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The Tudor History Play: An Essay in Definition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The english history play belongs distinctly to the sixteenth century. Although it has its roots deep in the medieval drama, it reached its full development only in the last decades of the reign of Elizabeth, and when John Ford wrote his Perkin Warbeck in 1634, it was already with the awareness that he was reviving a dramatic type which had been dead for some decades. It is significant that later attempts to revive the history play have always been with an eye towards the Elizabethan era. Nicholas Rowe turned to his Jane Shore fresh from his edition of Shakespeare and full of the inspiration of Shakespeare's histories. In our own time Maxwell Anderson, in such plays as Elizabeth the Queen and Anne of the Thousand Days, has been clearly anachronistic in his attempts to recreate Elizabethan verse drama, and it is significant that he has chosen his subjects from the very age he has sought to emulate.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902).
2 Pages 2-3. The relation of the history-play vogue to the defeat of the Armada, as E. M. W. Tillyard has shown—Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1947), p. 101- is a very dubious one.
3 Marlowe's Edward II (London, 1914), pp. xxi-xxii.
4 Woodstock, A Moral History (London, 1946), pp. 8-9.
5 As They Liked It (New York, 1947), pp. 123-125.
6 See L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare and Political Wisdom,” Sewanee Rev., lxi (1953), 43-55, for illustration of the complete unity of public and private concerns in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.
7 Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif., 1947), p. 17.
8 See Leonard F. Dean, “Tudor Theories of History Writing,” Univ. of Michigan Contributions in Mod. Philol., No. 1 (1941), pp. 1-24. Dean indicates that although Elizabethan historians professed the theories of providential history, they found it difficult to follow them in their actual writings, and he offers Ralegh's History of the World as an example.
9 Tillyard, p. 21.
10 English Drama From Early Times to the Elizabethans (London, 1950), p. 132. The same point was made a long time ago by John W. Cunliffe, Early English Classical Tragedies (Oxford, 1912), p. xcix.
11 The Tudor Drama (Boston, 1911), p. 297.
12 The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston, 1948), p. 5.
13 See Lewis Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England (New York, 1902), pp. 5, 14, and esp. 307-315.
14 See C. L. Kingsford, The First English Life of King Henry the Fifth (Oxford, 1911).
15 Histoire de l'historiographie moderne, trans. Emile Jeanmaire (Paris, 1914), p. 199.
16 Ibid., pp. 205-208. See also Leonard F. Dean, “Sir Francis Bacon's Theory of Civil History Writing,” ELH, viii (1941), 161-183.
17 See Fueter (note 15, above), p. 9.
18 Among these may be mentioned the translations of Guicciardini's Wars of Italy, of Machiavelli's History of Florence and Contarini's History of Venice. There were many others.
19 “Leonardo Bruni and Humanistic Historiography,” Medievalia et Humanistica, iv (1946), 45-61.
20 Cited by J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence (London, 1947), p. 277.
21 Leonard F. Dean, “Bodin's Methodus in England before 1625,” SP, xxxix (1942), 160-166.
22 See Beatrice Reynolds, ed. and trans. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History by Jean Bodin (New York, 1945); Henry Sée, “La Philosophie de l'Histoire de Jean Bodin,” La Revue Historique, clxxv (1935), 497-505.
23 The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), pp. 49-50.
24 The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories, according to the precepts of Francisco Patricio and Accontio Tridentino, two Italian Writers (London, 1574), ed. by Hugh G. Dick, HLQ, iii (1940), 149-170.
25 In this passage Blundeville is translating Concio. When he follows Patrizi we find a somewhat different attitude. Patrizi distinguishes between the outward and inward causes of action, the inward being those over which man himself has control, and the outward being the forces in the world over which he has no control; these logically would include the purposes of God. But history for Patrizi would concern itself only with inward causes. He writes, in Blundeville's translation, “the mind is the fountayne and father of all actions,” and he emphasizes that actions stem from man's environment, his education, family, country, etc., all of which combine to make him do what he does (p. 161). Patrizi is presenting the attitude of the Italian humanists; Concio is presenting a medieval Christian idea. It is interesting that Blundeville should have combined the two without realizing the inconsistencies involved. But this was typical of the Renaissance fusion of cultures.
26 “Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World,” Proc. British Acad. (1918), pp. 434-435.
27 Cited by Firth, p. 435.
28 Medievalia et Humanistica, iv, 50-52.
29 See Collingwood, pp. 42-45.
30 Histories, trans. W. R. Paton (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1922), i, 3.
31 See Collingwood, pp. 33-36.
32 Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford, 1907), p. 15.
33 In the final lines of his play, the anonymous author of A Warning for Fair Women makes a distinction between his truthful tragedy and what should be presented by history:
Beare with this true and home-borne tragedy,
Yeelding no slender argument and scope
To build a matter of importance on
And in such forme, as, happly, you expected.
What now hath fail'd tomorrow you shall see
Perform'd by History or Comedy.
34 I am indebted to Professor Harbage for this suggestion.
35 Thucydides Mythistoricus (London, 1907), pp. 137-139.
36 The Ancient Greek Historians (New York, 1909), pp. 33, 68.
37 See B. L. Ullman, “History and Tragedy,” Trans. Amer. Philol. Assoc., lxxiii (1942), 25-53.
38 His distinction, as Ullman summarizes it: “Tragedy imitates the actions of men, history states facts; the purpose of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity, especially through the unexpected and through change of fortune; tragedy deals with a complete action, having a beginning, middle and end, history does not necessarily do so” (p. 26).
39 R. Reitzenstein, Hellenistische Wundererählungen (Leipzig, 1906), pp. 84 ff.
40 The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941), pp. 1463-1464.
41 See J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1945), and A. P. Rossiter, Woodstock, A Moral History. I have considered the relation of morality play to history play in “Morality Roots of the Tudor History Play,” Tulane Studies in English, iv (1954).
42 Schelling, p. 28-29; A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (London, 1899), i, 187.
43 Ward, i, 185-187; Schelling, pp. 16-17; W. R. Mackenzie, The English Moralities from the Point of View of Allegory (Boston, 1914), p. 218.
44 As Jesse W. Harris has pointed out in John Bale (Urbana, 1940), p. 93, Bale deliberately set out to contradict Polydore Vergil's hostile account of King John, to tell the story from a Protestant point of view and thus, as he saw it, to tell it correctly. It is clear from the text that Bale used extensively the accounts in the British chronicles, of which he owned probably the largest collection in England. Herbert Barke, in his Berlin doctoral dissertation, Bales “Kynge Johan” und sein Verhältnis zur zeitgenössischen Geschichtschreibung (Würzburg, 1937), particularly pp. 44-136, has indicated the specific relationship of each historical event in the play to earlier chronicle material. Of Bale's serious historical purpose there can be little doubt. He was using history just as Machiavelli had used it in the Florentine History and Life of Castruccio Castracani.