Edward IV's Secret Familiarities and the Politics of Proximity in Elizabethan History Plays

Of all the kings that ever here did raigne,

Edward named fourth, as first in praise I name.

—Sir Philip Sidney 1

Tremulously erected where the Wars of the Roses blossomed, the court of Edward IV fascinated Elizabethans increasingly hungry for the drama of their own past. More, Hall, Holinshed, and Stow dealt in different ways with the reign. Churchyard, Chute, Daniel, Drayton, Deloney, Heywood, Shakespeare, and Sidney countered with their own distinct renderings for the page and stage. Paul Murray Kendall has outlined certain facets of the allure: “The court was like a tropical garden not altogether reclaimed from jungle: overheated, luxuriant in blooms of pageantry and the varicolored plumage of tilting knights, rustling with the endless whisperings of faction, dense with suspicions and half-hidden hatreds.” 2 In a handful of decades, writers found personalities such as Jack Cade and Jane Shore, the king-making Warwick, Margaret of Anjou, and Richard III, of course. Here were plots and complots, debates over succession and Salic law, not to mention murders, plebeian uprisings, favorites, and mistresses. For every contemporary issue, the fifteenth-century world served as a kind of prism, dispensing reflections of “us” and “them” and those who came before. In their introduction to Shakespeare’s 2 and 3 Henry VI, Robert K. Turner, Jr. and George Walton Williams suggest that more than glamorous resemblance prompted this “special fascination” with Edward IV’s reign: “The times were near enough to be influential and well remembered, yet far enough away to be safely idealized. Readily available were extensive historical and legendary accounts devoted wholly or partially to fifteenth-century personages and happenings.” 3 To put it succinctly, being “near enough” and “far enough” made the period exceedingly useful to historians, poets, and playwrights alike. Together, they could demand, as Edward Hall did in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, that their readers grasp the Tudor age in terms of fifteenth-century disjunctions:

What noble man liveth at this daie, or what gentleman of any auncient stocke or progeny is clere, whose linage hath not ben infested and plaged with this unnaturall devision [of the Wars of the Roses]. All the other discordes, sectes and faccions almoste lively florishe and continue at this present tyme, to the great displesure and preiudice of all the christian publike welth. 4

How could anyone think about the “union” of Tudor rule without recollecting the “unnaturall devision” of the immediate past, without recognizing the continuity of discords, sects and factions? 5 The aforementioned writers certainly could not, but this confluence of projects must not be taken as an indication of interpretive agreement—far from it. Edward’s fractured reign existed as a sensational aesthetic and ideological prize.

This essay aims at setting out what was at stake in the competition for control of the idea of Edward IV’s court. To do so, it returns to a reign marked by excesses in order to raise a series of exorbitant questions about the content of history plays and the relation of sixteenth-century writers to each other. Perhaps because history plays owe something to a world of “facts” their content seems more determined, more restrained, than that of comedies and tragedies. 6 Restraint, we cautiously admit, leads to principles of selection on the part of writers and literary critics; institutions, offices, and battles tend to be priviledged over those things—affections, trysts, and charms—conceived as excesses. Following this model, twentieth-century critics cite Nashe’s praise for Talbot on the stage as one of the grand illustrations of the genre’s sixteenth-century worth. Meanwhile, Edward IV’s mistress receives slight attention, even though Jane Shore’s life inspired a host of retellings by Renaissance writers who relished her excesses. The example of Talbot and Shore marks the curious, almost unconsidered boundary between source and analogue. The source represents the controlling past, the analogue, the uncanny present or forgotten past made out of the same historical materials. In most of the criticism directed toward history plays, these two categories...