Shakespeare’s plays on the reigns of English monarchs from King John to Henry V, together with his later groups of plays on ancient Rome, constitute what most of us think of as his history plays. A number of his other mature works have some connection with history and, though they do not form a group either in date of composition or in relation to one another, they illustrate Shakespeare’s developing concern with the nature of history and the issues it raises. I want to focus on two matters which came, I believe, to trouble him deeply, and provoked his most serious investigations of the processes by which we understand the past. The first of these matters may be briefly defined as the relation between history and myth. In the English history plays Shakespeare recreated Richard III cheerfully as the Yorkist monster we all love to hate, who prepared the way for the Tudor succession idealised in Queen Elizabeth. Also in the 1590s he established Henry V as a great, heroic English king whose glorious victories over the French might foreshadow later glorious victories over a Spanish enemy. It has become commonplace to stress the qualifications, even contradictions, in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry, whose ‘largess universal, like the sun’ (Chorus, Act 4) and religious scruples (4.1) hardly square with his threats to destroy Harfleur (3.4) and orders to kill the French prisoners (4.6); yet after all such anxieties are taken into account, including Falstaff’s send-up of heroic posturing and honour, the Henriad sequence remains to a significant degree a celebration of English history with a strong propagandist element appropriate to a decade when the country seemed to be under threat from the dominant power in Europe, Spain.

Genre

In 1623 when, seven years after Shakespeare's death, John Heminges and Henry Condell, the editors of First Folio (the first collected edition of Shakespeare's works), grouped roughly a third of Shakespeare's plays under the heading of 'histories', they confirmed a dramatic genre that Shakespeare himself seems to have endorsed: Polonius announced that 'the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history . . .' had arrived in Elsinore (Ham., 2.2.416). But Heminges and Condell also unloosed a host of critical problems - they seem to have recognised difficulties themselves. Troilus and Cressida, which they placed after Henry VIII, they entitled The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida. Yet this play is not included in the Folio's 'catalogue' or index of the tragedies, which are printed after the histories. In fact many have regarded Troilus as a 'history', which is how it had been categorised by the publisher of its Quarto version (1609) where it was entitled The Famous History of Troilus and Cresseid [sic]. In recent years critics have located Troilus among the 'problem plays' (plays that defy easy generic classification and which may be best approached by way of the ethical problems they explore).

Most biographies begin, as Dickens in David Copperfield famously said they should, at the beginning: that is, with the birth of their subject. Elizabeth Gaskell, however, took a different view, dedicating the first two chapters of her Life of Charlotte Brontë not to Charlotte, nor even to her ancestry, but to the place where she grew up and spent most of her adult life. In this way, Gaskell set Haworth at the forefront of the Brontë story, deliberately linking place and subject in an exceptionally emphatic way. he explained why she did so quite candidly.

The reason why it was so necessary to do this is not immediately apparent to the modern reader, though it was obvious to Gaskell’s contemporaries. Jane Eyre had taken the literary world by storm when it appeared in 1847, but it was regarded in the terminology of the day as ‘a naughty book’.

'Once upon a time four gifted children built themselves a dream world, magnificently wrought and marvellously beautiful.' So begins the first serious study of the Brontë s' juvenile writings, Fannie Ratchford's The Brontë s' Web of Childhood, published in 1941. Ratchford's description of the juvenilia as 'a dream world' where the children 'found escape from the discipline and restraints of ordinary life' seems apt when one reads the journal Charlotte kept as a young teacher at Roe Head School. After one particularly tedious day in October 1836, she complained:

The dream Charlotte refers to is, of course, the romantic saga of love, war, passion, and revenge that she and her siblings had been writing together for nearly a decade.

Shirley was written in circumstances very different from any of the Brontës' previous works. It was not merely that its writing was interrupted by the deaths of Branwell, of Emily, of Anne; that this was the first of the extraordinary productions of that extraordinary family to be completed outside of that intimate circle of excited, hopeful discussion of which Charlotte Brontë's first biographer was to tell. Less striking, in retrospect, but perhaps no less significant is the fact that Shirley was the first of the Brontë novels to be written by a famous author. Charlotte's long apprenticeship in literature had culminated in success. One, at least, of those youthful 'scribblemaniacs' now had an established place amongst the writers of the day.

