Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Commentaries on Shakespeare’s Genres: History

What are history plays?

What are history plays in the Shakespearean context? Well, they’re just plays grounded in some version of English history but whose prime directive is to entertain, which justifies quite a lot of changing and rearranging of events and recastings of character for dramatic purposes.

Why wouldn’t, say, Macbeth be classified this way? Probably because it isn’t about “Scottish history” in any deep sense. Macbeth fits into the tragic genre so well that we would feel strange calling it anything but a tragedy. In a true history play with all its events and pageantry, there just wouldn’t be mental or emotional “room” for a character like Macbeth, with his second-guessings, deep inwardness, and so forth.

Shakespeare didn’t invent the dramatic genre we call “history plays.” It was a phenomenon of the 1580s-90s. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is one fine example, and others are The True Tragedy of Richard III, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The Famous Victories of Henry V. These latter three plays were performed by the Queen’s Men acting company (1583-1591).

Still, there wasn’t a long tradition to draw from. A growing sentiment of nationalism in Early Modern England led to the flourishing of this genre—the English apparently wanted to see their history reflected back to them, and Shakespeare was happy to oblige. [1] While Shakespeare didn’t invent the history play, English history retains its fascination for us moderns in large part because certain lucky kings and queens had a great dramatist to help them strut their stuff.

As Scott MacMillin and Sally-Beth Maclean point out in their 2006 Cambridge UP book The Queens Men and Their Plays, [2] nobody has thus far heard a whisper about the next Queen’s Men Drama Festival. But Shakespeare’s efforts? That’s another and more memorable story. As Cassius asks his fellow conspirators in Julius Caesar, “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” [3]

Consider a modern example: while JFK was a complex, intelligent man whose presidency was already consequential by November 1963, does anybody think he would exercise the continuing fascination that he does without the Arthurian “Camelot” legend woven around him by his family, his advisors, and above all by his wife Jackie? She is the one who made her husband’s funeral an unforgettable symbolic event—something for the ages. Even a lifetime on, there is something of the doomed hero-king about him in our collective cultural memory. [4]

In an older context, Abraham Lincoln was remarkable enough to have been remembered no matter what, but Walt Whitman cemented our sixteenth president’s status as an American symbol with his moving elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” [5] That is the sort of thing that Shakespeare has done for English history—Great Britain is a sophisticated little island country now, not a great power like America, but to this day they cast a huge shadow. If you’re interested in using Shakespeare to meditate on modern politics, by the way, Eliot A. Cohen’s The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall (Basic Books, 2023) is a good bet. [6]

Are Shakespeare’s history plays history in the sense of “true, objective narration”? Well, as I suggested earlier, no. While they have a factual basis and render the grand sweep of English history faithfully enough, the playwright does a great deal of rearranging and telescoping of events, and the sources from which he drew (Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles chief among them) were not objective in the first place. [7] To some extent, they read like what Winston Churchill called history as it ought to have been, not as it happened down to the last detail. [8] Shakespeare didn’t whitewash English history, but he did adapt it to his dramatic purposes.

For example, there’s no proof that Richard III really ordered those famous lads in the Tower killed, but it’s logical to assume that either he or his high-ranking follower Buckingham were responsible since both had means and motive to want Edward IV’s heirs out of the way. Shakespeare’s play, in accordance with the Tudor bias against the Yorkist Richard III, casts this conviction as a moral imperative, an “ought,” so the wicked king ends up chortling that the Princes “sleep in Abraham’s bosom.” [9]

Aristotle lays down the premise in his Poetics that historians are at a disadvantage with respect to poets because they, unlike poets, are bound to represent the ugly and sometimes chaotic scenes of actual history. [10] We know that sometimes the bad guys win and the good guys lose: things don’t often happen in an ethically satisfying or even coherent manner. History is the record of life, and it’s often a mess because life is a mess.

Aristotle writes that the historian and the poet differ in that “the former relates things that have happened, the latter things that may happen.” For that reason, he suggests, “Poetry … is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (1451b). [11] If we like that line of thinking, poets are free to give us an intelligible and morally satisfying representation of historical events and people. They are at liberty to construct recognizable scenes from chaotic events, and to derive ethical and intellectual clarity from the welter of motivations that have driven the great men and women of history.

To be fair, though, modern historians would point out that they, too, are weavers of plots that follow the ways of fictional narratives. See, for example, Hayden White’s groundbreaking 1973 Johns Hopkins University book Metahistory. [12] There is no simple, unified truth when we are dealing with complicated, murky events.

None of this is to say that Shakespeare gives us a dumbed-down version of history. If you read widely in his histories, you’ll find that the playwright manages to do two things at once: 1) pay tribute to the contingency of many of history’s events and to the complexity of historical agents; and 2) give us a sense that history adds up to something, that there are lessons to be learned about ethics and power from this crazy pageant of people and deeds. That accomplishment is apparent in the plays we will be examining.

In terms of making sense of history, Shakespeare’s history genre is at base teleological: it leads us to the rightness of Queen Elizabeth I’s Tudor reign: all roads lead to Gloriana, the real-life Faery Queen celebrated by Edmund Spenser. Among the histories, only Henry VIII was written after the death of Queen Elizabeth I.

“So close, and yet so far”: the environment at court and family relations

The environment in medieval courtly systems was treacherous even before the time of royal absolutism and the centralized court. [13] There was great danger in personal, intimate proximity to power. A person so highly placed was always close not only to power but also to chaos—he or she was dancing in an incredibly small circle illuminated by the brightest torchlight. Intense aristocratic competition was a daily reality, even though the great aristocrats were privilegedin ways that the common folk—who suffered from a great deal of want and injustice—could scarcely imagine.

We might ask ourselves as a little thought experiment, if the king were our eldest sibling and we were first in line after him, would we loyally maintain his image and authority, or … not? There is a vast distinction in status between a king and his next sibling, though both are royals. Consider the strangeness of this: the sense of intimacy and proximity smashing right up alongside the reality of seemingly infinite distance. So close to absolute, sole power, and yet so far!

Such circumstances could easily warp people’s minds, causing them to lose their moral bearings and make a play for the top position occupied by their brother or sister, or cousin or other relative. That’s probably why monarchs and dictators never seem to sleep well. How could they?

Seething resentments may develop from this near/far distinction, and we might say that the problem comes of treating a human being like a god. Biographers say Richard of Gloucester admired his older brother Edward and that Edward trusted him, but the record shows that when it came time to make his decision to take the crown for himself, Richard sided with himself, not with his brother Edward through his children. [14] Gloucester took the throne because he could. The haughty Athenians said to the people of Melos: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” [15] Predators generally feel no need to explain or justify what they do.

So we should keep in mind that fierce human energies were always roiling barely under the graceful surface presented by the royal families and the great lords nearest them. This comes from building a system grounded in bloodlines, or as we would say, “genes.” The justification would be, perhaps, that such an emphasis lends stability to the primal chaos that might otherwise hold sway in human societies. But we could also say that it brings into play a special chaos all its own.

Perhaps the worst problem that arises from the infighting of royal elitists is their tendency, in unleashing the worst in themselves in their struggle against one another, to precipitate a society-wide race to the bottom in terms of the lowest, most “raw” dimension of human nature. They may drive the entire society they govern to be as cruel, unreasoning, greedy, and chaotic as they themselves are. Who wants to live in that kind of society? Shakespeare sometimes forces his audiences to behold the worst in humanity, but he doesn’t seem pleased to make us dwell there for long—it isn’t healthy, and honestly, we already have a pretty good sense of what’s there.

It seems to have been Shakespeare’s view that, like “the head that wears a crown” (Henry IV’s famous phrase), social and political stability is always uneasy. It’s a matter of temporary balancings and arrangements of strong desires in powerful individuals and groups. There is a baseline conservatism to such a view: don’t tear down or tear apart what you can’t easily rebuild.

The people’s relation to their government—an enduring issue in political philosophy

In Shakespeare’s history plays, we are not dealing with societies wherein there is an equilibrium or even a genuine reciprocity between the people and their government. Average people, if we may borrow that modern construction, had some rights, but they could easily fall victim to a brutal justice system that often resorted to torture, or get conscripted into some violent, tortuous conflict, or be subjected to ruinous taxation or patently corrupt governmental policies, with little or no practical recourse. England even in Shakespeare’s time did not have a fully developed modern government, and even though English law has been sophisticated stuff for a long time [16] , ensuring that all citizens should be treated equitably wasn’t the operative principle of government.

Did monarchs such as Elizabeth I or James I think of their subjects as adults, much less equals? No. They thought of their subjects as children who needed to be tended to, with the caveat that Elizabethan notions about child-rearing were nowhere near as tender as our ideas on the same subject today. These monarchs expected to be treated with the utmost respect by their “subjects.” We will sometimes see Shakespeare offering a nod to his fellow commoners, but on the whole, he seems to be uninterested in undermining the claims of the royals and the nobility to rule by right, so long as their rule is not more than commonly abusive.

That said, Shakespeare doesn’t hesitate to point out when his “betters” do behave abusively. Neither is he shy about positing consequences for such abuse. James I thought that if a king misbehaves—even very badly—only God can judge him, not his subjects, who must remain loyal and long-suffering. [17] While Shakespeare doesn’t outright deride such formulations, he is never enthusiastic about them. His bad kings tend to get destroyed, if only because they make themselves vulnerable to some disaster or coup by their disorderly and cruel conduct.

But the truth is that people can only take so much abuse, and rebellions will occur from time to time. Shakespeare, of course, knows that. He is never sanguine about the outcomes of rebellions like those made by, say, Wat Tyler in 1381 [18] or Jack Cade in 1450, [19] but he recognizes why such events sometimes occur. In the end, as Shakespeare’s King Henry V says, “a king is but a man,” [20] and as such he should respect the common limitations he faces as a suffering, striving human being among others. Failing to maintain this connection with common humanity may be one of a monarch’s worst possible mistakes.

*Note: In the audio version, this is the end of Part 1.

Genre in the History Plays

“No matter where; of comfort no man speak”: How should we think of Shakespeare’s history plays in terms of their relation to other genres?

Shakespeare no doubt appreciated his audience’s passionate responses as they watched the rise and fall of monarchs and great noblemen from their own past. It’s emotionally compelling stuff, and he must have felt relatively free to present such exalted figures’ triumphs and sufferings as fully as his art and skill allowed. In his history plays, one person’s tragedy may play out even as another’s comedy proceeds on its merry, significant way.

Alongside of or mixed in with the “history” in Shakespeare’s history plays, then, there is always some comedy and some tragedy to be found—it’s an inherently composite sub-genre because life is composite in that way. The comedies and tragedies labeled as such are closer to experiments in pure modality, though they, too, contain a mixture of happy and sad events. Think of King Lear, for example—it’s an incredibly bleak tragic play, but there’s plenty in it to laugh at, and even a scene (Act 4, Scene 6) in which Gloucester mock-falls over the Cliffs of Dover, that might be described as fully absurdist in its effect. [21]

It’s customary to say that the comic spirit consistently asserts itself in Shakespeare’s history plays – even, to some extent, in the ones sometimes labeled “tragedies” like Richard II, Richard III, and 3 Henry VI. That may be because in the future lies the teleological endpoint of Elizabeth’s Tudor reign and the Stuart line of James I, the two rulers during whose time Shakespeare lived.

All of the events the playwright covers, we might say, were necessary to make the mostly felicitous present possible, and all of the rulers and the great nobles were in that sense actors in a pageant larger than they could have comprehended. In this scheme, their individual tragedies may be viewed as sacrifices towards the greater comic pattern, which starts with turmoil and ends in felicity. This is of course to superimpose a “grand narrative” on the past to make it justify the present, but until modern times, historians (and artists like Shakespeare) didn’t have a problem with performing such an operation on “bare events.”

Still, none of this is to dismiss the tragic mode of experience in the history plays—far from it. Classical Greek tragedy would lead us to suggest that deep tragedy is only possible when the universe crumbles around characters who fall to their ruin, and that same universe is shown to be fundamentally indifferent or even hostile to human aspirations. That would be a defensible description of what happens in a number of ancient Greek tragedies, though not all. [22]

Still, Greek tragedy isn’t mainly what the Elizabethan playwrights modeled their own tragedies on, and their audiences would hardly have required such bleakness and chaos in their tragedies or their histories. Every culture has its own notions about what is or is not “tragic.” For the English and large parts of Europe, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 1350s De casibus virorum illustrium ( “Of the fates [or falls] of famous men”) provided some backing: if an exalted person is at the top of Dame Fortune’s Wheel, look for that person at the bottom before his or her end. [23]

