Commentaries on Shakespeare’s Genres: History
Introduction to Shakespeare’s 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, so to speak, 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 focuses pretty narrowly on the tragic career and thoughts of the title character. It really isn’t about “Scottish history” in any deep sense, is it? Macbeth fits into the tragic genre so well that we would feel silly calling it anything but a tragedy. In a true history play with all its events and pageantry, there really wouldn’t be mental or emotional “room” for a character like Macbeth, with his second-guessings and deep ruminations.
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 theatrical tradition to draw from when it came to history plays. 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. 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 The Queens Men and Their Plays, nobody has thus far heard a whisper about the next Queen’s Men Drama Festival. But Shakespeare? 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!”
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.
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.”
That is what 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 over us. Who is going to forget monarchs like Richard III and Henry V and certain other great aristocrats, now that they have been so well memorialized?
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 (2023) is a good bet.
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 (Holinshed’s Chronicles chief among them) were not objective in the first place—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. This need not imply that Shakespeare whitewashed English history, but he certainly adapted 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 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,” and so the wicked king chortles that the Princes “sleep in Abraham’s bosom.”
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. We know that sometimes the bad guys win and the good guys lose, and things don’t often happen in an ethically satisfying or even coherent manner. History is the record of modern life, and it’s often a mess. Aristotle wisely points out that “the difference [between the historian and the poet] is 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 more serious thing than history; poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (1451b). 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. Shakespeare’s history is at base teleological in that 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.
To be fair, though, modern historians would point out that they, too, are weavers of plots that inevitably follow the ways of fictional narratives. See, for example, Hayden White’s groundbreaking book Metahistory. There is no simple, unified truth when we are dealing with complicated, murky events, even if historians are bound to achieve as much accuracy as they can.
None of this is to say that Shakespeare gives us “history for dummies,” tales so black-and-white in their simplification that they insult our intelligence. 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 some 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.
“So close, and yet so far”: the courtly environment and family relations
The environment in medieval courtly systems was treacherous even before the time of royal absolutism and the centralized court. 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—a perennial potential with powerful people dancing, so to speak, in an incredibly small circle illuminated by the brightest torchlight. Intense aristocratic competition was a daily reality, even though we should remember that 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, if the king were our eldest brother 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 right up alongside the reality of seemingly infinite distance. So close to absolute, sole power, and yet so far! Such circumstances could easily warp a person’s mind, cause him to lose his bearings and make a play for the top position. That’s probably why monarchs and dictators never sleep particularly well.
Seething resentments may develop from this near/far distinction, and we might say that it 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. Gloucester took the throne because he could. The haughty Athenians said to the people of Melos: “The strong do what they will; the weak do what they must.” 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 sometimes graceful surface presented by the royal families and the great lords nearest them. This comes of building a system grounded in bloodlines, or as we would say, “genes.” The justification is 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 in which they live to be as cruel, unreasoning, greedy, and chaotic as it can be. And who really 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.
The people’s relation to their government—an enduring issue in political philosophy
In the English societies that Shakespeare represents in his history plays (and his other plays as well), we are not dealing with societies wherein there is an equilibrium or even a genuine reciprocity between the people and their government. The “average person,” if we can use that construction for medieval and Early Modern societies, had some rights, but could easily fall victim to a brutal justice system that often resorted to torture, or get conscripted into some stupid, violent conflict, or be subjected to ruinous taxation or patently corrupt and unfair governmental policies, with little or no practical recourse. England in Shakespeare’s time did not have a fully developed, unbiased, equitable government, even if they had the makings of such a government.
A monarch such as Elizabeth I or James I thought of his or her subjects as children who needed to be kept firmly in line—Elizabethan notions about child-rearing, by the way, were not as tender as our ideas on the same subject today. These monarchs expected to be treated with the utmost respect by their “children/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. While Shakespeare doesn’t outright deride such formulations, he is never enthusiastic about them. His bad kings tend to get destroyed, if for no other reason than that they make themselves vulnerable to some disaster or coup by their disorderly and cruel conduct.
The truth is, people can only take so much abuse, and Shakespeare, of course, knew that. He is never sanguine about the outcomes of rebellion, but he recognizes why rebellion sometimes occurs. In the end, as King Henry V says, “a king is but a man,” and as such he should respect the common limitations he faces as one suffering, striving human being among others. King Lear is right to say, “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this.” Failing to tend to his connection with common humanity is one of Lear’s primary faults, and he pays a heavy reckoning for that failure.
“No matter where; of comfort no man speak”: How is the tragic dimension possible in Christian literature like the history plays?
It’s customary to say that the comic spirit consistently asserts itself in Shakespeare’s history plays – even, to some extent, in the ones labeled “tragedies” like Richard II, Richard III, and 3 Henry VI. That’s 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 and wrote. All of the events the playwright covers, we might say, were necessary to make the 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. Their individual tragedies, in this scheme, are sacrifices towards the greater comic pattern, which starts with turmoil and ends in felicity.
