In Our Time - Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

In the first of two programmes marking In Our Time's 20th anniversary on 15th October, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare's versions of history, starting with the English Plantagenets. His eight plays from Richard II to Richard III were written out of order, in the Elizabethan era, and have had a significant impact on the way we see those histories today. In the second programme, Melvyn discusses the Roman plays.The image above is of Richard Burton (1925 - 1984) as Henry V in the Shakespeare play of the same name, from 1951WithEmma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of OxfordGordon McMullan Professor of English at King’s College London and Director of the London Shakespeare CentreAnd Katherine Lewis Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of HuddersfieldProducer: Simon Tillotson

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Henry V, Richard III, Margaret Vanjou, that we remember them at all is substantially thanks to Shakespeare. He reworked the story of mataginets,

from the fall and death of Richard II in 1400 to the death in 1485 of Richard III. His version came to dominate perceptions of that last century of the Middle Ages what was important and why one action led to another. But is Shakespeare history? And what impact have his reimagining's had? That's what we're discussing over two programmes as we mark the 20th anniversary of In Our Time.

Now we have the Plantagenets. Next week, it's the Roman plays. With me to discuss Shakespeare and his Plantagenet histories are Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hartford College University of Oxford. Gordon MacMullen, Professor of English at King's College London, and director of the London Shakespeare Centre and Catherine Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History

at the University of Huddersfield. Catherine Lewis, which plays are we going to talk about? When were they written? So we're going to talk about, as you've said, the plays that start in the very late 1390s at the end of the reign of Richard II and then successively go through the reigns of all the kings that follow him

up to the accession of Henry the 7th in 1485. So all of the plays are named after the kings who reigned in this period, although Edward IV and Edward V don't get their own plays, but their reins are covered in other plays. And that's it. That's what we're going to talk about today.

Shakespeare did also write a play about King John. He wrote a play about Henry VIII. It's usually regarded that he contributed to a play about Edward III. But his most sustained engagement with English history is the 15th century. What were his sources? So his main source was a chronicle, which is known as the Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which is normally called Raphael Hollinshead's Chronicle,

although actually it was a collaborative project. It was a very ambitious project and attempt to tell the whole history of the British Isles from their foundation right up to the present day, up to 1577, which is when the first edition was published. And it was such a success that it actually went into a second expanded edition in 1587. It expanded from two volumes to three volumes. We know that it was a great success

because about 100 copies survive of each of these two editions, either the complete chronicles or parts of them. And this is the main source that Shakespeare used. I should also mention here Edward Hall's Chronicle, which is the union of the noble and illustrious houses of York and Lancaster. And this was the source that Hollinshead used for the 15th century, and Shakespeare also made use of it independently as well. And I think the important thing is that Shakespeare didn't only derive the substance

of his history plays from these sources, but he also derived the form of them as well, this idea of them as a sequence with a unifying theme. And also we must emphasise that we're talking about a time when Elizabeth was still on the throne, very much under the aegis of Elizabeth I. And we have to place history in her reign as to what it meant to her

and what it meant to those who advised her. That's right, yes. Can you tell us a bit more about Hornshed? He seems to have taken a great deal, as I remember, the great slabs of Hollinshed become metered slabs of Shakespeare. Is that true? Yeah, again, to a great extent, I think that is true. Shakespeare isn't, he's not inventing the 15th century. He is basing his 15th century on what he finds in Holland said, which again comes from Edward Hall. But he does elaborate it. He fills in some of the gaps of the sources in very memorable ways, very, very compelling ways as well.

Which raises the question, where did Hollinshire get his information from? So, well, the collaborative team that composed that chronicle were, they went back to previous. chronicles. They knew their medieval history very well. So they consulted the whole sweep of chronicles from Latin monastic chronicles through the vernacular urban chronicles of the 15th century up to the present day. But they also consulted other kinds of primary sources as well. So they looked at things like bishops registers, they looked at parliamentary records, they looked at administrative records as well. But you as a contemporary scholar, how scholarly, how accurate would you think that they were at the time? To be honest,

I think that they are following a recognisable method in what they do. They are sifting through a range of primary sources. One of the things that Holland said says in his introduction is that he's not attempting to frame all events according to what he describes as his liking. So he says that sometimes he will include, as it were, dubious material because he wants the reader to have a sense that there is a variety of perspectives. And I think he's assuming that the audience is educated and he's sometimes leaving it up to them to make decisions as to the accuracy or the veracity of what he's describing.

Emma Smith, the audience was educated, a great number of them were anyway. We told that that century there were more literate people than in any previous century and more books and so on. But was it about the plays that fascinated Shakespeare's audiences? Because he wrote so many. Obviously he knew a market when he hit it. Oh, well, I think there are two things that fascinate Shakespeare's audiences. The first might seem a little bit of a number.

under understating of what's great about the plays, I think people were interested in fighting and in warfare and in getting lots of people on the stage and in showing this kind of masculine action, masculine, virtue, masculine valour. Battle scenes. Battle scenes, trying to work out how to show battle scenes, how to sort of cut between different areas of the battle.

