THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Shakespeare’s Plays
Politics and History
For some 250 years after the deaths of the dramatists the plays of Shakespeare completely eclipsed those of Kyd and
Marlowe. As has become increasingly evident, however, Shakespeare’s early tragedies and histories existed, and
continue to exist, in a symbiotic relationship with those of his contemporaries. Kyd’s revenge dramas stimulated a
public appetite to which Shakespeare responded with a sensational replay of Kyd’s themes and echoes of his rhetoric
in Titus Andronicus (c. 1587, published 1594). Shakespeare’s professional rivalry with Marlowe was to be more
intense and to prove more fertile. Some of Aaron’s speeches in Titus Andronicus distantly echo the cadences of
Tamburlaine and, far less distantly, the malevolent gusto of Barabas. It was, however, with the first sequence of plays
based on English history that Shakespeare found a distinctive voice and presented a considered riposte to the radical
challenge posed by Marlowe. The ‘tiger-hearted’ Queen Margaret of the three parts of Henry VI (c. 1588-91), who
learns to spit curses, to wheedle, and to fight, is also the mistress of the kind of flamboyant gesture that audiences
might readily have associated with Marlowe’s male protagonists. It is she who so extravagantly insults the royal
pretences of the captured Duke of York and his ‘mess of sons’ by putting a paper crown on his head and then
knocking it off again to the words ‘Off with the crown and with the crown his head’. But it is one of these sons, the
Gloucester whom she has characterized to his father as ‘that valiant crookback prodigy ... that with his grumbling
voice | Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies’, who as Richard III most menacingly outcapers Marlowe’s
Machiavellian villains. If, as some critics believe, Edward II was Marlowe’s reply in historical kind, its moodiness
and its exploration of the tragic dimension in the fall of a king were in turn to stimulate both the new departures and
the plangency of Shakespeare’s Richard II (c. 1595, published 1597).
Shakespeare’s two sequences of English historical plays (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III; and Richard
II, the two parts of Henry IV of c. 1596 and c. 1597, and Henry V of 1599) plus King John of c. 1595 and Henry VIII
of c. 1612-
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13, reinvent the myths, memories, and constructions of recent history which had so preoccupied Tudor historians.
They explored divisions, depositions, usurpations, and civil wars, but they also bolstered the concept of secure
monarchic government propagated by officially approved apologists for the Tudor dynasty. If the subject-matter of
Richard II proved to be sufficiently contentious for the deposition scene to be omitted in the three editions published
in the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth, and if in 1601 the Earl of Essex and his fellow conspirators recognized that a
performance of the play might arouse support for their proposed coup d’état, such susceptibility served to prove how
well Shakespeare had understood affairs of state. His history plays have continued to shape British perceptions of the
national past and of nationhood. They remain political and patriotic statements of some potency (as Laurence
Olivier’s cinematic reworking of Henry V proved at a crucial phase of the Second World War). The ten history plays
are central to the conception of Shakespeare as a, perhaps the, national poet which began to emerge in the late
seventeenth century. To Samuel Johnson, writing in the mid-1760s, the Henry IV plays seemed to mark the apogee of
a certain kind of dramatic art. (‘Perhaps no author has ever in two plays afforded so much delight’). To English and
European Romantic poets, from Keats, Browning, and Tennyson to Goethe, Hugo, and Pushkin, Shakespeare emerged
as the key figure in the moulding of a particular national consciousness and the deviser of the model from which
future national historical dramas could develop.
In all, Shakespeare refers to England 247 times in his plays and to the English 143 times. It is scarcely surprising
that the vast majority of these references should occur in the history plays (the intensely nationalistic King John, for
example, mentions England no less than 43 times, Henry V 49 times, and Henry VIII 12 times). To many fond
anthologists, the central statement of Shakespeare’s feeling for his homeland occurs in Richard II as the dying John of
Gaunt feels himself ‘a prophet new-inspired’:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall,