Historias digitales

You might be thinking that this is all starting to sound uncomfort- ably subjective, as though the history plays only mean whatever we want them to mean and that there are no historical facts. There are certain facts and they can help us at least in the matter of whether the whole eight-play, two-tetralogy cycle really is the telling of one grand and epic story of English history, as Tillyard maintained. As you can see from the list on page , Tillyard’s readings make sense when we think of the kings in the order in which they reigned, with the sin of Richard ’s usurpation at the beginning, the civil strife that ensued (in the reigns of Henrys , , and , Edwards  and , and Richard ), and redemption occurring with the succession of Henry , grand- father of the monarch reigning as the plays were written, Elizabeth. But what if we think about the plays in the order Shakespeare wrote them, and link that to the order of the reigns? The outcome is this table:

Historical reality History play

Richard  (reigned –)  Henry  (performed ) Henry  (–)  Henry  () Henry  (–)  Henry  () Henry  (–) Richard  (–) Edward  (–) Richard  () Edward  ()  Henry  (–) Richard  (–)  Henry  (–) Henry  (–) Henry  (–)

The first thing Shakespeare did right at the beginning of his career was write three plays about Henry : Part , then Part , and then Part . This seems odd – why write Part  first? – until you think of how epic serials get written. The Star Wars films ( – ), for

example, began with a story from the middle and then went back for what Hollywood calls a prequel, and the same thing happened here with what are called the Wars of the Roses, the struggle between the families of the Duke of Lancaster and the Duke of York for possession of the throne of England. After success with two plays about Henry , Shakespeare went back and wrote a prequel. Then he wrote a play about the reigns of Edward , Edward  and Richard , and this collection of four plays – the three parts of Henry  and Richard  – forms the first tetralogy. Then he really got the prequel bug and went back to the beginning of the story – starting with the last direct descendant of William the Conqueror, Richard  – and wrote four plays (the second tetralogy) about the events leading up to the Wars of the Roses, which is ini- tiated because Bolingbroke of Lancaster deposed Richard .

It should be clear that the order of composition plays havoc with Tillyard’s Tudor Myth reading in which the full suite of eight plays shows the disaster of Richard ’s fall, the long period of English civil misery (as though God were punishing the country for Richard’s downfall), and then the redemption with the marriage at the end of Richard , which depicts the houses of York and Lancaster united in the person of Henry . The Tudor Myth is a neat scheme, and indeed it seems anticipated by what people say in the plays. Remember that Richard  talks about God’s vengeance for his usurpation and although we don’t see the armies of angels that Richard expects will fight on his side, perhaps the whole collection of plays taken together does show God’s reaction. The Bishop of Carlisle even has a speech (..–) that seems to prophesy the Wars of the Roses, making it seem that Shakespeare had the whole eight-play cycle in mind as he worked. Carlisle’s speech anticipates what comes to pass in the later plays. Only, as we have seen, they are not the later plays, they were written earlier. The order of composi- tion would seem to disrupt the neat, religious explanation of what is happening with English history in Shakespeare’s work.

As soon as it was published, reviewers noted that Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays took good account of the ideas about history that were circulating in Shakespeare’s time and that stories about how the relatively stable and orderly England of Elizabeth’s reign had come into being did indeed use religion to  

bolster patriotism. But they rightly complained that Tillyard had not taken good account of the history of Shakespeare’s writing, and that when the plays are looked at in the order he wrote them it is hard to see the overall plan at work. Moreover, in Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories (), Henry Ansgar Kelly pointed out that the sources Shakespeare used – the chron - icles of Holinshed and Hall – are themselves ambivalent about the Tudor Myth and divine Providence. Certainly at times the chron - icles seem to portray the hand of God shaping English history, but they also detail how human opportunism, politicking, and down- right thuggery – the kind of thing that Machiavelli’s name is asso- ciated with – played its part in making the history of England.

Perhaps the order of composition of Shakespeare’s history plays can, nonetheless, be reconciled with the Tudor Myth reading of them. Suppose that when Shakespeare came to write the second tetralogy his playing company, the Chamberlain’s men, revived the plays of the first tetralogy in their theatre, so that a playgoer could see the plays in their regnal order (rather than their order of com- position) if she wanted to. At the end of Shakespeare’s Henry  there is a hint that this happened. The chorus enters to round off the play, and says that this happy king, Henry , was succeeded by his unhappy son:

[CHORUS]

Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king Of France and England, did this king succeed, Whose state so many had the managing

That they lost France and made his England bleed, Which oft our stage hath shown – and, for their sake, In your fair minds let this acceptance take. Exit (Henry , Epilogue –)

The first tetralogy was written and first performed about eight or nine years earlier, which is quite a long time for the theatregoer to be expected to remember that the Chamberlain’s men had indeed shown the story of Henry . It seems more likely that Shakespeare’s company revived the Henry  plays at the end of the s and put them on with the Henry  and Henry  plays to give those

playgoers who wanted it a grand sweep of English history leading to the Elizabethan present.