History in Shakespeare’s England: from Caxton to Camden
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hakespeare’s artistry uncannily animates the past. As one near contempo-rary insists, in a commendatory poem in the second edition of Shakespeare’s col-lected plays (1632), the plays energetically present ‘what story [i.e., history]coldly tells’, and they even more literally enliven history in their ability ‘to raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse’. The stage makes the past present and allows its audiences vicarious emotional participation. When historical charac-ters are represented in the theatre, ‘the present age / Joys in their joy and trem-bles at their rage’. For the commendatory poet, this is value enough; we are ‘by elaborate play / Tortured and tickled’.
Yet the representation of the past was of more serious concern to many in Shakespeare’s England. History was unquestionably among the most influential forms of writing circulating among the ranks of an increasingly literate popu-lace, and history plays were written not least to exploit in the theatre the enthu-siasm for history that was evident in the bookstalls. But to understand what these history plays were (and were not) for the audiences that saw them, it is necessary to think about how the more traditional forms of history writing were under-stood and valued.
There was a general consensus that the past had meaning for the present, but less agreement about what this meaning was. History was sometimes recognized as a branch of theology, the record of God’s providence, and sometimes it was seen as an exclusively secular concern, the record solely of human motives and actions. History was sometimes valued because it is truthful, that is, for its accu-rate recording of events; and sometimes it was valued because it is useful, that is, for its ability to provide compelling examples of behaviour to be emulated or shunned. History was sometimes understood as the record of noble deeds and matters of state, and sometimes its focus self-consciously widened to include the experiences of a greater slice of the population, implicitly insisting that the nation was more than just its aristocracy.
Although many in Shakespeare’s England were well aware of the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the practice of history writing, history unques-tionably existed for them as a significant cultural enterprise, and indeed it is in
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this period that ‘history’ begins to form as an academic discipline.1 History served the nation in various ways, and the multiple benefits of history writing were part of the familiar catalogues of praise that usually introduced it. Richard Stanyhurst, for example, in but one of the many sixteenth-century encomia of history, claimed that it serves as the ‘marrow of reason, the cream of experience, the sap of wisdom, the pith of judgement, the library of knowledge, the kernel of policy, the unfoldress of treachery, the calendar of time, the lantern of truth, the life of memory, the doctress of behaviour, the register of antiquity, the trumpet of chivalry’.2And if no single example of history writing was likely to be all of these things, the variety of available historiographic practices indeed meant that history could function to recover and preserve the past, to instruct and inspire the present, to witness to God’s providence, and to celebrate, perhaps even to define, the nation. Antiquarian, moral, theological, and political interests motivated both the writing and the reading of history, and could be discovered to various degrees in the wide range of historical texts that circulated.
Though history writing in Shakespeare’s England would become most spec-tacularly available in the massive folio volumes of Foxe’sActs and Monuments (first published in 1563) or the collaborative project familiarly known as Holinshed’s Chronicles (first published in 1577), already by the end of the fif-teenth century history had emerged significantly both as a topic of serious thought and as a commodity. Indeed, the printing of history in England is virtu-ally coextensive with the history of printing in England. Among the books printed by William Caxton in the years immediately after he founded the first English press in 1476, on Tothill Street in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, were two books of history writing:The Chronicles of England (1480), a translation of the Brut, an Anglo-French chronicle history of Britain beginning, as its name suggests, with its mythical founding by Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, and con-tinuing to the battle of Halidon Hill in 1333; and a translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon (1482), a universal history in seven books, that began with Adam and Eve and continued to 1358, with Caxton himself adding an eighth book in his printed edition extending the narrative to 1460.
