Renaissance Studies Vol. 4 No. 4

Forms of time: some Elizabethan two-part history plays

PAUL DEAN

The student of the Renaissance English history play must still regard Irving Ribner’s The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, revised 1965) as the standard work on his subject, although that book is now in urgent need of replacement. One of Ribner’s most dubious assumptions - which has hardened into an orthodoxy - is that only chronicle sources had any serious influence on Shakespeare’s career as a history-playwright. This enables him to discount the so-called ‘romance’ or ‘pseudo’ history plays, which involve historical personages in a largely or wholly fictitious, broadly comic, action. Ribner judges these to be artistically inferior and of little literary-historical importance. I believe that, on the contrary, they were demonstrably important to Shakespeare, whose history plays may be interpreted as an attempt to explore, through juxtaposition, the boundaries between chronicle and romance as modes of historical percep- tion. This essay builds upon previous work in which I have examined that juxtaposition as it appears in the Henry VI trilogy, Henry V and Henry VIII. My present concern is to examine the interrelationship between the two modes more broadly, with reference first to some non-dramatic texts, and then to three examples of the two-part play - Munday and Chettle’s Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, Heywood’s 1 and 2 Edward IV , and Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV . Composition in two parts was, I believe, the most interesting technical solution to the problem of how to bring chronicle and romance together.

I

The relationship between the chronicle and romance modes is con- veniently focused in The Faerie Queene, Book 11, cantos ix and x, which

’ Ribner says, for example, that such plays ‘must not be confused with the true history play’ since they deal with ‘romantic themes which have no relation to the serious purposes of history’ (p. 25) - the loaded dice are obvious. Another authority, E. M . W. Tillyard, takes the same line, writing off a whole group of texts, including Peel’s Edward I and Jack Straw, as plays in which ‘there is hardly any thought about history at all’ (Shakespeare’s History Plays, Cambridge, 1944, p. 11 1). It is only quite recently that some critics have been prepared to take the plays on their own terms.

See my ‘Chronicle and romance modes in H e m y V ’ , Shakes Q 32 (1981), 18-27, ’Shakespeare’s Henry V I trilogy and Elizabethan ‘romance’ histories: the origins of a genre’, Shakes Q, 35 (1982), 34-48, and ‘Dramatic mode and historical vision in Henry VI I I ’ , Shakes Q, 37 (1986), 175-89.

0 1990 The Society for Renazssance Studies, Oxford University Press

Forms of time 41 1

are set in the chamber of Memory in the House of Alma.3 Here Prince Arthur and Guyon study two books, Briton Moniments and Antiquitie of Faery Lond respectively. Summaries of these works are given in canto x. Briton Moniments, drawing largely on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holins- hed, Hardying and Stow, depicts a pattern of repeated civil war leading to temporary national unification under a strong leader who in turn suc- cumbs to opposition. It is made clear from the start that the royal line being followed culminates in the universal peace of the reign of Elizabeth I (see x.iv). Antiquitie of Faery Lond, which has no single identifiable source, recounts the creation of the first man, Elf, by Prometheus, and traces the growth of the elfin race into a mighty succession of monarchs culminating once more in Elizabeth I, under the dual identities of Tana- quill and Gloriana (x.lxxvi). Bnton Moniments follows the typical pattern of chronicle, Antiquitie the typical pattern of romance, yet both Arthur and Guyon read ‘their countryes auncestry to understond’ (ix.lx).

The presence of these two different versions of the same events must be seen in the context of the theoretical position advanced in Spenser’s prefatory letter to Raleigh. Offering his poem as an allegory in which moral teaching is ‘coloured with an historical1 fiction’, he distinguishes between the historiographer (his word) who ‘discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions’, and the historical poet, who ‘thrusteth into the middest, even where it most con- cerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepast, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all’. Parallels have often been noted between this argument and that of Sidney in the Apology f o r

