SOURCE: “Ideological Conflict, Alternative Plots, and the Problem of Historical Causation,” in Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 40-85.

[In the following essay, Rackin identifies a conflict between two Renaissance theories of history, providentialism and Machiavellianism, as alternate explanations of historical causation. This conflict, maintains Rackin, can be found in Shakespeare's history plays, and it is the source of their theatrical energy and the inspiration for the audience's contemplation of the problems related to historical interpretation. Rackin goes on to investigate how this ideological conflict is portrayed in different ways in the history plays.]

Modern criticism of Shakespeare's history plays can be divided conveniently into two main camps, both concerned with the problem of historical causation. First there was the “Tudor myth” school associated with E. M. W. Tillyard, which found in the plays “a universally held,” and “fundamentally religious” historical “scheme,” governed by divine providence, beginning with the “distortion of nature's course” in the deposition and murder of Richard II and moving purposefully “through a long series of disasters and suffering and struggles” to the restoration of legitimacy and order under the Tudors.¹

Then—and this side still holds the field—there was the rebellion against the Tudor myth theory, a rebellion that has taken two forms. Sometimes it takes the form of a refusal of ideology. Shakespeare, we are reminded, was always concerned with the universal qualities of human nature and experience. Accordingly, an interpretation based on the claim that the plays deal in ideologies belies their rich complexity and literary value by reducing them to political propaganda.² Most often, however, the rebellion takes the form of an attack on the Tudor myth itself, either a demonstration that it never existed, except in the minds of Tillyard and his followers, or a demonstration that Shakespeare was actually debunking rather than dramatizing the Tudor myth.

In this view, “Shakespeare was no spokesman for Tudor orthodoxy” but instead “used the stage to undermine” the conventional pieties.³ In fact, “there is no other Elizabethan writer [who] so acutely and extensively portrays the weakness, folly, incompetence, and wickedness of English kings.”⁴ Moreover, Tudor opinion was by no means so univocal or conservative as Tillyard and his followers supposed. The myth of the Great Chain of Being was “widely denied,” religious skepticism as well as credulity was commonplace, and “insubordination, mutiny and wholesale desertion occurred repeatedly in the princely passages, which were often preserved in appendices), Tillyard's version inevitably led to a consideration of all the material that had to be left out to make the case. The rejection of the conservative, providentialist view of the history plays also has obvious connections with larger trends in twentieth-century literary study, with the changing populations of university departments of English and history, with the new historical sophistication that refuses, in Stephen Greenblatt's words, to attribute “a single political vision” to an “entire population” or even to an “entire literate class,”⁵ and with the movement from the politically conservative New Critical tradition that venerated T. S. Eliot and the American Agrarians to the typically left-wing politics of contemporary European theorists who have influenced Anglo-American literary criticism during the seventies and eighties. In these same years the view of the politics of Shakespeare's history plays has also moved from conservative (or reactionary) to liberal (or radical). From the present vantage point, it is easy to see how Tillyard and his followers projected their own nostalgia for the medieval past and their own distaste for the competitive, individualistic modern age into the plays and only slightly more difficult to see how more recent critics, in constructing a new set of texts for the plays, have been expressing their own rejections of traditionalist mythologies and reifications.”⁶

It is not surprising that both sets of critics have found ample ammunition in the plays to defend their claims, for the plays do in fact offer plentiful evidence for both views. Dramatic scripts, open to a variety of directorial emphases and actors' interpretations, the plays lend themselves easily to the kind of interpretive “foregrounding” I have been describing. What the controversy among the critics both fails to acknowledge and demonstrates, however, is that although neither ideological position is clearly or consistently privileged, the conflict between them lies very close to the center of Shakespeare's historical project. Exploring the dramatic implications and exploiting the theatrical potential of rival theories of historical causation, the plays project into dramatic conflict an important ideological conflict that existed in their own time, not only by having dramatic characters speak and act from opposing ideological vantage points but also by inciting these conflicts among their audiences.

The conflict in Renaissance theories of history between providential and Machiavellian views of historical causation involved the most important cultural and social issues of a changing world: the conflicts between feudal values and capitalist practice and relationship between the two orders of the divine and the human. The demonic Machiavel of the Elizabethan stage expressed a recognition that Machiavelli's theories were irreconcilably opposed to the providential vision of human history that justified the existing social and political order. To a deeply political age, Machiavelli offered the attraction of shrewd political advice, but he also represented what Felix Raab has described as “the horror of atheism, of a political world no longer determined by the Will of a universal Providence manifested in Christian precepts of political morality.”⁷

Shakespeare, like his audience, was obviously fascinated with these issues: ten of the thirty-five plays listed at the beginning of the First Folio were English “histories,” and in every one of those plays the conflict about historical causation plays a crucial role. The audience at a Shakespearean history play, struggling to make sense out of conflicting evidence and uncomfortably reminded of the difficulty of explaining historical causation, is forced to enact the same conflicts that divided Renaissance historians. The conflicts among the twentieth-century critics illustrate this process: the critics themselves can be seen as a uniquely accessible divided audience, offering conflicting testimony as they describe and rationalize their conflicting responses to the ideological struggles depicted in and incited by the plays. Thus, although the twentieth-century conflict between the Tillyard school of “Tudor myth” advocates on the one hand and their revisionist debunkers on the other can be seen as a response to twentieth-century political and cultural forces, it can also be seen as a response to the rhetoric of the plays. The ideological conflict between providential and Machiavellian notions of historical causation was built into the plays from the beginning, generating theatrical energy and engaging the audience in the problematic process of historical interpretation.

Herbert Lindenberger, in fact, cites Shakespeare's English histories to illustrate his contention that it is a distinguishing mark of the history play genre to replace “the ordinary suspense of plot” with “a kind of intellectual suspense about the larger causes of action” (that is, about the question of historical causation):

To what extent are the events of Shakespeare's English historical cycle a working out of providential design (by which the deposition of Richard II must result in the ultimate downfall of the successors of Henry IV until the restoration of order by the first Tudor king) or a result of the weaknesses in character of the various kings (or, for that matter, the stroke of Fortune which cut off Henry V in his prime)? All these questions must, of course, remain unanswered—or, at best, tentatively answered, with new answers following to modify or contradict earlier ones.⁸

II

Subjecting conflicting propositions about historical truth and historical causation to the tests of dramatic action, Shakespeare's history plays can be seen as versions of trial by combat. In Richard II the ideological conflict between providential legitimacy and Machiavellian power is directly projected into the dramatic conflict between Richard and Bullingbrook. The ideological conflict forms the basis for opposed rhetorical appeals (and opposed modern interpretations)⁹ as Richard's theoretical claim to the throne as divinely anointed legitimate heir is supported by providential theory and poetic eloquence but opposed by Machiavellian logic and the hard evidence of Richard's personal and political failings and Bullingbrook's political and military superiority.¹⁰ It forms the basis for the ironic disparity in the opening scene between Richard's personal weakness (he cannot stop the quarrel between Bullingbrook and Mowbray) and his institutional authority (only he is authorized to adjudicate the quarrel). At the end of the scene, in a speech that expresses his ironic predicament, Richard capitulates in the face of Mowbray and Bullingbrook's stubborn refusal to give up their quarrel:

We were not born to sue, but to command,
Which, since we cannot do to make you friends,
Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,
At Coventry upon Saint Lambert's day.
There shall your swords and lances arbitrate
The swelling difference of your settled hate.

(I.i.196-201)

The first line is a proud assertion of Richard's inherited, institutional authority as king; the second an anticlimactic confession of his inability to exercise it. In the remainder of the speech he calls for a trial by combat, deferring the problem to the only authority superior to his own in the providential scheme that authorizes him, the will of God.

It is significant that Richard calls for a trial by combat, a chivalric ritual that must have had an enormous appeal for Shakespeare's original audience, many of whom would also have flocked to see the extravagant re-creations of medieval tournaments staged by courtiers at Queen Elizabeth's Accession Day tilts and open to the general public.¹¹ In both cases, the theatrical appeal of extravagant spectacle was reinforced by nostalgia, for both courtly and theatrical enactments of ritual combats evoked an imagined medieval world where divine providence legitimated earthly status.

Shakespeare throws enormous stress on the trial by combat in Richard II, deferring it and emphasizing its necessity with an invented scene between John of Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester, holdovers (as was the ritual for Shakespeare and his contemporaries) from an earlier world where power and legitimacy were united. The duchess urges Gaunt to avenge Richard's murder of her husband, but Gaunt argues with equal force that there is no way a good subject can avenge that crime without opposing the will of God:

God's is the quarrel, for God's substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caus'd his death, the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.

(I.ii.37-41)

There is nothing Gaunt can do, and nothing the duchess can say to make him change his mind. Faced with a dispute they cannot adjudicate and an ideological dilemma they cannot resolve, both Gaunt and the duchess turn to the trial by combat for providential adjudication. “God's is the quarrel,” and only God has the authority to resolve it.

Act I, scene iii, begins with all the formal preliminaries to the trial by combat, the anticipated resolution of the conflict between Richard and Bullingbrook (for which the conflict between Mowbray and Bullingbrook has been from the beginning the thinnest of screens) and the anticipated resolution of the ideological dilemma articulated in scene ii. But Richard interrupts the ceremony, refusing, after all the preliminaries have been accomplished, to allow the contest to proceed. When Richard stops the trial by combat he interferes with a symbolic embodiment of his own authority. Trial by combat is a ritual based upon the assumption that right makes might, an assumption that underlies the authority of the whole feudal system, including the authority of God's anointed king. In preventing the symbolic ritual of chivalry, Richard attacks the source of the only authority that makes him king. He also alienates Shakespeare's audience, for they, no less than the characters, have been waiting to see the tournament that Richard now interrupts, depriving them of the anticipated pleasure of seeing on stage a historical spectacle and the anticipated comfort of having their own doubts resolved by a clear, tangible demonstration of God's will.

