist analysis of the structural complex of Renaissance historiographical practices.

I

What emphasis is intended, what theoretical definition proposed, by terming the plays ‘historiography’; and how does that classification relate to other possible ‘historical’ descriptions, some of which would be universally accepted? A convenient theoretical formulation is provided by the trivium history, historical evidence and historiography.

The plays would be accepted as historical evidence—surviving records and documents attesting to the existence of historical fact—only in a very limited sense: as the record of an Elizabethan intellectual's view of his own society, mediated through fictional reconstructions of that society's past. They could be judged relevant to history—the ‘aggregate of past events’, the chronological sequence of happenings which can be assumed, by a reasonable consensus of historical analysis and judgment, to have occurred—insofar as they adhere to works of historical record and interpretation as sources; the closer the plays approximate to written records, to the chronicles of Halle, Holinshed and other Tudor historians, the nearer they can be judged to approach to actual ‘history’. These definitions make good sense in terms of the dominant practices of historiography in modern western societies—essentially literate, empirical, positivist and quasiscientific—but when applied to Renaissance historical drama, they reveal certain inadequacies. Henry V was a historical character, King Lear a legend (i.e. there is no surviving historical record except tradition to enable us to attribute to Lear a real existence): therefore Shakespeare's Henry V is a history play, King Lear a fable.² If the argument is conducted entirely within the parameters prescribed by modern historical thought, which has its roots in those decades of the seventeenth century immediately following the demise of the historical drama, some of Shakespeare's history plays—in common with other works of the period—must be acknowledged a loose and confused mixture of historically authenticated facts and imaginatively-invented fictions. According to the positivistic criteria prescribed by modern historiography, the two categories can be rigidly demarcated, and plays like Richard II and Henry V can be privileged as possessing a certain authenticity (with suitable allowances made for poetic licence), since they achieve a medium of articulation which observes the distinction between fact and fable, rigorously excluding all legendary and fabulous matter (the victory of Agincourt is ‘legend’ in a different sense from the ghosts who visit Richard III on the night before Bosworth, or the fiends who support Jeanne d’Arc in Henry VI Part One), all folk-tale and romance situations, all supernatural apparitions; and limiting the elements of historical ‘fiction’ to an emblematic interlude or a segregated comic sub-plot. From the perspective of modern historiography, the English history plays of Shakespeare would not normally be considered historiography, to a culture dominated by medieval ideas, the universal Christian providentialism of the Middle Ages, and the new science of history as it developed in the seventeenth century, the plays belong to a world without a proper historiography, to a culture dominated by mediaeval ideas, mingling legend and fact, myth and reality in a glorious confusion, relying on tradition rather than documentary record and primary source; unable, in short, to see the past as anything other than a distorted reflection of its own contemporary present.

II

The success of that influential school of historicist criticism to which I have already referred, which established its basis of cultural power and secured its ideological dominance after the Second World War, and can still be accurately summarised by the name of Tillyard, can be attributed partly to that school's skilful evasion of this problem. However, as I shall be demonstrating below, although its object of address was as much the contemporary world as that of the Renaissance, it systematically denied the relevance of modern thought to a historical understanding of Shakespeare's time. The historical ideas informing Shakespeare's plays were to be located within a general world-view dominated by the heritage of medieval Christianity: a philosophical system in which the state, or ‘body politic’, was never considered relativistically as a particular form of social organisation, developed from and subject to change—but as one of the functions of a universal order, created and supervised by God, and ruled directly by the machinations of divine providence. A state or human society occupied a median position in a cosmic hierarchy (the chain of being) with God and the angels above, and the animal and plant kingdoms below. The structure of a well-ordered state was itself a microcosm of the heirarchical cosmos, containing within itself a chain of being, from the monarch at the head, through the various gradations of social rank down to the lowest orders. The ruler of a body politic possessed power which reflected, but was also subject to, that of God: a king therefore ruled by Divine Right. The natural condition of a state, like the natural condition of the cosmos, was ‘order’, defined primarily in terms of the maintenance of this rigid hierarchy. Any rupturing of this pattern would produce disorder or ‘chaos’; since the state was a component of divine order, such alteration could not be accepted as legitimate social change, but had to be condemned as a disruption of the divine and natural order, to the displeasure of God. The extreme forms of such disruption, such as the deposition of a king and the usurpation of a throne, would constitute a gross violation of order, inevitably punished by the vengeance of God, working through the machinery of providence.

This comprehensive system of Elizabethan thought was developed fully by Tillyard in The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), and applied specifically to the functioning of the state within the universal order in Shakespeare's History Plays (1944). Here the whole sequence of English chronicle plays becomes a grand illustration of the operation of divine providence in human affairs, with the deposition and murder of Richard II initiating a disruption of the universal order, a century of social chaos and civil war, the punishment of those responsible and their descendents by the exercise of divine wrath—a process ended only by the ‘succession’ of Henry VII to the English throne. The plays are said to offer a unified historical narrative expressing a politically and morally orthodox monarchist philosophy of history, in which the Tudor dynasty is celebrated as a divinely sanctioned legimitate regime, automatically identifiable with political stability and the good of the commonwealth. Reflecting rather than expressing, since the system had already been developed by the great Tudor historiographers, especially in Edward Halle's Union of the Noble and Illustrious Houses of Lancaster and York (1548); and was embodied in various forms of loyalist political discourse, from government directives like the homilies against rebellion to comprehensive works of political science.³