I think that is important, and I think on to that, Shakespeare grafts, two really interesting elements, increasing interest in the notion of character as a driver in history. So what makes history happen? Well, perhaps by the end of Shakespeare's sequence of plays, the role of the individual, the powerful individual, in making his own history is really important. And that also Shakespeare is really interested in the human elements of government

and of agreement and disagreement, these very human scenes which together make up and illustrate historical processes. Was there a sense in which he was also filling a gap? Protestantism had arrived, the end of centuries of Catholicism, the new state was still not secure. The Spanish Amade had been sailing towards England and so on and so forth. There was a threat of Catholicism returning. Was he trying to fill in a gap?

I think in a way he was. I think the larger project of history writing in the Elizabethan period is in some sense an attempt to shore things up with a narrative which can make sense of this great disjunction between Catholicism and Protestantism at the Reformation and which can, as we heard, that the title of Hollinshead's Chronicles makes it a national project. So it's about forming the nation through describing its history. So I think that's definitely a feature. On the other hand, though, the history plays don't present an entirely comfortable or triumphant narrative. So they're not entirely comforting if in some way that's their role.

They give us a historical past and therefore perhaps a historical future, which is very fractured, where it's difficult to discern a through line or a kind of a narrative which rewards virtue or which rewards particular factions. There's no play, he doesn't write a play about Elizabeth. He doesn't talk about, in his sense, modern times. Was that a worry for him? Did he deliberately avoid it, or were history plays regarded as dangerous? History plays come to be seen as dangerous at the end of the period when Shakespeare's writing them.

So 1599 is the point when the writing of history, in drama and in other forms, becomes much more regulated. And that's the point when Shakespeare, there's the date of 1599, the last of those history play. Shakespeare moves on to other topics. So no, he doesn't write directly about Elizabeth, but many scholars feel that this preoccupation through the 1590s, through the last decade of Elizabeth reign, with these moments of transition, the moments at the end of a reign or a weak monarch or a contender or different possibilities at these moments of transition, that these are all disguised, perhaps not even acknowledged, but ways of thinking about the future.

did he change in 1599? He'd had to rummed through about 10 years or so. Why did he change then? Well, it may be that he gets to the end point of the sequence that he wants to talk about. So if he's gone from Richard the 2nd through to Richard the 3rd, if that's the movement, by 1599 he's filled in those gaps. And then there is this ban, the so-called Bishop's Ban, which makes the writing of English history a much more contentious sphere. And that may seem a politic moment to move to Julius Caesar, to some of the same questions in a different context. But it's a big move, just to nail it.

So he quit as soon as this band came in. He decided safer to write about Roman history. We could deduce that from the fact that that's what he does. Gordon McMullen, was he having, just to develop what I was being saying, was it, did he have to avoid certain issues in the play with something's awkward? before we talk about things right or wrong, were there many glaring omissions? Well, he shapes the history that he's dealing with.

He puts it into the order that works for a play, not for a chronicle. He compresses, he elongates, and he inserts scenes when he needs to emphasize certain points. I mean, when it came to the question of rebellion that he could hardly avoid in any of these plays, there was no... It would have been very uncomfortable

if he had made rebellion look like a good idea, the only occasion in which that becomes possible. is when he's talking about Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry the 7th or Richmond, in overthrowing Richard the 3rd. So that is legit. But earlier... Because that's her. Because it's her, yeah, because it leads directly to her. But one of the things he has to struggle with all the way through is how to portray a moment of overthrow of a monarch without looking like he's wholly in favour of that kind of activity.

But I think he's also dealing with censorship. He always had to have his work put before the Master of the Rivals. And we can see from if the manuscript hand D writing in Sir Thomas More is Shakespeare, then we know that that particular manuscript had actually been read by the Master of the Rivals and were scribbled on. So the things that they were told they couldn't do. To push it further, you talk about avoiding rebellions. there were rumblings right through that century.

Did this actually lead him to say, I'd better stick with kings and queens and aristocrats? Well, no, because the play in which he moves very clearly away from simply looking at the aristocrats is the second part of Henry the 6th, in which we see the Jack Cade Rebellion. That's only one. That is the only one where you see that particular kind of rebellion. But if you think about the Henry IV plays,

in which a great deal of the action takes place quite a long way from the aristocratic world in the tavern at East Cheap and in the sort of underlife of the military forces, then you are seeing a broader realm of social world than you do by simply looking at the aristocrats. Yes, I agree with you, but the mass of it is kings, queens, aristocrats,

and it set the template for the way people think about history for a long time after. Yes, there's no question about that. I mean, it seems to me that our continued British working premise that the monarchy is perfectly reasonable thing, so forth, that is something that emerges from Shakespeare's way of addressing the passing of time. No question about that. Can you sense in these plays a major shaping notion in Shakespeare,

or was it one hit after another? It's one of those debates that has taken place over the last hundred, years or so, did he have a grand plan right from the beginning? Did he know that he was always going to write a Richard the second play, even when he was beginning with two Henry sixth? We cannot answer that. There have been critics who have really believed in this idea of a sweep, a full sweep of history with a grand plan overall. But you look at some of the plays. For example, one Henry 4, the first part of Henry 4th, it's quite possible that he wrote a a single play and then realized that he had so much material it needed to become two.

