Accounts of the battles of Bannockburn,by the anonymous writer of the Chronicle of Lanercost, of Henry V’s battles at Harfleur and Agincourt, by Thomas Elmham or Ps.-Elmham and by Titus Livius, and of Richard III’s death at the battle of Bosworth Field by Polydore Vergil are given here as examples of military historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.A section of a metric poem on Henry V, in elegiac couplets, is also included. The reader must decide as to whether the writers on Henry V and Richard III can be regarded as writing ‘humanist’ Latin.

Chapter four argues these processes of marginalisation represent a feminine, not solely female, mode of storytelling by demonstrating that male characters who are disempowered in explicitly feminine terms are endowed with the same historiographical powers as female characters. I first explore characters like Hotspur and Richard II, who explicitly have their legacies relegated to the histories disseminated by women, thus posthumously becoming the stuff of feminine history. This chapter argues that Falstaff and Henry IV also trace a parallel pattern of feminised disempowerment across the course of the second tetralogy. In contrast are Henry V and Henry VIII, both of whom affirm their masculinised legacies by explicitly avoiding entrusting their histories to female voices. Turning to earlier history plays, shifting gender positions of Queen Margaret and King Henry VI complicate a clear correlation between dramaturgical gender and character gender and demonstrate how certain characters continually renegotiate their relationship to masculine history. Finally, I consider the malleable and unstable position of boy characters, whose ability to shift between identification as young men and feminine boys, and the parallels their embodied presence draws to the boy players in female roles around them, renders them particularly vulnerable to feminised erasure by history.

The third chapter explores how female characters narrate history within the plays themselves, particularly when they appear to transgress the boundaries of historical possibility through curses, prophecy, or describing events they have not seen – extra-historical powers enabled by their marginalisation from political power. It proposes the concept at the heart of Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy: that marginalisation from political power gives way to other types of insight enabled by the medium of the theatre, a specifically feminine relationship to historical narrative that I call Shakespeare’s feminine historiography. Beginning with an analysis of the connection between mourning and cursing, the chapter explores the ‘genealogies of loss’ that permit female characters to articulate their own versions of dynastic history. I then turn to other ways that female characters are marginalised from the centres of historical power, and the clarity of historical vision that their outsider position grants them, rendering them simultaneously suppressed and empowered by their exclusion. Finally, this chapter considers how genre itself operates as a force for this exclusion, exploring scenes which seem to defy the tonal and generic boundaries of their plays, suggesting Shakespeare’s awareness of the limitations of the history play genre for containing certain types of female stories.

This chapter provides a survey of the most common scholarly assumptions about the nature of a history play – that it is tragic, historically accurate, relates to a broader nationalistic agenda and that exclusion of the female is fundamental to the genre – and looks at how reading plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their most prominent female characters troubles these preconceptions. It first explores how the sub-genre of romantic histories challenges the assumption that a history play is concerned with historical accuracy. Reading Shakespeare’s co-authored Edward III as an example of this genre demonstrates its influence on the rest of his canon. It then re-evaluates the stereotype that foreign characters – especially foreign female characters – are always a threat against which the English national identity can be defined by contrast. It takes Margaret of Anjou as a case study in reading female characters not as women but as dramatic devices. The final section looks again to the tone of the plays to unpick how scenes of overwhelming female emotion can be seen as essential features of the history play genre and part of what contributed to the genre’s popularity in the eras when it was most frequently performed.

Chapter 6 concentrates on the Iraq War (2003–11) and a resurging critical interest in just war theory, reflected also in the design and reception of Shakespearean productions. Global public protests preceded the coalition invasion, led by the United States and Britain, of Iraq in March 2003, and the arts, including theatre, provided platforms for voicing this opposition. Chapter 6 adopts just war theory as its organizing principle: the first part considers the justification of conflict (jus ad bellum) as it is critiqued in Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003); the second part examines the violation of just conduct during conflict (jus in bello) as explored within Roy Williams’s Days of Significance (2007) and Sulayman Al Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (2007); the final part considers the end of conflict (jus post bellum), the relevance of the term ‘post-war’, and the erasure of Western wartime responsibility through an analysis of Monadhil Daood’s Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad (2012). This chapter argues that these productions, similar to contemporary Iraq War literature, are sceptical of conflict resolution and closure, but that other production and reception conditions shift their interpretative currency through structures of arts sponsorship and the political and cultural views brought to the theatre, all of which qualify the labelling of these productions as ‘anti-war’.

During the Second World War, the British state invested in theatre for the first time through two main organizations: the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and the Entertainments National Services Association (ENSA). Chapter 5 argues that official records and publications linked to CEMA and ENSA tend to stress the ‘apolitical’ currency of Shakespeare – that performances symbolize the pre-war cultural heritage that was under attack in this war against fascism – and favour plays that do not have, in subject matter, direct wartime application, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. This emphasis exists, however, in tension with the aims of individual production agents associated with CEMA and ENSA, such as Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson from the Old Vic. Shakespeare could be, for example, mobilized as explicitly anti-Nazi, socialist, or pacifist, sometimes within the same production. By examining productions that toured to regional towns and industrial cities across Britain and Europe, this chapter draws attention to the community-building impact and soft power of live theatre and breaks down the distinction between ‘apolitical’ and ‘political’ Shakespeare, suggesting that almost any production during this period of total war was a distinctly ‘political’ act.