Shakespeare’s histories are written within the Christian tradition, of course, so the simple idea that fallen humanity’s life-pattern should follow Christ’s path—life as an imitatio Christi, [24] an “imitation of Christ”—would also underlie Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories. When, in Act 4, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard prepares to surrender his crown to Henry Bolingbroke, he directly compares himself to Jesus Christ: “Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail’ to me? / So Judas did to Christ, but He in twelve / Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, / none.” [25]

In Christian art, tragedy thrives within the gap between human and divine understanding, and dwells upon the difficulty of aligning the human will with the divine will. In this sense, there is an abundance of the tragic dimension in Shakespeare’s history plays. Richard II can hardly be claimed to have followed in simple faith “the path of Christ,” but that doesn’t keep him from experiencing his own downfall as a tragic series of betrayals, or his sad present as having something about it of “the passion of the Christ.”

To add to this idea that there’s a dark side to Shakespearean history to supplement and challenge its “comic” dimension, let’s posit that Shakespeare most likely read Thomas Malory’s 1485 Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur) because practically everyone else did. [26] In the West, printing dates back to Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s and the Englishman William Caxton, [27] whose first print-job in 1475 was a French romance compilation based on the legend of Troy: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. In 1485, he also printed the Morte d’Arthur, which popularized the Arthurian tales as central to English lore.

In the Arthurian tales, the King and his Knights of the Round Table aim for a spiritual and material perfection that they will never achieve, no matter how they strive. Their own sinfulness will always drag them down. This accords well with the central struggle in Christianity, which is to align one’s personal will with that of the Creator, rather than remain fixated upon one’s own wants and needs. The Arthurian romances trade in the struggle between Christian charity or caritas, and selfishness and greed, or cupiditas. There is an air of doom always surrounding stories about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: they are Christian “speaking emblems” of humanity’s fallenness as they set out on their many quests.

Shakespeare, in his representations, wrestles with doing justice to the English monarchy, and he finds that there are few or no pure, lasting happy endings in the historical records compiled by the chroniclers Raphael Holinshed, John Stow, [28] Edward Hall, [29] and others.

In Act 2, Scene 1 of Richard II, the dying John of Gaunt pays tribute to the little section of earth he is departing, calling it, among other fine things, “This other Eden, demi-paradise … / This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England ….” [30]

The moments when “this England” is triumphant turn out to be fleeting, not permanent or even stable. The climactic victory of King Henry V at Agincourt in 1415 probably comes closest to an idyllic moment in the history plays. [31] But even the celebrated triumph at Agincourt is only a moment, and Henry V was written and performed (1599-1600) at a time when everyone knew that the great Queen was nearing her end.

Henry V is like Arthur in his doom as well—hanging over the play Henry V is the Early Modern playwright’s understanding that the martial glory of Henry’s reign won’t outlive his person. The “curse” upon his usurper-father King Henry IV returns in the form of the incompetent, sometimes mad Henry VI, who throws away his father’s victories and faces a miserable, powerless end in 1471, to be followed by the final phases of the “Wars of the Roses” [32] until Henry Tudor’s victory over Richard III in 1485, and on to June 1487, when Henry crushed Yorkist diehards fronting the pretender Lambert Simnel [33] at the Battle of Stoke Field.

We should certainly acknowledge the “pro-Tudor bias” in Shakespeare and in the chronicles from which he adapted his accounts. But at the same time, we shouldn’t forget the Arthurian “doom” that hangs over English royal history, including the Tudor line, which was a cadet branch of the Lancastrian line we are partly studying in our examination of the major tetralogy. Henry IV could almost have said, Macbeth-like, “for Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind; / For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered.” [34] Banquo’s issue, of course, being King James I, the first Stuart King of England, and Duncan being transposed to “Richard II.”

Why the major tetralogy of Richard II, 1-2 Henry IV, and Henry V?

I like the major tetralogy because the four plays comprising it are all among Shakespeare’s best in the area of history, leaving aside the amazing Richard III, which is part of the minor tetralogy along with the three Henry VI plays.