And also he had a hit on his hand. And he had a major hit on his hand, not so much with the history perhaps as with Falstaff. So it was worth perhaps rewriting. But we don't know. We only have the text that we have, and we can only conject you from that. But certainly, you know, towards the end of Richard II, you get reference to how spending time with the kind of people he shouldn't be spending time with. so you feel like you're being led towards the action of 1 Henry 4.

But you can never say with certainty that Shakespeare set out to write one vast sweeping history leading to the Tudors. But the leap into speculation. What's your opinion about why he stuck at this for eight plays? Do I think he had a grand plan? No. I think he was an improviser. I think the grand plan emerged in retrospect. and when it came to the first folio, when his friends put the first folio together,

they created a genre effectively by having an entire column of plays that are histories set out not in the order in which they are written, but the order in which the kings reigned. So that gesture alone changes our perception of the shape of the history that Shakespeare's dramatized. Thank you very much, Catherine. He wrote about the Wars of the Roses first,

and he wrote a great deal about a weak king, and the weak king served his. dramatic purpose as well because these great wars were going on. How do you happy with the way he presents them in terms of your scholarship, your history? I would actually, to some extent, I would say that I am. There are some obvious problems with the way that Shakespeare presents the Wars of the Roses. So, for example, this sense that we're talking about roughly a 30-year period, so say 1455 to about 1485 or up to 1487 if we want to include the Battle of Stoke.

And basically Shakespeare's presentation of these, makes it look as though it's bloody cataclysm for the whole period, effectively. And in fact, this actually was an emphasis that was picked up subsequently, and it held sway actually into the 19th century, very much with this idea, going back to the cycle, the sequence idea, that actually it starts in 1399. So the deposition of Richard II and the reign of Henry IV is, in many ways, the essential prelude for this disaster that rips the country apart subsequently.

And also I think that that idea that Shakespeare puts forward that it rips the whole country apart right down to family level so this idea of setting father against son and of course after the Battle of Tauton in Shakespeare Henry the Sixth witnesses the tragic outcome of this and there are certainly problems with that way of presenting it. But do you think, I think it was you who wrote in your note that it seems as if this whole entire massive period

people were fighting each other on battlefields and lengthened breadth of England all the time. You say this was just a fraction of the time and a lot of England got on with being increasingly prosperous, the rise of the gentry, increasing literacy, increasing prosperity and so on. So would you develop that? Well, exactly, I think this is the point.

So Shakespeare's portrayal, of course, it's incredibly dramatic and it's very compelling. Again, it's exciting, it's tragic. And eventually there is a resolution. Henry the Seventh rescues the country. But you're absolutely right. These are among the issues that modern historians have pointed out that in fact, the vast majority of the population wasn't touched by the wars. It depended very much on where you lived. So some parts of the country, you would probably have barely known that they were going on at all unless you were a high-ranking aristocrat or unless you were in his retinue. As you say, there's a great deal of prosperity, actually, and particularly among middling status people. But having said that, I think that on the other hand, there are areas. there are ways that Shakespeare characterises the Wars of the Roses that I think we could say do have a certain amount of accuracy. So the fundamental point about this being somewhat about dynastic rivalry,

but more to the point about competition between those high-ranking aristocrats, that that clearly is the case. And again, as you say, the weak king and the fact that Henry VI is so central to the problem. Emma, does the fact that he's writing a play, latching a certain amount of time involving a certain number of actors and characters. Is that a constraint on him? He has to get things done quickly. He has to have a clash between personalities. He can't dwell on the bigger pictures. Is there anything what I'm saying? Well, I think it certainly shapes what he does. I don't think that he, Shakespeare would see that as a constraint. Shakespeare would probably see that as a great liberation that to

be able to distill and condense these long protracted periods of history or these scores of folio pages from Hollinsheds Chronicles into exciting, dramatic, in the moment action would be a great kind of liberation. But I do think that, for example, the Henry the sixth plays have a huge cast of speaking characters. So they speak to the capabilities of the acting company probably at that time. There isn't really a star in those sequence of plays. There are lots of distributed parts. It's an ensemble. The fact that the king is so well. week plays into an acting style which doesn't have a central star actor and that's different from the plays that we get later on. So partly that move towards a more character-driven version of

history is also a move towards a more character-driven kind of performance style. You're talking about when stars took over and the way he wrote plays change. Yes, that's right. They move from ensemble pieces to star vehicles to some extent. Why did that happen? Why did it happen? Yes. Well, I think it probably responds to the calibre and the ability of an actor like Richard Burbage, whose career as the lead actor of the Chamberlain's men goes hand in hand really with Shakespeare's career

as a writer. We know Shakespeare writes particularly with an eye to the strengths of an actor. So I think that does make a real difference that Burbage starts to be in some ways the central figure around whom a play might be built. That's not the case in the Henry

the Sixth plays. And you know, there's no central actor around whom the play can be built in Henry VI, just as no central political figure around whom society can be built. Which do you think is more accurate to history, the ensemble or the star system? Well, I'm sure the ensemble is more able to show the kind of melee of history and the competing voices who are trying to make themselves heard in the historical process. But we do know that there's been a very, it's been a very compelling strand in historiography ever since, hasn't it? the kind of biographical, biopic view of history.

