From the Histories to the Tragedies

Abstract

Carlisle’s warning projects an audience forward in historical time to the Wars of the Roses in the next century which, in the orthodox political view of the Tudor period, were God’s punishment on England for the deposition of Richard II which is here being dramatised. In terms of Shakespeare’s theatre, however, it would have worked retrospectively to supply a cause for the whole dire cycle of ‘tumultuous wars’ which the playwright had already so vividly staged in the Henry Vl-Richard III tetralogy.