This authoritarian school of criticism, anticipated by L. C. Knights and G. Wilson Knight, and extended by J. Dover Wilson, constructed its model of Elizabethan culture from a highly selective range of sources, arbitrarily privileged and tendentiously assembled. The sources drawn on are either works of government propaganda or of Tudor apology from the more conservative ‘organic intellectuals’ of the state (Tillyard asserts for instance that the Machievellian school of Italian humanist thought had no impact on English culture); or convenient details arbitrarily stripped from works which are by no means as reductively orthodox as Tillyard implies. These materials constitute a fair description of the dominant ideology of Elizabethan society: in no sense do they represent a complete or even adequate picture of the true complexity and contradictoriness of culture and ideology in this rapidly-changing, historically-transitional period. In the writings of Tillyard the plays derive their ‘historical’ character entirely from the very rigid ideological constrictions of their own time: they present the past as a mirror-image of the present; they speak of the history of the late sixteenth century rather than the history of the later middle ages; they are historical evidence rather than historiography.

III

In the last twenty years this model of Elizabethan culture has been thoroughly displaced. Historical scholarship has demonstrated, by researching more deeply into the cultural and ideological context of Tudor and Elizabethan England, that this ‘world-picture’, powerful and influential though it may have been, was only one dimension of Renaissance ideology, an official or orthodox world-view held, imposed and preached by church and state and by an organic establishment intelligentsia. In practice, Elizabethan culture was as diverse and as contradictory as could be expected of the culture of a rapidly-changing and at times turbulent historical period. Not every Elizabethan accepted the state's official ideology: there were Catholics who thought differently from Protestants, Puritans who thought differently from either, and not only about religion; there were apologists for absolute monarchy and opponents of it. This is more than just a way of saying that in any society there is likely to be a wide diversity of opinion about everything, more than a liberal celebration of cultural plurality: it is rather an insistence that in any society there are connected but separable and conflicting ideologies, dominant, residual and emergent; antagonistic and competing bodies of thought and systems of value, which in their perpetual struggle for political power constitute the complex and contradictory structure of a given historical conjuncture.

In particular these competing ideologies delivered different modes of understanding the past. As long ago as 1957 Irving Ribner wrote:

What Tillyard says of Shakespeare is largely true, but by limiting the goals of the serious history play within the narrow framework of Halle's particular view, he compresses the wide range of Elizabethan historical drama into entirely too narrow a compass. There were other schools of historiography in Elizabethan England. The providential history of Halle, in fact, represents a tradition which, when Shakespeare was writing, was already in decline.⁴

It was however the encyclopaedic chronicles of Halle and Holinshed, with their heritage of medieval providentialism, that Shakespeare tended to use as major sources for his English historical dramas; and before considering the importance of the different schools of historiography, those sources should be re-examined to determine whether or not they contain historiographical materials of sufficient complexity to engage the interests of an intellectual probably quite uncommitted to antiquated medieval theories of providential disposition; to establish whether the writing of history in the period prior to the emergence of the historical drama, though not as yet graduating to the sophistication and objectivity of the ‘new historiography’, was not more complex in practice than the medieval theories the historians sometimes espoused.

Sixteenth-century England was itself, of course, a period which experienced crises of the monarchy, though no supplanting of the Tudor dynasty. The historical period which, above all others, Tudor historiographers sought to analyse, that stretching from the death of Richard II to the accession of Henry VII (1399-1485)—the period given shape by Halle's Union and Shakespeare's two tetralogies—was much more notable for its dynastic changes and civil conflicts. A simple theological theory of history such as that outlined by Tillyard would have been singularly ill-adapted for understanding the battles, real and ideological, of those turbulent times; in fact the Tudor historians were not confined within any such simple and reductive theoretical framework. One writer who has helped to subvert the Tillyardian view is H. A. Kelly,⁵ who undertook a massive study of the Tudor historians and their own sources in fifteenth-century chronicles, to reveal some of the complexities underlying the whole Tudor historiographical enterprise. Kelly's main theme is the attempt to disprove that there was any general acceptance of providential theories of history in the Renaissance; and in the course of making this argument he uncovers much of interest and significance about Renaissance historical writing. Kelly shows that roughly three bodies of myth were generated in the period 1399-1485, and transmitted to the humanist historians of the early Renaissance—Polydore Vergil, Halle, Holinshed: a Lancastrian myth, a Yorkist myth (subsuming material sympathetic to Richard II), and a Tudor myth. When Richard fell, opinions were naturally divided between Ricardian and Lancastrian sympathisers: French chroniclers such as Froissart and Jean Creton wrote of Richard's fall as an unjust tragedy; while Thomas Walsingham gave a Lancastrian account—God punished Richard for the murder of Woodstock, and inspired Henry Bolingbroke's return from banishment. The Lancaster myth is summarised by Kelly:

The corrupt reign of Richard II was providentially overthrown by Henry Bolingbroke, his cousin, who was next in line for the crown. God continued to bestow his benificence upon the new king until the end of his life, and showed his favour even more to his pious son, Henry V, and aided him in maintaining his sovereignty both in England and in France.⁶

The York myth reversed the Lancaster myth: the Lancastrians were usurpers who overthrew the rightful king; they were providentially deprived of their stolen crown by the divinely supported claim of the true heirs, the Yorkists. In the Tudor myth, the Lancastrian line was divinely vindicated and restored in the person of Henry VIII, the Yorkist usurpation punished, but with their royal pretensions appeased—the heiress Elizabeth joined in marriage to the inheritor of the Lancastrian right.

