WHEN Shakespeare's editors arranged his plays in the First Folio, they grouped them into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, putting the ten plays dealing with English history, and only those, into the Histories classification. The why of this arrangement implies definition. What was a history play in the thinking of the editors? Many scholars have discussed the genre without having agreed upon a definition.
Clearly the editors of the First Folio did not accept the authority of the titles of such plays as had already appeared in quarto editions. In the quartos the term tragedy had appeared in The True Tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke, The Tragedie of King Richard the Second, and The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. The term history had been used in the titles of The Taming of a Shrew, Henry IV, Hamlet (called a tragical history), and Troilus and Cressida, though it was perhaps used only in the sense of story. The more specific term chronicle history had, however, been used in the titles of The Chronicle History of Henry the Fift and the True Chronicle Historie of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters. Why were these original indications of dramatic genre ignored in the First Folio?
Clearly, also, the editors did not differentiate histories from tragedies on the basis of the sources from which they were derived, for the plays listed as histories have their source in the same chronicles as Lear and Macbeth among the tragedies, and Cymbeline among the comedies. Most of the Shakespeare tragedies were, indeed, drawn from accepted historical sources. What, then, differentiated the chosen ten in the thinking of Shakespeare's first editors?
The answer to these questions is usually vague. Many scholars have substituted description for definition in writing about Shakespeare's histories. Coleridge, seeing that the ten plays related to the history of England, and taking into account his premise that the history play should be regarded as “the transitional link between the epic poem and the drama,” framed a definition to fit the facts as he saw them:
In order that a drama may be properly historical, it is necessary that it should be the history of the people to whom it is addressed … It takes, therefore, that part of real history which is least known, and infuses a principle of life and organization into the naked facts, and makes them all the framework of an animated whole.1
It is difficult to see why Coleridge should regard plays dealing with the Wars of the Roses as “least known” to the Elizabethans, for this period was the one most frequently chronicled and made the subject of exegesis by the Tudors. But it is quite easy to see why he arrived at his definition of a true history as dealing with the people to whom it is addressed, since that apparently seemed to him the only basis upon which the ten English histories could have been differentiated from many of the others. It is evident, however, that he saw the inadequacy of his own definition, for he recognized the existence of varied types of history plays, calling Henry IV, for instance, a “mixed drama” and explaining:
The distinction does not depend on the mere quantity of historical events in the play compared with the fictions; for there is as much history in “Macbeth” as in “Richard,” but in the relation of the history to the plot. In the purely historical plays, the history forms the plot: in the mixed, it directs it; in the rest, as Macbeth, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Lear, it subserves it.2
The purpose of the history play Coleridge saw as familiarizing the people of a country with the great names from their past and thereby arousing “a steady patriotism, a love of just liberty, and a respect for all those fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together.”
Professor Schelling in his book on The English Chronicle Play, published in 1902, made probably the most effective contribution thus far to the recognition of the importance of the genre and to the history of its development. He alone recognized that the history play was more closely affiliated with historical literature than with other varieties of the drama. But he found its roots in the tide of patriotism which swept England at the time of the threat from the Spanish Armada, and he saw it withering with the “un-English prince,” King James of Scotland, on the throne of England. Professor Schelling would recognize two groups of history plays: those centering about history and historical personages, and those dealing with legendary history, or at least involving a more or less conscious deviation from history.
Professor Tucker Brooke in his small volume on The Tudor Drama, published in 1911, devoted a chapter to the history play3 which has been the basis for a good deal of the teaching of the subject to college students. He isolated two main causes as accounting for the popularity of the history play during the last years of Elizabeth: “an unusual public interest in the matters treated in such plays; and particular stage conditions which … greatly stimulated the demand for dramas constructed on the loose and facile pattern usual to this type.” Professor Brooke recognized the great interest of the Elizabethans in the history of foreign lands as well as their own, but he did not analyze the nature of the “matters treated in such plays” which interested them. Inevitably, like his predecessors, he found difficulty in defining the history play and chose to describe its various forms rather than to confine it in any formula. He listed plays of mixed type, biographical plays, histories of tragic type, romanticized treatments of history, and a most important group which he described as
Plays par excellence of national feeling or national philosophy, where the normal interest in dramatis personae is more or less absorbed either in the expression of patriotic sentiment or in the interpretation of problems of government and statecraft. It is this class which gives to the Elizabethan history play its individuality as a dramatic species.4
The many noble utterances of patriotic fervor which occur in Shakespeare's histories have led most students to think of the plays as patriotic plays, and the fact that the most notable of the plays were produced in the ten or twelve years immediately following the defeat of the Armada has led to the very common acceptance of a post hoc, ergo propter hoc explanation. But the descriptions of the history play as essentially the expression of the great patriotic ardor which centered about the victory of 1588, as resulting from the “triumphant exhilaration” of the Armada year, as exhibiting “exuberant nationalism,” and as being “jubilant in pride of country and of race,” ignore, strangely enough, the fact that with the exception of Henry V and perhaps Henry VIII, Shakespeare's plays were written, not about the admirable rulers of England and their times, but rather about those rulers who had sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. We should hardly expect that in the United States a great spirit of exuberant nationalism, a proud jubilation in victory, would result in plays centering about Presidents Buchanan and Harding. It seems just as unlikely that the desire to celebrate the greatness of England should result in plays about Richard II, who was deposed for his sins; or Henry IV and his rebel-ridden kingdom; or Richard III, infamous for his tyranny; or Henry VI, who “lost France, and made his England bleed.” Surely, the implied definition of patriotism, limiting it to its prideful and jubilant aspects, is too narrow to cover Shakespeare's loyal but searching study of England's past.
