RICHARD PLANTAGENET. The truth appears so naked on my side That any purblind eye may find it out.
SOMERSET. And on my side it is so well apparelled, So clear, so shining, and so evident,
That it will glimmer through a blind man’s eye. (1 Henry VI: 2.4.20-4)
In this famous scene set in the Temple garden, York and Somerset are bickering about some historically controversial events that took place prior to the beginning of the play. In order to sort the supporters of each side, and since their attendants are reluctant to speak, York suggests that those who support his argument pluck a white rose and Somerset advises his supporters to pluck a red one. In this way they set the grounds for the Wars of the Roses that will last for decades. In this scene, York, Somerset as well as their supporters are obsessed with establishing the truth about the events that happened prior to that time. The word ‘truth’ is mentioned 8 times in this small scene (out of 12 in the whole play), let alone the pronominal references to that word. In other words, both York and Somerset are striving to retrospectively reconstruct the actual past events whose validity is far from agreed-upon. However, each presents a special mode of truth: York’s ‘naked’ truth and Somerset’s ‘apparelled’ truth. Technically phrased, the difference is between truth about the actual past as a purely ontological category that has to do with what really happened, or rather as a cognitive category having to do with how that past is represented in ways that render it more credible and probable.
In the last Chapter, in our survey of the functions of the virtual events in Shakespeare, we unproblematically distinguished between the actual and the virtual in Shakespearean drama. However, in Shakespeare’s representation of the historical past, the distinction between the actual and possible is made on cognitive rather than ontological levels. In this Chapter I shall argue that, in his representation of history, Shakespeare tends to problematize the very notion of the actual past. Shakespeare stresses that the actual past, as we now conceive
it, is a representation. As such, he highlights two aspects of the representation of past reality that we have considered essential to the nature of the possible or the virtual: its rhetorical (or cognitive) function and its potentiality. In their contest about the past, characters are more concerned about providing a credible representation of the past (apparelled truth) than about establishing the absolute factuality of that past (naked truth). That representation of the past is essentially carried out through rhetorical and narrative strategies which emphasize the cognitive aspect of the representation. Although the very facts of the past might pass uncontested, the past reality still carries the potential of different representations and interpretations. Thus, the potentiality of the virtual as well as its rhetorical function also infects the representation of the actual past itself.
The questions about the nature of the actual past and its affinities with the virtual have theoretical and practical overtones. Theoretically, they are pertinent to the preoccupations of possible world theorists in two main points. First, possible worlds theory has generally rejected claims about the fictionality of the actual past, claims mainly associated with the postmodern challenge. Possible worlds theorists have opposed the claim made by Hayden White and others that, since historical writing uses literary devices, then history has a fictional aspect. But as we shall show later, this rejection results from confusion about the meaning attached to the concept of ‘fiction’; this concept has acquired two main meanings: an ontological meaning in the sense opposite to ‘historical truth’ and a cognitive meaning in the sense of literary and narrative organization. The second point has to do with the nature of the actual world: whether or not our knowledge of and access to the actual world is “independent of any mediating concepts, categories or structures of representation" (Norris 1992, 41). Two main positions can be discerned within possible world theory regarding this question: an essentialist position which holds that possible worlds, the actual world included, are independent of their linguistic representation; and a constructivist position which holds that they are only accessible through and thus influenced by their linguistic and cultural representations. These two views would adhere to the ‘naked’ versus ‘apparelled’ truths, respectively.
Practically, the question of the cognitive and potentialist aspects of the actual past becomes more provocative as we approach the domain of history
and historical truth. It is not a question of whether the real past existed or not; rather it is the question of whether our understanding and appreciation of the past is independent from or contingent on the representations of that past. In Shakespeare’s history plays, characters are desperate to prove their unmediated version of the real past. In this Chapter, I am less concerned about the actual/virtual dichotomy (which we pursued in the last Chapter) than with the exact nature of the actual world itself. I shall address these questions in the History plays, here represented by the three parts of Henry VI, and will demonstrate throughout that characters in these plays always treat historical truth in cognitive rather than merely ontological terms. Although they claim otherwise, these characters are less concerned with what really happened than with how to present their version of events more credibly and persuasively, using rhetorical, narrative and literary techniques. Given that these plays are intensely grappling with issues of historical writing and historical truth, it can be argued that this observation might also cover the practice of historiography in the early modern era when these plays were first performed.
Below I shall firstly examine the theoretical aspects of the debate between possible worlds theorists and adherents of the postmodern challenge (mainly Hayden White) about the effect of the rhetorical and narrative strategies on the factual status of historical representation. Then I shall turn to the early modern intellectual milieu and show that these questions about the representation of the past were hotly debated in the fields of history and, even more, in literary and rhetorical theories. Lastly I shall show how these controversies are reflected in these three plays; and I shall explore how characters view their role in transmitting historical material and what that can tell us about a view of Renaissance historiography which the plays might have been keen to present.