Tudor historians drew on these accounts, often in a judicious and discriminating way, creating their own interpretations from collation of their diversified sources. Polydore Vergil, for example, Halle's primary source, accepted some aspects of both the Lancastrian and Yorkist myths. He regarded Richard II as imprudent, though not deserving of the fate he encountered; but he didn’t condemn Henry IV, and regarded Henry V as the recipient of divine grace. Later he suggests that the loss of France after Henry V's death was providential—God was on France's side—and he admires Jeanne d’Arc; though there is no corresponding attack on Henry VI. An intelligent humanist account like Vergil's could choose from a wide range of interpretations and construct a narrative which, despite its attempt to subsume all these details into an overriding providential pattern, contains much awareness and evidence of the ideological conflicts which naturally characterised the period under discussion. This is so even in the chronicle of Halle, which is conventionally regarded as the major source of the providential theory of the history of England from 1399-1485, and of the Tudor myth. Halle in fact was himself extremely sceptical about providential explanations of history. And it is particularly the case in Holinshed, whose encyclopaedic method of compilation gives a very full representation to diverse and contradictory accounts.

Shakespeare's historical sources, then, were more complex than we often take them to be. Through their compilation of the ideological conflicts inscribed in the fifteenth-century chronicles, they offered to the Elizabethan dramatists a rich and detailed repository of historical evidence, the materials necessary for a more rational and objective understanding of the past.

The materials themselves, of course, were not enough: every ‘understanding’ of history is to some degree ideological, and the providential theory embodied in the Tudor myth was particularly adept at incorporating contradictions—no event, however unpredictable or apparently the result of an arbitrary and capricious chance, can resist explanation in terms of an overriding divine will, mediated through the complex machinery of ‘fortune’ and the ‘secondary causes’ of human action. A new historiography could not be constructed simply on the basis of a broader and more diverse reservoir of empirical evidence; for such materials to attain a new significance, they had to be incorporated into new theoretical models, new modes of conceptual analysis, new techniques of investigation and new methods of sociological definition.

IV

Several post-Tillyard critics discussing the English history plays have observed that historiography in this period was not a passive reflector of medieval providential theology nor a loyal transmitter of Tudor political commonplace, but a varied and changing activity producing different and competing methods and forms. Providentialism was part of the cultural apparatus of medieval Christian Europe and, with the Reformation and consequent cultural isolation of the Tudor nation-state, lost its predominant position: compared with the theology of Aquinas the providentialism of the Tudor myth was a feeble affair, self-evidently apologetic, in its extreme form of Stuart absolutism ripe for interrogation and challenge by the Puritan idea of providence, which saw the course of history in quite different terms. ‘Modern’ historiography was established in the early seventeenth century in the writings of Bacon, Stow, Camden and Selden, in the studies of philologists, the curiosity of antiquarians, the passion and patronage of bibliophiles, the conscientiousness of public recordkeepers. From these varied roots grew the recognisable shape of secular, empiricist, progressive historiography, later to become ‘Whig’ history, later still to become visible as itself historically relative, inseparable from the ideological coherence of the bourgeois state. The period of the English Renaissance history play falls precisely between these decisive historical ‘breaks’, and represents inevitably a transitional period in which different ideas of history competed for dominance. The enormous success of the victorious historiography which emerged dominant after the Restoration should not be allowed to persuade us that it was always the only and inevitable historical method.

The old Christian providentialism continued to exert an influence upon even those writers whose findings increasingly seemed to contradict it, and it provided the Stuarts with the concept of divinely sanctioned monarchy which they developed into a defence of their legitimacy. It was giving way to the influence of Italian humanism, which brought a more secular and sceptical spirit of enquiry to bear on historical issues.⁷ Sir Thomas More's Historie of King Richard the Third (1513) followed the principles of Leonardo Bruni and his school: unlike Shakespeare's play, based on later sources, it has little to say of the operations of providence. Humanist history could be Christian, providential and apologetic, but its tendency was towards a more rationalist, secularised and positivist historiography. Where the medieval chronicles wrote of universal world history, beginning with the creation, treating indiscriminately historical events and biblical fictions, Italian humanists on the other hand wrote histories of their city-states, based on principles derived from classical historiography, observing sharp distinctions between truth and falsehood, rejecting myths of origin and studying historical records, glorifying the prince or oligarchy rather than God. The later Florentine school of Machievelli and Guicciardini, which made historiography a kind of political science, a method of harnessing history for the purposes of political instruction, also had a tangible impact on English writing, as testified by Bacon's Historie of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622).

It has been argued, for example by Irving Ribner, that in Italian humanism, and particularly in the political science of Machievelli, we can see the shape of a ‘new history’ emerging in Shakespeare's plays. Contrary to Tillyard's providentialist orthodoxy, critics such as Moody E. Prior (in The Drama of Power, 1973) have argued that in plays like Richard II the traditional ‘providential’ ideas are shown giving way to a new ‘political’ understanding of history: the breakdown of an order reposing on providence and the emergence of a new regime deploying a flexible political pragmatism.⁸ Clearly this distinction has considerable value, and is particularly helpful in providing a more genuinely historical approach to Richard II. On the other hand, the thought of the humanists does not by any means represent an accomplished transition from a medieval to a modern historiography. As organic intellectuals of the new Renaissance state, the humanists were concerned with history as a source of moral instruction and political wisdom: with how a prince should rule, how a people should conduct itself, in the light of an intelligent and informed reading of history. This concern with practical utility and contemporary relevance gave humanism common cause with medieval providentialism: both, being committed to learning from history, were forced to assume that past societies were essentially no different from the present. The classical sources used by the humanists, as J. G. A. Pocock observes, ‘did not quite reach the point of postulating that there existed, in the past of their own civilisation, tracts of time in which the thoughts and actions of men had been so remote in character from those of the present as to be intelligible only if the entire world in which they had occurred were resurrected, described in detail and used to interpret them’.⁹ Pocock further suggests that the humanist enterprise was self-contradictory: their original purpose was to resurrect an ancient world as precisely as possible in order to apply its lessons to the present, but the world they recovered was so utterly unlike their own world that the task of application became increasingly difficult.

The emphasis on humanist historiography as a means of interpreting Shakespeare's history plays, though a definite advance on the providentialist orthodoxy, has led critics into a complicity with those ideologues of the Italian Renaissance and their English apostles. Bacon is not Shakespeare and yet the history plays have often been discussed in terms of an extremely abstract definition of ‘politics’, conceived not as the specific discourses and practices of power in a particular historical moment, but as a Machievellian system located in the universal shabbiness of political practices throughout the ages. In criticism of the late 1960s and 1970s, the providential organicism of post-war reconstruction gave way (especially in American academic circles) to a sceptical and pessimistic existentialism, prone to reduce politics to a series of dirty tricks characteristic of the degenerate but unchanging nature of abstract ‘society’. A curious effect of this cultural matrix, to some extent negating its intensified historicity, is to elide the contradictions between the medieval and Renaissance worlds: medieval pessimism and humanist pragmatism, adopting an equally cynical view of human life as fundamentally unchanging and unchangeable, are made to share a common discourse. In both philosophies change occurs relative to a larger stability—the universal power of God or the unchanging imperfection of man. In both, little significance or value can be attached to many human actions, for the willed and conscious actions of men are overdetermined by a predetermined fate or the subtle power of the ruler. At least one work of recent criticism is remarkable for its open embracing of these apparently remote ideologies: The Lost Garden (1978) by John Wilders begins by rejecting both the orthodox view of the plays as patterns of divine providence, and the counter-orthodoxy which constitutes the plays as humanistic treatises teaching the secular lessons of history to rulers and peoples. They embody, rather, ‘the expression of a consistently-held view of the human condition as one in which the solution of one problem creates problems of another kind, in which men thrive or suffer in ways which do not correspond to any ideal principles of justice, and choices are forced upon them, not between right and wrong, but between various courses of action all more or less unsatisfactory’. This theory of ‘the human condition’ was achieved by conflating the pessimism of Boethius and St Augustine with the sceptical pragmatism of Machievelli; the result could be incorporated into the theological doctrine of the Fall of Man. ‘Shakespeare portrays history as a struggle by succeeding generations of men to establish ideal worlds which are beyond their power to create … portraying in social and political terms the theological idea of a “fallen” humanity’.¹⁰

V

Meanwhile, in circumstances apparently remote from the colourful world of the public playhouse, ‘modern’ history was being created: making use of the advances in philological studies, the growth of book and manuscript collections, the increased efficiency in techniques of record keeping, the ‘antiquarians’ were developing a science of historiography, approaching the past through empirically verifiable evidence; interested in the past as fact, not as theological pattern, moral instruction or political wisdom. William Camden's patriotic national history Britannia (1586), John Stow's Survey of London (1598) a middle-class urban history, and John Selden's secularising History of Tithes (1618), which offered a naturalistic explanation of theologically sanctioned customs, can be regarded as landmarks in the growth of the new historiography. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the writing of history was approaching the point where the past would become visible as nothing more or less than ‘the history of man pursuing his ends’, a naturalistic rather than a providential process, and therefore subject to question and rational analysis; not a mirror-image of the present, but a lost world of experience as alien as the most distant foreign country.¹¹

This latter point, which brings us to the heart of the argument, has to be approached with great delicacy. It would be foolish to underestimate, in this period or any other, the overpowering force of the universalist idea of human nature. If the Italian humanist could walk with ease and familiarity into the civilisations of Greece and Rome, what Elizabethan Englishman would be capable of recognising his own national history as in any way remote or foreign to his immediate experience? Camden wrote for the patriotic noble, Stow for the proud London bourgeois, both anxious to establish continuity with their own past, not to voyage into strange and uncharted seas of alien history. And yet it was in this very period that European scholars discovered and guessed at the most remarkable and disturbing feature of their history: the fact that, in the centuries between the fall of Rome and their own civilisation there had developed, flourished and decayed a unique and self-contained social formation, with its own peculiar economic and military systems, its own hierarchical social structure, its own individual codes of values and conventions of behaviour: feudalism.