Gordon McMullen, in the Henry V, Sixth plays, we see the struggle among the aristocrats, the red and the white rose. Now, this is an excellent scene, I presume entirely imagined by Shakespeare. Totally made up by Shakespeare, yes. It would be a brilliant way, wouldn't it? You've got a play which is full of aristocratic names, a cast of thousands, the audience wondering what on earth's going on and to have half of them wearing a little white rose and the other half wearing a little red rose.

Very, very simple dramatic gesture, but it makes life so much easier for anybody watching their play, certainly. But he liked gardens as well, you know. I mean, the number of times in which he will create a scene in a garden in Richard II, you get a moment where there's a gardener, talking about the growing of plants and there's a sense of a sort of attempt

to make history. as organic as botany is, but it's being overheard by the queen who's just losing everything, and the strain in that moment is something that I think will come across to the audience. So I think what Shakespeare is really good at is making up those scenes that

offset what would otherwise be a procession of aristocrats overthrowing each other. Do you think there's a conflict he has or an enjoyable thing he has between imagination and chronicling? Absolutely. He does draw a lot of, lot of, as you said earlier on,

quite a large amount of these plays is Versified Chronicle. But he's a dramatist. He's the best dramatist ever. He knows how to take that stuff and then turn it into a drama. So you can see with the Henry VI plays that you're in a dramatic structure

which is cyclical, which is going to come round and is never, as Emma was saying, fully focused on a single individual. But you come to a play like Richard the second and that play is much more obviously responding to developing strands of history that say, well, it isn't just providence that determines the way history develops. It's up to certain individuals with powerful agency to make a difference. And by mapping out the sheer willpower of Bolingbrook as

he sets out to see off Richard, you see that dramatization of strength of character changing the path of history. And you find that accurate the way Bollingwood moving? I don't think accurate. the right word. I think what we're not... You tell me the right way and then ask the question again. I don't... I mean, I mean, one of the things I was saying to Catherine earlier on is the truth is, you know, I might spend quite a lot of time reading these plays about history in the 15th century, but do I actually know much about history in the 15th century in the 15th century in the answer in truth is no, because I'm a Shakespearean. I mean, I was thinking that when I, probably the first grown-up book I ever read, and I was about 14 or 13 or whatever, was I Claudius. Robert Graves is like Claudius. And I know exactly what happened in the late Republic, early Roman Empire, because I've read Robert Groves. Of course, it's absolute nonsense. Most of it

is not even faintly like what happened, but that doesn't matter to me. I know what happened. Just as Shakespeare's audiences, if they knew nothing about the history when they went in, they would come out with a very powerful sense of the shape of the past. Tushé. But there's also, as a sense, Catherine, that history is not the history that you three look at. The history is story at that time as well. It's myth, it's legend.

It doesn't have the, there's a weight that we attach to it and the importance that we attach to it. Does it or does it? Well, I would say, I think that it does, actually. And I think that the, again, the tradition that Shakespeare inherits that so if we're thinking about Hollinshead and Hall and so on, they think that it's important, they think that it's weighty. It matters not just because you're finding out about the past, but it matters because it has applicability to the present in those chronicles. Holland said

in particular is it's intended to be useful to men of affairs. The reason why there's a focus on kings is because they are relevant models not just for kings and royalty, but for men further down the social scale as well. And I think there's also there's that sense that you can, yeah, that you can learn from the past. What, if we can talk about themes, which is quite difficult, because they're all up and

down, never mind, one sort of theme is decline after Richard II, the deposition of a king who ruled by divine right, the bishop of Carlisle of great speech, this will bring devastation on the country, which it eventually does, one way and another. And that was a decline, and when, your phrase, I think,

after the Battle of Bosworth, the lights came on again, the Tudors arrived, and all was well in the world, or began to be well in the world. Was that happening? No, not at all. But I guess that's exactly a classic example

of the way in which retrospectively you make sense of these events. So you do put them into the grand scheme, even if that's not what he actually set out to do. But again, you are telling a moral story, and it's partly about tension surrounding what it means to be a good and about, monarch. What do you do when you have a tyrannical monarch? What can you do? And what happens if you do

try to get rid of them? And in this case, there's this sense that it plunges the country again into disaster effectively. And the Tudors then are positioned as the, as the saviors. So the union of Henry the 7th and Elizabeth York is what leads the country from this terrible descent, this Nadea, into the enlightenment of, well, what we would now call the early modern period. But of course, that's certainly not how, I mean, late medieval historian like me, I get very very frustrated with that sense that the 15th century is the fag end of the Middle Ages, where everything is in decline, essentially. It's very convenient that Chaucer dies in 1400, for example, because it means that everything goes downhill from there, until we're all waiting

to be rescued by the Renaissance and the Reformation, and nothing could be further from the truth. You don't agree with that at all? No, not all. I think the 15th century is wonderful. It's fascinating. And the idea that it's culturally inferior to what came before or what came after, I think is nonsense. Of course, that's replicated in what happens with Queen Elizabeth, with Shakespeare, the idea that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan playwright, when in fact he was half Elizabethan, half Jacobian, but historians have not traditionally in the past been very fond of James I.

