The English History Play in the age of Shakespeare

Irving Ribner.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136566929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1957. This edition re-issues the second edition of 1965. Recognized as one of the leading books in its field, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare presents the most comprehensive account available of the English historical drama from its beginning to the closing of the theatres in 1642 and relates this development to Renaissance historiography and Elizabethan political theory.

CHAPTER ONE

History and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare

T he type of history play which flourished in the age of Shakespeare was particularly an expression of the English Renaissance. Although its roots are deep in the medieval drama, it reached its full development in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth, and when John Ford wrote his Perkin Warbeck, it was with the awareness that he was reviving a dramatic type which had been dead for some decades. It is significant that later attempts to revive the history play often have been with an eye towards the Elizabethan era. Nicholas Rowe turned to his Jane Shore fresh from his edition of Shakespeare and full of the inspiration of Shakespeare’s histories. In our own time Maxwell Anderson, in such plays as Elizabeth the Queen and Anne of the Thousand Days, has attempted to re-create Elizabethan verse drama, and it is significant that he has chosen his subjects from the very age he has sought to emulate.

To define the Renaissance history play as a distinct dramatic genre, however, has not been easy, although many attempts have been made. It is now, more than ever, necessary to so define it, for in the half century that has gone by since the appearance of Professor Felix E. Schelling’s pioneer study,¹ our knowledge both of Elizabethan drama and of Renaissance historiography has increased vastly, and the time has come for a re-examination of the entire field of Elizabethan historical drama. But before we can begin to write of the English history play, we must decide by what specific standards we may distinguish history plays from other plays of the Elizabethan era. The special use of the term ‘histories’ in the Shakespeare folio of 1623 is, as we shall see, of little help in this respect. We must further bear in mind that those plays whose theme is the presently authenticated history of England do not comprise the whole of the dramatic genre we may call the history play.

This study will be concerned with but one part of the historical drama of the age of Shakespeare. It must of force limit itself to those plays which deal with the history of England. The emergence of this specific type of history play may perhaps best be studied, as it will be in the following chapter, as part of the general growth of the idea of history as a dramatic subject in the Elizabethan age. But once plays on English history began to be written, such plays inevitably acquired characteristics which could never be shared by plays drawn from the annals of either classical times or continental Europe. There is thus some justification for studying the English history play as an independent phenomenon.

The great age of the history play comes as perhaps the final distinctive manifestation of a new birth of historical writing in England. It may thus be well for us to have clearly in mind the particular historical works which served as the sources of Elizabethan and Jacobean history plays, and which, together with the historical drama and the widely current historical non-dramatic poetry, make up the historical literature of the age of Shakespeare. The Middle Ages had produced its great chroniclers: Matthew Paris, Thomas of Walsingham, Ranulph Higden, and others; but the coming of Henry VII to the English throne in 148 5 gave a new impetus to historical writing, for among other things the right of the Tudors to the throne had to be demonstrated. The new English historical writings carried on much of the tradition of the medieval chronicles, but, as we shall see, they were profoundly influenced also by the new historical schools of Renaissance Italy. They were predominantly secular works, intensely nationalistic in their dedication to the greater glory of England, and deliberately propagandistic in their use of history to support the right of the Tudors to the throne and to preach political doctrine particularly dear to the Tudors.² Although medieval chroniclers like Geoffrey of Monmouth were also sometimes drawn upon by the historical dramatists of the age of Shakespeare, it was chiefly the writings of these Renaissance English historians which furnished the sources of the history plays with which we shall be concerned.

The new Renaissance history had its birth in England when Duke Humphrey of Gloucester commissioned Tito Livio of Ferrara to write the history of Henry V. But the new historiography begins in earnest with the arrival in England of Polydore Vergil in about 1501. Vergil was commissioned by Henry VII to write a history of England which would, among other things, establish the right of the Tudors to the throne. The Anglica Historia was not published, however, until 1534, and in attacking the authenticity of Arthurian legend it did not accomplish the ends Henry VII had envisioned.³ In 1516, in the meantime, had been published Robert Fabyan’s The New Chronicles of England and France, essentially a medieval work, but one to be used by Elizabethan writers of history plays. It was to go through three more editions by 1559.

In 1543 appeared Richard Grafton’s edition of a verse chronicle of England by John Hardyng, who had recorded English events down to 1436. Grafton continued Hardyng’s chronicle down to his own time, and in his book he included also the Historie of Kyng Rycharde the Thirde, usually attributed to Sir Thomas More, there printed for the first time. In 1548 Grafton printed posthumously the important work of Edward Hall, a barrister at Gray’s Inn. This was The Union of the two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, which, as we shall see, did so much to shape the philosophy of history in the plays of Shakespeare. Hall had based his work upon Polydore Vergil, and by writing in English he gave wide currency to Vergil’s particular propagandists view of English history. Hall’s was probably the most influential of all Elizabethan accounts of the period from Richard II to the coming of Henry VII. In 1562 Grafton further brought out An Abridgement of the Chronicles of England which went through five editions by 1572.