Another thing that’s attractive about the major tetralogy is that it covers much of the period during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337-1453) when England seems to have developed what we might call a “national consciousness.” [35]

Before the Hundred Years’ War, the English and the French had already been fighting one another for centuries, starting from the time of the Capetian dynasty [36] and the French Normans. But with regard to this earlier series of wars, it might be more accurate to say that the French were fighting the French, not “the English.” The Norman invasion of 1066 [37] meant that Norman French aristocrats took over the territory called England, and Normanized it. Until the time of Henry IV, the language of the English monarchs, law courts, and nobility was Norman French.

As for the cause of The Hundred Years’ War, the fighting started soon after there was a problem over who would succeed Charles IV as King of France. When this lastdirectlyCapetian ruler died in 1328, he had no male heirs, so the French put forth a cousin who became Philip VI. However, England’s King Edward IIIput forth his own claim, which was rejected. The French King also confiscated from Edward III the very lucrative duchy of Guyenne in 1337, and this latter affront coincides with the beginning of hostilities in that year.

So during the course of this long, complicated, intermittent war, England comes into its own as England. For anyone who wants a fuller account, there’s Desmond Seward’s The Hundred Years’ War: The English in France 1337-1453. Penguin, 1999. [38] There’s also David Green’s The Hundred Years War: A People’s History. [39] Jonathan Sumption’s magisterial 5-volume account is also available, for those who have the time.

Some brief notes on the major tetralogy: Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, and Henry V

Richard II serves as a prime example of Shakespeare’s interest in what happens when those at the center of English history’s whirlwind of events don’t know how to use the power they have. In Shakespeare’s casting, Richard II is a wicked man but also a doomed poet-king who philosophizes about and dramatizes his downfall even as it is happening to him “IRL,” as we would say—in real life.

The following passage from Act 3, Scene 2 speaks for itself as an indicator of Richard Plantagenet’s mindset; Richard is in the midst of preparations for battle with Henry Bolingbroke, who has returned from the Continent with an army to claim first the rights he lost when Richard stripped him of his inheritance from John of Gaunt, and then the throne itself:

AUMERLE. Where is the Duke my father with his power?

KING RICHARD. No matter where—of comfort no man speak.
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
…………………………………………
For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings ….

CARLISLE. My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail. [40]

Richard II is a master of words, but not a good ruler. As Carlisle tries to tell him, men in his position don’t have the luxury of sitting around and poeticizing: their task is to act quickly and resolutely. Chairman Mao famously said that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun.” [41] That was largely true of the English monarchs in the period Shakespeare covers—violence was never far from the throne, either in its getting or its defending. “Use it or lose it” is the first lesson of political power: if you are entrusted with authority and fail to use it, someone else will.

All the English rulers had to have known that primogeniture, [42] legitimacy, and allied concepts were partly fictions. What matters is material power and possession. We can’t do better than to quote il Brutto, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, from the 1966 Sergio Leone classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” [43]

Ultimately, we can draw from Richard II Shakespeare’s interest in the pitiless dynamics of royal power; his concern for the close relationship between rhetoric and political action; and the fundamental need of rulers to understand their own people. Richard II has failed in all three regards, and so he falls to the ruthless and efficient Henry Bolingbroke.

1 and 2 Henry IV show a sense for the redemptive disposition of time that we can see in comic plays such as Twelfth Night. Henry Bolingbroke (King Henry IV) was a powerful and competent man, but in Shakespeare’s handling, he is a guilt-ridden stage-setter for his prodigal son Prince Hal, who will in Henry V be represented as a great warrior-king and an icon of early English nationalism.

Much of the two Henry plays is taken up with Shakespeare’s interest in the playful, redemptive development of Hal from his troubled youth to maturity. The young man has time enough to run with the morally dangerous Sir John Falstaff and his set, even turning the tables on the old knight when he robs Sir John of the spoils he himself had won during an earlier robbery at Gadshill.

What Hal learns is not only who he is but who his subjects are. Unlike Richard II, he is not an alien in his own land, but the living symbol of England whose power comes from the fact that he understands the kingdom he must govern and lead to victory in war. Hal understands as well that while being a king involves game-playing or role-playing, this “play” is no joke: it’s done in a spirit of consequential earnestness.