August Wilhelm Schlegel long ago provided a key to the meaning of the Shakespeare histories when he said that they, as a series, furnish “examples of the political course of the world, applicable to all times,”5 though he did not use his key to unlock the specific significance of the individual plays in relation to the times in which they were written.
When in 1929 Professor H. B. Charlton published his lecture on Shakespeare, Politics, and Politicians,6 he went further with the statement that a better name for the history plays would be political plays, ‘for they are plays in which the prevailing dramatic interest is in the fate of a nation.” Very disappointingly he then defined the political purpose of the plays as “exercising and fostering patriotism” and gave the old description of the England of the Armada:
A wave of exuberant national sentiment cried out for such stimulus as visible reminders of England's past could give it.
The way in which the history play answered this need, according to Professor Charlton, is reminiscent of the travesty on the teleological conception of the universe which proved a divine providence by the fact that men actually had two legs in a world that proffered trousers, for he says of Shakespeare:
His tragedies are glimpses of individual man as a nursling of immortality, his vision of the ways of God with man: his comedies are his imaginative experience of the same individual in his domestic and social relationship with other members of civilized society. But by pure chance there was in Shakespeare's day a type of theatrical entertainment which was neither tragedy nor comedy, neither focused mainly on the life eternal, nor on the life private, domestic, and social. There was the so-called History or Chronicle Play.7
However, Professor Charlton did face squarely the dilemma of patriotic plays written about the nation's rulers who are least to be emulated:
But what ultimately will distinguish the history-play from tragedy is beginning to appear. Comedy and tragedy are concerned with the eternal or ephemeral fate of individual men. The history play is concerned with communities of men, and primarily with nations. The real hero of the English play is England.
Having taken the important step of recognizing the plays as political, and having defined the interest in history as an interest in nations, he was thus led to a conclusion which seems to me utterly without justification, that England is the hero of the plays. Accepting England as the hero but fully aware of the far from noble conduct of the English heroes who act for the hero England, he was forced to the decision that national politics are to be judged on general Machiavellian principles, for even in Henry V there is
the sense that not only is politics a nasty business, but that a repugnant unscrupulousness is an invaluable asset in the art of government. That is the burden of the English History Plays, jubilant as they are in pride of country and of race.
J. A. R. Marriott anticipated Professor Charlton in considering the plays as political plays in his English History in Shakespeare and in his more important paper on “Shakespeare and Politics,”8 where he examined the plays to find what was said
upon “Politics” as properly understood: upon the science of government and the art of statesmanship; upon man's place in the πoλις; upon the reciprocal obligations of ruler and ruled; upon the relation of the citizen and the commonwealth.
It is in distinguishing between Shakespeare's continually derogatory references to politicians and his constant concern with politics in the true meaning of the word that Marriott made his most significant contribution, but he went further than this in stating certain premises necessary to the understanding of Shakespeare's history plays. First, he stressed what no critic should ever forget—that Shakespeare was above all a playwright, “possessed of pre-eminent skill in delineation of character by means of dialogue,” and that we must be wary of “identifying Shakespeare's sentiments with those of his puppets.” Second, he insisted that Shakespeare's approach to contemporary problems in politics or religion was an indirect approach, for he was too great an artist “to allow contemporary problems in politics or religion to obtrude themselves directly into his drama,” and that if he wanted to teach the ecclesiastical controversies of the time, he would do it not by reference to the “Jesuit mission” but by picturing the relations between King John and Pope Innocent III. Third, he said, Shakespeare as a dramatist was of necessity only incidentally a philosopher, politician, or historian. Finally, he reaffirmed the “law of the universal” as the law to which Shakespeare like every great artist must conform, so that his appeal may always be to humanity at large and not merely to any one nation.
Having oriented the discussion by his definition of politics and his premises as to Shakespeare the artist, Marriott concluded that the theme of Shakespeare's history plays is the evil of civil dissension, domestic discord, and unnatural controversy as set forth by Edward Halle in the first sentence of his chronicle, that he pictures in King John the peril to the State of internal divisions, in Richard II the political amateur, in Henry IV the professional politician, in Henry V saintly strength, and in Henry VI saintly weakness. In the plays concerning the Wars of the Roses, “Shakespeare, with unerring dramatic instinct, turned aside from political philosophy and seized upon the personal aspects of the disorders of that day.”
