Christy Desmet, Department of English
Graduate Student Association
May 16, 1997
Having participated in a Folger seminar and received release time from the UGA Humanities Center, I then applied to the Huntington Library (one of America's premiere rare books libraries for work from my period). I wanted to use a wide range of materials, both printed and manuscript, in the library's collection, and so asked for a month's residency.
The relationship between Shakespeare's English history plays and their chronicle sources needs to be reevaluated. According to earlier critics such as E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's two English tetralogies set forth a providential view of English history. Re- presenting the War of the Roses from the perspective of an Elizabethan political hegemony, these providential plays celebrate the Tudor dynasty whose advent had resolved the contention between the houses of Lancaster and York. In this view, Shakespeare's plays are politically conservative, praising the Tudor dynasty for restoring order to England. Later interpretations have challenged this hierarchical view of Shakespearean politics. Shakespeare's relation to the history chronicles, however, has not been subjected to the same kind of revision. As a result, the chronicles are characterized as elitist and reactionary in comparison to the drama.
For instance, Phyllis Rackin's excellent study, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles, argues that "a major impetus for the Tudor fascination with history was to defend against the forces of modernity, to deny change, and to rationalize a bewildering world in fictions of hereditary privilege. The public commercial theater, by contrast, was a totally new phenomenon, a disreputable place where common players draped in the discarded clothes of aristocrats impersonated their betters for the entertainment (and the pennies) of a disorderly, socially heterogeneous audience" (22). Although I am indebted to Rackin's work, I would like to challenge the notion that historical writing is "univocal" and conservative while Shakespeare's theatrical scripts are "polyvocal" and subversive. Instead, I would like to argue that Shakespeare was drawn to the historical chronicle because of its ideological instability.
In many ways, this argument is not new in the study of Tudor history. F.L. Levy, for instance, noted that the Tudor chronicles contained "a vast quantity of miscellaneous matter" (167). More recently, the factuality and ideological function of individual chronicles is being studied by writers such as Ian Archer, Lawrence Manley, and Annabel Patterson. In a recent article, Annabel Patterson challenges specifically the idea that the chronicles are univocal. She argues that "Given the nature of post-Reformation experience, which set Protestants and Catholics against each other in changing patterns of domination and repression, a national history should not and could not be univocal, but must shoulder the responsibility of representing diversity of opinion" (190). In her forthcoming book, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles, Patterson analyzes at length Shakespeare's principal source for his history plays. My own project takes Patterson's concerns in a different direction. Like her, I am concerned with the writing of England's national history in the early modern period. Like her, I am interested in the rhetoric of historical writing. But while Patterson wants to liberate Holinshed's Chronicles from their dependence on Shakespeare, I would like to liberate Shakespeare from Holinshed. In other words, I think that we can learn a great deal from placing Shakespeare's English history plays within the larger context of chronicle writing. We can understand Shakespeare's plays by analyzing the motives for writing and publishing English national chronicles at different points in the Tudor era and by analyzing their use of earlier medieval and classical historical materials. Returning to the Source therefore aims to articulate a set of relationships among early Tudor historiography, its sources in medieval chronicle and ancient sources, and Shakespeare's English history plays of the 1590's.
Although I envision Returning to the Source as a contribution to the recent dialogue about history writing, the book has a more general thesis. In the broadest sense, this will be a study of the rhetorical construction of national identity in the early modern period. Richard Helgerson's wide-ranging book, Forms of Nationhood, has described how English national identity was constructed in a number of discursive fields. But although Helgerson includes a chapter on the history plays, he does not discuss specifically the relation between the rhetoric of drama and of prose histories. This rhetorical interplay is my main focus. Many writers have cited Hayden White's well-known essay on history writing, in which he proposes that historical texts are literary artifacts, incorporating the recalcitrant materials of history into comprehensible narratives. However, the tendency to define historical rhetoric broadly in terms of "narrative" has obscured the connections between the rhetoric of drama and of prose.
Historiographers distinguish among various strands of historical writing in the early modern period, and I am not challenging the reigning taxonomies that separate antiquarian from popular history, or humanist from Machiavellian perspectives. (See for instance, Levy and Woolf, The Idea of the State.) Rather, I am interested in a persistent kind of rhetoric that crosses generic boundaries when national identity is at stake. (On generic connections between chronicle and drama, see Braunmuller.) As Christopher Hill has suggested, appeals to patriotism or to national feeling involve a re-evaluation of history, an effort to separate national events worthy of respect from those that are shameful. Hill points to the existence of a long tradition of historiography that unites ethics and politics by using epideictic rhetoric--the language of praise and blame--to assess the events of chronicle. Epideictic rhetoric, by bringing the concerns of ethics and politics into collision, involves a tension between individual and collective identity. I argue that both the drama and prose histories that I study, as examinations of national identity, dramatize this tension between individual and collective identity by setting the demands of chronicle--the faithful recording of events--against the kind of moral judgments that are made possible by the rhetoric of praise and blame. I therefore concur with David Riggs's judgment that heroic aspiration or individual achievement is central to the historical drama.
