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Time and the Problem of Royal Succession in Shakespeare's History Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2016

John D. Cox
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Abstract

Shakespeare's most innovative genre was the history play, because it has no precedent in either classical or medieval tradition. In contrast to the focused teleology of Christian medieval drama, Shakespeare's history plays manifest an implicit idea of history that was secular, political, and open-ended. They emphasize human action in a political arena, where the criterion for success is the ability to act in time, without regard to one's spiritual state. Time determines royal succession, which is the focus of all Shakespeare's history plays, as it was the focus of political concern in England in the 1590s, when the plays were written. His emphasis on time and royal succession distinguishes his implied political theory from the moralism and authoritarianism of official Tudor state doctrine on one hand and from the pragmatism of Machiavelli on the other.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 78 , Special Issue 4: Shakespeare's Politics in Honor of the 400th Anniversary of his Birth , Fall 2016 , pp. 609 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

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References

1 Kastan, David S., Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 41 Google Scholar.

2 Richard II, 5.5.49. Quotations from Shakespeare are from Bevington, David M., ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (New York: Longmans, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 Neale, J. E., Queen Elizabeth I (London: Cape, 1961), 385–86, 390Google Scholar.

4 This admission results directly from quarrels over the succession. Henry rightly asserts that he is “son of Henry the Fifth” (3 Henry VI, 1.1.107), but he is rattled by his opponents' designation of him as “usurper” (114), alluding to the successful rebellion of his grandfather, Henry IV, against Richard II—an indisputably illegitimate succession.

5 Historically, the secret murder of the princes gave an opening to various challengers to Richard's successor, Henry VII, from Lambert Simnel in 1487 to Richard III's declared heir, the Earl of Suffolk, as late as 1506. The most colorful of them was a bold adventurer from Flanders, Perkin Warbeck, who pretended to be the younger of Edward IV's sons and attempted an invasion of England in 1497. His story became the basis of John Ford's play Perkin Warbeck (about 1630). On the historical background to Henry VII's accession, see Chrimes, S. B., Henry VII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 68–94 Google Scholar.

6 Henry Tudor's strongest claim lay through his grandmother Katherine, widow of Henry V; she had married Henry Tudor's grandfather Owen, after her first husband's untimely death. On his mother's side, Henry Tudor was descended from John of Gaunt, second son of Edward III, by Catherine Swynford, Gaunt's third wife and former mistress.

7 The only scene that features commoners prominently in Richard II is set in the garden of the Duke of York (3.4), where gardeners labor to serve their betters—a very different place from the tavern, which is an indigenous social space for commoners. For comment, see Leinwand, Theodore, “Spongy Plebs, Mighty Lords, and the Dynamics of the Alehouse,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 159–84Google Scholar.

8 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, chap. 15, in Chief Works and Others, trans. Gilbert, Allan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 1:57–58Google Scholar. Before he becomes king, Richard of Gloucester mentions Machiavelli approvingly (3 Henry VI, 3.2.193), but Elizabethans had so demonized the Italian political theorist that only villains and scoundrels openly approved of his ideas.

9 On the contrary, Richard accuses his rival Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, of currying favor with “the common people” (Richard II, 1.4.23–36), and Henry's followers complain that Richard himself is alienating the commons (2.1.246–48 and 2.2.88–89).

10 Hal is extraordinary among Shakespeare's kings because he never makes a mistake. The possible exception is his good-naturedly allowing Falstaff to take credit for the death of Henry Hotspur (1 Henry IV, 5.4.155–56). This ill-advised concession comes back to challenge the Prince in 2 Henry IV; in fact, Shakespeare used it as the basis for a second play on the same general idea that he had treated in 1 Henry IV.

11 This point is made by Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, 51.

12 Quinones, Ricardo, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. On Shakespeare's history plays, see 290–360. Frederick Turner sees no relation between time and history, in that he omits the history plays entirely in Shakespeare and the Nature of Time: Moral and Philosophical Themes in Some Plays and Poems by William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)Google Scholar.

13 Machiavelli, Chief Works, ed. Gilbert, 1:264.

14 Machiavelli may well have influenced Shakespeare's secular thinking about power in general, but his specific influence in the plays has yet to be demonstrated, as Hugh Grady points out: “Shakespeare was never ‘a Machiavellian’ in any straightforward sense—in fact, there is no direct evidence that he ever read a page of Machiavelli's works” (Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from “Richard II” to “Hamlet” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 20).

15 Orr, Robert discusses both time and fortune in “The Time Motif in Machiavelli,” in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed. Fleisher, Martin (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 185–208 Google Scholar. Orr's explication of time in Machiavelli (188–97) is very close to Shakespeare's conception of “acting in time” in the history plays, but Machiavelli does not address the issue of time directly, as Orr acknowledges (187), in contrast to fortune, to which Machiavelli refers insistently. At the very least, to say that Shakespeare ignored Machiavelli's explicit idea of fortune and somehow divined his implicit idea of time is to say that Shakespeare thought differently from Machiavelli.

16 Among many others, see particularly Discourses 2.29, 2.30, and 3.137.

17 The quotation is from The Prince, chap. 25 (Chief Works, 1:92). Cited by Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 152 Google Scholar.

18 J. G. A. Pocock infers a link between fortune and time in Machiavelli, but he does not attribute it to Machiavelli, i.e., he cites no statement of Machiavelli's in support of it. See The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 178 Google Scholar.

19 See Henry V, 3.6.27–29; As You Like It, 1.2.30–31; and Antony and Cleopatra, 4.15.46.

20 This point can be illustrated from a frequently cited parallel between Measure for Measure and Machiavelli's The Prince, chap. 7, where Machiavelli commends Cesare Borgia for putting a cruel substitute in charge of cleaning up Romagna and then executing the man (Chief Works, 1:31). The episode is cited as more or less conclusive by Jaffa, Harry V., in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. Alvis, John and West, Thomas G. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), 188–89Google Scholar; by Bloom, Allan, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 330 Google Scholar; by Marx, Steven, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 101 Google Scholar; and by Spiekerman, Tim, Shakespeare's Political Realism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 25 Google Scholar. As Norman Holland argues, however, if Shakespeare was indebted to this episode, he could more easily have read it in Gentillet's Contra-Machiavel than in Machiavelli, whose works were not published in English during Shakespeare's lifetime ( Holland, Norman, “ Measure for Measure: The Duke and the Prince,” Comparative Literature 11 [1959]: 16–20 Google Scholar). Most damaging to the claim for Machiavelli's influence on Measure for Measure is Felix Raab's observation that the principle Machiavelli commends Cesare Borgia for following in Romagna had also been recommended by Erasmus in The Enchiridion, following Aristotle's Politics ( Raab, Felix, The English Face of Machiavelli [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964], 11Google Scholar).