Late in 2 Henry IV (IV.i.123-27), Mowbray's son will recall this scene, attributing enormous historical significance to Richard's reneging:

O, when the King did throw his warder down,
His own life hung upon the staff he threw;
Then threw he down himself and all their lives
That by indictment and by dint of sword
Have since miscarried under Bullingbrook.

Regardless of the accuracy of Mowbray's analysis (and it is suspect, since he assumes that his father would have defeated Bullingbrook, had the king allowed the trial to proceed), it serves as a reminder of the importance of Richard's refusal. Trial by combat occupies a central place in the conflict between providential and Machiavellian explanations of history because it forms a nexus of power and authority, a place where those two forces, opposed in the conflict between the two ideologies, are joined together in medieval practice and providential belief. Trial by combat is a crucial ritual in the scheme of divine right because, like the theory of divine right itself, it rests on the assumption that God takes a hand in human events, ensuring that might derives from right, that power derives from authority, and not the other way around.

In the vastly diminished world of 2 Henry VI, Shakespeare presents a very different trial by combat, parodically reduced to an inept contest between a terrified prentice and his drunken master, but the same issues are involved. This trial ends in a severely qualified version of divine justice when the poor prentice Peter, despite his lack of experience in arms, kills his master, Horner, and Horner confesses with his last breath that Peter spoke the truth when he accused him of the treasonous statement that the Duke of York was rightful heir to the crown (II.iii.94; I.iii.25-27). Shakespeare's modifications of his historical sources for this incident are suggestive. Neither Holinshed nor Hall verifies the servant's story or connects the charge of treason to York's claim to the throne. Both attribute the servant's victory to the master's drunkenness, and both end by reporting the servant's execution. Holinshed, in fact, specifically absolves the master of guilt, both in the marginal description of the episode—“Drunkennese the overthrow of right and manhood”—and in his account of it:

The said armourer was overcome and slaine; but yet by misgoverning of himselfe. For on the morow, when he should come to the field fresh and fasting, his neighbours came to him, and gave him wine and strong drinke in such excessive sort, that he was therewith distempered, and reeled as he went, and so was slaine without guilt. As for the false servant, he lived not long unpunished; for being convict of felonie in court of assise, he was iudged to be hanged, and so was, at Tiburne.¹²

In Holinshed's account, the servant's story is false, the incident is a warning against drunkenness and a lesson in obedience to earthly masters. Justice comes from the court of assizes rather than the judicial combat. All the implications are secular.

Shakespeare's entire reconstruction of the incident seems designed to raise the issue of providential justice but withhold an answer. He has Horner confess, departing from his historical sources to validate Peter's story, but he refuses to take the next step and attribute the victory to divine intervention. Henry VI reads the outcome as an unambiguous message from above—“God in justice hath reveal'd to us / The truth and innocence of this poor fellow” (II.iii.102-3)—but York urges Peter to “thank God, and the good wine in thy master's way” (II.iii.95-96). Shakespeare gives Henry the last word in this scene, but Henry's opinion is finally no more reliable than York's, for we have just seen Henry accepting Simpcox's bogus miracle as the work of “God's goodness” (II.i.82). If York has too much interest in discrediting Peter's story to offer reliable testimony, Henry is too credulous. On the one hand, there are Horner's confession and Henry's faith; on the other, York's cynical explanation and the authority of the chronicles. York and Henry offer alternative explanations for Peter's victory, but the world of this play provides no clear standard to adjudicate between them and no clear answer to the riddle of historical causation.¹³

In the providential world of Richard III, Richmond's victory will be clearly marked as the will of God, not only by the judgments of the other characters but also by the prophecies, curses, and prophetic dreams that give direct and unambiguous directions for its interpretation. In the world of Henry VI, by contrast, incessant battles between Yorkists and Lancastrians yield no clear pattern of victory, and the rhetoric of those plays yields no clear warrant of legitimacy. In a Machiavellian universe, rival truths have no means of adjudication but the law of force. The verdicts of force, however, are always provisional, always subject to contradiction by the next turn of the fortunes of battle. Trial by combat can only yield an uncontested verdict in a providential universe where victory means vindication because it represents a supernatural justification for the victorious side.

Richard II cannot allow the fight between Mowbray and Bullingbrook to proceed because, unlike the treacherous master in 2 Henry VI who expects to win even though he knows he is defending a lie and the cynical Duke of York who attributes Peter's victory to the wine his master drank before the battle, Richard really does believe in trial by combat, and he knows that Bullingbrook's charges are true. But once he throws his warder down, using his ritualistic authority to interrupt the ritual that authorizes him, he abandons the field to another kind of battle—the kind that really is decided by superior military and political power, the kind that Bullingbrook is sure to win.

The interrupted ritual at Coventry may well have been the last formal trial by battle in English history. The chronicles, including Holinshed's, emphasize its importance, and it is pictured in the Harleian MS.¹⁴ It is also the only formal trial by combat in any of Shakespeare's English histories. Richard is the only king in the two tetralogies with an unambiguous hereditary claim to the throne, rooted in an uncontested genealogy and ratified by divine right. The medieval world—and with it the possibility of ritualized judicial combat—disappears with his deposition.

In King John, set even farther back in the past but depicting an anachronistically modern world where the relationship between power and legitimacy is endlessly contested, trial by combat ends in frustration and stalemate. The immediate cause of contention is the city of Angiers. The city belongs, as its citizens admit, to the King of England, but neither citizens nor audience can be sure who that king is. John, who sits on the throne, bases his claim on “strong possession much more than … right” (I.i.40), but the true heir is a helpless child whose claim on the audience's allegiance is undermined by support from the French king and the Roman pope.

The conflict over Angiers is both the direct result and the direct expression of the larger conflict on which the entire play is based—the conflict between the two claimants to the English throne—and its ideological basis, the conflict between power (“strong possession”) and authority (“right”). The struggle for legitimacy represented within the play reaches out to engage the audience, who must try to decide where to place their allegiance as they watch the play. Shakespeare makes the analogy explicit in the trial-by-combat scene, where the citizens of Angiers standing on their battlements to watch the two contending armies are compared to an audience “in a theatre” who “gape and point at … industrious scenes and acts of death” (II.i.375-76). Both sides have appealed with equal eloquence to the citizens (and the audience) to accept their claims to the city and the English crown, but the citizens (speaking, I believe, for the audience) have refused to admit either claim until one is proved legitimate: “Till you compound whose right is worthiest, / We for the worthiest hold the right from both” (II.i.281-82). Turning to action when words fail, John and Philip try to adjudicate their quarrel in battle, but the audience does not see the battle, which takes place offstage, and at the end of it both sides claim victory. The audience, like the citizens, still has no way to decide, for neither side can present a clear claim to the English throne, and the trial by combat has ended in a draw.

The Bastard's scornful description of the citizens of Angiers exposes the element of voyeurism and theatrical exploitation in all these scenes of trial by combat:

By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings,
And stand securely on their battlements
As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death.

(II.i.373-76)

The Bastard's contemptuous metadramatic comparison demystifies the trial by combat, extending the nihilism of his world to encompass the audience in Shakespeare's theater. Debased by theatrical representation, the mortal conflicts of kings and noblemen are reduced to meaningless spectacles designed to amaze and titillate a vulgar public. However, the same theatrical appeal that the Bastard cites to empty the scene of significance and value serves, by merging the audience with the spectators on stage, to engage them in the ideological dilemmas that lie at the center of the plays. The Bastard's demystification exposes the element of vulgar spectacle in all theatrical reenactments of battles, but it elides the ethical and ideological significance of the trial by combat, a significance which is finally theatrical as well. As Herbert Lindenberger points out, “Drama has never thrived well on moral neutrality.”¹⁵ The ethical conflicts the trials attempt to resolve constitute an important element of their interest for theater audience as well as characters onstage. Directly or indirectly, the trials represent efforts to clarify the relationship between power and authority and answer the riddle of legitimacy. Appealing to God to adjudicate conflicts that earthly justice cannot resolve and attempting to read God's verdicts in the outcomes of physical conflict, the trials attempt to resolve in dramatic action the crucial and contested issues surrounding the problem of historical causation.

A trial by combat constitutes a miniature plot that stages conflicting propositions about historical truth in the form of physical action, its outcome designed to ratify one proposition and discredit the other. As such, it exhibits in simplified microcosm the dynamics of the larger and more complicated plots of the plays. A plot, as Aristotle explained, is a proposition about causation. If plot is, as he said, the soul of tragedy, it is also the theme of history. A historical plot, whether in a narrative history or in a play about history, constitutes a proposition about historical causation. At the same time, as Michael Quinn points out, “an idea about Providence is an idea about drama.”¹⁶ A providential view of history constructs an unbroken chain of historical causation, but a Machiavellian view interrupts that chain, constructing each age as unique, the product of Fortuna, or accident, and individual will.¹⁷ Hence the episodic structure of King John and the Henry VI plays and the radical separation of King John, the most Machiavellian of all Shakespeare's histories, from the temporal and causal chain that unites the two tetralogies. The varied structures of Shakespeare's history plays not only produce a variety of dramatic forms and imagined worlds; they also express changing conceptions of historical causation.

