The Early Tudor History Play

Abstract

The history play is usually associated with the decade of the 1590s and with public theatres. David Bevington’s pioneering work in Tudor Drama and Politics showed the genre to be clearly associated with England’s wartime aspirations during that period, and to recede with the failing years of Elizabeth and the peace policy of James I from 1603.¹ Despite broad critical agreement about its central axis in the 1590s, however, the history play has never been easy to define, and there is a general lack of agreement about how it should be identified. The term ‘history play’ was not in use during the sixteenth century, and the term ‘history’ was used in so loose a way (often closer in sense to modern ‘story’) that its presence or absence in play titles is unhelpful in reaching a definition of dramatic genre.² Even the well-known divisions of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), which have probably been most influential in creating the need to conceive of the history play as a genre, distribute plays into the categories of history and tragedy in ways that raise almost as many questions as they answer. Samuel Johnson in 1765 expressed the opinion that ‘the players who in their edition [the First Folio] divided our author’s works into comedies, histories, and tragedies’ seemed not ‘to have distinguished the three kinds by any very exact or definite ideas’.³ Benjamin Griffin, who has most recently sought to pursue the question of definition at length, begins his chronology of the history play in the fourteenth century, choosing ‘Englishness’ and ‘pastness’ as ‘the genre’s essential features’ and arguing for the inclusion of British saint plays as amongst the earliest examples of the genre.⁴