In 1563 John Foxe produced his Actes and Monuments or The Book of Martyrs, as it was commonly called, which gave to the history he recorded the strong imprint of his own Reformation prejudices.⁴ This work was to be a source for historical plays dealing with the Tudor period, and particularly the biographical plays. In 1565 John Stow published A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles, which went through ten editions by 1611 and was probably the most important short history of England of its age.

But the most important work of all, in so far as the history play is concerned, appeared in 1577, when Raphael Holinshed published his monumental Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande. This work was prefaced by a Description of England, written by William Harrison, and the history of Ireland was written by Richard Stanyhurst, who used materials collected earlier by the Jesuit, Edmund Campion. Holinshed had little imagination and little historical insight, but he was a careful compiler of all that was available to him, and, what is particularly important for the period from Richard II to Henry VII, he used the earlier work of Edward Hall. It was probably through Holinshed that Hall’s view of history received its widest currency. A second edition of Holinshed, greatly altered, appeared in 1587, and it was to this edition that Shakespeare and his contemporaries went for the greater part of the Elizabethan and Jacobean historical drama.⁵ Holinshed himself had died around 1580, and the additions and expansions in the 1587 volume are the work of John Hooker, Francis Thynne, John Stow, William Harrison, and Abraham Fleming under whose editorial direction the others seem to have worked.⁶

Drama was, of course, not the only literary art in the Elizabethan age which went to the chronicles of England for its inspiration. There is also a long and vital tradition of historical non-dramatic poetry,⁷ of which the most significant exemplar, for its influence upon the history play, is A Mirror for Magistrates – begun by William Baldwin as a continuation of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes – first printed in 1559 after having been suppressed by Queen Mary and enlarged and re-edited six more times by 1587. The Mirror, moreover, was widely imitated.⁸ Other poetic histories of England include William Warner’s Albion’s England, four books of which were published in 1586 and two more in 1589; Samuel Daniel’s First Foure Bookes of the Civile Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, published in 1595, with a fifth book to follow in 1596, a sixth in 1601, and the complete work in 1609. Michael Drayton was the author of several historical poems. His Piers Gaveston was printed in 1593, and his Matilda followed in 1594. These were both reprinted in 1596, along with The Tragical Legend of Robert Duke of Normandy. In that year also Drayton published his Mortimeriados, which he was later to rewrite and republish in 1603 as The Barons Warres. A related work, although not entirely historical, is Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, a long topographical poem inspired by Camden’s Britannia. This was first published in 1612 and then in an enlarged edition in 1622. The age was one of deep interest in history, manifest in prose, poetry, and the drama, and it was to the same preoccupations and tastes as the others that the historical drama catered.

Much confusion has resulted, I believe, from the use of the term ‘chronicle play’ to refer to the large body of extant plays which take as their subject matter the history of England. The term is always used with the unstated implication that a chronicle play somehow differs from a history play, although what a history is and just how a ‘chronicle’ may differ from it is never made clear. Henry V is labelled a ‘chronicle play’ and Julius Caesar a history, but the only generic difference between the two plays is that the one is drawn from English history and the other from Roman; and although Roman history could never have the same significance as English history to the Elizabethans, both are parts of the great sphere of history, and it is ridiculous to make generic distinctions on the basis of the national origin of subject matter. The term ‘chronicle’ is used, moreover, to refer to a kind of formless, episodic drama, and the implication is usually that this was the only kind of drama in which the history of England was ever treated. The inadequacy of this notion I shall attempt to demonstrate below. Since a meaningful distinction between ‘chronicle’ and history is impossible, we had best abandon the term ‘chronicle’ entirely. Plays which deal with the history of any country are history plays, and no other critical term is needed.

The Elizabethans themselves have left us little of value in so far as a definition of the history play is concerned. The famous induction to A Warning for Fair Women (1599), in which History appears upon the stage with Tragedy and Comedy, tells us something about tragedy but does nothing to define the history play. The editors of the Shakespeare folio of 1623 divided his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories; but it is not likely that Heminges and Condell approached their task with fine critical distinctions, as we know, for instance, from their inclusion of Cymbeline among the tragedies. Under histories, they included only Shakespeare’s plays on recent British history, but certainly no Elizabethan would have questioned the historicity of such plays as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, to say nothing of King Lear and Macbeth. It seems likely that the editors of the folio were most interested in presenting Shakespeare’s plays on recent English history in chronological order. This they did, labelling the group histories. All other plays they grouped as either comedies or tragedies – except for Troilus and Cressida, about which there was apparently some confusion – ignoring whether they were histories as well. The designations on the title-pages of quartos are equally useless, for the term ‘history’ was applied to almost anything.

Schelling called the history play a distinctively English product which sprang suddenly into being with the great tide of British nationalism and patriotism that accompanied the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, and he held that it was more closely related to non-dramatic literature than to other forms of the drama.⁹ Schelling made little attempt to fix the limits of the history play as a genre, and in separating it from the general course of Elizabethan drama he was, if anything, misleading. William Dinsmore Briggs, on the other hand, defined the history play in a more arbitrary manner:

Let us define the chronicle history as a dramatic composition purporting to draw its materials from the chronicles (or from an equivalent source), treating these materials in a way to bring out their accidental (particularly chronological) relations, recognizing as a rule no other principle of connection than that of personality, and having the general character of a survey of a more or less arbitrarily limited period.¹⁰

The limitations of such a definition are obvious. Even in so far as form alone is concerned, it will fit only the crudest specimens of the history play. Its inadequacy is implicit in that it cannot apply to such plays as Woodstock, Edward II, or Richard II, where we find well-knit dramatic structure and integrating forces far more important than the chronological. There is, moreover, in the greatest history plays a distinct political purpose which Briggs ignored. The history play cannot be defined on the basis of dramatic form, for the forms in which we find it are many. Far more important than form is the dramatist’s artistic intention. Schelling and Briggs merely perpetuated what A. P. Rossiter has termed, ‘an academic myth raised by last century aversion to morals and politics, with the resulting failure to estimate aright the shaping influence of the Morality in particular and allegory in general’ on the mature Elizabethan history play.¹¹ This is the critical myth, still widely accepted, which would define the Tudor history play as an episodic, disintegrated, non-didactic pageant.

A more realistic distinction has been drawn by Professor Alfred B. Harbage in his separation of Shakespeare’s plays into history and fable.¹² Among the histories he would include the ten English and three Roman history plays and Troilus and Cressida; all others he would call fables. The primary distinction between the two groups, he holds, is that in fable, ‘the relationship among the characters is mainly personal and domestic, not political; and vice and virtue operate on individuals directly, not through the intermediary of national programs or party platforms’ (p. 124); in histories, on the other hand, moral choices are determined by national and political, rather than personal, concerns. The matter of fable, he holds, could be altered freely to suit the dramatist’s purposes, whereas the authors of history plays were more closely restricted to their sources.

Professor Harbage is correct in pointing to the political motivation of history, and his distinction is essentially a valid one, although one might question his categorization of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly since it is based upon a rigid distinction between history and tragedy which would deny to plays like Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra the status of tragedy. But as a means of defining the history play Harbage’s distinction does not go far enough. One wonders whether, in actual analysis of a play, the line between private and political conduct can be clearly drawn. The political and the personal are often inseparable,¹³ and it is perhaps inevitably so in a dramatist such as Shakespeare who saw the problems of state in terms of the personality of the ruler and who conceived of society as a dynamic organism in which the goodness of individual men and women was indispensable to the health of the political whole.

The freedom with which a dramatist treats his sources depends largely upon personal attitudes and purposes. Robert Greene in his Alphonsus of Aragon could take a widely celebrated historical figure out of Bartolommeo Fazio’s history of Naples and involve him in a mosaic of imaginary battles and romance situations, without any concern for historical truth whatsoever. When Shakespeare used Plutarch, he followed his sources much more faithfully than he did when he used Holinshed. To assume that there was in England before the middle of the seventeenth century any great concern for historical accuracy as an end in itself is unwarranted. The purpose of a history, as I shall explain below, was not to present truth about the past for its own sake; it was to use the past for didactic purposes, and writers of history, both non-dramatic and dramatic, altered their material freely in order better to achieve their didactic aims.¹⁴ The King John story furnishes an excellent example. The chronicles through Polydore Vergil had all treated John harshly and from a Catholic point of view, but Reformation w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Preface to First Edition
• 1 History and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare
• 2 The Emergence of a Dramatic Genre
• 3 Some Early English History Plays
• 4 The Early Shakespeare
• 5 Historical Tragedy and Moral History
• 6 Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy
• 7 The Biographical Play
• 8 Legendary and Anglo-Saxon History
• 9 The History Play in Decline
• Appendices A: A Note on Tudor Political Doctrine
• Appendices B: A Chronological List of Extant English History Plays, 1519-1653
• Appendices C: The Principal Sources of the English History Play
• Appendices D: A Select Bibliography of Secondary Materials
• Index