There we find a rejection of the claims of moral philosophers and historians to be superior to poets as teachers of virtue. The former, Sidney contends, can enunciate only abstract precepts, the latter can only enume- rate specific examples, whereas the poet, in a uniquely delightful fusion, can unite particularly of circumstance with universality of application (pp. 104-7), as Spenser claims to do. Referring to the well-known passage in the Poetics (1451b) in which Aristotle declares that the universality of poetry makes it ‘more philosophical’ than history, Sidney adds that the historian is constrained by the ‘bare was’, the simple occurrence which he can either relate without comment or else with imaginative embroidery, and is ‘captived to the truth of a foolish world’ (pp. lloff), the world of externals which Sidney has earlier described as ‘brazen’, in contrast to the ‘golden’ one which is the unique product of poetry (p. 100) - again a distinction echoed in Spenser’s letter. Spenser certainly intends to be a poet of the kind praised by Sidney, who may depart from the truth of historical fact in the interests of truth to ethical principle.

’ References are to the edition of the Faerie Queene by A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977), with u/v

‘ References are to the edition by Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965). normalized.

41 2 Paul Dean

We may feel inclined to agree with the critic who writes that ‘the Sidneian distinction between historiographer and poet stands behind Spenser’s juxtaposition of Arthur’s and Guyon’s chronicles’. Briton Moniments displaying ‘the moral ambiguities of history’ and Antiquitie of Faerie Lond the golden world which can ‘present a moral vision in a way that history’s brazen world ~ a n n o t ’ . ~ However, the reading matter of Arthur and Guyon juxtaposes not only history and poetry, but two kinds of history. Where Briton Moniments offers us the cyclical and providen- tialist patterns of chronicle, seeing history as repeating itself yet as having been guided towards fulfilment in the reign of Gloriana/Elizabeth, Anti- quitie exhibits typical features of romance, focusing on the supernatural rather than the natural world, on procreation and continuity of life rather than on destruction and death, on stability and harmony rather than on uncertainty and dynastic strife. Both are teleological, but the chronicle is saved from meaningless circularity only by the imposition of a pattern which the romance, bent on celebrating ‘the artifice of eternity’ (to borrow Yeats’s phrase) sees as pre-existing time entirely. The matter contained in Antiquitie is not ‘history’, although references to Henry VII and Henry VIII have been detected in its elvish characters: it deals not with time as a linear sequence but with time transfigured into and by another, higher kind of meaning. The accession of the Fairy Queen, at once a mortal and an immortal, transfigures the grim linearity of chronicle into visionary fulfilment.

It seems to have been only under the influence of the early Tudor humanists, with their sophisticated concepts of historiography, that any qualitative distinction was felt between chronicle and romance. Neo- classical purist disdain for the ‘lies’ of romance was, however, brief in its influence, thanks largely to the Arcadia and The Faerie Queene, and the mixed genre incubated, ironically, in those humanist foundations the grammar schools where Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare acquired the rudiments of their literary education.

The humanists based their opposition to romance on the grounds that its mixture of fact and fiction set in a timeless world was inimical to the cultivation of historical awareness. This ignores the point that such awareness may operate on many levels, and it seems more useful to ask what made romance so attractive to dramatists. The answer lies in some of the expressive conventions of the mode, admirably sketched here by Gillian Beer:

The finest romances are always much preoccupied with psychic respon- sibilities. Because romance shows us the ideal it is implicitly instructive as well as escapist. By removing the restraints of rationalism it can

’ Michael O‘Connell, Mirror and C‘ezl: T h e Historzcal Dimemion of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen?’

‘ See R. P. Adams, ‘Bold bawdry and open manslaughter: the English New Humanist attack on (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), 81.

medieval romance’, Hunt Libr Q, 23 (1959:60), 33-48.

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reach straight to those levels of our experience which are also recreated in myth and fairy-tale. By simplifying character the romance removes the idiosyncracies which set other people apart from us; this allows us to act .out through stylized figures the radical impulses of human ex- perience. The rhythms of the interwoven stories in the typical romance construction correspond to the way we interpret our own experience as multiple, endlessly interpenetrating stories, rather than simply as a procession of banal happenings. ’

Some features of Renaissance history plays are instantly recognizable from this description: for instance, the stress placed on preoccupation with ‘psychic responsibilities’, particularly those of the monarch, or the structural principle of ‘interwoven stories’. These were part of the con- tribution made by medieval romance to popular Renaissance literary genres in general: the representation of history may be seen as a dialec- tical interplay between differing modes of thought, rather than as a linear process of evolution.

