Dramatic Form in the Early Modern English History Play

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Dramatic Form in the Early Modern English History Play A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Shaun Stiemsma Washington, DC 2017 Dramatic Form in the Early Modern English History Play Shaun Stiemsma, Ph.D. Director: Michael Mack, Ph.D. The early modern history play has been assumed to exist as an independent genre at least since Shakespeare’s first folio divided his plays into comedies, tragedies, and histories. However, history has never—neither during the period nor in literary criticism since—been satisfactorily defined as a distinct dramatic genre. I argue that this lack of definition obtains because early modern playwrights did not deliberately create a new genre. Instead, playwrights using history as a basis for drama recognized aspects of established genres in historical source material and incorporated them into plays about history. Thus, this study considers the ways in which playwrights dramatizing history use, manipulate, and invert the structures and conventions of the more clearly defined genres of morality, comedy, and tragedy. Each chapter examines examples to discover generic patterns present in historical plays and to assess the ways historical materials resist the conceptions of time suggested by established dramatic genres. John Bale’s King Johan and the anonymous Woodstock both use a morality structure on a loosely contrived history but cannot force history to conform to the apocalyptic resolution the genre demands. Marlowe’s Edward II takes many aspects of the same genre but inverts them to show a bitter and tragic historical perspective. Conversely, Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays engage in competing modes of comic time, as Falstaff’s saturnalian comedy succumbs to Prince Hal’s long-planned comic resolution to his own morality play. Another conventional comic resolution—marriage—is explored using the close of both Richard III and Henry V, and in both cases Shakespeare affirms and limits the unified resolution that marriage offers to historical events. As one of the last “histories,” John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck presents what its author calls “Chronicle History” as a tragedy that denies its audience the certainty that chronicles offer. Finally, Robert Greene’s ahistorical James IV is used to reconsider the parameters of the history play, finding that even a highly fictionalized account can create distinct effects between known history and generic conventions. Through the exploration of these plays, this study intends to suggest the simultaneous interdependence and incompatibility of history and dramatic form. This dissertation by Shaun Stiemsma fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English approved by Michael Mack, Ph.D., as Director, and by Tobias Gregory, Ph.D. and Jennifer Paxton, Ph.D., as Readers. ______________________________________ Michael Mack, Ph.D., Director ______________________________________ Tobias Gregory, Ph.D., Reader ______________________________________ Jennifer Paxton, Ph.D., Reader ii Table of Contents Introduction: History as a Dramatic Genre 1 Chapter 1: History as Allegory: Morality Form in Bale’s King Johan 56 Chapter 2: History as Moral Test: Woodstock and the Everyman King 89 Chapter 3: History as Amoral: Edward II and the Tragedy of a Moral Universe 125 Chapter 4: History as “Redeeming Time:” Saturnalia and Morality as Comic Modes in 1 and 2 Henry IV 166 Chapter 5: History as Unity: Marriage and Comic Closure in History 232 Chapter 6: History vs. Tragedy: Perkin Warbeck as Tragic Hero 265 Conclusion: Greene’s Accidental History and the Nature of Early Modern Historical Drama 314 iii Acknowledgements Thanks to God, who directs history toward comedy but permits tragedy if we want it badly enough. With grateful thanks to my wife, Sarah, without whom I would never have been able to start, and to my whole family, who have put up with this project for far too long. Thanks also to Dr. Michael Mack, whose advice and guidance both allowed me to follow my own path through this project and pushed me not only to make this a better dissertation but also to become a better scholar and thinker. Finally, thanks to Dr. Paxton, Dr. Gregory, Dr. Gibbons, and Dr. Ward, all of whom have provided invaluable advice and assistance through this project. iv Introduction: History as a Dramatic Genre “a rude Notion of it; indeed rather a Description then a Definition” –Lisidius, John Dryden’s “An Essay of Dramatick Poesy”1 Although its existence has been assumed since at least the division of Shakespeare’s first folio into three distinct genres, the problem genre of the early modern history play is more surely a problem than it is a genre. Early modern literary critics have discussed and debated the definition of what was an apparently recognizable form in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but, despite many conceptualizations over the past four centuries, there is still no scholarly consensus on exactly what is meant by the genre “history play.” In the introduction to a 2008 collection of critical essays about history plays, Theresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer acknowledge not only the lack of certainty about what they propose to discuss but also that the ongoing critical discussion of such plays “will probably never result in a satisfactory agreed answer to the question ‘What is a history play?’”2 Approaches to the definition have varied from considering the source, the form, the purpose, the subject, the characters involved, or even the location of the action as the key to identifying and understanding the form, but no approach has come close to the kind of clarity of definition typical of the classical genres of tragedy and comedy. Nonetheless, in Shakespeare’s first folio, the familiar genres of comedy and tragedy are joined by history as if all three were equally certain and accepted as distinct and recognizable forms. Thus, a typical way of making sense of the genre of the early modern history play has 1 Dryden: Poetry, Prose, & Plays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP), 384. 2 “Introduction,” in English Historical Drama, 1500-1660: Forms Outside the Canon, ed. by Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1. 1 2 been to accept those included in Shakespeare’s folio as central examples, add other plays from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that seem most similar to Shakespeare’s, and then describe the set of plays included. Such attempts at definition also must be careful to exclude Shakespeare’s plays that the folio did not classify as tragedies, such as the Roman plays, as well as King Lear and Macbeth, all of which might seem, according to at least some of their attributes, to be history plays. With this basis for the genre of the history play, a clear definition of history as a distinct genre, particularly a definition using similar principles to those used to define the classical genres, has proved elusive to literary and dramatic critics for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the group included in the folio, a better way to understand the genre as it must have been understood in its own time is to explore the references to history plays in early modern publications. The genre has some apparent existence predating the folio’s classification system, as printed plays include the word “history” in titles as early as the middle of the sixteenth century,3 but these are hardly a dependable source of generic identity. Indeed, no part of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of “history” plays included the word “history” or any form of it in any publication prior to the folio, and only Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry V, of all those plays of Shakespeare commonly considered “histories,” actually included “history” in any part of the title of an edition printed prior to the folio. Further, editions of the “histories” of Richard II, Richard III, and Henry VI all include the word “tragedy” as a part of their titles. Not only are 3 The two earliest dramas including the word history in the title are John Pikering’s A newe enterlude of vice conteyninge, the historye of Horestes with the cruell reuengment of his fathers death, vpon his one naturill mother, published in 1567, and the anonymous play A nevve mery and vvittie comedie or enterlude, newely imprinted, treating vpon the historie of Iacob and Esau taken out of the xxvij. chap. of the first booke of Moses entituled Genesis, published in 1568. The length and descriptive nature of these titles, both also called enterludes, and one also referred to as a comedy, provide nearly sufficient argument against making too much of the published titles of plays as a dependable guide to genre. 3 “history” plays rarely called such in quartos, but many plays not based on history are called “histories:” just from Shakespeare, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and more had some form of the word in their printed titles.4 Beyond the scope of Shakespeare’s plays, even the more precise term “Chronicle History” is not particularly helpful—the anonymous King Leir, based on Britain’s mythic past, is called such, but so is No-Body and Some-Body, an absurd play which features the entirely fictional “Elydure” as a thrice-crowned king of England.5 The use of “history” for plays about mythic events or even entirely fictional narratives suggests not only that the term “history play” was not clearly defined and consistently used but also that the very term “history” was ambiguous. Thus, these titles indicate a further problem with using the term “history” as applicable to specific plays and representing a distinct genre: in early modern England, the word was often used as synonymous with “story,” without any special reference to the truth of the events involved.

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