Contexts and structures

This introductory chapter provides an outline of some of the ideological, political, and institutional structures and contexts within which the plays under discussion in this study were produced and consumed. Shakespeare's stagings of history were peculiarly intense in their concentration on the doings of kings and princes. In an emergently absolutist personal monarchy and during a period in which issues of succession and legitimacy were much on people's minds, plays that were so insistently about kings and queens were also quintessentially political plays. As a great deal of recent work has shown, such political concerns could well structure and, in their turn, be structured by, parallel sets of concerns and beliefs about the workings of the social order and the gender hierarchy. Political narratives then became useful ways to figure and interrogate the dynamics of economic exchange and value determined by the market or the workings of the gender hierarchy.

Festive Falstaff: of popularity, puritans and princes

This chapter focuses on Falstaff. In a famous scene, Falstaff is actually installed in a mock throne, playing the angry king to Hal's miscreant prince. In the ensuing exchanges, they swap different versions of Falstaff's character and attributes. The result is an association of Falstaff and his world with a variety of aspects of popular festivity and the ritualised order of the carnivalesque mode. Falstaff, however, sees himself as but old and merry. Throughout both plays, Falstaff continually claims to have been corrupted by the prince. Young and old, not so much a person as a principle of nature, Falstaff both personifies and transcends the life cycle, and thus defeats the puny efforts of quotidian logic and constraint to define or contain him.

The history play and the post-reformation public sphere

This chapter argues that the public theatre most definitely sought to feed off, and in so doing to expand, the resulting ‘post-reformation public sphere’. Not, of course, out of a principled desire to disseminate or increase political knowledge or to inculcate civic virtue, but rather because the spread of such attitudes and interests was likely to increase the appetite for a certain sort of play and thus redound to the considerable profit of those providing such plays to the viewing and reading publics. On the face of it, one might think that that essentially parasitic, secondary role would be the extent of the public theatre's contribution to the development of the post-reformation public sphere. After all, plays were precisely not pamphlets or position papers. They neither made a case nor advanced or refuted arguments; plays merely told stories, the resolutions of which represented, not successfully clinched arguments, but emotionally satisfying endings.

Between Henry V and Hamlet

This chapter argues that if Julius Caesar can be read as an examination of the dangers inherent in the particular political moment of the summer and autumn of 1599, and of the internal contradictions and temptations exposed by that moment within the Essexian project and synthesis, then the decisions reached by Brutus and Cassius, under the influence of the best wisdom of the ancients, and in emulation of the Roman virtue of their ancestors, become, in their turn, a warning to contemporaries not to repeat their mistakes, even as they sought to emulate their examples and virtue. On this reading, the play compounds its central message about the unwisdom of violent insurrection and assassination with another equally salient warning about the further unwisdom of seeking to base political and ethical decision-making in a Christian monarchy on the principles, precepts, and examples of pagan republicans.

Richard III: political ends, providential means

This chapter looks at Shakespeare's Richard III. If 1 Henry VI imposed a sort of closure on the two earlier plays by suggesting how the outcomes depicted therein might have been avoided, Richard III imposed a rather more conventional sense of an ending by depicting what actually happened next. In so doing, it departed from the modes of exposition and explanation adopted in the Henry VI plays. As Donald Watson observes, ‘the play provides us with essentially two approaches to explaining Richard's triumph, one on the level of providential ritual and the other through the making and unmaking of political factions’. Working, as it were, from both the inside and the outside, the play privileges neither of these modes of explanation but rather seeks to fit the one within the other.

Disorder dissected (i): the inversion of the gender order

This chapter examines the inversion of the gender order in the Henry VI plays. The plays show a good deal of this disorder stemming from women either aspiring to get or else successfully climbing ‘on top’. This process can be seen quite clearly—in the first half of part II—in the pairing of the duchess of Gloucester with Queen Margaret, and throughout both plays in the progression of Queen Margaret from ambitious and unfaithful wife and subject to faction leader, warrior and ruler, until finally she becomes the virtual personification of violent revenge pursued for its own sake. From the outset, the play portrays both duchess and queen as disobedient, proud, and ambitious women, aspiring to a degree of power and influence first over their husbands, and then over the wider political system, far greater than anything a properly obedient and ordered woman and wife ought to aspire to.

The morning after the night before: Troilus and Cressida as retrospect

This chapter looks at Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. If, amongst other things, Hamlet can be read as an examination, both from the inside and the outside, of the political and the religious consequences of the implosion of the Essexian project, Troilus and Cressida can, in turn, be taken to be returning to that same topic, evoking and evaluating the political and moral wreckage left by the debacle of the Essex rebellion. Indeed, the play returns to many of the central themes and topoi of the preceding plays; to the compatibility of the politics of honour, martial prowess, faction, and popularity; to war itself as a source of honour, order and legitimacy; to the applicability of the language of the market to the political world, and that world's claims to be a source of legitimacy and moral worth.

The state we’re in

This chapter argues that Henry V was not the only history play that Shakespeare wrote in 1599. Also dateable to that year is Julius Caesar. There the politics of popularity, honour and legitimacy are again in play, in a political scene in which men of the highest virtue are struggling to impose their will on events and, in this case, restore legitimacy to the state by refounding it. For all his world-dominating achievements and well nigh universal fame, Caesar's efforts to transform the Roman state end not only in his own assassination but also with the descent of the Roman world into chaos and civil war.

Contemporary readings: Oldcastle/Falstaff, Cobham/Essex

This chapter discusses how the plays studied in this book were read and received by contemporaries in order to test and confirm aspects of the analysis conducted thus far. It starts with an examination of the fuss attendant upon the identification of the first version of the character subsequently known as Falstaff with Sir John Oldcastle, then read central elements in The merry wives of Windsor as a quite remarkably daring response to that fuss, before moving on to an analysis of the Oldcastle play as a response to the Henry IV plays. As David Womersley puts it, ‘dramatic ripostes—that is to say, plays written in response to an earlier play or group of plays—carry within themselves encoded readings of the earlier works to which they reply. Once a work has been identified as a dramatic riposte, it can be used as a lens to focus at least the outline of a contemporary reading of the work to which it responds’.

Henry V and the fruits of legitimacy

This chapter argues that from the outset of Henry V, the transformation of both the king and the polity consequent upon Henry's accession is figured as almost complete. In the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare had put a great deal of energy into showing that the miracle of the king's two bodies portrayed in the Famous victories had been no such thing; not a sudden transformation but a long-planned, and entirely calculated performance or facsimile of such a transformation. However, at the start of Henry V, Shakespeare went out of his way to show both that that was precisely how the transformation of Hal into Henry was perceived by even the most learned and eminent of his new subjects and that that perception had worked an almost miraculous transformation on the condition of the body politic.