THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, ...
This statement of an ideal, separate, secure, peaceful, kingly, little island is frequently truncated by those who cite it
before the prophetic Gaunt gets to his point: the ideal does not exist and the England of Richard II ‘hath made a
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shameful conquest of itself’. Gaunt’s idealized vision is used in the play, and, by means of echoes, in the three dramas
that follow it, to expose the reality of a realm descending into disunity and war. The ‘other Eden’ and the ‘demiparadise’
are, if they ever existed, now lost. If, on one level, Richard II and its successors explore the consequences of
the disruption of the direct line of royal descent from the Conqueror, on another they demonstrate that powerstruggles
and conflicts of interest are not exclusively concerned with dynastic rights nor does civil peace automatically
stem from the legitimate rule of divinely appointed kings. The Earl of Essex would not have been alone in 1601 in
recognizing that history was ramified in the guts and minds of the living.
The historical play entitled The Reign of Edward III, which was once loosely ascribed to Shakespeare, was
published in 1596 (it was registered for publication a year earlier). In its first two acts it is concerned not with
showing us a golden age basking in the glory of a chivalrous warrior King, but with that King’s dishonourable pursuit
of the Countess of Salisbury. Edward emerges as a flawed hero who redeems his ‘honour’ by chasing the chimera of
his supposed rights in France (the same chimera to be pursued, as Shakespeare himself showed, by another ‘hero
King’, Henry V). The Reign of Edward III provided the context from which Richard II and its successors developed.
The memory of Edward III and his foreign wars served to show up the domestic disasters of the reign of Edward’s
grandson Richard (whose only military campaign is a failed one in Ireland). In turn, the deposition of Richard leads to
the disorders which so shake Henry Bolingbroke and which persuade the sleepless king to acknowledge that the crown
has sat ‘troublesome’ upon his head. Even though Henry V attempts to distract minds at home from civil ills by taking
up Edward III’s claims in France, he too is obliged to muse sleeplessly in the night before the battle of Agincourt on
‘the fault | My father made in compassing the crown’. Despite Henry’s military triumph and despite his French
marriage, Chorus reminds us at the end of the play that his heir’s inheritance will be bitter; France will be lost and
England will bleed, an event ‘which oft our stage hath shown’. Henry V returns us, therefore, to the historical point at
which Shakespeare began to explore the civil disasters of late medieval history, the first of the three Henry VI plays.
What distinguishes I and II Henry IV from the history plays that Shakespeare wrote both before and after it is his
presentation of an England which prospers and suffers beyond the King’s court and the circle of the King’s
aristocratic enemies. In a sense, the cue for this celebration of a wider, popular England lay in the traditional
interpretation of the transformation of the scapegrace Prince Hal into the gracious and honourable King Harry. Where
Holinshed excused the former as some kind of adolescent prelude to the famous victories of the King, Shakespeare
sought to show us a Prince who carefully calculates in all that he does. He is both prig and prodigal son, but in his
prodigality he encounters a world which is more than an alternative to his father’s troubled
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court. Hal does not simply drop out from a fraught ruling class, he drops in to the society of the ruled. Through
Falstaff, he learns the intense delights of irresponsibility and experiences the exercise of an elastic morality, but he
has to teach himself the significance of responsibility and the law. Where Falstaff discounts honour as ‘a mere
scutcheon’, Hal has to outface his father’s enemy, Hotspur, who once rejoiced in the idea of plucking ‘bright honour
from the pale-faced moon’. Where Falstaff claims to have misused the King’s press ‘damnably’ in Part I and cynically
demonstrates his scandalous methods of recruitment in Justice Shallow’s Gloucestershire in Part II, Hal has, with,
perhaps, a parallel degree of cynicism, to learn the bluff arts of military command. Falstaff, Shakespeare’s amplest
comic invention, squashes all endeavour; Hal, the playboy Prince, has occasionally to pause to remind us that he is in
fact in earnest training for his future role as ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’. Falstaff is warned of his, and Hal’s,
destiny, in one of the most carefully modulated exchanges in I Henry IV. In Act II, scene v the two men play an acting
game which parodies an interview between the penitent Prince and his sorrowing father; when Falstaff in the part of
Hal mounts a highly imaginative defence of the character of ‘plump Jack’, the real Hal royally responds to the
challenge of banishing him with the blunt force of ‘I do: I will’. The scene is suddenly interrupted by the sound of
knocking, and it is for the actors to determine how pregnant is the potential pause, how potent is the moment of truth.
The England that contains Justice Shallow’s orchard and the battlefield at Shrewsbury, Gad’s Hill and the
Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, is a hierarchically ordered nation threatened on all levels by disorder. The
English history plays consider how civil order is related to central government. If government is generally represented