It was in legal theory that this great breakthrough took place in England: in the developments of constitutional and jurisprudential thought characteristic of a period when questions of right and legitimate title, and debates on forms of government, were emerging into prominence and sharpening until they became life-or-death issues in the Civil War.¹² The French humanist school of legal scholars in the sixteenth century attained a highly sophisticated understanding of feudal customs by studying the only written systematisation of feudal law, the Lombard Libri Feudorum. They succeeded in defining the central relationship of feudalism, and debated whether its origin should be traced back to Roman law or to the customs of Germanic barbarian tribes. A Scots historian, Sir Thomas Craig, who studied law in Paris in the late 1550s, applied the findings of the French scholars to his own country, arguing that feudal law had been established in England at the Norman Conquest, in Scotland a century earlier through an alliance with France, and remained the basis of all property law to the present day. Though he failed to recognise the passing of feudalism, Craig was able to recognise that in England the Norman Conquest succeeded in establishing an entirely new social form, wiping away all Anglo-Saxon law and custom. It was this acknowledgment of the possibility of fundamental social change—the realisation that a historically-constituted social structure could be created simply by military conquest, and could subsequently wither away leaving a legacy of custom and practice sustained by, but barely intelligible to, subsequent generations—that offered the most radical challenge to the dominant universalist ideas of permanence in human societies. In legal thought those ideas were embodied firmly in the institution of the English common law. Common Law is the law of custom and precedent: not a written body of theoretical doctrines or a systematised structure of legal rules, but an empirical assemblage of practices conceived as immemorial custom. The law was supposed to evolve organically, always changing but always the same, a premise which permitted the lawyer to read back existing law into the remote past, and hold that no radical constitutional change had ever taken place:

For the Common Law of England is nothing else but the Common Custom of the Realm, and a Custom which hath obtained the force of a Law is always said to be Jus non scriptum: for it cannot be made or created either by Charter, or by Parliament, which are Acts reduced to writing, and are always matter of Record: but being only matter of fact, and consisting in use and practice, it can be recorded and registered nowhere but in the memory of the people.¹³

The memory of the people is an unreliable historical record; and the ideologues of the Common Law held absolutely that the Norman Conquest, the one radical discontinuity in the nation's history, did not in fact change the native institutions. The laws of Anglo-Saxon England had been confirmed by William and maintained by his successors: this historical myth (initiated by the Normans themselves) became in the sixteenth century a means of denying the possibility of fundamental social change, in the past or in the future. The common law could of course be used as a parliamentary argument by identifying Parliament with immemorial custom in resistance to the royal prerogative. But defenders of the monarchy employed the same argument: there was certainly an immemorial law, and the king's prerogative was part of it. In the 1640s and 1650s the common-law constitutional position became identified with royalism: the best safeguard of an ancient constitution and an immemorial law was in fact the restoration of an ancient and immemorial monarchy. The progressive forces in the Civil War used the argument in an entirely different way: the Leveller theory of history insisted that the Norman Conquest had fundamentally changed the old native customs, by imposing a system of tyranny (the ‘Norman yoke’) on Anglo-Saxon representative institutions. And while common-law apologists like Sir Edward Coke believed that the law was immemorial,

What Walwyn, Lilburne and Winstanley said was the very reverse of this. Being engaged in a revolt against the whole existing structure of the common law, they declared that there had indeed been a Conquest; the existing law derived from the tyranny of the Conquerer and partook of the illegitimacy that had characterised his entire rule. Their historicism was not conservative. It was a radical criticism of existing society; the common-law myth stood on its head, as Marx said he had stood Hegel. Both parties indeed looked to the past and laid emphasis on the rights of Englishmen in the past, but what the common lawyers described was the unbroken continuity between past and present, which alone gave justification to the present; while the radicals were talking of a golden age, a lost paradise in which Englishmen had enjoyed liberties that had been taken from them and must be restored.¹⁴

The great English discoverer of feudalism was Sir Henry Spelman, an antiquarian whose scattered writings were haphazardly published between 1626 and 1721.¹⁵ Spelman's research produced a comprehensive description of feudal relationships, customs and institutions, and also offered a historical view of feudal society as a system introduced into England in the eleventh century and decaying in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: once history revealed the existence of freeholders attending Parliament, voluntarily rather than in fulfilment of a statutory obligation to the king, feudal relations were visibly, at that point, a thing of the past.

VI

While it is possible with confidence to ascribe the origins of Shakespeare's historical plays to the Tudor chronicles and the humanist histories, there is no possibility of postulating such a cause-and-effect relation between the new historical ideas and the drama; and to argue that the plays express a seventeenth-century historical consciousness will seem a very unhistorical procedure, inevitably drawing the charge of anachronism. In addition, the diverse cultural spaces occupied by those different activities will seem so remote as to defy identification: what connection could there be between the antiquarian historiographer, laboriously and conscientiously researching the dusty records of the past and preserving them for posterity—and the busy professional dramatist, writing quickly and carelessly for a showy and ephemeral medium of entertainment? But what we call literature is not merely the effect of a cause, and historical drama is not a mere reflection of a discourse which can claim greater authenticity by virtue of its proximity to the ‘real’ of history. Shakespeare's historical plays are not just reflections of a cultural debate: they are interventions in that debate, contributions to the historiographical effort to reconstruct the past and discover the methods and principles of that reconstruction. They are as much locations of historical controversy as the history books: they are, in themselves and not derivatively, historiography. We cannot establish whether or not Shakespeare was familiar with new currents of historical thought; but we cannot establish, except by inferring from the plays, precisely what ‘he’ thought about anything. We can only say that ‘he’ wrote his plays in a critical and transitional epoch of his national history, a few decades before that history was to be put in fundamental question by the greatest historical upheaval since the Norman Conquest; and we can attempt to maintain, by practical demonstration, that the plays can be read as serious attempts to reconstruct and theorise the past—as major initiatives of Renaissance historical thought.