III

The issue of authority is closely implicated with issues of historical causation and dramatic structure. In a Machiavellian universe, where the hand of God is absent or invisible, so is the hand of the author: the dramatic structure becomes loose and episodic, the principle of causation becomes inscrutable, and the audience has no guidance to help them discover significance or assign value as they watch the action unfold. The issue of authority is also implicit in the long-standing preference of conservative critics for Richard III and the plays of the second tetralogy and their superior canonical status to King John and the Henry VI plays. Set in a providential universe, graced with aesthetic unity, these plays construct a world where the authority of the playwright as well as that of God is clearly manifest. In King John and the Henry VI plays, by contrast, where royal authority is ambiguous and the hand of providence is absent or invisible, the dramatic structure is loose and episodic, as if the hand of the playwright were also effaced. Indeed, many of the earlier critics saw in these plays undigested lumps of chronicle material. To John Middleton Murry, for instance, 3 Henry VI seemed a “‘mere record’, with ‘no trace of speculation on the causes of things’”; and theories of multiple authoriship were often advanced.¹⁸ In these theories, Shakespeare's authority as playwright was attacked just as the dramatic structure of the plays deposed the king from his expected central role and their represented action attacked the king's authority and that of his office.¹⁹

At the opposite extreme, in Richard III, which delineates a process of providential retribution and restoration, the hand of the playwright is all too apparent; and although the play has a complicated textual history, Shakespeare's authorship has not been seriously questioned. The play has a tight, linear dramatic structure, and the king is a strong, central character, so dominant, in fact, that he has no real antagonist in the play except providence itself. Margaret curses, and she is a powerful dramatic presence, but she has no real part in the plot. Richmond comes in at the end to take Richard's crown, but he is a deus ex machina rather than a dramatic presence, and his tiny part in the play could easily be given to a minor actor. The play, in fact, has a large cast of minor characters, but rather than diffusing Richard's dominance, they serve to reinforce it, for most of them could be listed as “assorted victims.”

Everyone who dies in Richard III is Richard's victim, and, with the exception of the two innocent babes murdered in the Tower, everyone who dies expresses his recognition that he is paying for past crimes. Finally, when all the dying is done, the kingdom is purged of evil and the succession purged of ambiguity. All claimants to the throne except for Richmond and Elizabeth have been killed, and their marriage will unite the warring dynasties. In the Machiavellian universe of 3 Henry VI, by contrast, death is meaningless or, at best, pathetic, and the play ends with the succession still in question and Richard of Gloucester plotting to take the throne.

Most of the twentieth-century debates about Shakespeare's history plays center on various, related forms of authority: the authority of the king, the authority of God, the authority of the historical source, of the dominant ideology, of the authorial script. In fact, the arguments about Shakespeare's authorship recall (although they do not invoke) the Renaissance analogy between the author of a literary work and the Author of the universe. Julius Caesar Scaliger argued that the poet in the act of literary creation “makes himself another God, as it were.”²⁰The Arte of English Poesie (1589), attributed to George Puttenham, begins:

A Poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conformes with the Greeke word, for of poiein, to make, they call a maker Poeta. Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God; who without any travell to his divine imagination made all the world of nought. … Even so the very Poet makes and contrives out of his owne braine both the verse and matter of his poeme.²¹

The same analogy (and even more diffidence about making a comparison that might be construed as an irreverent usurpation of divine prerogative) appears in Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy (ca. 1583):

Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of nature: but rather give right honor to the Heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature, which in nothing he shows so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he brings things forth far surpassing her doings.²²

Puttenham uses a theological argument to celebrate the work of the poet. Sidney transforms a celebration of literary creativity into an affirmation of religious faith. Both make explicit the deep connections between aesthetic and theological issues implicit in the varied forms of Shakespeare's history plays and the modern scholarly debates about their ideological import. As William Camden wrote in the preface to his Annals of Queen Elizabeth (1615), “Although I know that matters military and politic are the proper subjects of an historian, yet I neither could nor ought to omit ecclesiastical affairs (for betwixt religion and policy there can be no divorce).”²³ The growing rift that Camden attempts to bridge lies beneath the dispute about historical causation and the problem of plot as well. As Wlad Godzich points out, “The problem of agency arises in modern times” as a legacy of the secularization that marked the end of the medieval world. For the Scholastics, although “human will could rise in opposition to the divine will … it did not have any agential power as such to determine the course of affairs of the world.” Secularization, Godzich argues, “let loose all that which had previously been an attribute of God,” thus producing the problem of agency and the problem of plot as well.²⁴ Writing in the time that saw the beginnings of that secularization and reconstructing historical narratives in the shape of dramatic plot, Shakespeare could hardly avoid confronting the problem of historical causation, which was also a problem of plot. To say that Shakespeare's English histories cannot be reduced to an extended sermon pro or contra Machiavel is not to say that the issues raised by the Machiavellian challenge to providential views of history are irrelevant to the plays, only that the ten plays can better be construed as series of dramatic meditations than a sustained univocal sermon.

IV

History is always constructed in retrospect. Thus, the criticism of the 1940s and 1950s found in the medieval world, and in Shakespeare's representations of it, a story of national union and English patriotism that answered to their own desires and needs, just as the radical criticism of the present finds a story of conflict and subversion. In both cases, present desire is projected in the form of a historical plot: alternative political agendas construct alternative plots. In Shakespeare's own time, the Tudors, like the conservative critics of the mid-twentieth century, projected the authoritarian world they wished to build into an imagined medieval past.²⁵ The story that begins with Richard II and ends with Henry VII shows the passage from an idealized medieval England through the crime against God and the state that destroyed it and the long process of suffering and penance that led to its redemption in the divinely ordained accession of the Tudor dynasty. Following the structure of the providential historical plot of the Bible and the medieval cycles that dramatized biblical history, it begins with a myth of the Fall in the deposition and murder of Richard II and ends with a story of redemption in the accession of Henry VII.

The traditional view of Shakespeare's history plays reproduces the teleological providential narrative of Tudor propaganda, focusing on the second tetralogy and Richard III to construct a plot that traces the passage from the medieval world to Shakespeare's own. It starts with Richard II, which represents the beginning of the providential narrative Shakespeare found in Hall and depicts a ceremonial, medieval world that looks back to an even more perfect union of authority and power in John of Gaunt's idealized vision of the time of Edward III.²⁶ It proceeds, in the Henry IV plays, to depict an abrupt plunge into a contemporary, fallen world,²⁷ where the future Henry V must engage in a long struggle to reconstruct the uncontested union of authority and power that obtained in the older, Edenic world ruled by kings whose power was rooted in unambiguous hereditary authority and validated by divine right. Henry V cannot inherit the Edenic England described by John of Gaunt because it is already lost, but what he can do to reproduce it, he does; when he conquers France, he “achieves” “the world's best garden” (Epilogue. 7), as close a postlapsarian approximation to Eden as human endeavor can produce. The final redemption will have to wait for the end of Richard III and the advent of Henry Tudor.

An ideological construction, designed in retrospect to ratify the Tudor claim to the throne, this is the story that Shakespeare found in his historiographic sources and twentieth-century conservative critics found in Shakespeare's history plays. It is also implicit in the First Folio arrangement of the plays in a sequence that begins with King John and Richard II and ends with Henry VIII. But it is not the only story Shakespeare could have learned from Tudor historiography, and it is certainly not the only story that modern critics have found in his plays. The plot of Tudor historiography constructs a myth of original order followed by a fall in the deposition of Richard II and leading finally to a glorious redemption in the person of Henry VII, but the order in which Shakespeare composed his English history plays constructs a much more complicated story, whose plot is embedded in the cultural history of his own time. The series of plays that begins with Henry VI and ends with Henry V replaces the teleological, providential narrative of Tudor propaganda with a self-referential cycle that ends by interrogating the entire project of historical mythmaking. The first tetralogy Shakespeare wrote ends in providential redemption; but although the second recapitulates that process, it does so in much more problematic terms. The deposition of Richard II, like the death of Henry V, initiates a period of civil strife, penance, and purgation and ends with the advent of a savior-king, but the redemption depicted in Henry V is severely qualified. The order in which Shakespeare produced his two tetralogies follows the progress of Renaissance historiography, towards an increasingly self-conscious and skeptical attitude, not only toward its subjects but also toward the very process of historical production. Increasingly opposing historical fact to literary artifact, Shakespeare exposes the processes of historical mythmaking even as he engages in them.

V

From the beginning, the plays seem guided by this double agenda: the historical story they tell is also a story of historiographic production. Shakespeare's historical protagonists, in fact, repeatedly conceive their actions as versions of history-writing. In 1 Henry VI, English heroes identify their struggle to retain Henry V's French conquests as an effort to preserve the historical record of English glory, an identification that recurs in King John in the French king's effort to defend Arthur's hereditary right to the English throne, and in Henry V with Henry's effort to win his place in history by defeating the French in battle.²⁸

In structure as in subject, the plays signal their discursive origins. The retrospective process of historical construction informs the structure of King John and Henry VIII as well as the entire first tetralogy. The disorderly and disturbing plot of King John ends with the assurance that Prince Henry will “set a form upon that indigest / Which [John] hath left so shapeless and so rude” (V.vii.26-27) and the Bastard's ringing declaration that England will never be conquered so long as it “to itself do rest but true” (V.vii.118), denying the subversive implications of its chaotic plot with assurances of future stability and the imposition of a conventional moral lesson.²⁹ In Henry VIII, the birth of the princess Elizabeth ends a similarly disjointed and painful narrative with similar assurances. The rush of coincidences that resolves the plot in King John undermines the concluding rationalizations, making the play increasingly popular with recent critics, who have discovered in it anticipations of their own project of historical demystification.³⁰ In Henry VIII the birth of Elizabeth redeems the preceding action without rationalizing it: like Shakespeare's emphasis on Katherine's virtue even as he depicts her fall, the entire plot seems calculated to demonstrate that the ways of providence are inscrutable. In the first tetralogy, by contrast, the process of retroactive reconstruction is fully realized.

The first three plays are set in a Machiavellian universe. Linked together by open-ended conclusions that conclude nothing but initiate actions to be pursued in the subsequent play, their episodic plots depict an increasingly chaotic and meaningless world and an action that seems devoid of ethical significance or providential purpose until it is explained in retrospect in Richard III. At the beginning of 1 Henry VI, Henry V, the mirror of all Christian kings, has just died; as the Henry VI trilogy progresses, the chivalric, civic, patriotic, and ethical virtues associated with Henry V also die, often in the persons of human exemplars like Talbot and the dead king's brothers, Bedford and Gloucester, who retain and exemplify the virtues of an older world. Finally, in 3 Henry VI, the kingdom is reduced to a Machiavellian jungle where Yorkists and Lancastrians vie with each other in treachery and atrocity, and even the loyalties that bind parent and child are violated in senseless battles in which fathers kill sons and sons kill fathers. Authority is effaced, power becomes an end in itself, and the crown becomes a commodity, tossed back and forth from one head to another at the whim of blind fortune and the Earl of Warwick. Even the pretense of hereditary legitimacy and divine right is left behind.³¹

In 3 Henry VI, a Machiavellian figure erupts from this maelstrom of history turned savage: Richard of Gloucester, who promises to “set the murtherous Machevil to school” (III.ii.193), defining in advance the role he will play in the final play in this tetralogy. In Richard III, however, the ideological tables are turned. Richard believes (as well he might, given his background in the Henry VI plays) that the world runs on Machiavellian principles, but almost from the first the audience is given reason to believe that he may be mistaken. Prophecies, prophetic dreams, curses that take effect—all suggest that supernatural forces are involved in the events that Richard believes and claims are completely under his control. For instance, we have Richard's clever manipulations and self-congratulatory soliloquies as he arranges his brother Clarence's death, but we also have Clarence's prophetic dream and death's-door recognition that his impending doom is, in fact, a recompense for the crimes he committed in the time of Henry VI.

Richard thinks he is living in a world governed by Machiavellian Realpolitik, but Shakespeare places him in a world governed by providence, a dissonance that produces heavy dramatic irony in the scenes when Richard gloats happily about the success of his machinations while the audience, informed not only by their foreknowledge of Richard's historically appointed doom but also by the intimations of a providential agenda provided by the women's prophecies, know better. At the end of the play, Richmond, the agent of providence, heralded by prophetic dreams and heavenly imagery, kills the tyrant and takes over, but not before Richard has been forced to suffer the horrified recognition that he does indeed live in a providential universe, one where he will be punished now and forever for the crimes he committed in the past.

Richard III offers a neat, conventional resolution to the problem of historical causation. All the cards have been stacked in advance, and the entire play reads like a lesson in providential history. In the first English treatise on historiography, The true order and Methode of wryting and reading Hystories … (1574), Thomas Blundeville advised,

As touching the providence of God … though things many times doe succeede according to the discourse of man's reason: yet mans wisedome is oftentymes greatlye deceyved. And with those accidents which mans wisedome rejected and little regardeth: God by his providence useth, when he thinketh good, to worke marveylous effects. And though he suffreth the wicked for the most part to live in prosperitie, and the good in adversitie: yet we may see by many notable examples, declaring aswell his wrath, and revenge towardes the wicked, as also his pittie and clemencie towardes the good, that nothing is done by chaunce, but all things by his foresight, counsell, and divine providence.³²

A “notable example” of providential justice, the entire action of Richard III is subsumed in the ideological scheme that Blundeville recites. Richard “greatlye deceyves” himself and the other characters, but Shakespeare's audience knows from the beginning that this is a providential universe and that Richard will fall. The audience came into the theater knowing Richard's history and they came to see a play called “The Tragedy of Richard III.” That knowledge offers the audience a privileged vantage point, removing them from the flux of human temporality and placing them in the omniscient position of providence itself.

The only threat to that position is Richard himself, who reaches out to seduce the audience by the sheer energy and dramatic force of his characterization. By the end, however, even Richard has been subsumed in the providential scheme, first as the diabolical figure defined, as John Blanpied suggests, “as an antitype of the providentialism it opposes,”³³ and then, like the devil himself, as an unwitting instrument for the fulfillment of a providential plan. Killing off all the characters stained by the lingering guilt of the Wars of the Roses, Richard purges the kingdom to make it ready for Richmond's accession. Counting over Richard's victims and recalling the past crimes which justify their deaths, Margaret concludes,

Richard yet lives, hell's black intelligencer,
Only reserv'd their factor to buy souls
And send them thither. But at hand, at hand
Ensues his piteous and unpitied end.
Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray,
To have him suddenly convey'd from hence.
Cancel his bond of life, dear God I pray,
That I may live and say “The dog is dead.”

(IV.iv.71-78)

Richard is a “factor,”³⁴ a purchasing agent acting for a superior power, even though he denies the authority of that power and supposes he acts on his own behalf.

In Richard III Shakespeare reconstructs the history he has already written, retroactively imposing a providential order that makes sense of the Machiavellian chaos he depicted in the Henry VI plays. The women's litanies of old wrongs and the repeated pattern of Richard's victims recalling just before they die the past crimes for which they are now about to pay subsume the events they recall into a teleological providential plot. Shakespeare brings all the chickens home to roost in Richard III, framing and containing the wild melee of human treachery, bloodshed, and injustice he depicted in the Henry VI plays in a totalizing explanatory scheme that purges moral ambiguity and eradicates ideological conflict.

Richard III has remained a popular play on the stage, although it is frequently revised for performance, but its neat structure probably did not satisfy Shakespeare;³⁵ for all the issues so comfortably resolved in the end of that play are opened up again in King John, a “problem history” where the audience has no sure guide through the ideological ambiguities but instead finds itself lost, like the Bastard, “among the thorns and dangers of this world” (IV.iii.141). Historical events take on meaning and coherence only after they have passed into history. Experienced in the present tense, as they happen, “actions outstrip comprehension”; the “truth” a historical narrative constructs is, as Marshall Brown points out, “a reification that only exists outside of time” or after the fact.³⁶ Of all Shakespeare's English histories, King John is set farthest back in the past, and yet of all of them it depicts a world that is least medieval and most insistently present. Caught up in the whirl of events, the audience shares the characters' uncertainties as they find themselves lost together in a “thorny wood” of ideological confusion and confused plot. In King John Shakespeare abandons the Tudor historians' anachronistic ascriptions of divine right and providential theory to their medieval ancestors in order to depict a world without faith or ceremony,³⁷ where failure and success ride on the shifting winds of chance. Late in the play, beset by political and military attack, King John gives “the ordering of this present time” to the Bastard (V.i.77); but it is tempting to speculate that Shakespeare gave it to him from the beginning. The Bastard is a fictitious character; that is, not historically legitimate, and his cynicism and illegitimate birth epitomize the lawless forces that substitute for providential order to motivate the action and move the plot in the confused “present time” of King John.

In many ways, King John offers a Machiavellian antithesis to the providential thesis so insistently laid down and retroactively imposed upon the entire first tetralogy in Richard III. But the second tetralogy would be difficult to read as a synthesis. Moving further into the past and retreating from the providential resolution he imposed in Richard III, Shakespeare reopens the question of historical causation and complicates the conflicts it involves with an increasingly intense interrogation of his own historiographic project. Instead of reconciling the binary oppositions between past and present, providence and Machiavelli, theater and history, the second tetralogy destabilizes them in a whirling dialectic that increasingly calls into question both the adequacy of its own dramatic representations and the possibility of historical knowledge.

At the beginning of the second tetralogy, Shakespeare seems to be replaying the conflicts he staged in the first tetralogy, ringing new changes on the same chimes. Richard II begins with a situation exactly opposite to the one in Richard III. This time, the king who is the play's protagonist sits on an inherited throne to which he is entitled by divine right. If Richard III thinks he lives in a Machiavellian universe where authority is only another name for power, Richard II thinks he lives in a providential world where authority alone is sufficient to maintain him in office. He imagines that the king's very name can be armed against a would-be usurper—“Is not the king's name twenty thousand names? / Arm, arm, my name! a puny subject strikes / At thy great glory” (III.ii.85-87)—and that angels will fight to defend his title to the crown:

The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord;
For every man that Bullingbrook hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

(III.ii.56-62)

Shakespeare gives Richard glorious poetry, but he also supplies him with a Machiavellian antagonist, a character who speaks few words but raises large armies and rejects the comforts of imagination and philosophy with the materialistic protest,

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

(I.iii.294-99)

In this play, unlike Richard III, it is the Machiavel who wins.

Despite their opposite outcomes, both plays project the ideological conflict into the opposition between a protagonist king and the antagonist who deposes him. In Richard II, however, Shakespeare does not simply reverse the terms of the opposition; he also complicates and compromises them. In Richard III the principle of historical causation is unambiguous: providentialism and divine right are clearly privileged. The dangerous theatrical power of the Machiavel is contained by his unequivocal definition as a villain. Richmond, the providential figure, is clearly a paragon of royal virtue, his victory the fulfillment of God's plan. No such simple assignment of virtue, vice, or agency can be made in Richard II. Richard, the hereditary king who believes heaven will protect his divine right to the throne, is still depicted as being largely at fault in his deposition. Bullingbrook, the usurper, is an enigmatic figure, clearly at fault in taking a throne that he has not inherited, but otherwise not obviously reprehensible, and certainly endorsed with the warrant of success. Moreover, the obscurity of Bullingbrook's motives makes it impossible to determine whether his victory represents the will of God or the triumph of his own Machiavellian strategy.

