Shakespearean history
Shakespearean history plays begin with a classification problem. When the First Folio was published in 1623, the editors sorted William Shakespeare's works into three bins: comedies, histories, and tragedies. That sorting seems tidy enough. But the borders dissolved almost immediately. Plays filed under "tragedies" turned out to dramatise historical kings. Roman plays about Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra ended up counted as histories in practice, even when shelved as tragedies on the page. And beneath all of it ran a question that preoccupied scholars for centuries: were these plays sincere attempts to portray the past, or were they political instruments shaped by the Elizabethan court?
The full span of what scholars now call Shakespearean history runs from King John to Henry VIII, covering English kings across four centuries. It includes a continuous sequence of eight plays built around Prince Hal's journey to become Henry V of England, a cycle scholars named the Henriad. And it raises a second, stranger question: why did an entire generation of English playwrights, across roughly two decades, become obsessed with putting dead kings on stage?
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, published in editions of 1577 and 1587, served as the main documentary foundation for Shakespeare's English history plays, as well as for Macbeth and King Lear. For the Roman plays, the route was different: Thomas North's English translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, published in 1579, provided the raw material for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.
Holinshed was not working alone. The chroniclers Polydore Vergil and Edward Hall wrote their own histories of England, and all three wove the same political mythology into their narratives. Edward Hall, in his Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke, published in 1548, argued that divine Providence had cursed England for the deposition and murder of Richard II, then restored peace through Henry Tudor and his dynasty. Holinshed's own judgement held that Richard, Duke of York, and his line suffered divine punishment for Richard violating his oath to allow Henry VI to reign fully. These were not neutral historical observations. They were political arguments, and Shakespeare inherited them wholesale.
Shakespeare lived under Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603 as the last dynastic monarch of the House of Tudor, a dynasty that had held the English throne since 1485. That context matters for reading the history plays, because the plays consistently frame the founding of the Tudor line as a kind of national salvation.
The Tragedy of Richard the Third, written around 1594, offers the clearest example. The play degrades King Richard III, the last man of the rival House of York, with the phrase "that bottled spider, that foul bunchback'd toad", while presenting his successor Henry VII as the better candidate for the throne. The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth closes in celebration of the birth of Henry's daughter Elizabeth, a gesture that reads as flattery of the reigning queen. The pattern runs across the plays: civil war is ruinous, the Tudors restored order, and resistance to legitimate monarchy is the root of English suffering.
Yet the academic H. A. Kelly, writing in Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories in 1970, found something more complicated underneath that surface bias. Shakespeare, Kelly argued, did not simply adopt the chroniclers' providential framework. Instead he displaced divine Providence from the historical sources and placed divine influence in the mouths of spokesmen-characters. Lancastrians speak the Lancaster myth, Yorkists speak the York myth, and Henry Tudor embodies the Tudor myth. No single voice in the plays gets to claim the definitive view of history.
Three competing myths of dynastic right run through the history plays, and Shakespeare drew all three from Holinshed's Chronicles. The Lancaster Myth held that Henry IV's overthrow of Richard II and his subsequent reign were divinely sanctioned, and that Henry V's military victories were expressions of divine favour. The York Myth countered that Edward IV's removal of Henry VI was the divine restoration of a usurped throne to Richard II's rightful heirs. The Tudor Myth condemned the York brothers for murdering Henry VI and Prince Edward, and presented Henry Tudor's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 as the fulfilment of a prophecy that Henry VI himself had made.
Shakespeare's handling of these myths was selective and sometimes contradictory from play to play. In 1 Henry VI, the dying Mortimer's narration to Richard Plantagenet carries a clear Yorkist slant, and Henry VI himself admits, in an aside, that his own claim to the throne is weak. Kelly noted that this was "the first time that such an admission is conjectured in the historical treatment of the period". In 2 Henry VI the balance tilts: York appears unrighteous and hypocritical. Richard III, despite being the Yorkist villain of the Tudor myth, contains a scene in which Clarence and his assassins acknowledge Henry VI as their lawful sovereign. Kelly's conclusion was that Shakespeare's moral characterisation "changes from play to play, which indicates that he is not concerned with the absolute fixing of praise or blame", though each individual play maintains its own internal consistency.
One of Shakespeare's most revealing omissions is the complete absence of Edmund Mortimer, Richard II's legal heir, from the play Richard II. That gap quietly strengthens the Lancastrian claim. In Henry IV, a plan to divide the kingdom three ways further undercuts Mortimer's credibility. By the time Henry V arrives, Shakespeare's king has no doubt about the legitimacy of his claim to the throne.
