The Making and Remaking of History in Shakespeare's History Plays
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The Making and Remaking of History in Shakespeare’s History Plays Candidate’s Name: Alun Deian Thomas Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. at Cardiff University. September 2012 1 DECLARATION This work has not been submitted in substance for any other degree or award at this or any other university or place of learning, nor is being submitted concurrently in candidature for any degree or other award. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of …………………………(insert MCh, MD, MPhil, PhD etc, as appropriate) Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. The views expressed are my own. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 4: PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BAR ON ACCESS I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loans after expiry of a bar on access previously approved by the Academic Standards & Quality Committee. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… 2 Summary of Thesis: History is a problem for the history plays. The weight of ‘true’ history, of fact, puts pressure on the dramatic presentation of history. Not fiction and not fact, the plays occupy the interstitial space between these opposites, the space of drama. Their position between the binary opposites of fact and fiction allows the history plays to play with history. They view history as a problem to be solved, and the different ways in which each play approaches the problem of history gives us a glimpse of how they attempt to engage and deal with the problem of creating dramatic history. Each history play rewrites the plays that preceded it; the plays present ‘history’ as fluid and shifting as competing narratives and interpretations of the past come into conflict with each other, requiring the audience to act as historians in order to construct their own narrative of events. In this way the plays dramatise the process of remaking history. This can be seen in the relationship between the two parts of Henry IV, which restage the same narrative in a different emotional key, and the way that Henry IV’s retelling of the events of Richard II from his own perspective at the conclusion of 1 Henry IV forces the audience to re-evaluate the events of the earlier play, reinterpreting the dramatic past and imaginatively rewriting the play in light of the new perspective gained on events. The history plays thus create a new, dramatic history, a history without need for historical precedent. The plays deliberately signal their departure from ‘fact’ through anachronism, deviation from chronicle history and wholesale dramatic invention. In this sense the plays deliberately frustrate audience expectations; knowledge of chronicle history does not provide foreknowledge of what will happen onstage. History in the 3 theatre is new and unpredictable, perhaps closer in spirit to the uncertainty of the historical moment rather than the reassuring textual narrative of the chronicles. 4 Contents Introduction.....................................................................................................................6 Chapter I: History and the Histories.............................................................................23 Chapter II: The Making of History in Richard III......................................................49 Chapter III: Richard II: Competing Histories..............................................................86 Chapter IV: 1 Henry IV: Echoes of History................................................................118 Chapter V: 2 Henry IV: Rumours of History.............................................................155 Chapter VI: Other Histories........................................................................................197 Conclusion: A New History..........................................................................................224 Bibliography..................................................................................................................226 5 Introduction Anyone writing about Shakespeare’s histories has to wrestle with certain intractable problems. The first of these is the issue of which plays to consider. Shakespeare wrote eleven history plays throughout his career, some of them by him alone, some in collaboration with other playwrights. Some remain of doubtful authorship, but are generally considered to be at least partly his work.1 The history plays, and in particular the first tetralogy, thus present us with a patchwork history, comprised of different writers and different kinds of play. Shakespeare’s histories are generally grouped into two major sequences,2 with some plays existing outside this pattern. The so-called first tetralogy consists of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III; the second tetralogy comprises Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. This seemingly straightforward arranging of the plays itself causes problems, partly because the second tetralogy, although written later, depicts events that occurred before the first tetralogy. This means that Shakespeare completed his first history play sequence with Richard III and then began another, earlier, sequence starting with Richard II. Such an ordering could be taken to indicate that initially Shakespeare did not plan to continue the series.3 However, the placing of plays in two distinct tetralogies also raises the problem of the plays which do not fit into this pattern. Edward III, King John and Henry VIII are all chronologically distant from the plays 1 These include Edward III, the three parts of Henry VI and Henry VIII. See Giorgio Melchiori, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare, Edward III, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 14 and John Margeson, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. John Margeson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 4-5 for more information. 2 Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000), pp. 1-2. 3 Nicholas Grene argues that Shakespeare conceived the first tetralogy as a sequence of plays, but that the second tetralogy, initially at least, was not planned as such. Cf. Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 247. 6 which constitute the tetralogies, and clearly do not readily fit into any history play sequence. In turn, this raises the question of whether the plays actually form a sequence at all, or whether critics have imposed a historical structure on a series of ‘essentially disaggregated’ plays.4 There are, in fact, compelling arguments for treating each play as a unique, stand- alone entity with only tangential links to other plays. For example, Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III, appears to be a completely different character in Henry VI than he is in Richard III. Similarly, it is hard to reconcile the tongue-tied Henry V with the quick- witted Hal who so ably matches wits with Falstaff. The disconnection between the two versions of the same character is so marked as to suggest that each play occurs in its own continuity, completely separate from the other histories. Even those plays which appear to continue a single narrative, such as the two parts of Henry IV, seem to be separated from the plays which precede them.5 This apparent disjunction between plays is complicated, however, by the fact that characters often look back at the history previously dramatised, explicitly referring to the events of previous plays. This would appear to fix the plays in the same continuity, but the accounts of the dramatic past related onstage often differ from what was actually dramatised in the earlier plays. Are the plays misremembering or deliberately reconstructing the past? Or are they referring to a different past, one similar to but ultimately quite different from the one the audience has seen? The relationships between the plays are not as straightforward as they first appear; the dramatic history they present is complex, multifaceted and contradictory, but also one that deeply involves the audience. 4 Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories, p. 8. 5 Cf. Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays, p. 27. 7 Faced by such questions it is tempting, of course, to assign an overarching narrative to the histories, but any narrative imposed on the plays proves illusory at best. The two tetralogies are so different in tone, style and themes that it is difficult to see any concrete links between them.6 The first and second tetralogies appear to be relating two entirely different kinds of history as well as different periods of history. Taken together the plays do not readily constitute a unified whole; indeed, ‘disaggregation’ appears to be the hallmark of the histories. Instead of approaching the tetralogies, then, as a grand narrative, with all the assumptions about dramatic history which such an approach entails, or examining each play as an isolated history bearing tangential connections