History was, of course, not all that Caxton printed (though interestingly the very first book that he did print, while still working in Bruges in 1474, was The Recuyell of the History of Troy, an English translation of Raôul Lefèvre’s French version of two alleged eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War).3Nonetheless, the fact that Caxton so eagerly took on the printing and publishing (and even the writing) of history suggests how important the genre was – both to him and to the emerging reading public that enthusiastically greeted the supply of a fford-able copies allowed by the new technology. Caxton’s versions of both the Brut and the Polychronicon went through multiple printed editions. By 1530, the Brut, which in its enlarged form had become known as ‘Caxton’s Chronicles’, had been published thirteen times; the Polychronicon six.
Caxton’s Brut and Polychronicon were the first two printed histories that a 168 David Scott Kastan
reader could consult in English, and they set the pattern for much of what was to come. The Polychronicon arranges human time according to the seven ages of the world, a structure of history derived ultimately from Augustine, in which worldly events find meaning in relation to the defining rhythms of salvation history; it is, however, no less than the more obviously nationalistic Brut, a work of secular and patriotic history designed for lay reading, in which the past takes its ordering principle from political institutions – regnal or mayoral years marking time – rather than from God’s providential scheme.
Not least because of its independence from the structure of salvation history, the chronicle form evident in Caxton’s two histories became a significant and successful genre, responding to the demands not only of an aristocratic reader-ship but also of an increasingly literate middle ‘sort’ for histories that would help explain and secure their growing prestige. Numerous other chronicles were written, perhaps most significantly that by Robert Fabyan, a London draper, which would serve as both source and pattern for the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed that would later influence Shakespeare.
Fabyan’sNew Chronycles of Englande and Fraunce appeared posthumously in 1516. In the next half-century, Fabyan’s work was printed six more times.
Divided into seven parts, Fabyan’s history begins with the Romans’ appearance in ancient Britain and carries the history forward until 1485. The bulk of the book, however, covers the period 1066 to 1485, that is, from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Wars of the Roses. Additions first present in the 1533 edition extended the history to 1509, bringing it up through the reign of Henry VII.
Fabyan did little if any original scholarship, depending for most of his history on the accounts that were readily available to him in the augmented editions of the Polychronicon and the Brut, and in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. But if Fabyan was not noticeably ambitious as a scholar – he describes his book merely as ‘The Concordance of Histories’ – he did compare his sources and often recognized contradictions between them. Indeed he saw as a major part of his task ‘the stories and years to make accordant’,4though his principle of adjudication was usually merely quantitative. Where one source varied ‘from other writers of authority’, he would rely on that which ‘accordeth best with other stories and chronicles’ (p.35), with no apparent recognition that agreement might prove only common dependency rather than greater reliability.
Nonetheless, in places he does show some sophistication about source material, insisting, for example, that the bias of the historian must be factored into one’s reading, as with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who Fabyan realized omitted material that might taint the British past with ‘dishonour’: ‘for he was a Briton, he showed the best for Britons’ (p.36).
Fabyan’s chronicle, however, itself ‘showed the best for Britons’. Although his occasionally voiced scepticism about received traditions would become the very mark of modern historiography, he wrote a history primarily designed to Shakespeare and English history 169
preserve and celebrate the English past, to ‘spread / The famous honour of this fertile Isle’ (p.3). If he was suspicious of some of the Arthurian material that derived from Geoffrey, he, nonetheless, usually included it, because it provided a useful genealogy for sixteenth-century England’s own energies and ambitions.
A more scholarly tradition of historiography was almost simultaneously estab-lished in England. The Italian cleric, Polydore Vergil, who had been educated at Padua and Bologna, had come to England in 1502, officially as the deputy collec-tor of Peter’s pence. He was encouraged by Henry VII to rewrite England’s history, and he was hard at work on it by1506. He had probably completed a version by1513, though a printed edition of the Anglica historia was not available until 1534.
Vergil’s history, written in Latin (and not published in English until the middle of the nineteenth century), demonstrated the scholarly rigour of conti-nental humanism, even as it produced a history that would bolster the legitimacy of the Tudor reign. Vergil examined primary materials, such as statutes and other governmental documents, interviewed people who had first-hand knowledge of events, and, for the earlier history for which such direct evidence could not be assembled, energetically sought historical accounts that might be more accurate or more extensive than the Brut or the Polychronicon. He brought to the practice of history writing a methodological self-consciousness previously absent from the writing of English history,5a self-consciousness that led him to reject the his-toricity of the Arthurian material that made up much of the early chronicle material and accounted in large degree for its great popularity.
