THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

substantially altered the story of Lear’s misfortunes to suit his particular tragic predilection (in Holinshed’s account
the King both retains his sanity and regains his throne), in his English history plays he tended to remain faithful to
his source as a record of received opinions of character, motive, and political consequence. The King John of the
Chronicles is the victim of ‘the pride and pretended authoritie of the cleargie’, and the ‘greatlie unfortunate’ Richard
II is a man ‘rather coveting to live in pleasure, than to deale with much businesse, and the weightie affaires of the
realme’ (though Shakespeare chose to ignore the claim that ‘there reigned abundantlie the filthie sinne of leacherie
and fornication, with abhominable adulterie, speciallie in the king’). Holinshed’s Henry V is a paragon (‘a capteine
against whom fortune never frowned, nor mischance once spurned ... his vertues notable, his qualities most
praiseworthie’), while his Richard III is a shifty basilisk (‘When he stood musing, he would bite and chaw busilie his
nether lip ... the dagger which he ware, he would (when he studied) with his hands plucke up & downe in the sheath
to the midst, never drawing it fullie out ... he was of a readie, pregnant, and quicke wit, wilie to feine, and apt to
dissemble’). Despite the aberrant behaviour, the deficient morality, and the frequent sins of usurpation which stain the
careers of certain kings, the line of monarchs which marches through the pages of the Chronicles effectively stretches
out to the crack of doom. England and Scotland are seen as sharing a common history of royal government and
destiny, if not as yet a common dynasty. Holinshed’s volumes view history from a narrowly monarchic perspective,
but if on one level they see the weight of national history and royal tradition as justifying the new emphases of Tudor
and Stuart policy, on another they treat the past as a series of dramatic, occasionally tragic, occasionally bathetic,
conflicts between personalities.
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Patriotic and propagandist zeal was not the exclusive preserve of antiquarians who saw the present as an organic
development of patterns implicit in the national past. An emphasis on divine providence, on the providential
movement of history, and on the special destinies of Britain also marks the accounts of the often unlearned men
engaged in expanding the frontiers of British influence in the world beyond Western Europe. Richard Hakluyt’s
enterprise in collecting the testimonies and celebrating the exploits of contemporary sailors, traders, adventurers, and
explorers in his Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) enabled both
relatively commonplace and quite extraordinary men to speak out plainly and proudly. Hakluyt (1552-1616) expanded
his collection into a three-volume work in 1598-1600 (adding the mercantile word ‘Traffiques’ to his title). It was
further supplemented in 1625 by Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a
History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travell by Englishmen and others, a work partly based on data
acquired but left unpublished by his predecessor. Samuel Purchas (?1557-1626), a London parish priest, chose his title
carefully. His heroes, like Hakluyt’s, are pilgrims seeking future promises rather than historic shrines. Their secular
quests are both blessed and inspired by God. The voyages described by Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s explorers are beset by
storms, fevers, famines, and enemies to the body and the soul; they are rewarded, as the overall editorial structure
implies, by the knowledge that something momentous has been achieved for the good of God’s Englishmen. Sailors
are enslaved by Pagans and Christians alike and they are menaced both by the determined natives whose cultures they
threaten and by the Spanish Inquisition (‘that rakehell order’) whose principles they defy. English travellers are
variously fascinated by the sumptuous entertainment at the Czar’s table on Christmas Day (‘they were served in
vessels of gold, and that as much as could stand one by another upon the tables’), by the Emperor Akbar’s menage
(’The King hath in Agra and Fatehpur as they do credibly report 1000 elephants, thirtie thousand horses, 1400 tame
deer, 800 concubines; such store of ounces, tigers, buffaloes, cocks and hawks that is very strange to see’), and by the
‘great reverence’ accorded to the King of Benin (‘it is such that if we would give as much to Our Saviour Christ we
should remove from our heads many plagues which we daily deserve for our contempt and impiety’). Openings for
trade are paramount in the Old World; seizures of Spanish Gold, Anglican missionizing, and advantageous English
settlement in the New. Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s economic pilgrims stumble upon the exotic and the wondrous and
they react either with amazement or with an insular intolerance of cultural otherness, struggling to articulate the
import of their epiphanies.
Perhaps the most sophisticated of Hakluyt’s narrators was Sir Walter Ralegh (?1554-1618). Ralegh, one of Queen
Elizabeth’s most gifted and arrogantly assertive courtiers, remained preoccupied with the idea of an English
settlement in Guiana to the unhappy end of his career (indeed, his unsubstantiated
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insistence on the wonders of this Eldorado contributed to the charges of treason brought against him by the
intransigent and pro-Spanish James I). In his The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana
(published by Hakluyt) Ralegh stresses that he had come to a paradisal land as its liberator. He tells the Indian chiefs
that he represents something finer than their Spanish oppressors: ‘I made them understand that I was the servant of a