Abstract
The general purposes shared by sixteenth- and early-seventeenthcentury English historians are explicitly formulated in almost all the dedications and introductions to the chronicles and, more extensively, in treatises on history-writing (these, however, were mostly written after the first decade of the seventeenth century). From these texts, a remarkably uniform catalogue of aims can be easily compiled. For Edward Halle,
wryting is the keye to enduce vertue, and represse vice. Thus memorie maketh menne ded many a thousande yere still to live as though thei wer present: Thus fame triumpheth upon death, and renoune upon Oblivion, all by reason of writyng and historie.1
In particular, Halle’s narrative aims to show
what mischiefe hath insurged in realmes by intestine devision, what depopulacion hath ensued in countries by civill dissencion, what detestable murder hath been committed in citees by separate faccions, and what calamitee hath ensued in famous regions by domestical discord & unnaturall controversy.2
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Notes
E. Halle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London, 1548), ‘Preface’, p. ii.
T. Lanquet, An Epitome of Chronicles (London, 1559), p. ii. Lanquet’s preface is entitled ‘Of the use and profite of histories, and with what iudgement they oughte to bee redde’. Lanquet’s Chronicle was ‘finished and continued’ to the reign of Edward VI by Thomas Cooper.
S. Daniel, The Civile Wares betweene the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke, corrected and continued (London, 1609; first published 1595), ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’ to the Countess Dowager of Pembroke, p. 2. It is interesting to note the explicit mention of the idea of a ‘circle’ as a conceptualisation of the course of history following the usurpation of Henry IV. The Epistle is not present in the first edition.
Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (1614), ed. C. A. Partrides (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 48, 49. Raleigh believed that the same pattern showed itself in Jewish, French and English history.
G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 [1936] ), p. 39; my emphasis.
Op. cit., p. 62. After the failure of Essex’s conspiracy and the suppression of his book in 1600, Hayward was imprisoned and he was released only after Elizabeth’s death, in 1603. In the same year, he published An Answer to the First Part of a Certain Conference, Concerning Succession (Doleman/Parsons’ Conference about the next succession to the Crowne of England had been published in 1594: see note 48 on p. 101), where he argues the Stuart case against the Jesuits’ preference for the Spanish, and dedicated it to James I. As can be inferred from the dedication, Hayward’s aim was to regain the royal favour, although without actually pleading guilty. On Hayward’s case, see Campbell, op. cit., pp. 182–92, A. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 44–8; P. Rackin, Stages of History (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 236; L. Barroll, op. cit. Mervyn James discusses the contribution of Hayward’s Life and Raigne ‘to the reputation of the Essex circle as characterized by an atheistic political secularism’ and remarks that ‘as an exponent of Tacitean historical style, [Hayward] abandoned in his historical work the providentialist framework, and the stress on the moral exemplum which had been characteristic of earlier Tudor historiography.’ (Politics and Culture, p. 420).
F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution. English Historical Writing and Thought 1580–1640 (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 39.
The historian’s debt to previous authors is almost always acknowledged in a list of sources which precedes the text. Halle explicitly declares the compilatory nature of his chronicle, naming the authors ‘out of which this work was first gathered, and after compiled and conjoined’. Sidney ironised about the historian, ‘laden with old mouseeaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundations of hearsay’, A Defense of Poesy, 1595; my edn, A Defense of Poetry, ed. by J. A. van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 30.
Bacon’s position requires at least to be mentioned. For Bacon, the task of the historian was ‘to carry the mind in writing back into the past, and bring it into sympathy with antiquity; diligently to examine, freely and faithfully to report, and by the light of words to place as it were before the eyes, the revolutions of times, the characters of persons, the fluctuations of counsels, the causes and currents of actions, the bottoms of practices, and the secrets of governments’ (De augmentis scientiarum, Book II, chapt. V, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John Robertson (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 432. However, although he in theory recognised the need for first-hand enquiry, when writing The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh, Bacon relied on existing sources (principally Polydore Virgil, Halle, Stow and Grafton) and, although he might have had access to the formidable manuscript collection of Sir Robert Cotton he never carried out research of his own.
E. Bolton, Hypercritica, in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908–9), 2 vols, vol. I, pp. 83–115, 94; my emphasis. The year in which Bolton’s booklet was first published is uncertain (1618?).
Quoted by D. S. Kastan, and P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations. The Later Tudors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), II, 240–1. Kastan comments on this prescription, remarking that an unregulated representation of the monarch might derogate majesty ‘by subjecting it to the impudent gaze of its subjects’. (‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’, SQ XXXVII [1986], 459–75, pp. 462–3). What the proclamation established to be ‘the natural representation of her majesty’ was, of course, no more ‘natural’ than the sanctioned historical representations.
M. Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled, p. 19. On the historical romances, see Anne Barton, ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History’, in J. G. Price (ed.), The Triple Bond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), pp. 92–117.
Walter Lynne, The Thre Bokes of Cronicles (London, 1550), p. iii. Lynne’s is a translation from a Latin version of Johann Carion’s Chronica (Wittenberg, 1532), that the translator dedicated to Edward VI. In Lynne’s version, the introduction is entitled ‘The use of readynge hystoryes’.
R. Zacchi, ‘La citazione ovvero la memoria trasparente’, Quaderni di filologia germanica della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’ Università di Bologna, IV (1988), 17–33, p. 22.
Extended to include Bakhtin’s and Voloshinov’s concept of dialogism, the field of intertextuality has been especially fruitful in suggesting new perspectives as concerns the study of sources. The practice of reuse, C. Segre suggests, varies in quantity as well as in quality; and these variations illustrate in the last analysis the user’s attitude to the source text: the user may be a simple imitator, but also one who ‘plays on estrangement as regards strongly implied epochal structures or, on the contrary, one who plays on the uniformity of themes and forms, reconstituting them for a different cultural context’, Teatro e romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), p. 110. A microanalysis of source manipulation in Shakespeare’s historical and Roman plays has been conducted in A. Serpieri et al., Nel laboratorio di Shakespeare (Parma: Pratiche, 1988), 4 vols. The analysis of transformations produced in this work concerns such categories as fabula, plot, time, space, voice, perspective and discourse (see vol. I for a theoretical assessment of the phenomena considered).
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Pugliatti, P. (1996). The Tudor Historians’ Dialogue with the Dead. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_3
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