Holinshed's Nation: Ideals, Memory and Practical Policy in the Chronicles (review)

Holinshed's Nation considers Rafael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577 and 1587) as a serious and intentional exercise in historiography whose agenda appears in its rhetorical strategies. This study confines itself to the portion of the Chronicles for the years 1377-1485 (those of Shakespeare's history plays) and focuses on how the Chronicles offer a 'mirror for policy' through three principle tropes — chivalry, politic monarchy, and the 'common wealth ideal'. While these tropes occur throughout the 1377-1485 narrative, the predominant ideal shifts from chivalry to commonwealth over time. After an initial chapter spent wrestling with preceding studies of the Chronicles, critical and historiographic theory, and the textual complications presented by the two editions, Igor Djordjevic divides his study into three sections. The first focuses on the reign of Richard II and Richard's failure to achieve the chivalric ideal; the second on the Hundred Years' War (principally on Henry V) and the definition of English national character through 'heroic, chivalric and honour paradigms' (p. 140) associated with English chivalry as opposed to 'French faintheartedness' (p. 144). It also introduces the ideal of the politic ruler. The third considers how, during the Wars of the Roses, 'the political discourse of the factions vying for power is dominated by the rhetorical formulae of "commonwealth" and "France"' (p. 169). During this time 'all actors on the political stage continually claim that the chivalric conduct to the governing, noble estate, and the defence (or reconquest, after 1453) of France are a public good for all the estates of the English commonwealth' (p. 169).

Djordjevic's choice of the medieval res gestae as the means for understanding the Chronicles' intentionality is neither arbitrary nor anachronistic. His analysis of Holinshed is grounded in texts contemporary with the historical period the Chronicles narrate. Indeed Djordjevic's method in each of the book's three sections is to select one or two exemplary texts of contemporary political theory and derive from them the era's political ideals. These ideals then become the foundation for his close reading of the Chronicles and the ways in which different aspects of the multivocalic texts, including the 'authors' of the 1577 and 1587 editions, develop their rhetorical strategies in relationship to politics. The first section on the reign of Richard II, for example, relies on Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (1411-12) to establish the chivalric ideal of kingship: 'If a Prince is magnanimous to his Subjects, Hoccleve says, they will not only follow him into battle risking their own lives for the cause, but will also call him a king indeed' (p. 67). Djordjevic establishes the degree to which these chivalric ideals may be found more in Richard's uncles, York and Gloucester, and others of the baronial faction, than in Richard. To assure his readers that this kind of political and rhetorical approach to Holinshed's text is justifiable, Djordjevic demonstrates how Holinshed's contemporary readers and readers in the generation immediately following him introduced similar political notions into their own works. So, for example, in the section on Richard II, he also considers the anonymous play, Woodstock, along with Shakespeare, John Hayward, and Samuel Daniel.

Probably two of the most important aspects of the Chronicles' rhetoric, according to Djordjevic, are their assimilation of multiple narrative voices and their introduction of attitudes assigned to the 'Commons'. The Chronicles' multivocality is not new: modern historians have abhorred it as much as Annabel Patterson appreciated it. Djordjevic goes a bit beyond Patterson by insisting that the multivocality contains ideological tensions and allows the introduction of potentially subversive material by either offering more conservative interpretations or by introducing so many different views that the reader is forced to interpret ideological meaning — albeit while being given clues by shifts in narrative detail. For example, in passages on warfare the Chronicles' narrators frequently condemned brutal practices but only after the text had...