I am proposing, and will be attempting to demonstrate, that these plays embody a conscious understanding of feudal society as a peculiar historical formation, revealing unique cultural characteristics, codes of value, conventions of manners, based on particular structures of political organisation and social relationship. This ‘understanding’ should not be exaggeratedly identified with the discoveries of a historical scientist like Spelman or with the radical speculations of a theoretician like Winstanley: we will find no attempt in Shakespeare to establish the origins of the feudum, or to define precisely the links between land tenure and military service; nor will we find any characterisation of the post-feudal ruling class as Norman tyrants—they are very definitely English, and Henry V has barely mastered the basics of French grammar. What the plays offer is rather a form of historiography analogous to the new science, in that it perceives human problems and experiences to be located within a definable historical form, a society visibly different in fundamental ways from the society of the late sixteenth century. That assertion in itself will require demonstration since the orthodox historicism of post-Tillyard criticism insists so firmly on the rudimentary character of Renaissance historiography that we will consider it very unlikely that a thoughtful Elizabethan would have been able to draw any firm historical distinction between the kingship of Edward III and that of Elizabeth; between the punctilious pride of a Renaissance noble and the ‘honour’ of a feudal knight; between the crusades and the war against Catholicism, the Turk and the Spaniard; between the blood-feud and the duel. I will be attempting to prove in a brief discussion of Henry V that despite the sixteenth century's inheritance of a visible legacy of feudalism, there is no question of the plays confusing the present with the past, the modern national sovereign of a Renaissance state with the warrior-king of a feudal society.

VII

In defining and describing these three historical methods—the chronicle-compilation with its providential theory and encyclopaedic practice; the didactic political science of humanism; and the ‘new history’, with its discovery of the pastness of the past—we have not entirely exhausted the diversified currents of English Renaissance historiography. The three ‘schools’ already mentioned will serve to characterise the historiography of a certain type of history play such as Richard II; but the approach to a play like Henry IV Part One cannot proceed without acknowledging other, more venerable modes of historical discourse.

Richard II represents a distinct type of historical drama, remarkable for its strict adherence to historical sources: in this respect it resembles Marlowe's Edward II, since in both plays action and incident are drawn largely or exclusively from written historiographical materials. However elaborate and innovative the dramatisation and poetic stylising, the events and characters (with a few minor exceptions, such as the gardeners in Richard II), follow those authenticated as historically accurate by the chronicles. Such plays derive from and are inextricably involved with a highly literate culture: they dramatise what has already been written, they speak to those already familiar with the literary discourses of historiography, with Halle and Holinshed. This fact has its implications for the plays' visions of history: they are necessarily deterministic, since they record a finished historical narrative cast into permanence by the fixity of the written word, a chronological sequence of events which admits of no change or fundamental reconstruction. Obviously Marlowe and Shakespeare reshaped their historical materials to create new narrative and dramatic patterns, but they observed, in these plays, a strict adherence to the authoritative diktat of the written historiographical text. It is natural then that these works should be tragic: in the secularising Renaissance drama tragic nemesis and historical determinism begin to share a common discourse. In Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II and Henry VI, images of flight and recapture symbolise the helplessness of the individual confronted by the ineluctable tyranny of history, the inescapable determination of the unalterable past.

The genre of the Renaissance history play was, however, considerably more elastic and flexible than the deterministic medium of these literary tragedies. It contains plays in which the style of historiographical drama interacts with older modes, with the conventions of romance and the manners of comedy. In such plays the historical drama reveals itself as very much a popular genre, often acknowledging by its themes and situations an origin on the public stages of citizen London. It did not recognise the absolute authority of the chronicles, maintaining a freedom to invent actions and situations without precedent, or quite unthinkable, in written history. Its sources were less the written chronicles, more materials from a still largely oral popular culture—ballads, romances, songs and stories incorporating legends, folk-tales, fairy-stories, myths. It represents an older kind of history, still indeed visible in the Tudor chronicles, in which the rich and varied fantasy worlds of myth and legend consort with the new positivism of historical narrative. In historical medleys such as James IV and also Edward I, historical characters mingle with citizens and figures of legend such as Robin Hood and Maid Marian. It was in fact this genre which produced the dominant tradition for the dramatic representation of Henry V: a comic tradition, in which the king's ‘riotous youth’ is used positively as a means of humanising the monarch. This king is not so much the hero of Agincourt as the good fellow of Eastcheap; not the mirror of all Christian kings, but the prince of carnival. In Dekker's The Shoemakers Holiday (1599), a carnival play based on the London apprentices' Shrove Tuesday Saturnalia, Henry V appears as a ‘bully king’ who associates freely with citizens and apprentices, dispenses justice and equality, resolves conflict and promotes harmony. The King does not pose as a common man, but acts like one; and Simon Eyre, the ‘madcap’ Lord Mayor, humorously claims ‘princely birth’—an inversion of social roles characteristic of carnival and festive, saturnalian comedy. The main source for the Henry IV and Henry V plays, the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, is mainly in the comic mode.

Anne Barton has discussed in an illuminating article¹⁶ the relation of Henry V to the comic history; and called attention to the most striking emblem of this drama's freedom from the determinism of historical event, the motif of the ‘king disguised’. Most of the romance and comic histories contain a king who poses as a common man and mingles with a varied company of folk heroes and common citizens, the outlaws of Sherwood forest or the shoemakers of London. In the tragic history, disguise is a hopeless attempt to evade the inevitable—capture, imprisonment, death: the king's tragic destiny written inexorably into the unchangeable past (cp. Henry VI). In the comic history disguise is a liberation: it dispenses with the distances of class and hierarchy separating the king from his common people, and enables a direct rapprochement (usually complicated by comic misunderstanding) between monarch and subject. Anne Barton quotes from Maurice Keen's The Outlaws of Mediaeval Legend, which sees the ‘informal meeting of commoner and king’ as ‘the wishdream of a peasantry harried by a new class of officials, an impersonal bureaucracy against which the ordinary man seemed to have no redress’:

They only knew that the king was the ultimate repository of a law whose justice they acknowledged, and they saw treason against him as a betrayal of their allegiance to God himself. If they could only get past his corrupt officers, whose abuse of the trust reposed in them amounted to treason in itself, and bring their case before the king, they believed that right would be done. Their unshakeable faith in the king's own justice was the most tragic of the misconceptions of the mediaeval peasantry, and the ballad-makers and their audiences shared it to the full.¹⁷

The motif of the disguised king certainly originates from that historical conjuncture: but the image of a king humanised, crossing barriers of hierarchy and class to mingle freely with his subjects in mutual affection and concord, seems almost endemic to the ideology of monarchy itself: it has its modern counterpart in that popular curiosity about the lives of the royal family, which mingles a gratified welcome at their revealed humanity with a malicious and cynical contempt at their descending to the level of their own ‘subjects’. But there is also a strong egalitarian impulse behind this wish to confront the ruler directly, man to man—to be able to explain the abuses, demonstrate the social evils which the monarch would surely redress if only he could be made aware. A tragic misconception, certainly, but scarcely a futile one: it was the programme of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the ambition of the Blanketeers' March of 1816, the slogan of the 1930s Hunger Marches and of the ‘Right to Work’ marches of today.

It is misleading to explain such a mixed form in terms of a single ideology; the style is more a receptacle for varied and possibly even antagonistic ideologies to interact. Perhaps the primary ideological function of such drama was to endorse monarchy—to propose that the rigidity of hierarchical social relations concealed the true equality of king and subject, ruler and ruled. But the romance mode of such plays could also function quite differently: by posing an ideal commonwealth in romantic-comic terms, a play could differentiate sharply between its own self-evidently fantastic world and the reality its fantasy denied. Anne Barton attaches the plays too firmly to that peasant ideology (which could scarcely have had much currency in the London of the 1590s); and consequently underestimates those potentialities of the comic romance which Shakespeare exploited most strikingly in Henry IV:

By 1599, the comical history was a consciously reactionary, an outdated dramatic mode …¹⁸

In fact Barton does not acknowledge the comic history genre to be active in Shakespeare's plays at all. Rather, she differentiates sharply between the comical history and Shakespeare's essentially tragic history, showing that in Henry V the king attempts to implement the rapprochement of monarch and subject but fails, for he is caught in an insoluble contradiction between the king's personal and his public natures. The later play The True and Honourable History of Sir John Oldcastle, by contrast, turns Shakespeare's tragic history back into comic romance:

As it was defined by Shakespeare, the tragical history became a serious, and politically somewhat incendiary, examination into the nature of kingship.¹⁹

This differentiation of ideological functions between the separate categories of historiographical drama is unsatisfactory. The tragic history, with its submission to the deterministic authority of written historiography, certainly represents a new secular positivism associated with the new priorities of the Tudor state, reflecting the new humanistic status of history and of the written word. But it would be unwise to categorise every cultural development of that state as necessarily ‘progressive’. The Tudor construction of a positivistic historiography, initiated by Henry VII, was certainly an instrumental factor in the consolidation of the Tudor state apparatus, and it was also a method of imposing new and increasingly sharp ideological constraints on the human understanding of the past: history became necessity, and the outcome of necessity the Tudor dynasty. The determinism of the tragic history foreclosed on the liberty of the comic history play; evidently Shakespeare recognised this process, since he moved from the pure chronicle-play style to a drama constructed on a confrontation of chronicle and popularcomic historical discourses. In Henry IV, it is actually the popular tradition which points to a progressive, egalitarian and democratic tendency: an oppositional energy which is gradually narrowed, controlled and ultimately destroyed by the necessitarianism of chronicle drama.

The comic history, then, is a mixed mode, without the stylistic consistency of the chronicle play. It is fantastic and utopian rather than realistic and historically accurate. It is a popular form, which makes free use of the conventions of drama, and thereby provides a space of freedom from event, from the necessity of a complete history; thus a historical character can be liberated from his historical destiny, can play roles not dictated to him by the written authority of history. It is festive and saturnalian in character—the mighty are put down from their seats, and those of low degree exalted. The plays are written and performed as popular entertainment: they make much use of song, dance, popular pastime and holiday custom. They are a contradictory fusion of chronicle and carnival.