In the Henry IV plays, this duplicity intensifies. All the actions can be explained on two levels, the mystical and the political. As Matthew Wikander points out, “traditional patterns and images refuse to stay put as they do in the earlier history plays. … The clear rhetorical lesson that each scene seems to offer is undercut and questioned even as it is taught.”³⁸ The duplicity is probably most obvious in the king's plans to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which are explained both as a political stratagem (“to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” “lest rest and lying still might make them look too near unto my state”; 2 Henry IV: IV.v.211-214) and as a religious obligation (“to wash this blood off from my guilty hand”; Richard II: V.vi.50; cf. 1 Henry IV: I.i.19-27), but it characterizes every component of the king's action. Hal's wildness is both a political problem (How will civic order be maintained in the future if the king is a riotous wastrel?) and a supernatural affliction.³⁹ The rebellions that beset the king throughout his reign have a similar duplicity, sometimes rationalized as retributions for Bullingbrook's crime against Richard, sometimes explained as the ambitious strivings of power-hungry nobles. Thus, Henry IV is a play that can be understood on either or both of two levels, like the Tudor histories that, acknowledging that all things have their first causes in the will of God, still found it profitable and useful to explore their second causes in the deeds of men.

In Henry V, the last play in the second tetralogy, the two views are deliberately clashed against each other. We get not only two interpretations of the action but two accounts of the action, one in the discourse of the chorus and one in the dramatic representation staged before us; and the two accounts not only differ from each other but also insist upon each other's inadequacies. Moreover, instead of reconciling the two views at the end of the play or discarding one for the other, Shakespeare lets both of them stand, directing our attention to the abyss at the center of the historiographic project: the impossibility of recovering the past or of getting behind the historiographic text (whether that text be a written record or a dramatic representation) to discover the always postulated and never graspable fiction called historical truth.

The two emblems of royal perfection, English triumph, peace, and prosperity that frame the first tetralogy—Henry V at the beginning, Henry VII at the end—are never problematized. Indeed, Henry V never even appears on stage, and Henry VII appears only at the very end of Richard III and only as Richmond, not as the ideal king he will become. Both, therefore, exemplify an authority that is never really seen or subjected to the tests and strains of theatrical representation. In the second tetralogy, by contrast, Shakespeare subjects his icon of royal authority to those tests and strains, exploring the theatricality of royal authority and the fictiveness of historical truth even as he creates their dramatic embodiments. Henry VII, briefly introduced at the end of Richard III as England's savior, is never anything but God's soldier, the destined king who will unite the red rose and the white to found the Tudor dynasty. Henry V and his England, recalled with nostalgic longing as the world of his son sinks into chaos, is projected in the Henry VI plays in unproblematic terms as an image of lost perfection. In the second tetralogy, however, Shakespeare complicates that image by showing the process of its creation.

The second tetralogy depicts a world where “miracles are ceas'd; / And therefore we must needs admit the means / How things are perfected” (Henry V: I.i.67-69). The Henry we see on stage in the second tetralogy anticipates the Tudors in using the resources of theatrical role-playing to produce the perfect image of royal authority that he could not inherit from the ambiguous genealogy that left him the throne. Producing himself as “the mirror of all Christian kings,” Henry appropriates the legitimating emblems of an older world to authorize himself.⁴⁰ Just as Henry VII looked to the dim mists of legendary Welsh history to ratify his claim to the English throne, Henry V invokes a tortuous, distant genealogy to ratify his claim to France. Just as Elizabeth's aspiring courtiers engaged in mock tournaments and her newly rich merchants purchased genealogical titles to authorize their newly acquired gentility, Henry appropriates Hotspur's chivalric honor to reproduce the anachronistic ideals of the world his father destroyed when he usurped the English throne.⁴¹

VI

There is a sense in which Shakespeare's progress as a writer of English history seems to run against the current of Renaissance historiography, which moved from providential to Machiavellian explanations of historical causation. In the Machiavellian world of the Henry VI plays, Shakespeare celebrates the pagan virtues of heroic warriors like Talbot and good citizens like Alexander Iden. Moreover, these plays, like King John, highlight the forces that subvert the project of patriarchal history. The characters who dominate the worlds of these plays act on the Machiavellian principle of self-interest, and they prevail because they live in a Machiavellian universe governed by force and fortune rather than the providential hand of God. Moving in Richard III and the second tetralogy to a providential universe, Shakespeare depicts history in mythic, Christian terms, thus, it would seem, inverting the progress of Renaissance historiography, which developed in the direction of rational analysis and demystification. But there is another way to see this progress; for at the same time that Shakespeare's historical representations became more providential, they also became more self-consciously theatrical, increasingly complicated by metadramatic allusions that emphasize their status as theatrical representations. Even as he celebrates the glamor of Richard II and the perfect royalty of Henry V and depicts the working out of God's holy purpose in English history, Shakespeare emphasizes the theatricality of his own representations. The metadramatic self-consciousness of the plays of the second tetralogy invokes the growing rift between historical fact and fictional artifact to emphasize the constructed character of all historical representation.

Moving backward to the mystified medieval past of Richard II, Shakespeare's second tetralogy self-consciously reconstructs the providential order that was deconstructed in the Henry VI plays, but it also moves forward into Shakespeare's own theatrical future. Reconstituting a providential universe in explicitly theatrical terms, the plays of the second tetralogy expose their own compromised status as theatrical performances to interrogate the process of historical representation that produces images of authority and the myths that authorize them. Henry V, the great image of royal authority in the second tetralogy, is depicted from the first as a player of roles. Conquering France, unifying the English nation, submitting himself first to the legal counsel of churchmen and finally to the verdict of God in heaven, Henry V frames his story in providential terms; but his continual recourse to theatrical strategies to achieve those ends also identifies Henry as a Machiavel. As Kenneth Burke points out, Machiavelli's Prince “can be treated as a rhetoric insofar as it deals with the producing of effects upon an audience.”⁴² Separating moral virtue from political efficacy and private character from public mask, Machiavelli conceived politics in theatrical terms, as, in Wylie Sypher's words, “a form of role-playing.”⁴³

In Shakespeare's history plays there is a persistent association between Machiavellianism and theatricality. Richard III, the only one of Shakespeare's English kings explicitly associated with Machiavelli, is also the most theatrical. Images of the theater hover around Richard from the beginning. Contemplating his impending death at Richard's hands, Henry VI asks, “What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?” (3 Henry VI: V.vi.10). Plotting with Buckingham to seize the English throne, Richard prepares him for a theatrical performance where he will “counterfeit the deep tragedian” (Richard III: III.v.1-9). It is significant, moreover, that Richard announces himself as a Machiavel in the same speech wherein he announces himself as an actor:

Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall,
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk,
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murtherous Machevil to school.

(III.ii.182-93)

Richard describes his diabolical theatrical power in the same terms that Renaissance writers typically used to describe actors. Both Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, the actor who first played Richard's role, were compared by admiring contemporaries to Proteus the shape-shifter;⁴⁴ but in Richard's self-description, the reference to Proteus slides inexorably into the reference to Machiavelli, a far more sinister symbol of perfect hypocrisy, who was also associated with Proteus in contemporary thought.

Although Richard represents the apotheosis of the Machiavellian forces in the first tetralogy, he has numerous and varied antecedents. Subverters of history, opponents of true royalty and the English state, characters like Joan, Margaret, and Jack Cade deceive their fellow characters and seduce the audience with a dangerous theatrical energy. They pursue a power to which they have no legitimate claim with the ruthless, amoral ambition that associated the image of Machiavelli in Elizabethan thought with the new commercial forces that threatened the status quo. Deceitful, ambitious, scornful of traditional restraints and traditional notions of honor, the Machiavel represented the threats to traditional order posed by emergent capitalism.

The associations between actor, merchant, and Machiavel are explicit in Thomas Heywood's satiric pamphlet, Machiavel as He lately appeared to his deare Sons, the Moderne Projectors (1641). Of one group of projectors, Heywood writes, “Their scene was the whole Kingdome. In every part of which, they stoutly acted their well seasoned interlude, which now at last is proved the Tragedie of the Actors themselves.”⁴⁵ In fact, Heywood's description of the Machiavellian deceptions of “A Projector in generall” employs the same images that Richard uses in his self-characterization as a Machiavel. Just as Richard can “frame [his] face to all occasions” and “add colors to the chameleon,” Heywood's projector can “change himself into as many shapes as Painters can doe colours.” Like Richard, the projector has “more wit than honestie,” and like him, he uses his Machiavellian devices to rise in the world and acquire titles that bespeak a nobility he does not possess.⁴⁶ The Protean, shape-shifting actor, the ruthless image of the Florentine and the new commercial adventurer merge in a single figure that combines subversive threat with theatrical power. Cut loose from the traditional bonds that unite feudal society and define the place of individuals in terms of hereditary rights and obligations, no longer subsumed under the old generic categories that reduced individuals to representations of their classes, these strikingly individualized characters represent the emergence of individual subjectivity in a changing world.⁴⁷

Like the “new men” of emergent capitalism that Heywood satirizes, the Machiavellian subverters of established order provide the subjects for sharply individualized characterizations. Intensely theatrical, they represent not only a new kind of dramatic characterization that substitutes individual for generic attributes but a new conception of personal identity. No longer imposed by an inherited social position, the new man's identity is constructed in action: the theatrical principle of present performance replaces the historical principle of hereditary status as its defining ground.

The most compelling dramatic presences in the first tetralogy, these characters speak with distinctive dramatic voices that emerge from the undifferentiated blank verse that constitutes most of the dialogue. Nonetheless, despite the lively dramatic particularity of their voices and personalities, they are all contained ideologically within the binary opposition that defines them as enemies to royal authority and established order. The French peasant Joan and the English queen Margaret, the great Cardinal Beauford and the knavish priest John Hume, the noble lady Eleanor Cobham and the poverty-stricken Simpcox, the bricklayer's son Jack Cade and the Plantagenet pretender to the throne range in characterization from the heights of aristocratic pride to the depths of poverty and humiliation. Their languages range from learned eloquence to inarticulate illiteracy, but they all share the Machiavellian attributes of treachery and selfish, amoral ambition that define them as demonic Others. Peasant rebels, aristocratic traitors, and noble usurpers are all contained within the binary opposition between legitimate authority and Machiavellian subversion.

