Matthew Paris was a monk at St. Albans who was a chronicler and artist and cartographer who illustrated his own works. The Chronica Majora is his longest work, from which an excerpt is taken recounting the otherwise unattested meeting between king John’s envoys to Morocco and the Muslim Caliph to whom John wishes to hand over Britain. The Caliph is shocked, and unimpressed by the envoys’ description of Britain and of the king, and he refuses the offer.

This chapter turns to female characters whose roles in the plays are more marginal. It uncovers a pattern of interactions that recur in minor female roles across almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays. These efforts take the form of resistance to marriages and efforts to forestall political events, often wars, frequently pointing to flaws in the male leaders’ plans. It highlights such inconclusive interventions as moments that demand engagement and interpretation by the audience, inviting spectators to unbalance the supposed didactic and moral purpose of the plays by attaching their sympathies to the characters out of power, rather than the kings who command them. Such imaginative potential is seen particularly clearly in the marginalised figures of lower-class female characters, as well as the women whose scenes are dismissed as ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ – in truth, scenes whose interactions depict the types of events unrecorded by traditional history but which are essential to the history play as a theatrical genre. The presence of these curtailed or unrecorded incidents, and their thematic importance to the plays in which they appear, suggests that the relationship of the plays to their chronicle sources is less one of direct adaptation than of querying and contestation.

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.

Chapter 3 examines the fighting over Shakespeare that takes place during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). This period of prolonged conflict is characterized by an obsessive interest in position-takings and labelling, such as revolutionary/loyalist and Jacobin/anti-Jacobin; but, as this chapter demonstrates, these wartime binaries are protean. By deploying them we are at risk of under-interpreting the conflict. The performance of Shakespeare at the major and minor theatres in London reveals this distinctive political malleability. The chapter begins by considering pressure points in the conflict when Shakespeare seems to have been loudly mobilized in support of the British war effort – such as the resumption of conflict in 1803 – but concentrates for the most part on the contested political valence of Shakespeare. It examines the opposing political sympathies and theatrical interests of John Philip Kemble and Richard Brinsley Sheridan who were both connected to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as the operations of the minor theatres that position Shakespeare within a battle over the democratization of culture and politics that strongly resonates with the period’s domestic and foreign conflicts. The chapter concludes by proposing that ‘conflicting Shakespeares’ become united through the vagaries of patriotism, a powerful and uncertain concept during this period and beyond.

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.

This chapter explores the most well-known English constitutional text and the period that followed its enactment. It explores how Magna Carta was a much more mundane and feudal document than its reputation suggests. It also examines how it was by no means the sole kingly concession during this period and discusses the origins of Parliament and how this affected the common law. The chapter falls into three sections. The first section discusses the importance and effect of Magna Carta. It explores what Magna Carta said and what effect it had upon feudalism, the operation of courts, governance and upon immigration. The second section will then explore the debate concerning the role the charter played in the development of Parliament, examining what Magna Carta said and also the importance of alter developments during this period. The final section will examine the impact of the charter upon the position of women.

Given the challenges war posed for direct physical representation on the Elizabethan stage, much of Shakespeare’s mimetic success depends on his techniques of linguistic construction, especially of narrated war scenes and dialogic encounters. For narrated scenes, Shakespeare follows Marlowe in translating the “high-astounding terms” of the classical grand style to the Elizabethan stage, a choice with ideological implications explored in the chapter. Shakespeare often favors the prospective narration of imagined war scenes, turning potentially static description into the terrorizing speech acts of Henry V and other leaders. In dialogic encounters, Shakespeare develops the dynamics of verbal quarrels and of diplomacy as themselves central events of war. Plays like King John parse war as dysfunctional communication and explore what meager possibilities verbal diplomacy affords for remediation. The chapter assesses contradictions inherent in a rhetorical culture that idealizes eloquence as peacemaking and yet makes eloquence the default language for violent militarism.

This essay explores the significance of genealogy and inheritance in Shakespeare’s history plays; specifically, the idea that national and racial characteristics were passed down through the generations in the blood. The word "race" is often applied to peoples produced by the intermingling of different lineages and with different characteristics. The essay shows that such issues were important not just for royal dynasties but for the people they ruled, as is demonstrated through readings of King Henry V, King Richard II, and King John. When races are imagined in such ways the word "bastard" assumes particular importance, as the progeny of two different people(s) taking on new characteristics from a combination of those of the parents. Shakespeare demonstrates in his English history plays that nations and races are never pure, but are always intermingled, compromised, revitalized, and constantly transformed by their union with other peoples, especially the neighbours in terms of whom they define themselves.