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Department of English and American Studies Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Kristýna Obermajerová The Elizabethan and Jacobean History Play: Genre Revisited Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Pavel Drábek, Ph.D. 2011 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Bc. Kristýna Obermajerová 2 Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. Mgr. Pavel Drábek, Ph.D, for his valuable comments and suggestions during the writing of the thesis. 3 1 INRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 5 2 THE DEFINITION OF THE HISTORY GENRE ....................................................... 8 3 THE SOURCES OF THE HISTORY PLAY ............................................................ 17 3.1 The impact of other dramatic genres on the history play ......................... 17 3.2 The impact of rhetoric on the history play ............................................... 24 4 THE DEVELOPMENT AND UTILIZATION OF THE HISTORY PLAY ............. 26 4.1 The rise and fall of the history play ......................................................... 26 4.2 The utilization of the history play for propaganda ................................... 31 5 THE CENSORSHIP OF THE HISTORY PLAY ...................................................... 34 5.1 The censorship of the history play under Elizabeth I ............................... 34 5.2 The censorship of the history play under James I .................................... 41 6 HISTORIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................. 44 6.1 Historiography in the Renaissance ........................................................... 45 6.2 Playwrights‘ use of the sources ................................................................ 49 7 PRACTICAL PART .................................................................................................. 56 7.1 The Scottish History of James the Fourth ................................................ 56 7.2 The Tragedy of Richard III ...................................................................... 63 7.3 Perkin Warbeck ........................................................................................ 73 8 COLCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 81 9 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 85 10 RÉSUMÉ ................................................................................................................... 90 10.1 Résumé ............................................................................................... 90 10.2 Resumé ............................................................................................... 90 4 1 INRODUCTION The history play was one of the three basic dramatic genres in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. Nevertheless, in contrast to the other two basic dramatic genres, comedy and tragedy, the history play has always been seen as problematic to define because of the wide diversity of plays it should encompass. Even though, there were many attempts to define this genre, so far there has been no definition that would be generally accepted. Moreover, the problem with this genre is that not even its boundaries are clearly set and therefore there are many plays which some scholars classify as history plays and others as other genres. The aim of this thesis will be to propose a new definition, or rather characterization, which would clearly fix the boundaries of the genre but which would at the same time take into consideration the variability and development of the genre. This work will be divided into two general parts. The first part will be more theoretical as it will deal with definitions, origins and the development of the genre and with the external factors which contributed to the shaping of the genre. The second part will be much more practical as it will present case analyses of three plays which are in some ways classified as a history play and as it will demonstrate whether the suggested characterization of the genre is applicable practically. This introduction is followed by a chapter which inquires into what is generally understood by the term history play and it will illustrate how diverse the genre is, how various scholars have tried to define it and why their attempts at definitions are not always efficient. This section will also serve the purpose of comparing the history play with other dramatic genres, namely tragedy and chronicle play. Eventually, I will make my own tentative characterization of the genre of history plays based on the information 5 obtained from the study of history plays. The subsequent chapter will provide a series of the most important dramatic as well as non-dramatic genres which were essential in the formation and shaping of the history play and from which the history plays largely borrowed. This chapter is especially important because the inspiration by and borrowings from these sources were so meaningful and significant that some of the features of the sources even became typical features of the history play. The next chapter, dealing with the development and utilization of the history play, will demonstrate the connectedness of the rise of nationalism with the surge of popularity of the history play and it will also deal with Tudor‘s and Stuart‘s appreciation of the importance of history plays and their endeavour to avail the genre for purposeful propaganda. The following chapter will provide a new look at the genre from the perspective of censorship. It will be very useful for the purpose of this thesis as it will explain the double allusions to the political history and the necessity of symbolic interpretation of the history play. In the last chapter of the theoretical part I will investigate how Elizabethan and Jacobean historians and playwrights handled historical facts and what was their methodology in rendering them in a dramatic form. Information acquired from this study will be fundamental for understanding what the early modern playwrights had in their minds when writing about historical events and historical personalities. In the following practical part, I will utilize all the information and employ it in analyzing three selected plays, which are often denoted as history plays and each of which represents a different time period of composition. The plays analysed will be: Robert Greene‘s The Scottish History of James the Fourth (1590-91), William Shakespeare‘s The Tragedy of Richard the Third (1592), and John Ford‘s Perkin Warbeck (1622-25). The aim of this part is to demonstrate the practical usage of the 6 characterization of the history play as suggested by me and through the use of the data ascertained from the previous chapters it will be figured out whether these plays are legitimately classified as history plays, and if so, into what extent they represent prototypical examples of the genre. This analysis will also test practicality of utilization of the above suggested definition in recognizing the dramatic genre of a play. 7 2 THE DEFINITION OF THE HISTORY GENRE At the beginning of any discussion about history plays it is necessary to try to define the genre and mention some of its basic characteristics. Generally speaking, in formulating the definition of history plays, it is usually looked at Shakespeare‘s history plays, as they form the best-known and best-preserved series of history plays written by a single playwright. Nevertheless, there is nothing like a single and clean-cut definition of what features, characters and other characteristics are typical of the history play. It is so because history plays did not emerge suddenly out of the blue but they gradually developed from other genres and thus it could be claimed that that in some form they had been around for a very long time. Moreover, as Irving Ribner says in his The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (English), ―The Elizabethans themselves have left us little of value in so far as a definition of the history play is concerned‖ (6). While discussing the usage of the term and classification of the genre, some time should be spent on the explanation of a difference between the history play and the chronicle play. The term chronicle appeared in several titles of plays but its use was as unsystematic as the usage of the term history. For example The Chronicle Historie of Henry the Fifth (1599) in the first quarto form 1600 bears in the title the word chronicle. The general belief is that chronicle plays imply that what is treated in the play is English history while history plays draw mostly from Roman history (Ribner, English 5). Sen Gupta claims that the difference is that chronicle plays are usually long and depict a long period of time and numerous events while history plays, especially Shakespeare‘s history plays, are much more similar to tragedies in the respect that they focus on a limited time span and much more attention is paid to the main hero (6). However, this rather indistinct 8 division into history and chronicle plays is not generally accepted by all scholars and thus it will not be distinguished in this thesis either. It is unascertainable when the term started to be used for the first time first in order to indicate
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