Chronicle plays, history-based dramas drawn from the writings of Holinshed, Hall, Vergil, and others, enjoyed intense popularity from the late 1580s to roughly 1606. By the early 1590s they outnumbered plays of every other kind on the London stage. Their appeal was partly patriotic: the Spanish Armada had stirred national feeling, and audiences were drawn to dramas about the Hundred Years' War, particularly the Henry VI trilogy. Unease over who would succeed the ageing Elizabeth made earlier dynastic struggles feel urgently relevant.
The genre was also politically constrained. Elizabethan and Jacobean authorities banned playwrights from touching "matters of divinity or state", with the Master of Revels acting as licenser. The deposition scene in Richard II, spanning lines IV.i.154-318, almost certainly part of the original text, was cut from the early quartos of 1597, 1598, and 1608 and presumably from performances as well. It was not fully restored until the First Folio. Because chronicle plays operated under this scrutiny, they tended to endorse the principles of order, degree, and legitimate royal authority, which made them useful to the authorities as didactic tools. Some historians have argued that history plays were quietly subsidised by the state: the Queen granted a thousand pounds annually to the Earl of Oxford from 1586, a grant that one interpretation held was meant to support plays educating the English public in their country's history without the Queen's financial backing becoming known.
The early chronicle plays themselves were rough. The scholar H. B. Charlton described them as suffering from "the wooden patriotism of The Famous Victories, the crude and vulgar Life and Death of Jack Straw, the flatness of The Troublesome Reign of King John, and the clumsy and libellous Edward I". The transformation came through Marlowe. His Tamburlaine, written around 1587, introduced lofty poetry and a focus on a single commanding figure. Marlowe then turned to English history himself: in Edward II, written around 1591, he moved from the spectacle of Tamburlaine to what critics described as "the interplay of human character", demonstrating how chronicle material could be compressed and shaped for dramatic effect. Marlowe's shift into English history was itself a response to the success of Shakespeare's Contention plays, written around 1589-90, and in turn those plays had been influenced by Tamburlaine.
Shakespeare carried the chronicle play further than any contemporary. Where Marlowe found the form and demonstrated its possibilities, Shakespeare brought a philosophy of history to the material. He interpreted events through character rather than through Providence, Fortune, or abstract social forces. He gave the genre noble poetry and a deep engagement with the human beings caught inside political struggles.
One distinction critics noted was his treatment of women in history. Shakespeare took greater interest in historical women than Marlowe had, and portrayed them with more subtlety. He also worked comic material from chronicle sources: Cade's revolt and the youth of Prince Hal both received comic treatment that no earlier dramatist had managed. His largely invented figures, such as Falstaff and Faulconbridge, became more memorable than many of the historical figures surrounding them. Taken together in historical order, his chronicle plays have been described as a "great national epic".
John F. Danby, writing in Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature in 1949, traced a progression across the full body of work. In the Wars of the Roses plays, Henry VI to Richard III, Shakespeare presents a new godlessness attacking the pious medieval order that Henry VI represents. In the King John and Richard II to Henry V cycle, Shakespeare comes to terms with Machiavellianism as he observed it under Elizabeth, adopting the official Tudor ideology that rebellion is never justifiable. From Julius Caesar onward, Shakespeare moves the question of tyrannicide away from English history and into the safer territory of Roman, Danish, Scottish, or ancient British settings.
Danby's reading of King Lear as Shakespeare's finest historical allegory is particularly striking. The play shows an older medieval society falling into error and being threatened by the new Machiavellianism, then regenerated by a vision of a new order embodied in Cordelia. By the time Shakespeare reaches Edmund, Danby argues, he no longer treats the Hal-type political operator as admirable; in Lear he condemns the society that Commodity drives, and holds up Cordelia as an alternative principle. The figure of Edgar, the "Machiavel of patience, of courage and of 'ripeness'", becomes the role-model until a decent society can be achieved.
Roman history plays occupied a distinct space in the Elizabethan theatrical world. They drew their appeal partly from exotic spectacle, partly from unfamiliar plots, and partly from the way they allowed playwrights to explore dangerous themes at a safe distance from English politics. Rebellion, tyrannicide, civic duty against private ambition, ancient freedoms against authoritarian rule: all of these could be staged in Roman dress when they could not be staged directly.
John Webster used this cover explicitly. In his Appius and Virginia, written around 1626, he added a non-historical episode about the starvation of Roman troops through the neglect of home authorities, to express his anger at the abandonment and death by starvation of English troops in the Low Countries in 1624-25. Shakespeare had used the same license earlier in Julius Caesar, written and performed in 1599.