By way of illustration we can consider briefly a concept which is as essential to the historian as to the creative artist, namely causality. Romance and realism perceive the logic of events quite differently. Romance is content with symbolic types of explanation, resting on meta- phoric identification of elements which, in the narrative, remain disparate; realism, which is separated from romance by a process of displacement, requires a rational, articulated sequence of steps connect- ing A to B. The intellectual elaboration of such steps, with its attendant awareness of historical change, is distinctively a product of Renaissance humanism and it has been shown that training in the principles of humanist debate, including the construction of causal chains of argu- ment, was a major influence on the plot construction of many early Tudor plays.’ Yet the older habit of mind persisted, with the result that a single play such as Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay may combine both a realistic exploration of psychological and political motivation with explanations based on magical or other supernatural agencies. Frequently, also, we find that this conceptual cohabitation is supported by a struc- tural one bringing together a serious, potentially tragic, main plot and a light-hearted, potentially comic, subplot, the resolution of the plots depending on which mode dominates. It is not wholly a question of sources: what makes a play a chronicle or a romance history is not the presence or absence of a chronicle source so much as the way the sources are treated.’

’ Gillian Beer, The Romance (London, 1970), 9. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Pluy ofMind (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), passim. For the intellectual

transition to Renaissance historicism See Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

Even the few discussions of romance history plays to have appeared since Ribner have missed this point. For example, Anne Lancashire’s ’Look About You as a history play’, Stud Engl L , 9

414 Paul Dean

This point is well brought out when we realize that the first important play in the tradition is Lyly's Campmpe (1580-4). There is more than paradox in R. Warwick Bond's insistence that this is 'the first English historical play'.'' He based this claim on Lyly's careful treatment of his sources, but from my point of view the description has another kind of truth, for Campaspe contains motifs which we find again and again in plays which do have an historical or pseudo-historical setting: the mon- arch tested by an unsuitable emotional entanglement in which he and a commoner love the same girl, with ethical problems for all concerned; inter- relation between government of the self and of the state and, more ab- stractly, between love and war; the use of magic (vestigial only here, in Diogenes' announcement that he will fly). The only main elements miss- ing are the pastoral and the use of (paradoxically self-revelatory) disguise, and they come in with the next major example, Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ( c . 1589-92) which is indebted to Campaspe in many respects. I

We can now see how the 'psychic responsibilities', of which Gillian Beer speaks, are presented. The psychological conflicts of the protagonist in his humanistic search for self-knowledge and self-control are externalized in the triangular grouping of characters, while disguise, by placing the characters in situations where they must deny their real feelings and (sometimes) feign a sexual orientation they do not possess, leads to ex- amination of the paradoxes of identity and the part played by sex in the individual psyche. Passion emerges as double-edged, issuing in undreamt - of delight or destructive delusion. The monarch in particular, as at once an individual and a symbol, must balance the conflicting claims of private desire and public duty: the yearning to escape this burden and become free, a mere subject instead of a unique being constrained by responsibilities, finds expression in the pastoral episodes. l 2 In some later plays the pastoral element becomes that associated specifically with folklore heroes such as Robin Hood. In themselves, of course, such con- ventions as disguise, irregular passion or the use of supernatural power can be either comic or tragic: again it is the treatment that matters.

The drama above all genres could translate into particularity the safely generalized issues, political-ethical rather than historical, which occupied Spenser, and Sidney in the Arcadia, or writers of 'mirrors for princes'

(1969), 321-34, concentrates entirely on documenting the playwright's debt to Holinshed in an ob- vious attempt to make the play academically respectable, and ignores the fact that the chronicle material was not treated in a chronicle history way.

' " Lyly, Works, rd . Bond (Oxford, 1902), 11, 251. " See Charles Hieatt. 'A new source for Frtar Bacon and Friar Bungay' , Rev Engl Sf, n.s. 32

( IYSI), 180-7, who argues that, by replacing L.ylv's humanist preoccupation with self-control by an interest in the transforming power of romantic love, Grrene modulated Lyly's courtly drama into a popular form.

