Aphorisms on History Plays

A play (O.E. plegian, “to exercise, frolic, perform music”) is a performance that recreates a narrative.

By virtue of a play’s necessarily narrative form, there is no such thing as an “annals play,” for annals have no narrative.

A chronicle play recreates the multiple and sometimes unrelated facts of an age in an episodic performance, scenes organized sequentially, making the plot both digressive and inconclusive.

A history play recreates a single event on stage, synthesizing the facts it presents so that all scenes are unified in their relationship to one plot with a beginning, middle, and end, embedding within this narrative an interpretation of the event.

Annals can be made into a chronicle play (giving narrative to a series of facts); a chronicle can be made into a history play (giving unity and an interpretation to a series of episodes); and of course an author can make a historical document into a history play (dramatizing the historian’s interpretation). This is a one way street, though, for no one would make a chronicle play of a history.

If history is already a form of poetry, a fiction of fact – and chronicle, albeit less so – then the author of a history play borrows material from historians who have already borrowed their narrative method from poets, making the history play a reduplicated fiction twice removed from fact.

Historiographers distinguish annals from a chronicle by organization – annals sequential, a chronicle narrative – and a chronicle from a history by narrative structure – a chronicle episodic, a history unified – and a medieval from a modern history by rhetorical mode – medieval political, modern legal – but dramatists distinguish plays primarily by genre (Gk. γενος, “to produce”), or the relationship between the morals of the play’s characters and the course of the play’s action, which broadly speaking can be either comic or tragic. (It is not necessary here to enter specifically into the alternate definitions of comedy and tragedy; your basic conceptions will suffice.)

Defining the history play as a genre is problematic because it is a narrative without a necessary course of action, without necessary character types, so it can be tethered to any genre (tragedy, comedy, romance, satire, etc.). A history play is problematic precisely because it gives generic distinction to facts and events that do not necessarily follow the strictures of genre. On the one hand, if you know a play is a history play, you still do not know the formal course of action or the types of characters to expect, not in the way you do when approaching a comedy or tragedy. On the other hand, the audience of a given history play notionally knows the narrative action and historical personages to be represented before the play begins. Paradoxically, the audience entering a history play knows everything and nothing at once. In its capacity to go anywhere with anyone, the history play cannot generate a course of action or a cast of characters. In terms of the genre, an audience walking into a history play has no idea where it is going.  If there is no generic distinction in the history play, the history play is not a literary genre.

Attempts to define the history play as a genre are futile, and so we turn to the historical mode of the play. Like history itself, the history play can be inflected with either politics or law.

A political history play would use the power of poetry for the purpose of altering the government of a given geographical space, for its epideictic narrative tries to influence its audience’s attitude toward current officials and their policies by expressing praise or blame for analogous characters and their actions.

A legal history play would use the stage as the forensic mechanism for adjudicating questionable behavior to determine innocence and guilt, for it measures the actions of the characters against a code of ethical conduct posited by the play itself (even if that code did not exist during the period represented).

Defining the mode of the history play as either political or legal is problematic because the history play is the dramatic equivalent of courtier verse, serving the same two-fold function. First, the dramatist represents an historical narrative in such a way as to legitimate the ascendancy of the current government. Second, though, the dramatist allegorizes current events, especially governmental failings, in the representation of the past so that the current government might recognize its errors and act in such a way that deserves the dramatist’s forgone endorsement. That is to say, the history play ironically presents characters that are at one naturalized historical personages and also allegorical literary devices. That is also to say, the history play contains the germ of both a legal interpretation, in its narrative of the past, and a political interpretation, in its allegory of the present.

History is political when medieval, legal when modern, but this formulation is complicated by the history play, which exhibits a legal encounter with the event, as a modern history ought to, but also makes history present again – literally represents history – in its allegorical function, which makes it political even if modern.

More important than the historical mode of a play – political or legal – is the literary mode of the history play – namely irony, the capacity to have multiple meanings for different audiences – for the play’s status as literature is more important than its status as history. Note the grammar of the term “history play,” the nominal “play” and adjective “history.” A history play is not a history but a play, and therefore it follows the dictates not of history but of drama. The history play cannot have an argument, political or legal. In fact, as play the history play contrasts starkly with the seriousness of the always argumentative history.

The history play cannot have an argument, and yet a history play always has an argument, a paradox only resolved by considering not the history play as an abstract literary form or mode but a history play in its manifold manifestations over time. The author does not determine whether the mode of a history play is political or legal, for it is ironically both. The historical mode of a play is determined according to how it is used by the audience (L. audire, “to hear”), or the assembly that gathers to enjoy and interpret the performance, usually at a theatre but sometimes a cinema or classroom. In ways that the pure forms of comedy and tragedy do not, the history play defers meaning to the local and unique situation of an audience. As an ironic poem, the history play occupies a negative space in the historiography of an event, an emptiness into which spills the surrounding historiography.

The history play is one of those rare literary traditions that can be defined not by what it is – its form or mode – but by what it was. It can almost be defined with reference to one man, for the history play is coextensive with Shakespeare’s career. The bard begins his career with the chronicle plays in the Henry VI trilogy, making his name with the history play Richard III, exploring the art form in his second tetralogy, and returning to it at the end of his career after a long time away with Henry VIII. A consideration of the history play as a literary tradition is necessarily a consideration of the Elizabethan history play and specifically the Shakespearean history play.

The Shakespearean history play is largely the history play of the Wars of the Roses, what brought them about and how they came to an end, and the historiography of this event is the single most important influence on the audience of the Shakespearean history play.

In the 1590s, the historiography of the Wars of the Roses is still in its medieval age, as the Tudor monarchy empowered by the war continues to govern England, which is why Shakespeare’s contemporaries understand his history plays as political statements. After the fall of the house of Tudor in 1603, one might expect the historiography of the Wars of the Roses to enter its modern age immediately, or at least within a couple of generations, 60 years or so. There is actually no clear shift to legal historiography, however, until the third quarter of the eighteenth century, about two generations after the dismissal of the ideology reiterated by the Wars of the Roses, namely royalism. A sixteenth-century historian may understand Henry VII to be the individual, the House of Tudor the institution, and the Tudor myth the ideology empowered in 1485, but to an eighteenth-century historian the king is the individual, the monarchy the institution, and royalism the ideology. Not Elizabeth’s death in 1603 but the glorious revolution in 1688 marks the end of the institution empowered by the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and the historiography of the Wars of the Roses only enters its modern age after the death of those who remember life before 1688.

Thus the greatest difference between the medieval and modern audiences of a Shakespearean history play is perhaps the most obvious: the two situations do not share the same history, at least not entirely. On the one hand, a sixteenth-century audience of Shakespeare’s history plays draws a distinction between the “medieval” houses of York and Lancaster and the “modern” house of Tudor, because this audience sees the play through the ideology of the Tudor myth. On the other hand, an eighteenth-century audience draws its distinction between the “medieval” monarchy – in all its houses, including the Tudors – and the “modern” parliamentary government, because this audience sees the play through the new ideology of the Whig myth. Only when a history play depicts an event that empowered an alien ideology will it be inflected with law.

In sum, the shift in historical practices from the political inflection of medieval accounts to the legal inflection of modern generations inevitably alters the way audiences interpret the history play. Specifically, an audience in the medieval age of historiography will see a history play as political, though a different audience in the modern age of historiography will see the same history play as legal. Whereas medieval audiences see a history play as dramatic propaganda, modern audiences use it for dramatic adjudication.