Abstract
It is one of the generally accepted ideas concerning the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that the year 1588, with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, marked the end of a long nightmare and inaugurated a period of optimism characterised by a sudden surge of nationalistic feelings.
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Notes
J. E. Neale opens his account of the event with a sentence that even betrays emotion: ‘There was a prophecy, long rife among Englishmen, that 1588 was to be a year of wonders. It proved to be the year of the Invincible Armada.’ Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 294.
Here is how F. E. Schelling explains the appearance — and disappearance — of history plays: ‘The English Chronicle Play began with the tide of patriotism which united all England to repel the threatened invasion of Philip of Spain. It ebbed and lost its national character with the succession of James, an un-English prince, to the throne of Elizabeth.’ The English Chronicle Play (New York and London: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 1–2. Certainly, the effects of that event on literature, both in England and Spain, cannot be overlooked.
See, for recent discussions of the topic, S. Onega, ‘The Impact of the Spanish Armada on Eliza-bethan Literature’, in J. Doyle and B. Moore (eds), England and the Spanish Armada (Canberra: ACT, 1990), pp. 177–95;
and for Spanish literature, P. Gallagher and D. W. Cruickshank, ‘The Armada of 1588 Reflected in Serious and Popular Literature of the Period’, in Gallagher and Cruickshank (eds), God’s Obvious Design. Papers for the Spanish Armada Symposium, Sligo, 1988 (London: Thamesis Books, 1990), pp. 167–83.
Quoting C. Tucker Brooke’s idea that Shakespeare’s historical plays resulted from the ‘triumphant exhilaration’ which followed the victory (The Tudor Drama [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911], p. 299),
L. B. Campbell remarks that ‘with the exception of Henry V and perhaps Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s plays were written, not about the admirable rulers of England and their times, but rather about those rulers who had sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind’. Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (London: Methuen, 1980 [San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1947], p. 11). Tillyard stated that the Armada ‘at most … encouraged a process already in full working’. Shakespeare’s History Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [London: Chatto and Windus, 1944]), p. 101.
R. Smallwood, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of History’, in S. Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 143–62, 147. Only recently have the reasons for the sudden disappearance of historical drama been the object of discriminating critical attention (but the performance of history plays was not discontinued as completely as their writing). Leonard Tennenhouse attributes the decline of history plays, along with that of Petrarchan poetry and romantic comedy, to radical changes in the strategies deployed to idealise political authority. See ‘Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII’, in J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 109–28 and ‘Rituals of State: History and the Elizabethan Strategies of Power’, in Power on Display. The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 72–101. Richard Helgerson attributes the shift in genre preferences and the change in the conditions of playing to the Essex revolt in 1601 and to the death of Elizabeth, but adds that ‘how the particular changes are linked to one another, which are cause and which are effect …, are questions that lend themselves to no easy resolution’. Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 198.
R. B. Wernham, After the Armada. Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 2. Neale characterises the defeat of the Spanish as ‘a disaster beyond expectation’ (op. cit., p. 300).
D. Howarth, The Voyage of the Armada. The Spanish Story (London: Collins, 1981), p. 239.
J. Hurstfield, The Illusion of Power in Tudor Politics (London: The Athlone Press, 1979), p. 19.
The notion of ‘horizon of expectations’ is discussed by H. R. Jauss, who argues for a rewriting of literary history as a history of the reception and influence of literary works. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Universitäts-Druckerei GmbH, Konstanz, 1967); English transl., ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 3–45. The expression, however, was first circulated by H. G. Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965); English transl., Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 19751.
A. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 132, 135. Emrys Jones, in turn, mentions the reprinting, in the years between 1587 and 1590, of a series of works (Holinshed’s Chronicles, the translation of Dolce’s Giocasta, The Misfortunes of Arthur and, more importantly, Gorboduc) that, he believes, contributed to the vogue. The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 23–4. The argument is, however, circular, since it does not explain the revival of interest in these works. F. E. Schelling, in fact, uses the same argument to support his idea that the history plays sprang from the patriotic feeling aroused by the Armada (op. cit., pp. 31–2).
T. Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1910), p. 212.
L. B. Wright, Middle-class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 297.
A. Patterson remarks that ‘Historiography, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, was no academic discipline but a matter of public interest’, and recalls that ‘the government regarded English historical materials as subject to its own control’. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 77–8.
See also Patterson’s earlier book, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
Quoted by J. Manning (ed.), The First and Second Parts of The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (London: Royal Historical Society, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 42, 1991), p. 1.
This edition contains Hayward’s announced but unpublished continuation of The Life and Raigne. Two accounts providing different interpretations of Hayward’s story in connection with Essex’s rebellion are in Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 416–65
and Leeds Barroll, ‘A New History for Shakespeare and His Time’, SQ XXXIX (1988), 441—64.
Among these may be mentioned The Famous Victories of King Henry V (1586), The Misfortunes of Arthur by Thomas Hughes (with Bacon, Trotte, Fulbeck, 1588), The Reign of King Edward the Third (Marlowe?, Kyd?, Greene?, revised by Shakespeare?, 1590), The Life and Death of Jack Straw (1591), The Troublesome Reign of John King of England (1591), The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First by George Peele (1591), The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of King Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe (1592), Woodstock (1592), The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (1594), Locrine (1594), Sir Thomas More (1595, by Munday, Dekker, Chettle, Heywood, Shakespeare), Sir John Oldcastle (1599) and Thomas Lord Cromwell (1600). The datings of all these plays are uncertain, although they all appear to have been written between 1586 and 1600. References are from A. Harbage, Annals of English Drama: 975–1700 (London: Routledge, 1989), 3rd edn, revised by Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim.
G. Holderness, ‘Prologue: “The Histories” and History’, in G. Holderness, N. Potter and J. Turner, Shakespeare: The Play of History (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 18. Holderness has returned to this issue in a recent book, Shakespeare Recycled. The Making of Historical Drama (New York and London: Harvester, 1992).
M. Hattaway, ‘Introduction’ to The Second Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1. Tillyard wrote that the style of 1 Henry VI is ‘hesitant and varied’ and argued that ‘if a young man attempts a big thing, a thing beyond his years, he will imitate others when his own invention flags’ (op. cit., p. 161).
N. Rabkin, ‘Either/Or: Responding to Henry V’, in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 33–62, 61. M. M. Reese, in what is one of the first substantial correctives to Tillyard’s view, spoke of ‘many-sidedness’ of vision and of ‘two-eyed scrutiny’. The Cease of Majesty (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), p. viii.
On Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’ in relation with political issues, see A. Serpieri, ‘La retorica della politica in Shakespeare’, Il piccolo Hans XIII (1977), 111–36.
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© 1996 Paola Pugliatti
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Pugliatti, P. (1996). Introduction. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_1
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