' ' See Anne Barton, 'The king disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the comical history', in J. G. Price (ed.), T h e Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in PerJormance (Philadelphia, Pa, 1975), 92-117, my 'Shakespeare's Henry V I trilogy', 43-6, and Joanne Altieri, 'Romance in f f e n r y V ' , Stud Engl L , 21 (1981), 223-40.

Forms of time 41 5

such as Elyot and Castiglione. Indeed, this very concentration on prin- ciples rather than practice facilitated the absorption of political ethics into the romance mode with its preference for the universal and idealistic over the particularized and realistic. When chronicle material, whose em- phases are all the other way, is also used, a fascinating mixture becomes possible, at worst a chaotic medley, at best a complex balance of modes in which Time itself, at once the subject and the medium of historical drama, is treated both in chronicle fashion, as the framework of external change, and in romance fashion, as the process of individual growth.

There are interesting cognate developments in other popular genres: for instance, Walter R. Davis has noted the appearance in the early 1590s of ‘fiction based on real or legendary history (one might better term it a reappearance, since such fiction had shared the stage with chivalric romance in the first half of the century)’,13 while Sandra Clark‘s analysis of Elizabethan topical and moralistic pamphlets shows that ‘legend, history and contemporary news are treated together, in a single work, on a single level of validity’. I 4 The history play offers us the best chance to study a similar process of cross-fertilization at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from the prose or verse epic. The exaltation of the chronicle by Tillyard and his school has virtually equated history plays with chronicle history, indeed, with the chronicle histories of Shake- speare. Yet it is salutary to remember that those ten plays represent ap- proximately one-eghth of the total number of history plays written in the period 1580 to 1620, of which fewer than half survive.

There is a further objection to exclusive concentration upon chronicle history: that it tends to foster the assumption that the proper business of a play is to embody or retail ‘ideas’ which remain external to the chosen literary form. This is an assumption of neoclassical aesthetics which does not offer the best approach to many types of Renaissance play, and cer- tainly not romance histories. And the belief that history plays embody at- tempts to ‘think about’ history is the product of another critical orthodoxy about how the history play ‘evolved’ through the accommodation of morality plays to the demands of Tudor political and religious propa- ganda. The sequence has a ritual inevitability: Skelton’s Mugnqicence, Bale’s King Johan, Udall’s Respublica, Gorbuduc, Shakespeare . . . Not only does such a hypothesis oversimplify the complex interrelationships of different kinds of play; it also tends, albeit in a laudable desire to stress the continuity between medieval and Renaissance dramaturgy, to associate the history play exclusively with moralistic tragedy at the ex- pense of more grotesque forms.’5

‘’ Walter R. Davies, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, NJ, 1969), 195. “ Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580 to 1640

(London, 1983), 99. ‘ I A . P. Rossiter’s English Dramafrom Early Times to the Elizabethans (London, 1950), esp.

pp. 122-38, remains the most intelligent statement of the ‘evolutionary’ view (Rossiter’s term). I ad-

41 6 Paul Dean

The craving for a handy pigeon-hole into which the history play can be placed is comprehensible, for its generic status baffles us, as it did many Elizabethans. l 6 Their descriptive and analytical comments are often obscure or illogical, taking refuge in analogies or assimilations with the two major recognized dramatic genres. Sidney, for instance, has no objec- tion in principle to the mixed drama: tragedy and comedy may be found together, for ‘if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful’ (p. 116), as long as the aim is edification. His censures of contemporary ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’ (p. 135) rest on their violations of classical decorum and their base neglect of the didactic function of poetry. What he would have thought about the first English history plays is a matter for conjecture, but these plays in fact meet his criteria mentioned above, just as much as The Faerie Queene does, because they too transmute the brazen world of historical fact into the golden world of poetry, where chronicle can be transfigured by romance and romance tempered by chronicle. Furthermore, their special status as poetic creations exempts them from any charges of misrepresentation, so that they can teach political lessons through a mixed drama aiming to delight while it edifies.

Concentration of interest upon chronicle history appears as early as the famous passage in Pierce Pennilesse (1592) where Nashe, in Sidneian fashion, contrasts the constraints placed upon the chronographer with the poet’s freedom to embellish, and incidentally supplies one of the first pieces of firm evidence for the existence of the history play:

Nay, what if I prove plays to be no extreme, but a rare exercise of vir- tue? First, for the subject of them: for the most part it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers’ valiant acts, that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion, and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence: than which, what can be a sharper reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours?