If we stay close to the classical notion of tragedy, we can argue cogently that deep tragedy is only possible when the universe crumbles around characters who fall to their ruin, and the 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 no description would be adequate to cover them all.
But the key to understanding the genre-related properties of Shakespeare’s history plays may be simply to point out that people don’t experience tragedy from an emotional and intellectual height of 30,000 feet. Because Shakespeare understood the intimate nature of his audience’s experience in watching the rise and fall of his monarchs and great noblemen, he was able to present all phases of their existence, both their triumphs and their sufferings, in full. One person’s tragedy may play out even as another’s comedy proceeds on its merry way.
How many of Shakespeare’s plays illustrate this truth? Quite a few, but especially the history plays. There is almost always some history, comedy, and tragedy in Shakespearean history—it’s an inherently composite sub-genre because life is composite in just that way. The comedies and tragedies labeled as such are closer to “pure” experiments in modality, though they, too, may show a “mixture” of happy and sad.
Christian tragedy, we can say, 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, of course there can be a tragic dimension to Shakespeare’s history plays.
To add to this idea that there’s a dark side to Shakespearean history, Shakespeare probably read Thomas Malory’s 1485 Morte Darthur or The Death of Arthur because didn’t everybody? In the East, printing goes back as far as the ninth century CE, but in the West there was Gutenberg in the 1450s and the Englishman Caxton in the 1470s, whose first printed book was a French romance narrative based on the legend of Troy. He also printed the Morte Darthur, which popularized the Arthurian tales as central to English lore.
In those tales, Arthur and his knights are aiming for a spiritual and material perfection that will never be attainable to them, 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 emblems of humanity’s fallenness as they go 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 Messrs. Holinshed, Stow, Hall, and others.
In Richard II, the dying John of Gaunt pays tribute to the little section of earth he is departing, calling it, “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise … / This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …” (503, 2.1.40-42ff).
The moments when “this England” is triumphant turn out to be fleeting, not permanent or even stable. Next to the climactic victory of King Henry V at Agincourt in 1415, Shakespeare’s moving account of the birth of baby Elizabeth in Henry VIII, arguably England’s greatest future monarch, comes closest to an idyllic moment. But like the celebrated triumph at Agincourt, it 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.
Perhaps the closest we come to an Arthurian figure in Shakespeare’s ten history plays is King Henry V (r. 1413-1422), iconic victor over the French at Agincourt and thus the Englishman who seemed most likely to end what today we call The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) in his country’s favor.
But 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” 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 at the Battle of Stoke Field.
Many critics have pointed out that there’s plenty of “pro-Tudor bias” in the Chronicles and in Shakespeare who borrowed his accounts from them. Fair enough. But at the same time, we shouldn’t forget the Arthurian “doom” that hangs over the great house, 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” (Macbeth 3.2). 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 excellent, which is not quite the case with the minor tetralogy, from which I like mainly 3 Henry VI and Richard III. 1 & 2 Henry VI are also pretty good, but not Shakespeare’s best work. (The Henry VI plays weren’t necessarily written in order.)
Another thing that’s attractive about the major tetralogy is that it covers 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.”
This is interesting to ponder since 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 and the French Normans. But it seems like it would be more accurate to say that the French were fighting the French, not “the English.” The Norman invasion of 1066 meant that Norman French aristocrats took over the territory called England, and “Normanized” it to a great extent. 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 1337.
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. There’s also David Green’s The Hundred Years War: A People’s History.
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 the whirlwind that is English history don’t know how to use the power they have. Richard II, in Shakespeare’s casting, is a wicked man but also a doomed poet-king who philosophizes about and dramatizes his downfall even as it is happening to him. 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 his father John of Gaunt (the third surviving son of Edward III), 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.
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.” That was largely true of the English monarchs in the time 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, whether their claim to wield that power is textbook legitimate or not.
All the English rulers had to have known that primogeniture, legitimacy, and allied concepts were partly fictions. What matters is material power and possession. We can’t do better than 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.”
Ultimately, what we can draw from Richard II is Shakespeare’s interest in the pitiless dynamics of royal power; his concern for the necessarily close relationship between rhetoric and political action; and the fundamental need of a ruler to understand his own people. Richard II has failed in all three regards, and so he falls to the ruthless and efficient (if manifestly inferior) claim to the throne advanced by Henry Bolingbroke.
From 1 and 2 Henry IV, it’s worth mentioning that the plays show a sense for the redemptive disposition of time that we can see in comic plays such as Twelfth Night. Henry Bolingbroke or 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 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 deadly earnestness.
It’s hard to miss the emphasis on the burdens of kingship in the Henry IV and Henry V plays. 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. Although Shakespeare allows Henry to outargue the soldier Michael Williams, who challenges him, 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.
Copyright © 2025 Alfred J. Drake