In King John and the second tetralogy, these characters become increasingly prominent, and their theatrical power becomes increasingly dangerous, reaching out to the audience with a seductive, amoral appeal and influencing the course of the action by the sheer force of their personalities. Character, in fact, emerges along with Machiavellianism as a motive force in Shakespeare's historical universe. In the providential universe of the morality play, as in the paradigmatic expressions of universal rules of causality that Aristotle found in tragedy,⁴⁸ character is subordinated to plot. As Catherine Belsey points out, the protagonist of a morality play is “a fragmented and fragmentary figure,” the battlefield for a struggle between Christ and Satan “which exists before he is born and continues after his death.”⁴⁹ Character, however, becomes increasingly important in the increasingly secularized worlds of Elizabethan drama (and in the increasingly secularized world of Elizabethan England), as human agency rather than transcendental teleology comes to motivate the action. This opposition between providential plot and Machiavellian character can be seen in the first tetralogy, where the emblematic flatness of the characters who act in the name of God and country and the uniformity of their language contrast with the vivid particularity of the characters who oppose providential order to pursue their own agendas. In the later plays, however, although characters like the Bastard in King John and Falstaff in the Henry IV plays exhibit many of the traits that marked their dramatic antecedents as Machiavels, they are no longer contained within the simple binary scheme that opposes character to plot and Machiavellian subversion to legitimate authority.

With the deposition of Richard II, royal authority is dispersed, and so is the subversive force that opposes it. In the second tetralogy, Machiavellianism is no longer contained by association with characters who threaten to destroy or usurp royal authority. In 1 Henry IV the rebels Worcester and Northumberland are marked as Machiavels by their calculation and duplicity, but so is the king, the man Hotspur calls “this vile politician, Bullingbrook” (I.iii.241). The most ruthless act of Machiavellian cunning in the Henry IV plays is used, significantly, to subdue rebel forces. Prince John deceives the rebels at Gaultree Forest when he swears “by the honor of my blood” and gives his “princely word” (IV.ii.55-66), corrupting and compromising the very authority he invokes to win an ignoble victory. The characterization of the royal prince as a cold-blooded Machiavellian deceiver shows how far royal authority has been compromised in the second tetralogy, for the same historical personage, grown old, was depicted in 1 Henry VI as a paragon of the old chivalric virtues, the “valiant Duke of Bedford” (III.ii.87), the subject of Talbot's eulogy, “A braver soldier never couched lance, / A gentler heart did never sway in court” (III.ii.134-35). It is Bedford who leads the chorus of praise and mourning for Henry V in the opening scene and Bedford whose gallant courage inspires the English victory at Rouen. Old and sick, Bedford refuses to leave the battlefield,

                                                                                                    for once I read
That stout Pendragon in his litter sick
Came to the field and vanquished his foes.
Methinks I should revive the soldiers' hearts,
Because I ever found them as myself.

(III.ii.94-98)

Bedford's emblematic characterization is completely subsumed within the binary scheme that associates noble English valor with a heroic, historic past.

In the world of Henry IV, by contrast, the only character who is thoroughly animated by the old feudal values is Hotspur, and it is in the name of those values, of personal honor and Mortimer's hereditary right to the throne, that Hotspur rebels against the king. Hotspur's honor is never questioned in the play, but the very absoluteness of his commitment to honor serves to compromise honor itself. To Douglas, Hotspur is the very “king of honor” (IV.i.10); and even the king he opposes calls him “the theme of honor's tongue” (I.i.81). Personified in Hotspur, the old knightly honor is doubly compromised, not only by the slightly comical enthusiasm with which he embraces it but also by the fact that it inspires him to rebel against the king.

Royal authority is compromised too. Not only opposed by Hotspur in the plot, but also characterized as the calculating, political antithesis to the impetuous, idealistic young rebel, the king has none of the honor that should belong to royalty. Prince Henry is perfectly aware that he must appropriate the honor he needs from Hotspur. He tells Hotspur before their battle, “all the budding honors on thy crest / I'll crop to make a garland for my head” (V.iv.72-73). Earlier, he used the same chivalric language, even the same metaphor, when he promised his father that he would “redeem” his shame “on Percy's head”:

And stain my favors in a bloody mask,
Which wash'd away shall scour my shame with it.
And that shall be the day, when e'er it lights,
That this same child of honor and renown,
This gallant Hotspur, this all-praised knight,
And your unthought-of Harry chance to meet,
For every honor sitting on his helm,
Would they were multitudes, and on my head
My shames redoubled!

(III.ii.132-44)

Hal's promise is a heroic vaunt in the old chivalric tradition. He promises to “die a hundred thousand deaths / Ere break the smallest parcel of this vow” (III.ii.158-59). But even in the course of making that promise, he slips into another idiom, contaminating the language of chivalry with gross terms taken from the new commercial economy. When he swears to “make this northren youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities” (III.ii.145-46), the prince transforms glorious deeds and indignities into objects of commercial exchange:

Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf;
And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(III.ii.147-52)

The “factor” image defines in advance Hal's victory over Hotspur in knightly combat as a repossession of the honor that rightly belongs to royalty, but it also compromises that honor by terms—“factor,” “render up,” “engross,” “strict account” and “reckoning”—that reduce the chivalric battle to a closely calculated financial transaction.⁵⁰

Like the aspiring commercial men of Shakespeare's time, the future Henry V must struggle to achieve a status he did not inherit. Unlike Richard II, who had a clear, hereditary claim to the throne, Henry V must earn his legitimacy. The honor he could not inherit from the “vile politician Bullingbrook,” he must acquire from Hotspur in battle. The “cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father” he warms by drinking “good and good store of fertile sherris,” in Falstaff's company (2 Henry IV: IV.iii.118-21).⁵¹ Like the son of a rich tradesman sent to university to acquire the education that will make him a gentleman, Hal revels and carouses, but he also “studies his companions” (2 Henry IV: IV.iv.68) and acquires new languages. Learning the names of his humble subjects and mastering the terms in which they speak, he wins their recognition as the “king of courtesy” (1 Henry IV: II.iv.5-11). The two parts of Henry IV, in fact, depict a long educational process in which Prince Hal learns the skills and assumes the attributes that constitute the “mirror of all Christian kings” he will become in Henry V (II.Chorus,6). Like the new gentility that successful commoners were acquiring by their own efforts, the royal authority that Henry V finally represents is an achievement, not an inheritance.

What Henry V does inherit is a taint—his father's guilt for usurping Richard II's crown. The hereditary taint of his father's low origins and dishonorable ascent threatens Henry's own aspirations for worldly power and success: “Not to-day, O Lord!,” he prays before his climactic battle of Agincourt, “O not to-day, think not upon the fault my father made in compassing the crown” (IV.i.292-94). Henry's struggle for France represents an effort to wipe out that taint and legitimate his status as King of England. “No king of England, if not king of France” (II.ii.193), Henry uses Agincourt as an enormous trial by combat to establish the legitimacy of his rule and earn his place in providential history. The providential legitimation, in fact, is the sole purpose of the battle. Refusing to accept any credit for the victory, he insists, “Take it, God, / For it is none but thine!” and he threatens his soldiers, “be it death proclaimed through our host / To boast of this, or take that praise from God / Which is his only” (IV.viii.111-16). The stridency of the threat exposes the anxiety that produced it, the keen sense of the absence of divine right that Henry attempts to fill by the exercise and mystification of earthly power.

It takes three plays for Henry to reconstruct the royal authority that was lost when Bullingbrook usurped the English throne, and although he finally succeeds in producing the perfect icon of royal authority in Henry V, the authority he reconstructs is deeply compromised by his recourse to Machiavellian strategies of political manipulation and theatrical display.⁵² His constant role-playing celebrates the power of theater to produce the perfect image of royalty, but it also compromises the authority it produces by associating it with the ambiguous figures of actor, Machiavel, and merchant.

The authority of the playwright is also compromised. The playwright of Richard III conceived his authorial role in the same exalted terms that Sidney used to describe the poet. Contriving his plot to show “virtue exalted and vice punished,”⁵³ he distributed rewards and punishments with a poetic justice that bespoke the providential order it imitated. Like God, he created and ruled a providential universe, and he ended his play with a prayer, designed to inspire his audience to piety and patriotism. In the second tetralogy, the authorial role is divided against itself by the social and ethical differences that separated Sidney's gentleman poet writing to inspire his readers from a commercial playwright manufacturing public entertainments for financial gain.⁵⁴ As a poet, the dramatist works in imitation of divine providence to teach the ways of righteousness and draw his audience “to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.”⁵⁵ As a commercial playwright, he deceives and manipulates for his own profit like a Machiavel.

