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Shakespeare's Use of History in "Richard II"
From: Cambridge University Press | By: Robert Smallwood

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |

In his cycle of great plays from "Richard II" to "Henry V," William Shakespeare created a panorama of English history that remains as compelling today as it was more than 400 years ago. To achieve this, Shakespeare made detailed and innovative use of Elizabethan histories, most notably Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the second edition of which was published in 1587.

Robert Smallwood, deputy director and head of education at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, outlines the reasons that history plays proved so popular on the London stage in the 1590s. Then, in an analysis of a pivotal scene in "Richard II," he demonstrates how, from a single, unrevealing phrase of Holinshed's, Shakespeare forges complex and compelling drama.

efore considering Shakespeare's use of history in individual plays, it may be worth asking why he used it at all. The editors of the 1623 Folio confidently divided their volume into "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies," but that intermediate genre between the classically recognized forms of comedy and tragedy is not altogether self-defining or self-explanatory.

The history play had emerged in the earlier sixteenth century from the morality form, and depended upon the replacement of "Everyman," the humanum genus representative, by the nation, or respublica, as the figure at the centre of the moral struggle. From the list of plays based on English history before I Henry VI, however, both extant and lost, it is clear that the genre was really little more than emergent before Shakespeare seized upon it and gave it life.

The history plays and their immediate sources are rooted, at a deeper level, in the Tudor Englishman's persistent interest in matters historical. Throughout the reign of Elizabeth history books poured from the presses, both original works on English and foreign history and translations of modern European and classical historians. They constantly reiterate the inescapable educative potential of history.

John Stow, whose diligence in the compilation of chronicles earned him in his day the affectionate, if not altogether enviable, epithet of "Laborious," must stand as the sole example of a phenomenon which could be multiplied a hundredfold. In the preface to his Chronicles of England of 1580 he remarks that

it is as hard a matter for the Readers of Chronicles, in my fansie, to passe without some colours of wisedom, invitements to vertue, and loathing of naughtie factes, as it is for a welfavoured man to walke up and downe in the hot parching Sunne, and not to be therewith sunburned.

It is precisely this attitude which Thomas Nashe takes up in his defence of plays in Pierce Penniless. Plays are, he writes, "for the most part ... borrowed but of our English Chronicles," and like them they "show the ill success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension." Here are the well-worn arguments in favour of history being used to defend the theatre, a situation which must have seemed immensely reassuring to a profession by no means free from attack at the beginning of the 1590s.

There were other pressures, however, inducing dramatists to interest themselves in history as the last decade of the century was beginning. One was certainly commercial. The huge increase in theatrical activity in these years, discernible especially in the establishment of more permanent playing places in London, created a need for plays in numbers hitherto undreamt of.

The rapidity with which plays were written, put on, and exhausted emerges clearly from the theatrical account-book of Philip Henslowe. Henslowe's records also make clear the alacrity with which dramatists turned to English history as a ready source of plots, so that, by the end of the century, there was scarcely a reign, from the Conquest to the coming of the Tudors, that had not been dramatized.

The great upsurge in national self-awareness in the last years of the sixteenth century also had its inevitable effect on the eagerness of audiences to be informed of their nation's past, and the willingness of dramatists to provide the information. To suppose that the passion for history plays stemmed exclusively from national euphoria following defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 would be absurd, for the emergence of the genre clearly precedes that date; but to suppose that it was unaffected by it, and by the intense anxiety concerning national security before and after it, would be equally unwise.

Above all, however, one must seek one's answer to the question of why Shakespeare wrote history plays in the man's fascination with politics. If comedy is that form of drama which concerns itself with social man, and tragedy with moral or ethical man, then history is above all an exploration of human political behaviour, of the desire for power, of men's response to gaining it and to being deprived of it.

Power in English history meant kingship, and the relationship between the theoretical amplitude of the office and the human limitation of the man who holds it. Shakespeare's "use of history" consists, then, in selecting, shaping, amplifying, and frequently in adding to, chronicle material in order to intensify concentration on political issues and on their human consequences.

One example must serve as the only detailed illustration of this. In the third scene of Act 2 of Richard II, Bolingbroke, illegally returned from exile, confronts his uncle the Duke of York, Lord Protector of the realm in the King's absence. Reproduced here is the page from Holinshed's chronicle which is the source for this episode, the middle paragraph of the second column describing the meeting at Berkeley Castle which Shakespeare turns into a pivotal scene of his play and the surrounding material offering further illustration of Shakespeare's processes of selection and adaptation.

