“To Set a Form upon that Indigest”: Shakespeare’s Fictions of History

COMPARATIVE drama 1 Volume 17 Spring 1983 Number 1 “To Set a Form upon that Indigest”: Shakespeare’s Fictions of History David Scott Kastan “History play” is an odd term, virtually an oxymoron, for a radical tension exists between the two words. “History” pro­ claims a commitment to fact, to events as they happened. Thus, Thomas Cooper defines historia in his Thesaurus (1565) as “the declaration of true things in order sette foorth.” “Play” on the other hand, declares a commitment to fiction, to an arti­ ficial verbal structure whose “subject,” as Chapman writes, “is not truth, but things like truth.’T Enemies of the theater, however, demanded from the his­ tory play payment for a debt perhaps never owed. Audiences that “know the histories before they see them acted,” it was claimed, “are euer ashamed, when they haue heard what lyes the Players insert amongst them, and how greatly they depraue them. If they be too long for a Play, they make them curtals; if too short, they enlarge them with many Fables, and whither too long or too short, they corrupt them with a Foole and his Bables.”2 Certainly Shakespeare’s histories have not made many DAVID SCOTT KASTAN, Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the author of Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time. 1 2 Comparative Drama “ashamed.” Indeed Marlborough, as Coleridge relates, “was not ashamed to confess that his principal acquaintance with English history was derived from them.”3 Yet, in spite of Marl­ borough’s confession, it is not for their factual accuracy that we admire them. Clearly the past is not in any exacting way recollected and rehearsed. Events are selected, sometimes in­ vented, and shaped so that what Sidney calls the “bare Was” of history is dressed with dramatic power and purpose. Not only Falstaff and his Eastcheap companions in the Henry IV plays but also emblematic personages like the “Son that hath killed his Father” and the “Father that hath killed his Son” argue that the histories cannot be understood as dramatic versions of past activity; and examples of historical characters engaged in actions that violate historical fact and chronology themselves testify tellingly that Shakespeare has not fallen into what Oscar Wilde called “careless habits of accuracy.” Shakespeare’s histories cannot, then, be valued primarily as representations of the medieval history on which they are based. They are not living chronicles, or “quike bookis,” as Corpus Christi plays were termed. Nevertheless, history is an issue in them in a way it is not in other plays whose subject matter is no less historical. In the histories, the pressure of historical evidence is heavy. Shakespeare, for example, cannot have Henry V defeated at Agincourt, though he can—and does—repudiate his sources and have Cordelia defeated on her return to Britain. The difference rests, according to Coleridge, in “the relation of the history to the plot”: In the purely historical plays, the history informs the plot; in the mixt it directs it; in the rest, as Macbeth, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Lear, it subserves it.4 In King Lear, the subject matter may be historical, but in no significant sense is the subject. The plot is, as Coleridge says, subserved by history: what informs it is the moral and emotional logic of character. In Henry V, both the subject matter and subject are historical, and what informs the plot is Shakespeare’s understanding of the deepest logic of history itself.5 This logic, however, is more complex than that suggested by the comforting patterns of coherence and correspondence that providentialists discovered in English history. The history plays do not allow us a vantage point from which such a design could become clear. Milton’s Michael and Adam “ascend/ In David Scott Kastan 3 the Visions of God” (Paradise Lost XI.375-76), and pattern and purpose do emerge from the apparent chaos of human history when viewed from the “Hill Of Paradise.” In the his­ tories, however, character and audience both come to realize their more limited vantage point. We “play the fool with time,” says Prince Hal, “and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us” (2...