It’s hard to miss the emphasis on the burdens of kingship in the Henry IV and Henry V plays. In the latter play, Henry V shares his father’s burden of guilt over the murder of Richard II, but he also takes upon himself the burden of making something of his great venture into France. The two things may well be connected, as the French Wars, if Henry V wins them, will help to erase the stain of his father’s usurpation against Richard II.

Although Shakespeare allows Henry V to outargue the soldier Michael Williams, who challenges the justice of his cause, Williams is not altogether wrong when he insists that it will be “a black matter for the king” if things don’t go well at Agincourt. To get the result he wants, of course, the one-time “Prince Hal” will have to call upon every ounce of understanding that he has gained about what motivates his common subjects.

A few pointers about the royal family in the major tetralogy

John of Gaunt, who dies early in the play Richard II, was the third surviving son of Edward III. He is very important for the monarchy’s future lineage. Henry Bolingbroke was born in wedlock to Gaunt’s first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, and that son, of course, goes on to become Henry IV, from whom we get Henry V and Henry VI.

But by his mistress Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt also had four “illegitimate” children (three sons and one daughter). These children we refer to as the Beaufort line, so-named after one of John of Gaunt’s inherited lands through his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. They are

John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset (1373–1410)
Henry Beaufort (1375–1447), Bishop of Winchester
Thomas Beaufort, 1st Duke of Exeter (1377–1426)
Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland (1379–1440).

John of Gaunt’s second wife, Constance of Castile, died in 1394, and he married Katherine Swynford as his third wife in 1396. At that point, Pope Boniface IX legitimized the Beauforts, and King Richard II repeated the gesture by royal proclamation in 1397.

John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset (1373–1410) had a son named John (1st Duke of Somerset, 1404-44) and through him a granddaughter, Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), who went on to marry Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond (half-brother of Henry VI and son of the Welshman Owen Tudor and Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois), from which union we have King Henry VII (“Henry Tudor”), and thence Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary, and Elizabeth I – the cadet “Tudor Line” that replaced the last ruler of the Plantagenet York branch, Richard III.

This same John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset (1373–1410) also had a daughter by his wife Margaret Holland (1385-1439, King Richard II’s niece and subsequently Duchess of Clarence after John died) named Joan Beaufort (1404-45), who married the Scottish King James I and thus became Queen of Scotland.

Aside: the Angevin Plantagenets were Henry II, Richard I (the Lionheart), and John; the main line consisted of Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, and Richard II; the Lancaster branch consisted of Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI; and lastly, the York branch comprised of Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III. All included, the Plantagenets ruled from 1154 to 1485.

The youngest of Katherine Swynford’s children by Gaunt, Joan Beaufort (1379-1440, and the aunt of the Joan Beaufort listed above), is tremendously important to the royal line and other great houses. After her first husband died, Joan married Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland, and had 14 children by him, ten of whom survived childhood, and most of whom went on to marry into key families/houses such as Mowbray, Woodville, Percy, Stafford, and York (i.e. through Cecily Neville’s marriage to Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, from whom we get King Edward IV and King Richard III).

By her children John and Joan Beaufort in particular, Kathryn Swynford is the ancestor of all English/British monarchs since King Edward IV. It’s remarkable how tightly knit the British royal family is, and the same can be said of the great houses beyond the royal line. In their case, “everybody is related to everybody else” is only a slight exaggeration.

Document Timestamp: 10/3/2025 6:25 PM

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] See Christopher L. Morrow’s dissertation, Speaking England: Nationalism(s) in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Texas A&M U, 2006. Accessed 10/3/2025. See also Philip Schwyzer’s Literature, nationalism, and memory in early modern England and Wales. Open University. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[2] Scott MacMillin and Sally-Beth Maclean. The Queens Men and Their Plays. Cambridge UP, 2006. (Amazon listing.)

[3] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 288-343. See 315, 3.1.112-17.

[4] See Dallek, Robert. Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House. Harper, 2014. ISBN-13:‎ 978-0062065858. (Amazon listing.)

[5] Whitman, Walt. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Poetryfoundation.org. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[6] Cohen, Eliot A. The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Basic Books, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-1541644861.