‘There has been no higher point in the whole history of English fiction’ writes Raymond Williams of the year in which Shirley was conceived. Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Kingsley’s Yeast were all appearing in parts; Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton was to be published before Shirley was complete.And it was against her famous contemporaries that its author measured herself. ‘Mr Thackeray, Mr Dickens, Mrs Marsh, & c., doubtless enjoyed facilities for observation such as I have not’, Charlotte Brontë had written to her publisher just before the appearance of Jane Eyre.‘Certainly they possess a knowledge of the world, whether intuitive or acquired, such as I can lay no claim to – and this gives their writings an importance and a variety greatly beyond what I can offer the public.’

Thomas Heywood, defending the theatre in his Apology for Actors (c.1612), writes that through drama everyone knows the history of England from William the Conqueror, nay even from Brutus. If not that full range, Shakespeare's history plays did nevertheless offer spectators and readers an opportunity to learn a significant part of English history. These theatre participants might expand and reinforce that knowledge through pageants and masques that constituted another major form of drama; these entertainments form the focus of this essay.

The Induction of 2 Henry IV can serve to open this subject. According to the stage directions, Rumour enters, ‘painted full of tongues’ and speaks: ‘Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?’ (1–2). This Rumour spreads continual slanders, a ‘pipe / Blown by surmises, Jealousy’s conjectures’ (15–16). But, Rumour asks, ‘what need I thus /My well-known body to anatomise?’ (20–1).

Jane Eyre is today a classic, canonical text, beloved of generations of readers. A passionate, headstrong narrative of a young woman confronting the world with obstinate integrity, it treats of marginality and loneliness, of the desire for adventure, intimacy and independence. Its heroine confronts myriad dangers and oppressions but survives to tell a tale of triumph and even revenge. Advertising itself as an autobiography – the title-page of the first edition reads Jane Eyre: An Autobiography edited by Currer Bell – it draws generically also on romance and quest narrative, fairy tale, the gothic novel, and the Bildungsroman. Densely allusive, it reflects its author's familiarity with the Bible, Milton and Shakespeare, and with works as diverse as Pilgrim's Progress and The Arabian Nights.Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is by comparison an obscure text. Though recently it has claimed the interest of feminist scholars for its focus on marital abuse and child custody, it has, in the one-hundred-and-fifty years since its publication, been neither well known nor well loved. Its dual narrative – the heroine's private diary framed by letters from her second husband to his brother-in-law – is often considered clumsy; its subject – a bad marriage and its consequences – depressing or uncongenial. The novel's frame of reference is religious rather than psychological; the Bible its most frequently quoted text. The heroine of The Tenant endures the degrading ordeal of her first marriage with piety and stoicism, trying to remain focused on doing her duty as she worries about her abusive husband's tainting and corruptive influence, even on herself. Only when she judges that maternal supersedes wifely duty does she flee him, abducting her child and hiding out in a distant county. The temperature of these texts, metaphorically speaking, is very different.

If, as many scholars believe, an early version of 2 Henry VI was the first history play Shakespeare wrote, then he began his dramatised version of the Tudor chronicles with Margaret's arrival at the English court. Although modern readers are unlikely to think of Margaret when recalling the memorable characters Shakespeare created, she is actually the subject of the earliest surviving reference to a Shakespearean character and to Shakespeare's work as a playwright. In 1592 Robert Greene complained about 'an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his “tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide”, supposes that he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country'. Even without the epithet 'Shake-scene', the identity of the upstart crow was probably clear to Greene's original readers, because 'his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide' echoes the charge 'O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide' (1.4.137) that York had levelled against Margaret in Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI. Greene's allusion, along with other evidence, has led James Forse to conclude that Shakespeare himself may have performed Margaret's part, but whether he did or not, it is clear that Margaret was a prominent and memorable character for Shakespeare's original audiences. She is the only character who appears in all four plays of the first 'tetralogy', and she plays a major role in shaping the course of the historical action in both Part 2 and Part 3 of Henry VI.

King John is a provocatively problematic play. In terms of its provenance alone, there have been keenly debated exchanges about its genealogical relationship to its main source, with editors of scholarly editions arguing on either side for Shakespeare's play as a source for the anonymous The Troublesome Reign of John King of England and for the latter as a source for the former. While the majority prefer to see Troublesome Reign as the source, and the most recent accounts of this have been quite dismissive of the opposite camp, the debate in its entirety has led to useful close readings of the anonymous play. Discussion concerning other known sources (Holinshed, Foxe, Hall) and an analogue, Radulph of Coggeshall's English Chronicle (written in Latin), has been somewhat less heated, and there are far fewer arguments for a direct use of its other dramatic analogue, Bale's King Johan. But there are resonances, if not replications, between Bale's and Shakespeare's plays that, if properly investigated, might reinforce some of the more recent scholarly excursions on Shakespeare's behalf, and there is a strong temptation to imagine, if not actually believe, that Shakespeare 'worked with the old play in his head, if not in his hand'.

