Raphael Holinshed

• 1. Introduction

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  Raphael Holinshed is the man Shakespeare read. That single fact has kept Holinshed's name alive for centuries, long after scholars dismissed his great work as outdated and inaccurate. Without the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, the plots of Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III, and Edward II might look entirely different. Yet Holinshed himself remains a ghost. His birth date is unknown. His early years are, in the words of those who have studied him, primarily a matter of speculation. He left behind no other known works. Even his death crept up quietly, somewhere around 1580, in a place called Bramcote Hall near Warton in north east Warwickshire. What we do know is that a London printer named Reginald Wolfe set an enormous idea in motion in 1548, and that Holinshed became the man charged with carrying it out. The questions the story raises are worth sitting with: How does a project conceived as a history of the entire world become the defining source for Renaissance drama? And how does the man at the center of it all vanish so completely into the margins of his own legacy?

• 2. The Man Behind the Name

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  Christ's College in Cambridge holds the earliest trace of Raphael Holinshed. Student records show a young man under the name Holinshed attending the college from 1544 to 1545. He was most likely born to Ralph Holinshed of Cophurst in Sutton Downes, Cheshire, though nothing is certain. Vernon Snow, who later wrote an introduction to the Chronicles, described Holinshed as an experienced Cambridge-educated translator. That skill brought him to London, where he worked for the printer Reginald Wolfe. Wolfe put him to work not on something small, but on a universal world history stretching from the biblical Flood to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Holinshed was not alone in this. George Bishop, John Hunne, and Lucus Harrison all had a hand in the project. When it was finally published, it carried Holinshed's name, but it was always a collective effort. A few months after the Chronicles were licensed, Holinshed left London and retired to the Warwickshire countryside. His will was proven on the 24th of April 1582, and it named a Mr. Burdet as the recipient of his belongings and estate. Holinshed called Burdet his master, which is one of the only personal details the historical record offers about the man.

• 3. Wolfe's Grand Vision

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  Reginald Wolfe was not a man who thought small. In 1548, the London printer and original member of the Royal Stationers' Company conceived of a "Universal Cosmography of the whole world, and therewith also certain particular histories of every known nation." He wanted the text in English. He wanted maps and illustrations. He acquired many of John Leland's works and used them to build chronologies and draw up-to-date maps. The project consumed more than 24 years of his life. When it became clear he could not finish it alone, he brought in Holinshed and William Harrison. Then Wolfe died in 1573, leaving the work unfinished. A consortium of three members of the London stationers took over. They narrowed the scope from a universal history to a work about Britain and Ireland, and kept Holinshed on to lead it. He in turn employed William Harrison, Richard Stanyhurst, Edmund Campion, and John Hooker. The final product emerged from negotiations with power as well as scholarship. Before the first edition reached readers in 1577, the Privy Council censored portions of Richard Stanyhurst's contribution on Ireland.

• 4. Publication and Censorship

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  The first edition of the Chronicles appeared in two volumes in 1577, and it was, according to those who assessed its reception, "an extremely popular work when it was first published." The second edition came out in 1588, augmented with many woodcut illustrations. It ran into trouble almost immediately. Certain passages were judged offensive to the Queen and her ministers, and the Privy Council ordered the offending pages removed. That act of censorship created an odd afterlife for the missing material. The suppressed passages were separately published in 1723, more than a century after the fact. A complete reprint of the Chronicles appeared in 1807. By the seventeenth century, however, the work had already lost its standing. Scholars viewed it as outdated and inaccurate. The very work that had shaped so much of Renaissance literature was being set aside. What saved its reputation from complete collapse was not any reappraisal of its historical methods, but the enduring fame of the writers who had borrowed from it. The first printed history of England composed as a continuous narrative had become, in a sense, a footnote to the plays it inspired.

• 5. Shakespeare's Debt

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  William Shakespeare turned to the revised second edition of the Chronicles, published in 1587, when building most of his historical plays. Richard III draws from it. So does Macbeth. Portions of King Lear and Cymbeline trace back to its pages as well. Alison Taufer put it plainly: "We care about the Holinshed Chronicles because Shakespeare read them." The relationship was not one of simple copying. Shakespeare took what Holinshed gave him and transformed it. In the Chronicles, the Welsh king Llyr from the 8th century BC provides the framework for what becomes King Lear. The king's madness is Shakespeare's own invention; everything else, including the emphasis on Cordelia's love for her father, follows Holinshed closely. In Macbeth, Holinshed describes Duncan of Scotland as a weak king with a "soft and gentle nature," while Macbeth is cast as a cruel leader. Shakespeare shifted the balance. He gave Lady Macbeth a far larger role than the Chronicles had, inventing her sleepwalking and her suicidal thoughts. Christopher Marlowe drew from the Chronicles as well, particularly for Edward II. The details he borrowed include class conflicts, inheritance disputes, and the specific circumstances of Edward II's brutal murder at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire.