Shakespeare's Kings (3 page)

The mention
of Edward III
may occasion some surprise; and I readily confess that if I had written this book a year earlier than in fact I did, it would never have occurred to me to include it. I had, I think, vaguely heard of it as an apocryphal play for which one or two nineteenth-century German scholars had tentatively suggested Shakespearean authorship, but I had certainly never read it; since it did not appear in the First Folio, nor indeed in any other multi-volume edition of Shakespeare's works, there seemed no particular reason to do so. But then, suddenly, it acquired a new respectability. In
1998
it found a place in the New Cambridge edition of the plays, and as I write these words I understand that a similar volume is now in preparation for the Arden edition. Readers must turn to these works to find the various arguments for and against its authenticity; suffice it to say that its acceptance into the two series which together represent the cutting edge of Shakespearean scholarship is good enough for me.
Edward III
may not be exclusively Sh
akespeare's work — how man
y of the plays are? - but the major part of it seems to be his, and there are a number of dazzling speeches which could surely have been written by no one else:

And never shall our bonny riders rest,

Nor rusting canker have the time to eat

Their light-borne snaffles nor their nimble spurs;

Nor lay aside their jacks of gimmaled mail;

Nor hang their staves of grained Scottish ash

In peaceful wise upon their city walls;

Nor from their button'd tawny leathern belts

Dismiss their biting whinyards, till your king

Cry out: 'Enough; spare England now for pity!'

The
authentication
of
Edward III -
a complete early version of which will be found as an appendix to this book - came to me as a godsend. For Edward was the royal patriarch, from whose loins all the subsequent rulers in our story directly or indire
ctly
sprang. Virtually nothing in Shakespeare's mighty epic - not the Hundred Years War nor the Wars of the Roses, not the deposition of Edward's grandson Richard II nor the murderous ambition of his great-great-grandson Richard III - can be properly understood without going back to him. His story had somehow to be told; now, through Shakespeare, I could tell it.

But although a discussion of what we may now consider the dramatist's thirty-ninth play
¹
enables us to set the scene for much of what is to follow, we are still left with an awkward gap to be filled — a gap of nearly half a century.
Edward III
stops effectively in September
1356,
with the appearance of the Black Prince and his prisoner John II of France after the battle of Poitiers. The next play,
Richard II,
opens in April
1398
with the quarrel between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke, and coven only the last year and a half of Richard's unhappy reign. This creates what has always seemed to me a major problem: watching the play, we never quite understand what the King has done to deserve his dethronement. He has admittedly been unjust to his cousin in confiscating his estates - though another ruler might easily have executed him - but this hardly explains how Bolingbroke was able to rally virtually the whole country to his banner and seize the crown, while scarcely a voice was raised in opposition. Why was Richard already so dangerously unpopular? Why, in his last years, could he never look to his subjects for their support? Only when we follow the progress of his reign from its outset do the answers to these questions begin, all too clearly, to emerge.

To those readers, therefore, who are looking exclusively for a historical commentary on the plays, Chapters
2
to
4
must be considered as an extended exercise in scene-setting by which the unfolding drama is - I hope - made more comprehensible than it might otherwise have been. Only with Chapter
5
do we rejoin Shakespeare and continue with the second purpose of the book. For
Shakespeare's Kings
is not

1. If we include
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
and
Two Noble Kinsmen,
which generally figure in the most recent collected editions, though neither appear in the First Folio.

concerned simply to tell a story; it is also an attempt to hold up the plays, scene by scene, to the light of history, in order to establish where that light shines through unclouded, where it is shaded or refracted, and where - as only occasionally occurs - it is blocked out altogether. This is not always an easy task. Before we can accuse Shakespeare of departing from the historical truth, we must ourselves know precisely where that truth lies - and this is not easy either. Like him, we must rely very largely on the contemporary evidence, collected and collated in the early chronicles. True, in the four hundred years since the plays were written much new material has come to light whose existence he can never even have suspected; none the less these chronicles remain, for us as for him, our fundamental authorities.

The scholarly editions list some half a dozen or more sources for each play, but by far the most important are the chronicles of Jean Froissart (for
Edward III
and possibly
Richard II),
of Edward Hall and of Raphael Holinshed, whose names recur again and again in the following pages. Froissart was born at Valenciennes around
I333
.1ni36ihe came to England, where he remained for the next eight years, travelling extensively round the country under the protection of Queen Philippa, who was herself from Hainault. Returning to France in
1369,
he set to work on the first of the four volumes of his
Chroniques, a
vivid and racy account of the Hundred Years War of which the English translation, made in
1523—5
by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, was certainly well known to Shakespeare. A born writer, Froissart is I fear the only one of the three chroniclers who can be read with real pleasure today.

The two Englishmen are plodders by comparison. Edward Hall, a government official under Henry VIII, began
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies o
f
Lancastre and York
around
1530;
it was first published in
1548,
the year after his death. Raphael Holinshed, whose birth date is unknown but who died around
1580,
was initially given by his employer, the publisher Reginald Wolfe, the formidable task of writing a history of the world from the Flood to the time of Queen Elizabeth. Not surprisingly, he never completed it; but a small portion of the work appeared in
1577
as
The f
irste volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande . . . conteyning the description and chronicles of England from first inhabiting unto the Conquest.
In fact, it continues to the writer's own day. It is not always easy reading, but it constitutes the first authoritative account in English of the whole of the country's history. Shakespeare used the second, enlarged but mildly censored edition of
1587,
not only for his major history plays but also for
Macbeth, King Lear
and
Cymbeline.