With Nathan Drake, ‘we are well aware, that, to many of our readers, the chronological discussion incident to a new arrangement, will be lamented as tedious and uninteresting; the more so, as nothing absolutely certain can be expected as the result’.

This chapter places the Brontë narratives in three intersecting contexts: the changing social circumstances in which their work appeared, the changing literary context in which works of narrative were created and understood by Victorian people, and certain ideological factors which unite these two. The key term is 'character', and here we need to distinguish two quite separate meanings. There is, first, the modern sense of character as the literary depiction of psychologically complex personalities. But there is also a Victorian sense of character (hereafter designated 'character') as a desirable moral quality. I will argue that the Brontë novels were written at a point in literary history when the modern 'psychological' understanding of character emerged as a significant criterion in the judgement of fiction, and a more open enquiry into the nature of human behaviour contested moral orthodoxies. The tussle between the two engages key issues: what is the private cost of public image? What pressure does the ideological environment exert on personal behaviour? How can writers of fiction represent the contest between them?

To be thought to be ‘of good character’ was, in most circles of the literate population of Victorian Britain, an absolute requirement of those entering employment.It was also essential for those entering respectable marriage.

By transforming the chronicles of Tudor historians into drama, Shakespeare and his contemporaries brought English history onto the English stage. History and performance converged, attracting thousands of spectators. For the Elizabethans, history meant political history, particularly stories of kings and high officials, who were seen as embodying the health of the state. As William Baldwin put it in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), 'where offices are duly ministered, it can not be chosen, but the people are good, whereof must needs follow a good common weal. For if the officers be good, the people cannot be ill. Thus the goodness or badness of any realm lieth in the goodness or badness of the rulers.'

The evaluation of rulers, however, was not the only goal of sixteenth-century historiographers. They wanted to know not only whether Henry VI had been a good or bad king, but also why. What were the causes of political success and failure, and what lessons could be drawn from English political history? In these concerns, Tudor historians resembled students of history today. Where they differed was in their interest, or lack of it, in accuracy. For example, Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1587), the chroniclers most used by Shakespeare, gathered their narratives of medieval English history not from primary documents or eyewitness accounts, but from earlier chronicles and literary stories.

In September 1841, Charlotte Brontë wrote an audacious letter soliciting funds for a European venture:

The eldest Brontë daughter proposed a living narrative of self-improvement, attainable by those who, like the hero of The Professor, direct their energies towards an ambitious goal: 'Hope smiles on Effort!' She requested cash: “the needful”, as it is characterised in the northern industrial idiom of Charlotte's first novel: 'I must live, and to live I must have what you call “the needful”; which I can only get by working' (P, 44). The Professor is a narrative of selfhelp, like Mrs Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). Pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps, the practice of frugality and business probity, taking careful initiatives in pursuit of financial independence and security, were major themes in Charlotte's life. Her managing mind initiated the idea of a school, further education in Belgium and the submission of the sisters' first novels in June 1846: a three-volume work comprising 'three distinct and unconnected tales', Charlotte's The Professor (then entitled The Master), Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey (CBL I, 461).

'Enter Time, holding an hour-glass', to usher in a new generation. Like most of his contemporaries, Shakespeare was aware of time's destructive powers. Unlike most of them, he was also sensitive to its healing qualities. Before his own farewell to the stage, he gave a speaking part to this major actor of the human drama. Richard II played with time, and discovered too late that a king can shorten lives but not add one minute to his own, nor call back yesterday to correct fatal errors. At the end of the Plantagenet sequence Henry V, who has learnt from his predecessors' mistakes, 'weighs time to the utmost grain'.

Time as a devourer had become an obsessive theme for Renaissance authors. A desperate fight against oblivion inspired the writing strategies of the poets and dramatists, who turned to historians for materials to feed their anxieties. Their forebears, like all humble Christians, had little time for this earthly life and no great doubt of their ultimate salvation. For a majority of them, life was indeed an ordeal, a passage through a vale of tears, mercifully ended by death and the reward of eternal bliss. Their main fear was of the Devil, whose traps could lure the weak flesh to damnation. If man would but see reason, Hell was too heavy a price for any pleasures the earth could afford.