If Fabyan and Vergil superficially produce similar kinds of history, each orga-nizing the swirl of event in terms of successive monarchical reigns, they differ in crucial ways that would shape the future directions of history writing. What counts as history for Fabyan could be seen as more capacious than what counts for Vergil. Fabyan focuses his narrative on the ‘acts and deeds’ of noble men, but fills his chronicle also with information irrelevant to the high politics of the nation. He writes as well of drought and dearth, of urban affairs and local customs. Clearly he is content to be one of those ‘Chroniclers’ who do, as a seventeenth-century satirist put it, ‘confound grave matters of estate / With plays ofPoppets, and I wot not what’.6For Fabyan, history is the history of the nation’s people, a history of the world that they experience.
For Vergil, history is the history of the nation’s rulers and its governmental institutions. His is a history from above, almost exclusively a history of great men and the ‘grave matters of estate’ that Fabyan’s capaciousness confounded. But it is also a history that is more plot than story, perhaps suggesting how powerful patronage might make for powerfully narrativized history. Fabyan’s popular history is largely paratactic, that is, a history in which many things happen but not necessarily in any relation to one another nor moving towards any particular end. Indeed Edward Hall, while praising the ‘diligence’ of Fabyan’s research, criticized the capacious chronicle itself as ‘far shooting wide from the butt of a 170 David Scott Kastan
history’.7Hall complains that Fabyan’s history lacks a ‘butt’, or target; it lacks, that is, teleological design. Vergil’s history, however, unmistakably has such a
‘butt’: the coming of the Tudors to power. Unlike Fabyan’s, his narrative is hypo-tactic: events are seen in causal relation as they unfold towards a known and desired end.
Fabyan and Vergil represent two separate impulses of English history writing.
Fabyan’s inclusive, popular history would give rise to the great chronicle tradi-tion of Grafton, Holinshed, and Speed, while Vergil’s more learned and critical practice would find its fulfilment in the seventeenth century in the work of Francis Bacon and John Selden. But the two historiographic traditions were never completely distinct.
Their interrelations can perhaps be seen most clearly in the work of Edward Hall. Hall, a London lawyer educated at Eton and Cambridge and a member of Parliament, made explicit Vergil’s effort to use history for present purposes. His Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (first published in 1548) recounts the emergence of the Tudor dynasty from the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. History, as for Vergil, is organized by individual monarchical reigns, stretching from ‘The unquiet time of King Henry the Fourth’ to ‘the tri-umphant reign of King Henry the VIII’. But Hall has, like Fabyan, a more robust sense of what counts as history,filling his pages also with trial records and legis-lative debates, natural occurrences and local events, texturing the historical romance that was his chief interest: ‘as King Henry the fourth was the beginning and root of the great discord and division: so was that godly matrimony [i.e., the marriage of Henry Richmond to Elizabeth of York], the final end of all dissen-sions, titles and debates’ (sig.a2r).
But in spite of the conspicuous achievements of both the popular chronicle and the more learned historical writing, achievements that would in time prove decisive for the practices and protocols of English historical scholarship, most English readers would have encountered their history elsewhere. Almost every-one would have somewhere seen (if not necessarily read) the great volumes of John Foxe’sActs and Monuments, often known as The Book of Martyrs, that were chained, along with the Bible, to lecterns in cathedrals and in many parish churches. The two volumes of the 1570 edition run to approximately two-and-a-half million words printed on somewhat more than 2,300 large folio pages (141⁄2
inches (36.8cm) by 91⁄2inches (24cm)). Foxe’s history stands in two senses as a monumental witness to what Foxe calls ‘the secret multitude of true believers’.