Not every attempt succeeded. Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall, performed at the Globe in 1604, was hissed off the stage. Jonson had, according to one account, confined himself strictly to dramatised recorded fact and refused to introduce anything he lacked historical warrant for, which meant he failed to construct a satisfying plot. Shakespeare's later Roman work, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, carefully avoided what the critic Park Honan called Sejanus's "clotted style, lack of irony, and grinding moral emphasis". The genre for Roman plays remained productive from the late 1580s through the 1630s.
The eight-play Wars of the Roses cycle has attracted ambitious theatrical productions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Royal Shakespeare Company performed the entire cycle in historical order in 1964 under the name The Wars of the Roses. In 2009, the Sydney Theatre Company staged a conflation of all eight plays by Tom Wright and Benedict Andrews, titled The War of the Roses.
Television brought the cycle to wider audiences five times. The 1960 BBC serial An Age of Kings, directed by Michael Hayes, broadcast the full cycle and featured Sean Connery as Hotspur, Judi Dench as Princess Catherine, and Eileen Atkins as Joan la Pucelle. The 1965 BBC serial The Wars of the Roses, based on the RSC's 1964 staging, featured Ian Holm as Richard III and Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret. The BBC Television Shakespeare filmed the Second Tetralogy in 1978-1979, directed by David Giles, with Derek Jacobi as Richard II and John Gielgud as John of Gaunt. Jane Howell directed the First Tetralogy for the same series in 1981, though those episodes did not air until 1983. Most recently, the Second Tetralogy was filmed as The Hollow Crown for BBC2 in 2012, directed across four films by Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre, and Thea Sharrock, with Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Tom Hiddleston as Henry V, and Jeremy Irons as Henry IV.
Stand-alone films have pursued their own interpretations. Henry V appeared twice as a major production: in 1944, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, and in 1989, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh. Orson Welles directed and starred in Chimes at Midnight in 1965, combining Henry IV Parts I and II with scenes from Henry V into a single film centred on Falstaff. The genre's decline in the early seventeenth century was accelerated by satiety, the growing sense that chronicle plays were historically unreliable, the vogue for Italian and satirical subjects, and finally by the closing of the theatres in 1642; but the closing of the theatres was not the closing of the plays themselves.
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Common questions
What are the Shakespearean history plays and how are they categorised?
The Shakespearean history plays are a group of works by William Shakespeare dramatising the reigns of English kings across four centuries, along with Roman plays based on Plutarch. The First Folio of 1623 organised Shakespeare's works into comedies, histories, and tragedies; in practice, scholars also count the Roman plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and the tragedies King Lear and Macbeth, as part of the wider Shakespearean history tradition.
What is the Henriad in Shakespeare's history plays?
The Henriad is a continuous sequence of eight plays built around Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England. It comprises two tetralogies: the first, written in the early 1590s, covers Henry VI Parts I, II, and III and Richard III; the second, completed by 1599, covers Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V.
What historical sources did Shakespeare use for his history plays?
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, published in 1577 and 1587, was the principal source for the English history plays and for Macbeth and King Lear. Thomas North's 1579 English translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives provided the source material for the Roman history plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.
Were Shakespeare's history plays Tudor propaganda?
Many scholars argue that the English history plays served as political propaganda supporting the House of Tudor, whose dynasty ruled England from 1485 to 1603 under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The Tragedy of Richard the Third attacks the last Yorkist king while praising his Tudor successor, and The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth closes with a celebration of the birth of Elizabeth. The academic H. A. Kelly, writing in 1970, found a more nuanced picture: Shakespeare distributed the myths of Lancaster, York, and Tudor across different characters rather than endorsing any single political view.
Why did chronicle plays decline in the early seventeenth century?
Several factors contributed to the decline of chronicle plays after roughly 1606, including audience satiety from overproduction, growing awareness that the genre distorted history, the competing vogue for Italian and Spanish plots, the rise of satirical city comedy, and the movement of leading dramatists toward more sophisticated court-centred tastes. The decline in national homogeneity after the Stuarts came to power, and ultimately the closing of the English theatres in 1642, ended the genre's long run.
What television adaptations have been made of Shakespeare's history plays?
The history plays have been filmed for television five times as cycles. Notable productions include the 1960 BBC serial An Age of Kings, which featured Sean Connery as Hotspur and Judi Dench as Princess Catherine; the 1965 BBC serial The Wars of the Roses with Ian Holm as Richard III and Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret; and the 2012 BBC2 series The Hollow Crown, with Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Tom Hiddleston as Henry V, and Jeremy Irons as Henry IV.
All sources
4 references cited across the entry
- 1BookOther Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance StudiesHelen Ostovich et al. — University of Delaware Press — 1999
- 3BookSejanus His FallManchester University Press — 1990