They're immensely fond of Elizabeth I, so they want to tie the national poet to her rather than to her successor. Richard III. He's the one that a lot of people might have been waiting for. We know what a villain he was, and we know what a movement there is to restore his reputation. What do you think? Well, and redeem his reputation. It's clear that in Shakespeare's play, he is a

villain, but he's an utterly wonderful villain. Just, I mean, let's just say you were going to a casting call for Richard III. You would not want to be Richmond, even though he is coming in on a white charger. You're talking about a part, not history, aren't you? Well, I'm saying, I'm talking about how

Shakespeare constructs this history. And I think it's relevant to what you said about a tension between imagination and versifying, because I think there is a tension in Richard the third that the historical story or the moral story is quite morally teleological. It's trying to get to the point where Bosworth Field, where the Tudors will come in in glory. But the drama of the play is not really interested in that moment at all. Shakespeare takes no care to characterise or introduce Richmond

or to make him somebody we care about. Richmond being the future, Andrew of the 7th, who's very dull, but to make Richard the 3rd. Yeah, I mean he's extraordinarily dull. He comes in at the end of the play. I mean, it's a bit sort of like Fortimbras at the end of Hamla or something you think, well, you know... Somebody's got to clear up.

Somebody's got to clear up. We don't care about them. It's not really the moment that the later historiography has stab... But was he as bad as Shakespeare said he was? What about the murder of the princes? And what about that sort of stuff? Now, you can't get away with that? Or can you?

Was it not true? Did he really murder the princes? Is all that stuff that's in there? report from what happened in the cell when they murdered these little boys? What do you say to that? Well, I'll let Catherine say whether he did that the first edition of the

play says that he did and says that he did and wouldn't that be great to see, wouldn't that be fun to see? Shakespeare's plays hate children. They love to see horrible snarling stick to the princes in the town. Whining little children being killed, they're quite like that. So something does, the

princes do disappear in the play. I think it's almost impossible to know in history what happened to them exactly. Well, in the play, Tyrell comes back and Richard says, kind and says they've murdered these little boys. Am I happy in thy news? Am I happy in thy news? He's done everything you want to be doing. Did you see them?

Did thou see them dead? I did my lord. And buried gentlete. I mean, he wants his pound of flesh, doesn't he? It's absolutely clear in the play how Shakespeare wants to construct Richard. And in some ways, the whole characterization of Richard III, I think is a sort of game with the audience to see how far will we go with him. Yeah, but I'm sorry to make it way.

I'm boring myself, but do you think it really happened or do you think it didn't? I think there's an enormous amount more to Richard, King Richard, than Shakespeare gives us, and nor would I want to go to a play, which was a kind of clear documentary account of King Richard III. I don't think that would be very interesting. One of the things we have to say is that of course this all comes from Thomas Moore's account of Richard III. 15.19. Yes, and it's practically word for word

because that's how it appears in Holland's Head and also in Hall, actually. I think the best that we can do is to say that Moore doesn't invent the idea that Richard murders the princes. And there is no source that can tell us definitively whether he did or not, but the best we can do is know that fairly soon after the princess disappeared, a lot of people believed that Richard had murdered them.

And Moore is an unreliable witness, is a propagandist, is vicious and wrongly vicious, and inaccurate about Tyndall, for instance, that's just one of the things. And he was serving, he was buttering up Henry VIII to get what he wanted,

which he got from Henry the age, and therefore denigrating the plantagenes. You want to come back. I was just going to say, there are two wonderful portraits in the National Portrait Gallery of Henry the 7th and Richard the 3rd. And one of them is a shifty-looking fellow

and you think, I bet he was a bad lot. and one looks rather a handsome Renaissance prince. And the labels are not the way around that you would expect. Okay, trust the artist. Gordon, he went back to Richard II. And the three plays had followed. What impact did that play have, the Richard II?

Was it important for him to go back there? It certainly seems to have changed the way in which he set about dramatizing history. In that play, he shifts much more to, the sense that an individual can make a difference to the way history unfolds in the person of Bolingbrook. And he sets up Richard initially to be just immensely unpleasant. The way he treats John of Gaunt as unconscionable. And yet later as the play develops, draws the audience into sympathy for Richard. So he's doing in that play what he...

I mean, he was doing it already in Henry the Sixth place, but he really pushes on the business of getting the audience almost falsely engaged with the particular character only then to ease back a little, or at least what he does is he takes the idea of testimony, takes ideas of truth, and makes them not as clear for the audience as you might expect him to. And it seems to me that what he's doing

is he is allowing the audience at times to make their own mind. up about how they're going to respond to these characters. Catherine Lewis, what does Henry VIII say to you about Shakespeare's grasp on accuracy? Well, the thing about Shakespeare's depiction of Henry the Fifth is that while he popularizes the notion of Henry the Fifth as the most excellent of medieval kings and a focus for patriotic fervor and a sort of nostalgic benchmark to which subsequent monarchs should aspire, this is not something that Shakespeare invents by any means, and it actually dates all the way back to sources that were produced in Henry's own lifetime or soon after. There's an unparalleled amount of biographical

information about Henry V, dating from his own lifetime and soon after, some of which was commissioned by or dedicated to men who knew him very closely. So I would say that there's a level on which certainly that the reputation of Henry the Fifth, as it appears in Shakespeare, is very true to the reputation that Henry VIII had quickly attained following his sudden death. And no flaws. The slaughter of the prisoners in the play itself is down to the killing of the children and so on, but no flaws. Well, I suppose it depends how you interpret that episode, of course, and often it gets left out when the play is performed, which I suppose is telling. And certainly, yes, that's the one flaw that tends to be picked up on. And of course, it's led to this modern sense

that Henry VIII should be regarded as a war criminal. But other historians would argue against that and say that actually the slaughter of the prisoners in that context. There's a French rearguard attack. They're trying to stop the French prisoners joining it. It doesn't actually contravene sort of contemporary chivalric norms. It wasn't without precedent. Strikingly, the French chroniclers of whom there were many who commented on Agincourt did not criticize Henry for this action. So much of the time, our response to a single one of these plays depends on the context in which we go,

in which we see it. So if you go and see Henry V on its own, if you see the Olivier film, if you see it the Brannock film, then you may decide that Henry is the model king. But if you have seen the two parts of Henry IV, if you've heard him give that nasty little monologue at the beginning of one, Henry IV,

where he freely admits that all the time he spends with Falstaff and the thieves, in all the places he shouldn't be as Prince of Wales, he's going to redeem time when men least think he will. You realise what a Machiavellian is. You realise that he is setting himself up to become visibly flawless. And he's absorbing the language and the way of being of the full range of people in his kingdom. So did he can then use that to become the military hero? Emma, most of Paulstaff was on the most popular creatures on the stage that he invented.

Would people think he was real? A historical person? That's a really interesting question, because in some ways, Falstaff's role in the play is to be anti-history or anti-historical processes. When he's first introduced, he says, what time is it? And Prince Hal scorns him and says, why do you need to know what time it is? You never do anything. So he's set outside that, you know.

you know, the medium of history, which is time. And he also, as we know, was probably originally conceived to be a version, although rather a distorted version of a historical figure, of Sir John Oldcastle, who was a knight who was part of Henry IV's army, and who was a very pious man actually martyred as a Lollard, what would later be seen as a kind of proto-protistent. So we know that Shakespeare's, original name Old Castle is suppressed, probably because the descendants of Old Castle are not

very keen on it. So there is a historical figure, as it were, struggling to get out, has been eaten up by this great fat man. But Falstaff is really an anti-historical figure. He's the one person at the battle who can't be killed. But is there evidence that young howl, which young princelings ever since have aped and justified them to behave you by, young Hal was encouraged and indeed educated in misbehaviour by this false staff figure. I think there's certainly, I don't think the false staff figure emerges in anything from the historical material, in anything like the way that Shakespeare presents it,

but there's certainly a sense that there is a period of misrule or wild oats for the prince. Catherine has shown much exercise, by the way, Shakespeare maligns Margaret and Moujeu. Do you want to express your spleen? Yes, I'd love to. Well, I suppose the problem is that whereas we're very used to the idea that we must completely dismantle his monstrous portrayal of Richard III as the ultimate villain, there's a sense in which his equally monstrous portrayal of Margaret of Anjou has remained accepted actually until relatively recently as an accurate depiction of her. And I think this is problematic for so many reasons really. The she wolf. Exactly, the she wolf. And that sense that she is not motivated by any kind of serious political concerns.

as we now know that the real Margaret vonjou was. But it's essentially an incredibly misogynistic portrait, which is all about a woman who has stepped outside her femininity and has acted beyond her station in life. So you think he was misrepresenting her, and you now have proof that he was misrepresenting her? He was misrepresenting her, but in ways that he found in his sources. He's misrepresenting to her, according to conventional stereotypes about the

the fact that women should not be involved in politics, essentially, and we now tend to take a much more sympathetic view to what she was doing. Why would you want to misrepresent her so viciously? Well, I think because that was the established way of representing her. So if we are thinking that he wants... Who'd you're established by whom? Well, it was established initially by Yorkist propagandists who completely besmirch her name. And where would he find that?

Well, he would find that replicated in Hall in particular. Hall is very hostile. Edward Hall's chronicles. and then Holland's head as well. They are both very hostile towards Margaret. So that becomes the received opinion about her. And again, it chimes in with ideas about the fact that women shouldn't be allowed to rule, or certainly not women like Margaret.

I think that's the point. Gordon, Gordon, MacMullen, there's a sense in which these plays as much about morality as history, aren't they? And did Shakespeare have a consistent view, or is he shifting and changing shape? He's a shape changer all the time. I would say he's shape-changing. I mean, I think the plays are about power and resistance and containment,

and they're about repetition, they're about the way things come around. And I think the false staff scenes obviously raise this point. I mean, the very long critical tradition of people, male critics, all arguing over whether false staff was a coward or not, as if we care. And I think that sense that many of Howells' questionable activities are displaced neatly onto Falstaff. Do you think that the 19th century getting hold of Shakespeare and treating him very much like history has had a continued an effect that still goes on and that people look to him more than they look to history books? I think there is something in that. I think the way that Shakespeare presents the 15th century,

again, it is so memorable, it's so compelling. He also fills in the gaps of a lot of very problematic historical records, which, for example, simply can't tell us how the historical actors themselves perceived events, why they acted in the way that they did. The classic thing for the later medieval period for us, motivation is something that's very difficult to recover. So we as historians have to speculate

about, say, why Richard III did what he did. And of course, Shakespeare does it in such, you know, a sort of fantastic way that it's easy to see why people have brought into this sense that this is what really happened. Emma, the elephant in the room really has been Queen Elizabeth I've scarcely mentioned. She was there. She was airless and that discombobulated a lot of things. When James took the throne with his three children, it was solved.

Succession was solved and the writing of history plays, the history plays were dropped away completely. Almost completely, yeah. So the history play is a really prominent genre in the last decade of the 16th century. And so it's absolutely bound up with the unspeakable but irrepressible question about the succession, the succession to Elizabeth, what's going to happen? And it's really interesting, the sense that we've been discussing,

that the Tudors come and bring peace to this war-torn land, that this comes out as such a powerful narrative when the Tudors themselves are, you know, just finishing. Finally, Gordon, Colin, do you think Shakespeare shaped the way we look at history of this country? Absolutely. I think there's any question about it. I think the way in which Shakespeare's plays have been repeatedly reinterpreted

and the way in which the plays have become dangerous later. I mean, it happened almost immediately for Shakespeare because in 1601 there was a rebellion by, or an attempted rebellion by the Earl of Essex against Elizabeth. And some of his followers got the Lord Chamberlain to put Richard the second on. And that got the actors into terrible trouble when it turned out that these people were going to do a rebellion the next day. Already that play had shown itself to be dangerous

because the first printed quotas omit the key scene of the deposition. But there's a moment when it becomes genuinely dangerous in a way that Shakespeare couldn't have predicted. So that imprint has not disappeared? Absolutely not. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much Gordon-Muland, Emma Smith and Catherine Lewis. Next week in the second of these two programmes,

will in Shakespeare history will turn to the Romans. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I would like to have said more, actually picking up on one of Gordon's points, about Wild Henry, because I've always found that fascinating. And there are lots of different ways of interpreting what's going on there. And I think, personally, I think that there is something plausible

about the fact that he could well have been a badly, behaved youth. We don't have any direct evidence from his reign of this, but certainly when he comes to the throne, there's a sense that he is the new man. And even though this is a trope, there's a suggestion that he will now be a model for virtue and so on. Given that he spent his youth on campaign and given that all three of his brother's fathered illegitimate children in their youth, then it would seem to me to be not entirely surprising if Henry himself perhaps was having sex before marriage, which seems to have been fairly commonplace for high-stableness. The highest young men.

The high crime of the time, is it? No, well, it certainly it's not, from their point of view. But I think the other thing to bear in mind here is that towards the end of Henry the Fourth reign, he and Prince Hal, as he's called in Shakespeare, really did have a very difficult relationship. And the other possibility is that actually these stories about him being a wild youth

actually come from slander from his political enemies. But you're talking about a relationship with his father. That's not unusual again. No, it's not. But again, I'm just, I'm saying that this might be where some of these rumours come from, because one of the planks of their arguments seems to be that he is badly behaved and that he's not actually fit to take over as king. But I think coming back to Gordon's point, what I would totally agree with is that regardless of whether he really was badly behaved or not,

it would have really suited Henry V's own self-image to be able to put that behind him, essentially. And to be seen to put him behind him. Exactly, that sense that he has the self-discipline, which is absolutely crucial to kingship, to sort of surmount these boiling passions and direct them towards the good of the nation, effectively. One of the things that's fascinating is that, I mean, an issue that we haven't discussed is guilt, and it's something that keeps coming up in Richard III, for example,

so right at the start, John of Gaunt, is remembering, knows that he was involved, he helped Richard kill his own brother, and he is uncomfortable about that. and it turns him somehow into a kind of saintly figure when he gives his septed isle speech. And the chronicles do not suggest that John of Gaunt was a saintly figure. They make it very clear that he was completely horrible.

