![]() Shakespeare’s English history plays absorb this reading of past events from Holinshed, their principal source, but they also subject its assumption to skeptical questioning. (See “ The line of Edward III.” ) In the narrative constructed by these chroniclers, the murderous confusions of fifteenth-century history served only to demonstrate the providential scheme by which God revenged the murder of a rightful king (Richard II ) and purged the nation of its crimes before placing the Tudors on the throne and restoring the English people to their status as God’s elect. Reaching its bloody climax in the reign of the Yorkist Richard III, the national ordeal was at last brought to an end by Richarďs overthrow at the hands of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, grandfather of Elizabeth I. They described a long-drawn-out dynastic crisis that followed the deposition and murder of Richard II-a crisis that, after the brief heroic respite achieved by the Lancastrian Henry V, erupted in civil war (the Wars of the Roses ) under his son, Henry VI. This century-long period of turmoil had already received considerable attention from such chroniclers as Edward Halle and Raphael Holinshed, the creators of what is sometimes called the “Tudor myth” of English history. ![]() The Life of Henry V is a “history play” in more senses than one: it is a play about how history is made, and also how it is remade it is a representation of past events while being at the same time an examination of the uses of the past and it is a play whose own reconstruction of history consciously intervened in the historical process.Īs the text itself reminds us, Henry V was the latest of a series of English history plays in which Shakespeare had dramatized the fifteenth-century conflict between the royal families of York and Lancaster. “It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”
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