It is monumental both in size and in intent, an imposing memorial to the martyrs whom Foxe sees as witnessing to and suffering for the Protestant faith. Foxe’s history is a genealogy of and a justification for the Reformation itself, and, if not a claim that England is the elect nation, a recognition that England is an elect nation, whose position as bulwark against the forces of the Antichrist the book would both celebrate and reinforce.
If the various editions of Foxe’sActs and Monuments (eight between 1563 and Shakespeare and English history 171
1641) offer massive evidence of the importance of history writing in the sixteenth century, equally telling evidence can be found in miniature, in the reduced form in which most readers would in fact have read historical texts. The big folios of Foxe, and other historians, were both unwieldy and expensive, and soon a supply of cheap and small-format histories, summaries or abridgements of larger works, began to fill the bookstalls. Even Foxe was abridged, first by Timothy Bright in 1589 in a quarto edition selling for five shillings, and subsequently in ever smaller redactions, eventually appearing in a version by John Taylor in 1616, which improbably reduced Foxe’s book to two hundred and thirty eight couplets pub-lished in 64mo, its pages measuring a mere 15⁄8inches (4cm) by 11⁄4(3cm).
Less spectacular reductions in size were of course the norm. Recognizing that few readers had either the money or the time to spend on the large chronicles, historians produced summaries or abridgements of the chronicles in inexpensive octavo and duodecimo formats, designed, as Alexander Ross said in his preface to The Marrow of History (1650), to be ‘more portable, more legible, and more vendible, than the great Book’. The first of these abridgements was Thomas Cooper’s Epitome of Cronicles (1549), a work begun by Thomas Languet, who had died having brought the history only up to the birth of Christ. Others soon followed Cooper’s example, most notably Richard Grafton and John Stow.
Though both published large folio editions of their histories, their abridgements were the great commercial successes – and generated an often bitter rivalry.8 Grafton’s Abridgement of the Chronicles was issued six times between 1563 and 1572, the year of his death; and Stow’s Summary of the English Chronicles five times in that period, with an additional fourteen editions appearing between 1573 and 1618 (the last three of which were edited by Edmund Howes after Stow died in 1605).
Some forms of history writing, however, did not readily lend themselves to abridgement, most obviously the form that was generally known as chorography, combining historical data and geographic detail. Place and family names, local customs, topographic features, coins, inscriptions, ruins, monuments, and build-ings are all described and analysed, enabling the history of a particular locale to come into view. But chorography resists abridgement because its logic is not nar-rative but accretive; more is always better. Details do not obscure the main point;
they are the main point.9
William Camden, an undermaster at Westminster School, wrote the most influential version of this kind of history. His Britannia, published first in 1587 in Latin, was enlarged and reprinted five times before 1607; it was translated into English in 1610 by Philemon Holland, and an enlarged version of the English translation was published in 1637. Britannia was conceived as a guidebook to Roman Britain. Camden traced the Roman occupation of Britain, often follow-ing the path of the Roman roads as he searched for archaeological evidence of Britain’s Roman past. Camden’s interest was in part to connect the nation to 172 David Scott Kastan
Imperial Rome, giving it a genealogy that would establish its links to the rest of Europe; but in part it was also a more general interest in the way the land absorbs and speaks its history.
Camden’s geographic focus offers a fourth understanding of the nation, not as its people or as its rulers, as in Fabyan or Vergil, nor as the battlefield on which the forces of Christ and Antichrist waged war, as in Foxe, but the nation as the land itself – country, that is, as countryside. Though Britannia sought to describe the entire nation, after Camden the chorographic impulse tended to produce
Camden’s geographic focus offers a fourth understanding of the nation, not as its people or as its rulers, as in Fabyan or Vergil, nor as the battlefield on which the forces of Christ and Antichrist waged war, as in Foxe, but the nation as the land itself – country, that is, as countryside. Though Britannia sought to describe the entire nation, after Camden the chorographic impulse tended to produce