A deep contradiction, therefore, divides the subject of Shakespeare's English history plays from their medium, opposing the patriotic piety of historical mythmaking to the Machiavellian subversion of theatrical performance. The theater, in fact, was associated with every sort of transgression of the social and religious order that the historical myths were designed to support.⁵⁶ Common players acting the parts and wearing the clothes of kings and noblemen transgressed the hierarchical status system; providential order and genealogical history supported it. The rhetoric of antitheatrical polemic, denouncing the theater as a seat of dangerous allure “whereunto more people resort than to sermons or prayers,” set the playhouse in diametrical opposition to the house of God: “More have recourse to Playing houses, then to Praying houses.”⁵⁷ Sidney's poet inspired his readers to virtuous action, but the playwright of the antitheatrical tracts provided the “springs of many vices, and the stumbling blocks of godliness and virtue,” seducing his audience to “adulterie and uncleannesse,” and every sort of “ungodly desires,” crimes, and treason:⁵⁸

if you will learne to … blaspheme both Heaven and Earth: … If you will learn to rebel against Princes, to commit treasons … if you will learne to contemne GOD and all his lawes, to care nither for heaven nor hel, and to commit al kinde of sinne and mischeef, you need to goe to no other schoole, for all these good Examples may you see painted before your eyes in enterludes and playes.⁵⁹

This final statement, taken from Phillip Stubbes' Anatomie of Abuses, represents an extreme example of antitheatrical invective, and the theater had its defenders as well.⁶⁰ The statement is significant, however, because it reveals the extent to which the subversive power of the theater was associated with rebellion against the authority of God and the king, the same authority that providential history was designed to justify.

VII

Henry V ends the two tetralogies in a play of unresolved contradictions. The action Shakespeare dramatizes contradicts the story the chorus tells. The king's recourse to Machiavellian plotting contradicts his representations of his achievements as manifestations of providential purpose, and his role-playing contradicts his characterization as a true embodiment of royal authority. The chorus constantly urges the audience to suppose that the historical persons and events the play depicts are actually present, and just as constantly reminds them that they are only watching a theatrical representation that falls far short of the historical reality it attempts to imitate.

The final chorus echoes these contradictions even as it attempts to deny them. Cast in the form of a sonnet, the chorus employs the familiar sonnet strategy of translating existential contradiction into verbal antithesis and paradox⁶¹ and resorting to rhetorical appeal to escape from logical impasse:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursu'd the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time; but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England. Fortune made his sword;
By which the world's best garden he achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixt, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France, and made his England bleed;
Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.

The chorus's description of Henry's French conquest (“Fortune made his sword: / By which the world's best garden he achieved”) redeems that Machiavellian and commercial implications of “fortune” and “achieved” with the providential warrant implied by the allusion to Eden. And the sestet erases the distinction the chorus has emphasized throughout the play—the intractable difference between the historic past and Shakespeare's dramatic representations. The sestet moves imperceptibly from England's historical future in the troubled reign of Henry VI to Shakespeare's theatrical past in the successful plays he had written about that reign, from the painful history of bleeding and loss to the pleasing theatrical spectacles that represented that history.

Refusing to distinguish between historical event and theatrical performance, the sestet of the final sonnet also denies the irreconcilable opposition between past pain and present pleasure. Conflating bloody battles with theatrical pleasure, the chorus now elides the social and ethical differences that separate participation in heroic history from attendance in a commercial theater. At the end of the first tetralogy, Richmond invited Shakespeare's audience to join him in a patriotic prayer for a common future of “smooth-fac'd peace,” “smiling plenty” and “fair properous days.” At the end of Henry V the chorus asks the audience to approve a theatrical performance. The playwright of the second tetralogy takes on a divided role, compromising the notable image of virtue he produces in Henry V and the providential plot that depicts Henry's triumph with the Machiavellian taint of his own theatrical, commercial contrivance.

When the Bastard in King John compared the citizens of Angiers to the members of a theater audience who “gape … at … industrious scenes and acts of death” (II.i.375-76), he exposed the debasement and commodification of the heroic past in the hands of professional actors working for the pleasure of a low-born audience and their own profit. At the beginning of Henry V, the Prologue addressed the same problem when he complained about the inadequacy of “this wooden O” to contain the heroic past and wished for “princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene”; only then, he said, would “warlike Harry” be “like himself.” He wished, as David Kastan points out, “that the contradictions of playing would disappear.” Purified of the social contamination of bourgeois actors and a socially heterogeneous audience, the representation of the heroic past “would be simply presentation and history plays would be history itself.”⁶² In the final sonnet, he papers over all these deficiencies and contradictions—the social deficiencies of actors and audience and the inadequacy of the theatrical representation—when he submits himself and the play to the public theater audience he actually has. The sonnet ends with a rhetorical appeal to the audience that is also a commercial appeal—if the audience does not accept the play, the play will not make money. The appeal rests on an ambiguous pronoun—the “their” in “for their sake”—that conflates the authority of history with the popularity of the Henry VI plays.

The final chorus's reference to the Henry VI plays defines the place of Henry V in Shakespeare's historical plot. Not only the last play in the two tetralogies, it is also their center; for the plot of Shakespeare's historical reconstruction bends the teleological, chronological line of his historiographic sources into a circle, beginning and ending with the death of Henry V. The circle is joined at the point that represents the moment of loss, and, like the “wooden O” of Shakespeare's theater, it circumscribes an absence—the heroic past and royal authority that the name of Henry V denotes. It replaces the purposeful, linear progress of history with the endless work of historiography and the endless repetition of theatrical performance, obsessively moving about a lost center they can never recover. Enacting the obsessive movement it describes, the image of the circle itself circles back to the first act of 1 Henry VI to recall Joan's resonant lines:

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
With Henry's death the English circle ends,
Dispersed are the glories it included.

(I.ii.133-37)

Here too the circle encloses an absence, and here too it is associated with Henry's death and the erasure of English heroic history.

The desired object of theatrical recuperation, the king who presided over the transcendent moment when the English star “most greatly lived” is finally revealed as the product of his own theatrical recuperation, his providential authority the product of Machiavellian manipulation. The unresolved contradictions of Henry V are those of Shakespeare's entire historiographic project. Infused by nostalgic yearning, the plays begin in a heroic effort to recuperate a lost, heroic past, but they end by calling attention to the ineluctable absence of that past and their own compromised status as commercial, theatrical representations.

Notes

1. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Collier Books, 1962), first pub. 1944, p. 362. See also Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1947); Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); and Andrew S. Cairncross's introductions to the Arden editions of 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI (London: Methuen, 1962, 1957, 1964). For more recent examples of providentialist readings, see Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); and Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr., Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984). See also the summaries of twentieth-century criticism of Shakespeare's history plays in Shakespeare Survey 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) and Shakespeare Survey 38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

2. Robert Ornstein, in A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), is a persuasive advocate for this view. He argues that Shakespeare's “progress in the history plays was a journey of artistic exploration … that led almost unerringly beyond politics and history to the universal themes and concerns of his maturest art” (p. 31). “Chaos comes in the History plays as in the tragedies, not when doctrines of obedience are questioned, but when the most intimate human ties disintegrate” (p. 222). More recent critics have argued that the “refusal of ideology” is itself ideologically conditioned. See especially Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 206-27.

3. C. G. Thayer, Shakespearean Politics: Government and Misgovernment in the Great Histories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983), p. viii. Other writers who dispute Tillyard's view include W. Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Henry Ansgar Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); John C. Bromley, The Shakespearean Kings (Boulder: Colorado Associated Press, 1971); Michael Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973); Edna Z. Boris, Shakespeare's English Kings, the People, and the Law: A Study in the Relationship between the Tudor Constitution and the English History Plays (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1974); and Gordon Ross Smith, “Shakespeare's Henry V: Another Part of the Critical Forest,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976), 3-26.

4. Ornstein, p. 29.

5. Stephen Greenblatt, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), p. 5.

6. Cf. the discussion of twentieth-century literary theory and criticism in Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), especially chap. 1, “The Rise of English.”

7. Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500-1700 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 69-70.

8. Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 133.

9. Twentieth-century critics reenact this conflict as they argue the relative merits of the two contenders for the throne and the opposed ideologies that support their opposing claims. See especially Ornstein, pp. 13-21.

10. It is interesting that “Bolingbroke,” the usual spelling of Bullingbrook's name in modern editions of Richard II, was first adopted by Alexander Pope. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), to whom Pope dedicated his Essay on Man, was in his own time a leading exponent of the ideology of civic humanism that J. G. A. Pocock has identified as an outgrowth of Machiavelli's theories. See Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 477-86.

11. On the Accession Day Tilts, see Frances A. Yates, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,” in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 88-111. On Tudor use of the cult of chivalry, see Julia Briggs, This Stage-Play World: English Literature and Its Background 1580-1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 132-33; Roy Strong. The Cult of Elizabeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 161-62; and Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986). My account of the conscious anachronism of Shakespeare's use of chivalry is indebted to a fine, unpublished paper by David Scott Kastan, “‘I’ the Vein of Chivalry': Troilus and Cressida and the Politics of Honor.” On Shakespeare's use of the cult of chivalry, see also Paul N. Siegel, “Shakespeare and the Neochivalric Cult of Honor,” in Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 122-62, especially pp. 133-38, where he discusses Hotspur and Hal; and Ralph Berry, “Shakespeare and Chivalry,” in Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), pp. 109-27.

12. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587; rpt. London: J. Johnson et al., 1808), 3:210. Cf. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548; rpt. London: J. Johnson et al., 1809), pp. 207-8.

13. A similar ambiguity about the issue of causation characterizes Shakespeare's representation of Gloucester's death. Initially, it seems to support a Machiavellian reading of history. Shakespeare implies the powerlessness of Gloucester's virtue in the face of his Machiavellian enemies when he has Gloucester deliver the following speech immediately before his summons, arrest, and murder: “I must offend before I be attained; / And had I twenty times so many foes, / And each of them had twenty times their power, / All these could not procure me any scathe / So long as I am loyal, true, and crimeless” (II.iv.59-63). Nonetheless, before the play is over, Suffolk and Beauford will join their victim in death, Beauford, in fact, by a mysterious, sudden illness that includes among its symptoms the belief that he is haunted by Gloucester's ghost (III.ii.373).