While it is sometimes claimed that, during the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), there were no theatrical performances in the colonies owing to legislation passed by the Continental Congress, many did, in fact, still take place. Leading this provision of wartime entertainments were the British military in occupied New York, and this chapter concentrates on their performances at John Street Theatre – renamed the Theatre Royal – including their repertory of Shakespearean plays. In this context, wartime theatre was a clearly political act: the individuals involved in these productions were both theatrical and military actors. Chapter 2 examines the operations of this wartime theatre and the range of repertory performed by the British military, including their prioritization of Shakespearean plays that feature monarchical structures of government – such as Richard III and Macbeth – over classical histories such as Julius Caesar that carried a republican ethos. These productions were used by some as a form of propaganda and the chapter re-evaluates this term to show how Shakespeare and the theatre more broadly were weaponized during this conflict.

In this chapter we study representations of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III, relating his myth and history to the discovery of his body in 2012 in a Leicester car park. Focusing on the body of Richard, we address the unique cross-genre nexus between historiography, Shakespeare’s drama, and modern medical writing, to evaluate the mythical, factual, fictitious, and scientific depictions of Richard. Our aim is to find out what role interpretation and truth play in the differing genres and what kind of implications interpretation and truth have for these genres regarding the body of Richard. We draw on literary studies, disability studies, health sciences, and especially the work of Horkheimer and Adorno to argue that, in the case of Richard, myth and science are modes of representation that seek to control truth and rely on interpretation and speculation to draw conclusions about uncertain and unknowable things. The post-excavation science does not oppose myth and fiction, but perpetuates the mythology surrounding Richard, whereas Shakespeare drama has ‘truth content’ in challenging conceptions of disability. Moreover, this cross-genre nexus demonstrates the inseparability of subjectivity from interpretation and that truth never appears unmediated. Thus, making subjectivity visible in analyses is indispensible for a higher fidelity to truth.

In his history plays, Shakespeare shows how the hierarchical shame- and honor-based political system called monarchy leads to an endless cycle of violence. But he also shows us through the character of Falstaff and his famous speech about honor how debunking or satirizing honor has no effect on honor- and shame-driven personalities. In the context of current US politics, this can explain the inability of the two sides to hear one another. Henry V, often celebrated as a national hero, becomes a killing machine when he ascends to power, pursuing wars that are as futile as they are bloody. In contrast, Henry VI, the exception that proves the rule, adheres to the guilt ethic of Christianity, which renders him powerless to protect himself from the violence generated by the shame culture in which he lived. Richard III shows the power of shame and humiliation to stimulate violence on a scale that ultimately consumes him as well.

Richard III, which has been described as Shakespeare’s most Senecanesque play, inhabits a middle ground between tragedy and history play. Because it focuses on the rise and fall of its title character, it is sometimes thought of as a precursor for later tragedies like Macbeth. Such readings emphasize the flamboyant, villainous agency of the play’s central antihero. When Richard III is read as a chronicle history play, however, it can be seen as being about how its central character’s monstrosity is overtaken by providential history. This chapter argues that the resulting ambiguity of perspective is built into the play’s Senecan inheritance. The first section examines paradoxes concerning human agency and temporal cause and effect in Senecan tragedy, and it looks at plays – like Octavia, Ecerinis, and The Spanish Tragedy – that are imitative of that tradition. Then the chapter reads Richard III as a sophisticated, Senecan examination of the dialectic between self-assertion and external predetermination. This Senecan dialectic underpins aspects of Richard’s character that have been read brilliantly in recent criticism via highly theorized postmodern ideas about character and psychology: here Seneca is a silent partner in the creation of one of Shakespeare’s most presciently modern-seeming characters.

Recent scholarship has shown the increasing likelihood that Shakespeare’s very first work was collaborative, or at least that collaboration as a practice dominates his pre-1594 writing in ways that we are finally beginning to understand, something many chronologies of Shakespeare have failed to acknowledge satisfactorily. While the matter of firm dates for Shakespeare’s early work remains elusive, its collaborative nature must change both our conception of Shakespeare’s working practices in his early career as well as our sense of how collaborative writing may be better understood as part of his development as a literary and dramaturgical craftsman. This essay charts the various arguments for collaboration, canon, and chronology in Shakespeare’s early career, and proposes some ways of understanding how they map onto possible company affiliations in Shakespeare’s beginnings as a dramatist.

Chapter 8’s aim is to interrogate the relationship between the court spaces depicted onstage in Shakespeare’s plays and the mimetic undertones that those represented spaces call forth for audiences. Clifford’s chapter explores Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True. Whitehall’s 'old name' lingers in the play as a reminder of its previous owner’s disgrace and its current owner’s power. Like Jacobean Whitehall itself, the palace’s narrative history is embedded in its architectural presence. Taking York Place/Whitehall as its centerpiece, this chapter considers court spaces in All is True in relation to the play’s narrative structure, arguing that the play’s engagement with Tudor history is partially defined by the royal places it represents or describes onstage. This chapter unpacks the spatial points of reference available to an imagined court audience for the play. Clifford argues that the palatial commonplaces upon which it relies might have been more meaningful to a court audience than that of the public theatre, thus positioning it as a play imagined for a royal performance.