But Richard, Shakespeare, turns him into, you know, the figure that is supposed to induce guilt in Richard that doesn't happen at the time, but starts to happen later. Henry V, Hal has at no point an expression of, O'Dare, I probably shouldn't have behaved like that when I was a lad. because he's preempted it. He said, I'm when you're doing this? Because it will make me a lot better afterwards.

And one of the things I find fascinating is the number of subsequent royals who have adopted that persona. The number, I mean, the number of princes of Wales who have had themselves painted as hell with their drinking mates. And it's a statement that they're going to be a great king down the line.

It's not a statement of their dissolute youth. It's using the model of Shakespeare to say, look, don't worry about it. Whatever it is, I'm going to be a great king. Do you remember those... American news reports after 9-11 saying that this is the moment when Bush became Henry V, set aside being Prince Hal.

So it's a very powerful trope, isn't it, for a kind of new beginning. But the way Shakespeare's done it, I think he's really curious. I mean, my sense, when you said he's got a hit on his hand after Henry IV, Part 1, it seems to me most likely that the play he was, you know, leaving in the bag as a sequel, would have been the Prince's Reformation,

the death of Henry IV, and Agincourt, because really there isn't enough material in those to make two plays. He spins it out to another two, but one consequence of that is you don't get the bad Henry and the good one in the same play. The Reformation sort of happens in between the two plays. When we meet him again, he's already gravely listening to this long, long speech

about the Selic law. And so much depends upon the order in which we see the plays if we're seeing them in the theatre. So I found it enormously helpful seeing Ivo Vanhova's Marvelous Kings of War sequence where he didn't do the usual thing of, okay, we're doing the first teutrilege, so we'll squish the three Henry the sixth into two parts

and then we'll have Richard the third at the end. He started his tertrology with Henry V and finished it with Richard the 3rd, which meant that you began with Richard the 3rd, England at the height of its achievement and then it was all the decline from Henry VIII so you didn't get the buildup to the character of Howell you missed all that but what you saw was the extent to which

Henry the 6th plays marked this appalling decline down to the horror that's Richard the 3rd and the casting choices that he made brought you right back to the Henry VIII at the start and again just to offset the the tradition the British tradition of doing the plays as if they were planned to be one

grand sweep in a particular order, the box set, exactly. I think that worked really well. Henry VIII really acknowledges that, doesn't it? The epilogue says, you know, his son lost all this, which oft our stage hath shown. So it's already saying there is an chronology about your

experience in the theatre. You've already seen what happens next. So you know it doesn't last. It's not a moment of victory that's allowed to last, even as people are leaving the theatre, it dissolves, doesn't it? Straight away. You have a suspicion that that, that particular epilogue wouldn't have been the major feature in some of the occasions that Henry

5th has been performed in a wartime context or whatever way you're not going to want to admit that it fades away. There was a performance of, there was a showing of Olivier's Henry V in Windsor Castle in the Waterloo Chamber, you know, a space that was designed to celebrate the victory at Waterloo and the film was put on shortly after D-Day in that context. And all the portraits apparently had been put in store in a slight mine in Wales somewhere, but everybody in that room would have known that the walls celebrated the crowned heads of Europe seeing off the threat of Napoleon. And again, what the play comes to mean at those moments is so far from what Shakespeare could have imagined,

but it continues to be generative of ways in which those in power want to be seen to be able to sustain themselves. So it is more than almost more than a legacy of scholarship. It's a legacy of morality. It's a legacy of national character. Yeah, I think so. It's a legacy of constructions of national identity. I mean, that's very visible in Henry V. When he carefully arranges Scots and Irish, Welsh, English characters in interaction,

the tensions of that attempt to make the nation. various nations look unified, is part of what makes that play, you know, powerful, it seems to me. Something else I'd just say, thinking about the effect that Shakespeare's had on history is that, of course, I can't help thinking that the fact that he does the 15th century in such detail is one of the reasons why it continues to be so popular

and disproportionately so in respect to other aspects of medieval English history. And the obvious example I was thinking of is poor old Henry III, who reigned for 56 years, but I wonder how many of us really know anything about his character or what he did or what his significance was. And I include myself in that because I'm aware. No, the Henry started at four. Well, exactly.

And I'm well aware that I'm woefully ignorant. And it's just really striking that the 13th century hasn't received anything like the attention that the 15th century has. And certainly in the popular imagination, again, I would say that people probably are very little aware. They've heard of King John, who of course was Henry's father. But I think that's one of the effects that Shakespeare has had. feel that we really know the 15th century and people just keep writing and rewriting it. There are so many biographies of the Kings, books about the Wars of the Roses, not to mention then the novels and other sort of more creative versions of it.

The producer wants to come in and leave us all. We're done now. Yeah. To your coffee. Thank you. Tea, please. I'll have tea as well, actually. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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