Dramatic Form in the Early Modern English History Play
The early modern history play has been assumed to exist as an independent genre at least since Shakespeare’s first folio divided his plays into comedies, tragedies, and histories. However, history has never—neither during the period nor in literary criticism since—been satisfactorily defined as a distinct dramatic genre. I argue that this lack of definition obtains because early modern playwrights did not deliberately create a new genre. Instead, playwrights using history as a basis for drama recognized aspects of established genres in historical source material and incorporated them into plays about history. Thus, this study considers the ways in which playwrights dramatizing history use, manipulate, and invert the structures and conventions of the more clearly defined genres of morality, comedy, and tragedy. Each chapter examines examples to discover generic patterns present in historical plays and to assess the ways historical materials resist the conceptions of time suggested by established dramatic genres. John Bale’s King Johan and the anonymous Woodstock both use a morality structure on a loosely contrived history but cannot force history to conform to the apocalyptic resolution the genre demands. Marlowe’s Edward II takes many aspects of the same genre but inverts them to show a bitter and tragic historical perspective. Conversely, Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays engage in competing modes of comic time, as Falstaff’s saturnalian comedy succumbs to Prince Hal’s long-planned comic resolution to his own morality play. Another conventional comic resolution—marriage—is explored using the close of both Richard III and Henry V, and in both cases Shakespeare affirms and limits the unified resolution that marriage offers to historical events. As one of the last “histories,” John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck presents what its author calls “Chronicle History” as a tragedy that denies its audience the certainty that chronicles offer. Finally, Robert Greene’s ahistorical James IV is used to reconsider the parameters of the history play, finding that even a highly fictionalized account can create distinct effects between known history and generic conventions. Through the exploration of these plays, this study intends to suggest the simultaneous interdependence and incompatibility of history and dramatic form.
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