Shakespeare was an apologist for royal power. He makes the Catholic distinction between the priest and his office — the weak priest or king must still be obeyed because of the sacredness of his role. His sympathies may be found also in the fact that he describes the followers of Jack Cade as a “rabblement,” quite different from the presentation of them in the chronicles. Cade was the leader of the disaffected multitude who in 1450 constituted the “Kentish Rebellion” against the government of Henry VI. It was an unsuccessful uprising, yet Cade himself is vilified by Shakespeare in a manner wholly at odds with his immediate sources. Shakespeare seems to have been averse to any kind of popular movement. In particular he ridicules the illiteracy of the London artisanal class, as if to be literate (as he was) was a singular mark of distinction and separation from the mass. He felt himself to be apart.
But there is a curious paradox here, one which he and his audience may have observed. The sixteenth-century theatre is a democratising force. Common players assume the roles of monarchs. On the space of the stage itself nobles and commoners are sometimes engaged within a shared action. There is no dramatic difference between the varying ranks of society. In the history plays Shakespeare creates ironic associations and parallels between the chivalric action of the nobles and the comic action of the commoners, as if he were testing the true potential of the theatre. It is a complicated point, perhaps, but one that suggests the subversive or revolutionary potential of the stage. It was in essence a populist medium.
In revising at a later date The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, he changed the sentence structure of certain scenes, added or excised stray lines and even words, removed local London detail and furnished more set speeches. He did not touch the actual structures of the plays but merely embellished and elaborated upon them. He also widened and deepened the characterisation. In the process of revising The True Tragedy, for example, he significantly added to the part of the Duke of York. It is most likely that when Shakespeare effected these revisions he already had in mind, or had written, The Tragedy of King Richard III. In The True Tragedy Richard compares himself to “the aspiring Catalin,” Catiline being a noble conspirator against the Roman Republic, but in the revised version Richard compares himself more villainously to “the murtherous Macheuill.”
Shakespeare also changed the parts in order to complement the actors. He altered the characterisation of Jack Cade, for example, to incorporate the talents of Will Kempe, who had become the principal comic of his company; he added the detail that Cade is a wild morris-dancer, at which dance Kempe was known for his skills. In the revised version of the play, too, the stage-directions refer to “Sinklo,” “Sink.” and “Sin.”; this was not a character in the play but, rather, the name of the actor John Sinklo or Sincler, who was well known for his extreme slenderness. This suggests that Shakespeare was rewriting the part with Sincler fully in mind and eye.
These revisions and alterations were no doubt part of his practice with all of his drama. It is only through chance or fortune that copies of The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy, Edmund Ironside and The Taming of a Shrew, have survived. Shakespeare was also learning and changing his craft in another sense. His later historical dramas, in particular the two parts of Henry IV, display much more subtlety and inwardness both in their characterisation and in their action. The demonstrative and oratorical mode of the earliest plays is subdued in favour of Falstaff’s wit and the old king’s melancholy. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare’s histories led him directly towards his experiments with tragedy and that one form cannot really be separated from the other. Certainly Shakespeare himself does not seem to have distinguished between them. The cry of “Et tu, Brute” in the drama appropriately entitled The True Tragedy points in that direction; the English history plays lead to Julius Caesar, which in turn proceeds towards Hamlet.
Part IV. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men
Robert Greene’s autobiographical pamphlet, Groats-Worth of Witte, calls Shakespeare “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.”
CHAPTER 32
Among the Buzzing
pleased Multitude
Shakespeare followed public taste but he also helped to create it. He wrote ten plays devoted to the subject of English history, far more than any of his contemporaries, and we can infer that it was for him an agreeable and accommodating subject. But, as is often the case with literary genius, the imagination of the age helped to inspire him. This in a sense was the first period of secular history in England. The plays of an earlier date presented sacred history from Creation to Doom, but from the mid-sixteenth century onwards the twin forces of the Reformation and Renaissance learning persuaded scholars and writers to look beyond the eschatology of the Church. If human will rather than divine providence was the source of significant event, then drama had found a new subject. It could be said that Shakespeare was present at the invention of human motive and human purpose in English history.
Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York had been published in 1548, and the first edition of Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland followed in 1577. These were the books that Shakespeare devoured, although he seemed to favour Holinshed’s more popular account of the past. If we wish to see Shakespeare as a characteristically or even quintessentially English writer, this appetite for historical re-creation affords some evidence for that identification. Schelling described the history play as a distinctively English genre. It did not last for ever, of course, but faded after approximately twenty years of successful performance; coincidentally or not, history plays really only lasted while Shakespeare continued to write them.