The busy diligence with which the historian gathers quantities of detailed fact to place indiscriminately before his reader--the precise day of the week upon which the feast of Saint James fell in the year 1399, the careful lists of persons present, the exact location of the meeting--are typical of the hundreds of pages of Holinshed that Shakespeare worked from to produce his history plays.

But when it comes to the constitutional and personal confrontation of Lord Protector and illegally returned exile, of uncle and nephew, the chronicler offers only the bland statement that York "communed with the duke of Lancaster." Shakespeare seizes on the moment, sorting through the chaff of detail to create a scene which exploits the personal and familial relationship of the chief participants and directly confronts the legal, political, and constitutional issues left dormant in Holinshed's account, and so makes theatre from them.

As soon as York appears he makes his own position clear, both constitutionally as head of state in the King's absence, and historically and mythically as the last survivor of those seven sons of Edward III whose untroubled and glorious reign has been regarded earlier in the play as a lost golden age:

Bolingbroke's presence in England is classified, similarly uncompromisingly, as "gross rebellion and detested treason" (109). The heart of the issue is the extent of the King's power in a system of government by monarchy, the nature of the relationship between the King and the Law.

It is an issue about which Englishmen were to argue with increasing urgency for the half-century after the play was written and which led, with an inexorability which this episode seems almost to predict, to a scene played before the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1649, when the execution of Charles I settled the question with awesome finality.

The basis of Bolingbroke's argument is that the King has deprived him of inalienable rights, fundamental to the legal system of primogeniture by which the country is governed:

York is in no position to offer an answer based on royal prerogative, for he has already committed himself to Bolingbroke's position--almost, indeed in the same terms. When Richard seized Gaunt's properties two scenes earlier, York had protested at the violation of succession, which deprived Bolingbroke (Hereford) of his birthright:

In the theatrical immediacy of confrontation between the old man and the young, their followers alert to the sharpness of the argument, stirring menacingly perhaps, in anticipation of the military solution which seems inevitable, one sees Shakespeare's relationship with historical source material in its essence.

The pressure of the past--of the historical past and of the past of these dramatic characters--bears down on this moment, as York, confronted unanswerably with the power of his own arguments, allows theatrical control of the scene, and with it political control of the nation, to ebb away from him. The theoretical basis of the confrontation remains legal, as Bolingbroke again appeals to him:

But beyond that legal theorizing there lies, in York's admission, the ultimate political truth of military power:

The last struggles of the representative of the old traditions, son of Edward III and companion in victory to the Black Prince, have a kind of elegiac pathos. He asserts what we can indeed vouch for: "I have had feeling of my cousin's wrongs, / And labour'd all I could to do him right"; he repeats once more the truth as seen from a position of constitutional orthodoxy: "you that do abet him in this kind / Cherish rebellion, and are rebels all"; and he admits the simple fact that legal theory and political conservatism, when confronted with an argument supported by a larger army, are emasculated: "I do remain as neuter" (141-59). The government has fallen:

The implications of York's capitulation are revealed as the scene ends. Northumberland insists that

A few lines later, however, a third chime of that potent syllable sworn offers to us, and perhaps to Bolingbroke too, a first glimpse of the frightening vista which military overthrow of the theory that King and Law are inseparable has opened up. Bolingbroke accepts his uncle's offer of hospitality and in tones of coaxing blandishment or veiled threat (the actor has a range of choice) leaves him no option but to join the next phase of the operation:

sworn

Between swearing that he comes "but for his own" and swearing to take over the administration of justice and cut off the heads of the King's subjects there is no apparent connection. Bolingbroke has breached the whole system that binds subject to king. "I am loath to break our country's laws," murmurs York in a last feeble attempt to resist the sweeping tide that has engulfed him (169). But we next see him, the puppet governor, standing by powerless while his nephew executes a surprisingly dignified pair of the King's favourites for a catalogue of alleged crimes which seem curiously to have been directed more against Bolingbroke than against the state. The revolution has begun.

This story is an extract from pages 146-152 of Robert Smallwood's essay "Shakespeare's Use of History," in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by Stanley Wells, published by Cambridge University Press.



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