14. Matthew W. Black, A New Variorum Edition of The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955), p. 49n.

15. Historical Drama, p. 141.

16. Michael Quinn, “Providence in Shakespeare's Yorkist Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959), 45.

17. It is perhaps for this reason that, as F. J. Levy has observed, Machiavellian historiography tended to deal with “a brief period, such as the reign of one monarch or the story of one event.” See Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), pp. 237-38, where Levy cites Machiavelli's Prince and Guicciardini's History of Italy as examples.

18. John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare, p. 144, quoted by Cairncross in his introduction to the Arden edition of 3 Henry VI, pp. xlviii-xlix. See Cairncross, p. xli, on the controversy over the question of authorship. On the related questions of royal authority and dramatic unity, the Quarto title pages are revealing. The earliest published version of 3 Henry VI was entitled “The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, as it was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his servants.” In the case of 2 Henry VI the Quarto title does not even mention the name of the king. Instead, it designates the play as “The first part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: and the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne.”

19. As David Kastan has pointed out, Elizabethan objections to “mongrel tragi-comedies” expressed similar anxieties, associating the hierarchical logic of the dramatic plot with the hierarchical logic of the unitary state. Kastan made this point in a paper at the 1989 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America—“‘Clownes shoulde speake disorderlye’: Mongrel Tragicomedy and the Unitary State”—where he identified the unassimilated intrusions of clowns in the dramatic structure as a register of “what the unitary state would repress.”

20. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetics (1561) I, i, p. 3DI, in Allen Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), p. 413. See also Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594): “The operations of art appear to us as though divine and in imitation of God, the first artist” (quoted in Gilbert, p. 492); and Thomas Blundeville, The true order and Methode of wryting and reading Hystories (London: Willyam Seres, 1574), E4^r-E4: “Of those that make anye thyng, some doe make much of nothing, as God dyd in creating the Worlde of naught, and as Poets in some respect also doe, whilest they faine fables and make thereof theyr poesies, and poetical Hystories.” Blundeville's treatise is reprinted with an introduction by Hugh G. Dick in The Huntington Library Quarterly 3 (1940), 149-70. For a remarkable twentieth-century reinscription of the analogy, see Sigurd Burckhardt's “Notes on the Theory of Intrinsic Interpretation” in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 285-313.

21. G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 2:3.

22. Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy, ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 10.

23. Trans. Abraham Darcy, reprinted in Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 127-28.

24. “Foreword” to Thomas G. Pavel, The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama, Theory and History of Literature 18 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. xx. Cf. Fredric Jameson's observation that “religious and theological debate is the form, in pre-capitalist societies, in which groups become aware of their political differences and fight them out” in “Religion and Ideology: Paradise Lost,” in Literature, Politics & Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976-84, ed. Francis Barker et al. (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 38-39. For an extensive analysis of the interpenetration between politics and theology in medieval and Renaissance thought, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

25. They also recognized that history was a field of ideological contention and that alternative accounts of the past threatened their present political hegemony. See Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories,” pp. 182-92, for an account of the use of Sir John Hayward's history of Henry IV as evidence at the Essex conspiracy trial.

26. For an especially perceptive version of this reading, see James L. Calderwood, “Richard II: The Fall of Speech,” in Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), pp. 149-86.

27. Leonard Barkan, “The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978), 5-19.

28. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Chapter 4, in Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, Cornell University Press, 1990.

29. For especially perceptive discussions of the way this structure interrogates the process of historiographic mythmaking, see John R. Elliott, “Shakespeare and the Double Image of King John,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965), 64-84; and Virginia M. Vaughan, “King John: A Study in Subversion and Containment,” in King John: New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 62-75.

30. See the two essays cited in the preceding note and the entire Aquino anthology, especially Larry S. Champion, “The ‘Un-end’ of King John: Shakespeare's Demystification of Closure,” pp. 173-85.

31. For an excellent account of the shape of the first tetralogy, to which I am much indebted, see Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975).

32. F3. Hugh G. Dick points out (p. 149) that Blundeville's was “the first separately printed treatise in English on the art of history.”

33. John W. Blanpied, Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), p. 100.

34. On the Machiavellian, commercial implications of the “factor” image, see my discussion in section VI of Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles,Cornell University Press, 1990. Of Hal's statement in 1 Henry IV, III.ii.147-50: “Percy is but my factor, good my lord, / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf; / And I will call him to so strict account / That he shall render every glory up.”

35. Cf. Blanpied, p. 100, where he too sees King John as an expression of Shakespeare's dissatisfaction with Richard III, although he defines that dissatisfaction in terms somewhat different from mine: “What he finds he needs, the morning after the Richard III blowout, is a strongly centered play that, paradoxically, does not refuse to relinquish control.”

36. Marshall Brown, “‘Errours Endlesse Traine’: On Turning Points and the Dialectical Imagination,” PMLA 99 (1984), 11, 21.

37. Sigurd Burckhardt (in “King John: The Ordering of This Present Time,” Shakespearean Meanings, pp. 116-43) sees King John as Shakespeare's critique of the Tudor myth, pointing out that Shakespeare greatly reduces the Protestant propaganda in his source, where John was depicted as a martyr to Roman Catholic wickedness.

38. The Play of Truth and State, p. 27.

39. Henry IV is characteristically skeptical: “I know not whether God will have it so / For some displeasing service I have done / That in his secret doom, out of my blood / He'll breed revengement and a scourge for me; / But thou dost in thy passages of life / Make me believe that thou art only mark'd / For the hot vengeance, and the rod of heaven, / To punish my mistreadings” (1 Henry IV: III.ii.4-11).

40. Like a playwright or actor, Henry is characterized from the very beginning as an “imitator.” Note, for instance, his first soliloquy in 1 Henry IV (I.ii.197), where he announces that he will “imitate the sun.” As Alexander Leggatt points out, the “promise to imitate the sun takes us back to Richard II; but while Richard, as rightful king, was naturally identified with the sun, Hal can only promise to imitate it—to produce, as his father did, a good performance in the role of king.” Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 89.

41. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 99, points out that “despite the archaising feudal costumes they wore at court entertainments,” many of the “members of Leicester's circle were essentially nouveaux riches” and that no less a person than the Queen's Champion at the Accession Day tilts, Sir Henry Lee, “owed much of his wealth to enclosures.”

42. A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962), p. 682.

43. Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), p. 28. Cf. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 97: “Machiavelli rarely asks whether the prince should practice such and such a vice … or should possess such and such a virtue … but rather whether he should be thought to practice it. … The image is all, the reality nothing.” Recent critics, especially American new historicists and especially during the Reagan presidency, have been fascinated with the Renaissance theatricalization of power. For an influential early exploration, see Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); for an especially committed later one, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986).

44. For a good summary of Elizabethan descriptions of actors, including those of Alleyn and Burbage, see Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios n.s. 7.2 (1980), 56-57. On the image of Proteus, see Barish, pp. 99-107.

45. (London, 1641), D2^r.

46. Sigs. B3-B4. For a perceptive discussion of Renaissance associations between theatrical deception and commercial trickery, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1-148. On pp. 76-77 Agnew cites Heywood's pamphlet to illustrate the way “English dramatists forced on Machiavelli's principles an association with commercial trickery that would have horrified the Florentine.”

47. On the intellectual roots of the conjunction between Machiavellianism and this new sense of personality, see Hugh M. Richmond, “Personal Identity and Literary Personae: A Study in Historical Psychology,” PMLA 90 (1975), 209-21, especially pp. 215-18. On the roles of social change and theatrical representation in the Renaissance production of a new concept of subjectivity, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985).

48. Poetics, VI. 9-11, in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, ed. S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (New York: Dover, 1951), pp. 24-27.

49. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 15.

50. Cf. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama, p. 94: “The thinking is that of a chivalric hero, but the words belong to the counting-house.”

51. This speech is placed, significantly, at the end of the Gaultree Forest episode. Celebrating the virtues of sherris-sack to explain the difference between the heat and valor of Prince Henry and the cold-blooded calculation of Prince John, Falstaff emphasizes that Henry's virtues are achievements and not inheritances.

52. For an extended discussion of Hal's Machiavellianism, see Blanpied, chap. 9, especially pp. 160-66. On the ways the mere fact of theatrical representation threatened to compromise royal authority, see Franco Moretti, “‘A Huge Eclipse’: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” Genre 15 (1982), 7-40, reprinted in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance; and David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (Winter 1986), 459-75.

53. Defense, p. 21.

54. On Sidney's association of social rank with poetic quality, see Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, p. 92. See also Stephen Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” in Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, originally published in Representations 1 [1983]), pp. 17-18 for a perceptive discussion of Sidney's anxious efforts to mark the status boundaries between himself as a gentleman amateur and the commoner who practices art as a profession.

55. Sidney, Defense, p. 13 et passim.

56. Many writers have explored the ways the Elizabethan theater constituted a site of transgression, but see especially Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing”; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap. 1; and Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

57. Samuel Cox, letter of January 15, 1591, and I. H., This World's Folly. Or a Warning-Peece discharged upon the Wickednesse thereof (1615), both reprinted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4: 237, 254.

58. George Whetstone, A Touchstone for the Time, printed as an “Addition” to A Mirour for Magestrates of Cyties (1584), and Gervase Babington, A very Fruitful Exposition of the Commandements (1583), reprinted in Chambers, 4:227, 225.

59. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses: Contayning a Discoverie, or briefe Summarie of such Notable Vices and Imperfections, as now raigne in many Christian Countreyes of the Worlde: but (especiallie) in a verie famous Ilande called Ailgna (London, 1583), in Chambers, 4:224.

60. For an account of these defenses, and of the deep instability of contemporary conceptions of the theater, see Chapter 3, section III, in Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles, Cornell University Press, 1990.

61. I am indebted to an unpublished paper of Myra Jehlen's for the distinction between paradox and unresolved contradiction.

62. Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject,” pp. 473-74.