History (theatrical genre)

• 1. Introduction

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  History, as a theatrical genre, sits alongside tragedy and comedy as one of the three main pillars of Western theatre, yet it arrived thousands of years later than its counterparts. That gap matters. It means the history play is not a relic of ancient Athens but a product of a very specific moment: Renaissance England, where writers, audiences, and governments were newly obsessed with the question of where England had come from and who deserved to rule it. What makes a play a history play rather than a tragedy? Why did this genre take root in Tudor England rather than anywhere else? And how did one playwright's body of work come to define the entire form?

• 2. Ancient Roots and False Starts

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  The earliest surviving work of theatre, The Persians, records an event that was entirely historical even by modern standards: the battle of Salamis. At first glance, that looks like the birthplace of the history play. Look closer, and the resemblance fades. The Persians leans on supernatural elements woven into the narrative of Salamis, and it dramatizes the Persian reaction to the battle rather than the Greek perspective a Greek historian would have prioritized. Those two choices push it firmly outside what later ages would call a history play.

  The Greeks themselves drew no clean line between myth and history. Their stories of gods and their stories of kings belonged to the same continuous account of the world. A play about Agamemnon was, for them, as historical as a play about a recent war. That blending would eventually have to dissolve before the modern history play could emerge.

  In the Middle Ages, theatre in Europe grew out of the rituals of the church. The Easter service gave rise to the "Quem quaeritis?", in which a priest and an acolyte explicitly portrayed characters. From that seed, medieval theatre makers built plays about saints, especially local saints, that were popular across England. These saint plays closely paralleled the "Lives of the Saints" books that contemporary historians were producing. Yet they too fell short of the modern genre's definition: they presented supernatural phenomena not as legend but as verifiable fact, exactly what a modern historian would refuse to do.

• 3. Tudor England's New Birth

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  Literary scholar Irving Ribner traces the emergence of the history play in England to what he calls "a new birth of historical writing" during the sixteenth century. New books of English history appeared from Polydore Vergil in 1534, Edward Hall in 1543, and Raphael Holinshed in 1577. The trend had roots in late medieval scholarship, but it gained sharp intensity after Henry VII took the throne, driven by a perceived need to justify the Tudors' claim to the monarchy. Playwrights and historians in this period shared broadly similar goals, and the genre grew in the space where those goals overlapped.

  Scholar Ralph Hertel connects the history play to a growing sense of national identity under the early Tudors. In his framing, "Englishness" was not a fixed quality but something brought into being by spectators who became "eye witnesses of sorts" of the events staged before them. Theatre was not merely reflecting national feeling; it was helping to create it.

  John Skelton's Magnyfycence, written in 1519, shows the genre at an early transitional stage. Its characters carry allegorical names in the tradition of medieval morality plays: the lead is called "Magnificance" and an adversary is named "Folly." Yet Skelton arranges the plot so that his contemporary audience would recognize Henry VII in the title role and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in Folly. John Bale's Kynge Johan, written in 1538, took a further step by naming specific historical figures alongside the allegorical ones.

  Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, from 1592, set a new standard for how the material could be handled. Where earlier history plays tried to include as much source information as possible, Marlowe selected only what served the story. That editorial discipline gave him something earlier playwrights had not achieved: a seamless link between history and tragedy. It also showed how effectively the form could be used as propaganda.

• 4. Politics, Propaganda, and Purpose

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  Thomas Nash and Thomas Heywood argued that the English history play performed a civic service by immortalizing English heroes and stirring national pride in audiences. Even critics of theatre in general were willing to grant that history plays had social value. That unusual exemption tells us something important about the political weight the genre carried.

  Brian Walsh, surveying a century of literary scholarship on the English history play, found that the field has kept returning to the same center of gravity: the political arena. Scholars have traced links between theatrical performance and questions of national identity, the authority of kings, and the day-to-day operation of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I. The genre was not simply popular entertainment. It was, in Walsh's reading, bound up with how power justified and reproduced itself.

  The anonymous plays Edward III, Thomas of Woodstock, and Sir Thomas More, along with John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, show that the form spread well beyond any single playwright. Each of these works engaged with historical material in ways that carried clear contemporary relevance for their audiences.

• 5. Shakespeare and the Defining Works

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  When the editors of the First Folio organized William Shakespeare's plays in 1623, they divided them into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. That act of classification itself helped solidify the history play as a recognized form. Shakespeare's histories focus on English history, stretching from the reign of King John to that of Henry VIII.

  Eight of his plays cover the unbroken run of English history between Richard II and Richard III. The first tetralogy, apparently written in the early 1590s, takes up the later portion of that struggle and includes the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. The second tetralogy, finished in 1599, follows Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V; it is frequently called the Henriad, named for its central figure, Prince Hal, the future Henry V.

  Shakespeare himself acknowledged the genre's standing in Hamlet, where Polonius announces the arrival of "the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history...". That passing line carries real weight: it shows the genre was recognized by name in the period's theatrical culture.

  Several plays that the First Folio lists as tragedies could reasonably be called history plays under a broader definition. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra draw on classical antiquity; King Lear and Cymbeline reach into ancient British history; Macbeth dramatizes medieval Scotland rather than England. A consistent concern runs through all of them: who holds a legitimate claim to participate in the affairs of the state.

  Later playwrights of history plays would either follow Shakespeare's stylistic model or work in conscious awareness of where they departed from it. The history plays of his English contemporaries, including the well-known Thomas Heywood's Edward IV, also contributed to establishing the genre's conventions.

• 6. After the Restoration

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  Following the Restoration, the history play as an English genre lost much of the energy it had built during the Tudor and Stuart eras. Even tragedy, the most prestigious form of English Renaissance theatre, fell out of fashion in favor of tragicomedy and comedy. History plays did not disappear entirely. Playwrights including William Davenant with The Siege of Rhodes, John Dryden with The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperor, and Elkanah Settle with The Empress of Morocco produced plays about historical events outside England.

  Adaptations of Shakespeare's plays were popular throughout this period, including his histories. These productions often carried an intentionally revivalist character, as if audiences and theatre makers were reaching back toward a tradition that felt increasingly distant.

  In the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison's neo-classical Cato, a Tragedy occupied a similar borderline position to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: it could be classified as a history play under the broad definition, though it would not meet the stricter criteria associated with the English Renaissance form.

• 7. The Genre in Contemporary Theatre

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  James Goldman's The Lion in Winter has drawn criticism as ahistorical, and it deliberately tests the boundaries of what a history play can be, even poking fun at the genre's conventions. Its deeper kinship is with absurdist comic domestic drama, yet it keeps a recognizably historical core.

  George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan has received widespread praise and has been compared favorably to Shakespeare's histories. David Hare's Stuff Happens pushes the temporal boundary of the form in a different direction. It chronicles the events leading to the Iraq War with only two years separating Hare from the events he dramatized. The play leans heavily on exact quotation: all public speeches by the main characters are taken word for word from real statements. That reliance on verbatim source material places Stuff Happens in direct conversation with the genre's oldest ambition, shared by Tudor playwrights and Renaissance historians alike, of making the past speak in its own voice.