[7] See Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. 1577, 1587 editions. Online source: The Holinshed Project. Accessed 10/3/2025. Also very useful is W. G. Boswell-Stone’s Shakespeare’s Holinshed: the Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared. Longmans, Green, and Co.: 1896. HathiTrust.org. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[8] In his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Vol. 1, Winston Churchill addresses the truth status of the stories about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, writing, “It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides.” Quotation from an excerpt at Goodreads.com. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[9] The full quote is “The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom, / And Anne my wife hath bid the world goodnight” (441, 4.3.38-39). Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 384-465.

[10] Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 6/1/2024.

[11] Aristotle, Ibid.

[12] White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Johns Hopkins UP, 2014, 1^st edition published in 1974. ISBN-13: 978-0801817618. (Amazon listing.)

[13] See How to Get Ahead – 1. At Medieval Court (BBC/YouTube). Accessed 10/3/2025.

[14] See, for example. Paul Murray Kendall’s Richard the Third. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1955-56. Especially pertinent is Chapter 6, “The King’s Man.” 89-106.

[15] Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. (Link to Paragraph 89) London, J. M. Dent; New York, E. P. Dutton. 1910. The Athenian envoys say to the Melian commission, “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Perseus Digital Library. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[16] The two gravediggers’ discussion of Hales v. Petit in conjunction with Ophelia’s death by drowning in Hamlet would be sufficient proof of English law’s sophistication, in case we needed further convincing. Shakespeare, William. The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. First Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 451-99. See Act 5, Scene 1 for the relevant dialogue.

[17] See King James I’s Basilikon Doron. Early English Books Online (EEBO), U of Michigan. See also his The True Law of Free Monarchy on the same site. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[18] See “Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt.” Historic-UK.com. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[19] See “Jack Cade’s Rebellion – 1450.” Britain Express. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[20] Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 790-857. See 830, 4.1.98.

[21] See Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840. 821, 4.6.27.

[22] Aristotle’s master text in The Poetics was Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, but Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia follows a very different path. A good edition of the great trilogy is Robert Fagles’s translation. New York: Penguin, 1984. An online edition is translator E. D. Morshead’s The Oresteia. Gutenberg e-text, Australia. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[23] John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes, adapted from Boccaccio, Giovanni. De Casibus virorum illustrium. (Of the Fates of Famous Men.) U of Virginia Library. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[24] See, for example, Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. (circa 1418-27.)

[25] Shakespeare, William. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 488-548. See 532, 4.1.163-65.

[26] Malory, Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. Project Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 10/3/2025. Caxton published his edition in 1485; Malory finished writing it in 1469-70.

[27] “William Caxton: England’s First Printer.” Reading the Past, 2023. YouTube. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[28] John Stow (c. 1525-1605), author of The annales, or generall chronicle of England. HathiTrust. Accessed 10/3/2025. See also A Survey of London. HathiTrust. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[29] Edward Hall (c. 1496-1547). Author of The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke. EEBO/U-Mich. Accessed 10/3/2025. See also Internet Archive copy. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[30] Shakespeare, William. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 488-548. See John of Gaunt’s description of England on 503, 2.1.40-60.

[31] See “The Battle of Agincourt.” World History Encyclopedia. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[32] See the detailed “Wars of the Roses” website at warsoftheroses.com. See also the current commentary author’s brief introduction to the topic in the commentary Richard III. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[33] See “Lambert Simnel” on the “Wars of the Roses” website. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[34] See Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 917-69. See 939, 3.1.60-66.

[35] See “The Hundred Years’ War.” World History Encyclopedia. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[36] See “The Capetian Dynasty.” Britannica.com. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[37] See “The Battle of Hastings, 1066.”

[38] Seward, Desmond. The Hundred Years’ War: The English in France 1337-1453. Kindle ed. Penguin, 1999. (Amazon listing.)

[39] Green, David. The Hundred Years War: A People’s History. (Amazon listing.)

[40] Shakespeare, William. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 488-548. See 520-21, 3.2.139-179.

[41] See “A Tale of Two Warlords: Republican China during the 1920s.” Association for Asian Studies. 10/3/2025.

[42] On primogeniture or inheritance by the firstborn child, see LII: Legal Information Institute. Accessed 10/3/2025.

[43] IMDB’s page for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Accessed 10/3/2025.