The other, less important sources are listed and described at length in the Arden and New Cambridge editions. The only one, I think, worth mentioning here is the work of Shakespeare's fellow poet Samuel Daniel, whose
First Fowre Bookes of the cr
uile warns between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke
were published in
1595.
This was to be part of a still longer epic poem which was to carry the story down to the reign of Henry VII, but after he got as far as the wedding of Edward IV Daniel decided to write a prose history of England instead. At his best, he was a superb poet - some of his sonnets are among the loveliest in the language - and in
1604
he was appointed Licenser of the Queen's Revels. There can be no doubt, therefore, that he and his work would have been well known to Shakespeare, and his influence can certainly be traced in the later plays of the canon:
Richard II,
both parts of
Henry IV,
and
Henry V.

Although Shakespeare remains faithful to his sources for much of the time, there are - predictably enough - a good number of divergencies. From time to time he may have had to cope with an objection from the censor; a shortage of actors may sometimes have made it necessary to eliminate some minor character and attribute his actions to another. There are even moments when the root of the trouble seems to have been nothing more than plain carelessness. But in the vast majority of instances when Shakespeare departed from historic truth he did so for the best of all reasons: to make a better play. He was, after all, a playwright - first, last and always. To him the cause of the drama was of infinitely greater importance than the slavish observance of historical truth. He was young and inexperienced — the three parts of
Henry VI
and
Richard III
ar
e
among the first plays he ever wrote, while the entire canon was finished before his thirty-sixth birthday - and the challenge of moulding what is still today one of the most turbulent periods of English history into a coherent series was a formidable one indeed. No wonder he took liberties; no wonder he freque
ntly
combined two or three different events, which in fact occurred months or even years apart, into a single scene. The miracle is that he was able to stick as closely to the truth as he did, weaving together all the various strands to create a single epic masterpiece which, for all its minor inaccuracies, is almost always right when it really matters. A would-be student of the period with only the plays to help him might draw a number of false conclusions; but the overall picture received - including that of the reign of Richard III - would not, I believe, be very far wrong.

After
Richard II
the action, though inevitably episodic, is fairly continuous; continuous enough, indeed, for it to come as something of a surprise to learn that the nine plays were written in so haphazard an order. Dating is always a problem with Shakespeare, but it is now generally agreed that he began with the three parts
of Henry VI.
These seem to have been written consecutively, with Part I begun probably in
1589,
Part II in
1590
and Part III completed in
1591,
which also saw the writing of
Richard HI.
Next in time came
Edward III,
which dates from
1592-3,
after which there is a short break, during which appear
The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona
and
King John;
only in
1595
does Shakespeare return to his series with
Richard II.
Another break gives us
Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream
and
The Merchant of Venice;
then, in
1596
and
1597
respectively, the two parts of
Henry IV.
These gave rise to the third - but very different — Falstaff play,
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
so it was not until
1599
that the canon was completed with
Henry V.

And
Henry V
is
unlike all the others. Though by no means the greatest of Shakespeare's histories, it is the only one which ranks as a true epic: a patriotic paean celebrating England's only royal hero, the triumphant conclusion of a nine-part work that had taken the author the first decade of his active life. How the Queen would have loved it - knowing, as she must have known, that such a play could never have been written before her own day. When she had ascended the throne - in
1558
,
at the age of twenty-five - England had been a poor country, both its army and navy small and ill-equipped. Just thirty years later and thanks largely to her, it had become a great nation: one that had defeated, in the Spanish Armada, the most formidable armed expedition ever launched against its shores without losing a single vessel in the process. America, discovered less than a century before, had proved a source of riches beyond her subjects' wildest dreams. The English felt themselves reborn, and filled with an unfamiliar confidence and pride: pride in their Queen of course, but pride also in their strength, their courage, their seamanship - and their language, which had suddenly and dramatically burst into the fullness of its flower.

From this new and unexpected standpoint, it was surely only natural that they should ask themselves just what had happened. England was, after all, an ancient nation: saving only the Papacy, the oldest political entity in Europe. Already more than
500
years had passed since the Norman Conquest, and the land had been ruled by kings for more than five centuries before that. Since Edward Ill's day, however, it had been increasingly disunited. The rot had started under his grandson Richard, had increased dangerously with Richard's dethronement, and after a brief period of remission under Henry V had finally spread out of control under Henry's idiot son. The Wars of the Roses had continued, though intermitte
ntly
, till Richard Ill's death at Bosworth. And then, with Henry Tudor, had come deliverance. After a century of chaos, the Tudors had forged a modern state which, by the time William Shakespeare was born on St George's Day
1564
,
¹
was both peaceful and prosperous. But precisely what sort of transformation had been achieved, and how? How could a monarch transform a nation? And what
was
a monarch, anyway?