History and the Nation in Richard II and Henry IV

I

The past, in the figure of the murdered King Richard, haunts the protagonists of the Henry IV plays. The relation between the Richard they remember or merely imagine and the Richard of Richard II is fraught with emotional, moral, and ideological consequences. Richard's post-mortem power turns out to be greater than that he possessed alive and figures significantly in the various constructions of the English nation of these histories. His murder is the transforming fact and detail of Henry's monarchy, and it looms over and transfigures the events of Henry's reign. All crucial events refer to it. Richard, in death, becomes the focal point of action, the site of conflict, and the means by which the present and future are made coherent. Richard himself is a curious presence, represented in the plays in which he figures in strangely ambivalent ways. Richard searches for a defining royal essence in his character, and for some of those who observe him it seems to express itself in the great moments of self-consciousness just prior to his violent death. For others, Richard remains the fixed emblem of failure, a king who never achieved sufficient command of himself or his kingdom. His tragedy is, of course, coincident with the process of his failure and commences only after the loss of his monarchy has become an established fact. In the play of Richard, the king stands in a contradictory and perplexing relationship to many of his subjects. Among those close to him are his enemies as well as his friends; those who love and those who hate him stand in dangerously equal proximity to this monarch. The array of perspectives upon the beleaguered king includes, of course, that of the audience, privileged to see a private side invisible to both his friends and his enemies.

The Elizabethan preoccupation with history was, as Phyllis Rackin describes it, a matter of urgent national interest, regarded both as a means of preserving peace and political stability and as a matter of national self-definition. The multiplicity of understandings of the nature and purpose of the study of history is reflected in the plays, where radically different conceptions of history and its relevance to national identity are subjected to intense dialectical pressures. ¹ Richard II himself is engaged in the making of history. This is a conventional and inevitable function and by-product of monarchy, and it is the way in which, for centuries, we have been schooled to understand the historical process—large affairs under the management of large men. The notion of history as justificatory political narrative confirming and legitimizing bourgeois political ideology has been explained by Jean-François Lyotard in his pursuit of a definition of the postmodern. To Lyotard, the postmodern is the very antithesis of the presumed credibility of the political imperatives that demand acquiescence and obedience to the authority by which history is heroic, male, and seamlessly woven into master narratives. Postmodernism is the rejection of that authority. ² The progressive and often contradictory historical revelations of the second tetralogy indicate that Shakespeare was aware of the traps and simplifications of traditional historical narrative.

The symphonic, ordered heroics of Richard II and of even the first part of Henry IV break up in the narrative dissonance and foundering of Henry IV's second part. The self-reflexivity of Part Two, as it refers backwards to the originating tragedy of the cycle, and as it somewhat cynically deconstructs its predecessor part, has, in its almost compulsive backward-looking perspective, the effect of setting Henry V apart, of separating it from its founding history. Indeed, this play, one of Shakespeare's most popular, does seem to have a critical and theatrical existence that is exclusive of the first three history plays of the tetralogy. Graham Holderness argues that these plays help mark the beginnings of modern historiography...