But because the premises are in general so eminently sound and so universally held, it does not follow that the conclusions are equally acceptable. It seems necessary, then, to detour from the matter of definition to discuss them briefly. That Shakespeare was first of all a playwright and skillful in the portrayal of character by dialogue, and that his characters did not necessarily utter the author's sentiments, is a statement to which with most other critics I can but say “Amen.” But a dramatist is more than a portrayer of character by dialogue. His most important business is with plot, if we agree with Aristotle that his drama is or should be the representation of an action. In his interpretation of the individual plays Marriott has indicated that Shakespeare “turned aside from political philosophy and seized upon the personal aspects of the disorders of that day,” a logical result of this omission of plot from the business of the dramatist. Perhaps Richard II does appear as an amateur politician, but it does not follow that the play of Richard II is a play concerned with amateur politics. Our concern should be to ask what the plot says.
That Shakespeare's approach to any contemporary problem of politics or religion must, because he was an artist, have been an indirect approach cannot be disputed if taken to mean only that Shakespeare did not use his plays as polemical tracts. But the use of the word indirect ignores the fact that, as I shall try to show in succeeding chapters, the chief function of history was considered to be that of acting as a political mirror. The idea of holding the mirror up to nature (or to politics) pervaded the whole conception of art during the Elizabethan period, but to identify the conception of the mirror with indirection seems to me inaccurate.9
That Shakespeare as a dramatist was only incidentally philosopher, politician, or historian is a contention that takes us back almost to the question of whether the egg or the hen comes first, but it is a fundamental question in the criticism of all the arts, reminiscent as it is of the theory of “art for art's sake.” Marriott quoted the wise words of Sir Walter Raleigh (the second) reminding us that Shakespeare “had a meaning even while Drama was his trade,” though I would suggest that medium is a better word than trade, for if we are considering Shakespeare as an artist rather than a craftsman, it is more fitting to consider the creator or interpreter of life in relation to his medium of expression. Certainly Shakespeare did not, so far as we know, write a treatise on moral philosophy or a political discourse or a history of England. His medium was the drama, and through the drama he said what he had to say. His medium made concrete what another man might say of philosophy or political theory in a treatise dealing with abstractions or generalizations. He represented an action with its causes and its results, so that it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The action was put into being by concrete and specific persons on the stage; as living beings they spoke and did their deeds of good or evil, and as living persons they hated and loved and feared and rejoiced. But because Shakespeare used the medium of the drama to express what he had to say, there is no reason for denying to him a moral and a political philosophy which motivated first the choice of story and second the plotting of that story.
To return, then, after this detour, to the main question: What is a history play? The Elizabethans expected any work of history to act as a political mirror, to be concerned with politics in the sense in which Marriott defined the term. And a history play must be regarded as a literary medium for history. If it is understood that a history play is concerned with politics, furthermore, the point of its divergence from tragedy becomes clear, for the divisions of philosophy known as ethics and politics were familiar from the very titles of Aristotle's works and represented the accepted approaches to the study of human conduct. For instance, the popular orations of the much revered Isocrates, translated into English as A Perfite Looking Glass for All Estates,10 opened with an “Oration of Morall Instructions … : contayning a perfite description of the duetye of every private person,” which was followed by an “Oration of Morall Instructions as Touching the Dutie of Princes and Magistrates and the Well Governing of a Commonweale.” Spenser, writing the great Tudor epic, proposed to organize his poem about this dual concept, and he pointed out the fact that he was following the examples of Homer and Virgil and Ariosto and Tasso in so doing. He called the divisions of philosophy Ethice and Politice, the one concerned with the private moral virtues, the other with the public or political virtues.11 What Professor W. D. Ross said of Aristotle could be equally well said of Shakespeare:
he does not forget in the Ethics that the individual man is essentially a member of society, nor in the Politics that the good life of the state exists only in the good lives of its citizens.12
Nevertheless, the dividing line is there, and it is to this distinction between private and public morals that we must look for the distinction between tragedy and history. Tragedy is concerned with the doings of men which in philosophy are discussed under ethics; history with the doings of men which in philosophy are discussed under politics.
To understand why this was so and why it had to be so in Elizabethan England we must turn to the aims and purposes and methods which the history plays shared with all other forms of historical writing, and these can be understood only by surveying the course of the writing and the interpreting of history as it developed in Tudor England during the sixteenth century.
1S.T.Coleridge, Literary Remains, ed. H.N. Coleridge (London, 1836), II, 160-61.
2Ibid., pp. 164-65.
3Chap. ix, pp. 297-351.
4P. 303.
5Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London, 1889), pp. 419 et seq.
6(The English Association, Pamphlet 72: 1929).
7The italics are mine.
8English History in Shakespeare (2d ed., London, 1918); the paper is in the Cornhill Magazine, CXXXVI (1927), 678-90.
9See below, pp. 107-8.
10“Translated by Hieronimus into Latin and now into English by Thomas Forrest” (London, 1580).
11See Spenser's letter to Raleigh, published with the 1590 ed. of the first three books of the Faerie Queene. See also below, p. 307.
12Aristotle (London, 1930), p. 186.