Henry IV is a ‘mixed’ type of drama not only in Coleridge's sense of the fusion of comedy with history; but in its rapprochement of popular and patrician discourses. Broadly speaking, the central figure of the chronicle-history dimension is the king himself, and the central pre-occupation is an extension of the historical narrative commenced in Richard II. The popular-comic-history element is dominated by the figure of Falstaff, centre of an oppositional play of comic energies. Prince Hal straddles the two dimensions and seeks reconciliation between them, a reconciliation achieved at the end of Henry IV Part One, and broken at the conclusion to Part Two.

VII

Shakespeare's plays of English history are chronicles of feudalism: they offer empirical reconstruction and theoretical analysis of a social formation firmly located in the past, and distinctly severed from the contemporary world. In this historiographical reconstruction, which focuses on the decline of feudalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, society is seen as a historical formation built on certain fundamental contradictions, and incapable of resolving or overcoming them within the framework of political and ideological determinants provided by the historical basis itself. As the vision of feudal society is historically specific, the disclosure of contradictions cannot be defined as reversion to medieval pessimism or a compliance with machievellian pragmatism: if a conception of the past admits the possibility of fundamental social change, the contradictions of a particular historical formation cannot be identified with ‘the human condition’; and an acknowledgment of distance between past and present confirms that a society's contradictions can be resolved or negated simply by the fact of radical and irreversible social change.

In the sixteenth century this recognition of historical relativity was a progressive development: the consciousness of a new society awakening to the fact of past transformation, the possibility of future change. Inevitably, however, the progressive quality of this discovery was equally relative to the limitations and contradictions of the emergent social formation, the nascent capitalist state. A few years after Shakespeare's death the transitional society of the Tudor state was overthrown by a bourgeois revolution, which required for its ideological constitution a historiography based on the principle of change. The bourgeois revolution accomplished, the alliance between old and new ruling classes required a conservative historiography, to secure ideological stability by insisting on the gradualist, evolutionary nature of social change: the revolutionary historiography of Milton and Winstanley was smoothly incorporated into the moderate empiricism of ‘Whig’ history.

Shakespeare's direct analysis of feudalism in Richard II seems to be accomplished within the context of this ‘new’ historiography: both the providential and the pragmatic views of history are strategically manipulated within the framework of a theory conscious of the relativity of both. The historical approach is progressive insofar as it locates its problems in a self-contained society of the past, neither idealised nor regretted but objectively analysed and evaluated. But the play is also potentially reactionary, since its combination of tragic form and literate, deterministic historiography can too easily collapse into a resigned pessimism where ‘mutability’, without its parent principle of universal order, becomes an appropriate metaphor for the ‘human condition’. Perhaps it was a growing dissatisfaction with the tragic determinism of the literary chronicle-drama that induced Shakespeare to bring into play a force capable of challenging it, a popular and comic mode of historical drama which challenges deterministic historiography with the utopian purity of an inflexible and unqualified demand for freedom. The new historiography was in fact emergent bourgeois historiography, and in Henry IV Part One an older popular culture is invoked to interrogate the terms on which that historiography was constructing both the past and the present.

Notes

1. See for example John Wilders, The Lost Garden (London, Macmillan, 1978), discussed below p. 26.

2. See Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It (New York, 1947), pp. 123-5.

3. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944).

4. Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 12.

5. H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970)

6. Ibid., p. 36.

7. See for example Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1947), pp. 59-60.

8. Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973). To some extent Prior's book is an extension of the arguments of L. C. Knights and Derek Traversi, though his attempt to relate intellectual currents in the plays to contemporary Renaissance ideas was an innovatory intervention.

9. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1957), p. 1.

10. Wilders, The Lost Garden, p. 9.

11. See F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).

12. See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, passim.

13. Sir John Davies: ‘Dedication’ to Irish Reports (Les Reports des Cases et Matters en Ley, Resolves et Adjudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland), London, 1674. (The spelling and punctuation of quotations from sixteenth and seventeenth century sources have been modernised throughout).

14. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, p. 126.

15. Ibid., p. 93.

16. Anne Barton, ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History’, in Joseph G. Price (ed.), The Triple Bond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975).

17. Ibid., p. 97, quoting from Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Mediaeval Legend (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).

18. Barton: ‘The King Disguised’, p. 111.

19. Ibid., p. 116.

Select Bibliography

Barton, Anne, ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History’ in Joseph G. Price (ed.), The Triple Bond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975)

Campbell, Lily B., Shakespeare's Histories (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1947)

Davies, Sir John, ‘Dedication’ to Irish Reports (Les Reports des Cases et Matters en Ley, Resolves et Adjudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland (London, 1674)

Fussner, F. Smith, The Historical Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962)

Harbage, Alfred, As They Liked It (New York, 1947)

Keen, Maurice, The Outlaws of Mediaeval Legend (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961)

Kelly, H. A., Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970)

Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1957)

Prior, Moody E., The Drama of Power (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973)

Ribner, Irving, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957)

Tillyard, E. M. W., Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944)

Wilders, John, The Lost Garden (London: Macmillan, 1978)