The two Shakespearean tetralogies that I study represent English national history between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VI. Although largely a record of internecine warfare, this group of plays also dramatizes England's conquest of and subsequent loss of France. Shakespeare begins with the loss of the French territories in Henry VI and ends retrospectively with Henry V and the conquest of Agincourt. It has been argued that history plays of the 1590's and Shakespeare's tetralogies in particular examine England's recent past through the lens of its imperialist aspirations. (See, for instance, Goy-Blanquet.) Although Henry V ends perversely with a retrospective glance to Shakespeare's own early Henry VI plays and the national disgrace they chronicle, it also implies that England's destiny lies westward. In the later eighteenth century, Shakespeare's English histories themselves become the occasion for debate over English national character. The discussion, which centers around Falstaff and his possible cowardice, comes to a head between 1750 and 1777, assessing England's "character" through her relation to the American colonies. At both historical moments, Shakespeare's plays document English patriotism by providing the occasion for a dialogue between ethics and politics in history writing.
In defining the political role of chronicle, both in drama and in prose histories, Returning to the Source focuses on the role of gender in defining national character. Because Shakespeare's English histories look backward to France and forward to America, they examine the relationship between self and other, English natives and foreigners. The "Other" of early modern England is often gendered as female. As Julia Kristeva points out, women are frequently the "first foreigners," or more precisely, the "strangers within us." Thus I suggest that an important connection exists between the discussions of English national character and of the foreign, which as a number of scholars have shown, is represented as a monstrous woman. (See for instance, Helgerson, Mason, and Montrose.) Rackin's recent book considers the female characters of Shakespeare's English history plays as "anti-historians": that is, they are alien to and work against the nationalist concerns of the prose chronicles and of the masculine characters within Shakespeare's own plays. I am less interested in the ways in which women are represented within Shakespeare's plays than with the ways in which early modern discourses of femininity are inscribed in historical writings.
Returning to the Source is divided into eight chapters:
Chapter 1: The Ethics of Reading History in Theory and Practice
Chapter 2: Chronicle Plays of the 1590's: A Rhetoric of History
Chapter 3: The Henry VI Plays
Chapter 4: from Richard III to Richard II
Chapter 5: The Henry IV Plays
Chapter 6: Henry V
Chapter 7: The Fortunes of Falstaff: English National Character and the American Revolution
Chapter 8: The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Domestication of History
Progress on the book has been steady. The occasion for this grant proposal is the first chapter, which discusses "The Ethics of Reading History in Theory and Practice." Last summer I spent six weeks at the Bodleian Library. Using Henry Ansgar Kelly's useful and intelligent study of Shakespeare's histories as a starting point, I began reading through the chronicles that Kelly considered relevant to Shakespeare's plays. This fall, using funds from the Humanities Center and from the National Endowment of the Humanities, I have continued reading history at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Perhaps more important, I have also been participating in a Folger Institute Seminar on "Women, Politics, and Political Thought in Tudor and Stuart England," led by Barbara Harris, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From these combined experiences, I have come to see how the historical sources for Shakespeare's plays reflect and respond to very specific historical moments. Thus the chronicles used by Shakespeare and the earlier sources for those chronicles all convey widely different political attitudes. Already an archaic form when Shakespeare turned his attention to it, the chronicle history is a dialogic text that brings into collision the concerns of different historical moments. (For the history of the chronicle's political rise and decline, see Woolf, "Genre.") Thus it is important to compare differences of content and of presentation that distinguish successive editions of the chronicles from one another. Last summer at the Bodleian library, I read through all of the available editions of Richard Grafton's Chronicle, where a myth of England's Amazonian origins appears and disappears, depending on narrative and political circumstances. At the Folger, I traced some ancient and medieval sources of this "story." I would like to perform a similar kind of analysis on other chronicles relevant to Shakespeare's histories. Specifically, I would like to see the ways in which they address and evade the story of England's female origins and how that maneuver opens a space for other discourses of femininity. Because these investigations involve comparison between different editions of the same chronicle, it is important to study the texts in a rare book library.
The Huntington Library has one of the best collections of English historical materials in the United States. Especially useful for my project are multiple editions of William Caxton's Chronicles of England, Froissart's Chronicles, Richard Grafton's Chronicle, and Fabyan's Chronicle of England and France. According to the Guide to British Historical Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, there also exists a manuscript collection of chronicles from the mid 1400's that I would like to examine. For this reason, I am applying for funds to read for one month at the Huntington Library this summer.