How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should

mire Rossiter’s work. and have karnt from i t , as much as everyone else who had studied this topic, but his confidence in the linear descent from political Morality to history play can lead him into over- simplifications - witness his saying that Bale’s KzngJohan ‘suggests a method by which any not- wildly-unsuitable “chronicle” stuff can be made into a history-play: by beginning with “what you want to prove” and pattemising history in accordance with set dogmas about all the personages named in Bale’ (p. 131) and his further comment that the representative function of the resulting abstrac- tions ‘is not altered by giving them names out of the history-book or even individual traits of character’ (p, 132). It is sobering to be reminded that Bale’s play ‘remained in manuscript . . . and as far as we can tell had not the slightest influence upon later drama’ (F. P. Wilson, The Englzsh Drama 1485-1585, Oxford, 1969, p. 38)! Tillyard, again, tends towards an evolutionary approach. I t is still offered as an established fact of scholarly knowledge by R. L. Smallwood’s ‘Shakespeare’s use of history’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studtes, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge, 1985). 146.

Allardyce Nicoll, ‘ “Tragical-comical-heroical-pastoral”: Elizabethan dramatic nomenclature’, BJohn Ryl, 63 (1960/1), 86.

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triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine that they behold him fresh bleeding! (pp. 1lZff)”

He imagines the objections of social parvenus who place promotion above patriotism and a sense of national identity:

All arts to them are vanity: and if you tell them what a glorious thing it is to have Henry the Fifth represented on the stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty, ‘Aye, but’, will they say, ‘what do we get by it?’, respecting neither the right of fame that is due to true nobility deceased, nor what hopes of eternity are to be proposed to adventurous minds, to encourage them forward . . .’ (p. 113).

Nashe defends history plays on the grounds that they preserve and transmit the memory of the great men and events which are part of the national heritage, and in so doing inspire the present generation with ideals of vir- tue and honour. Their function is ethically didactic - not surprisingly, if they are ‘for the most part borrowed out of our English Chronicles’. But we find romance-history motifs even in the Henry VIplays: and whilst the nationalism to which Nashe appeals here is one emotion tapped by history plays, it can be exploited as much by romance as by heroic tragedy: in- deed, the invocation of chivalric ideals which Nashe sees as a major func- tion of such plays places them within the romance form, whether their facts are drawn from chronicle sources or not. It should be noted that Nashe’s words give no warrant for the conclusion that he recognizes the chronicle history play as a self-contained genre; his aim is to vindicate plays in general, and he seizes upon those which, among the contem- porary examples, best suit his polemical purpose, to associate plays with the inculcation of noble behaviour and ideals.

I have suggested that the sharp divide between the ‘high’ mode of chronicle history and the ‘low’ one of romance was largely the invention of humanism and was a temporary interruption of a natural cross- fertilization between the modes which was of some antiquity and which was resumed, or rediscovered, by the popular dramatists of the 1590s. In the second part of this paper I shall examine three attempts, of very un- equal degrees of success, to unite the two modes within a single structural framework, that of the two-part play.

I ’ References are to J. B. Steane (ed.), ‘The Unfortunate Truveller‘and Other Works (London, 1972). Nashe’s remarks on history plays bear close resemblance to chapter xix, ‘Of historical poesie’, in Puttenham’s The Art ofEnglzih Poesze (1589), which holds that in such poetry we ‘behold as in a glass the lively image of our dear forefathers, their noble and virtuous manner of life’ (Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G . G. Smith, Oxford, 1904, 11, 41). For my present purposes it is interesting to note Puttenham’s categorization of historical works into ‘three sorts, wholly true, and wholly false, and a third holding part of either’ (11, 42).

418 Paul Dean

I1

The proposition that the unity of a Shakespearian play resides less in a neoclassical five-act structure than in a dynamic rhythm or ‘movement’ cutting across such mechanical divisions was first seriously advanced nearly a century ago by R. G. Moulton18 and received its classic modern statement in Emrys Jones’s observations that many single plays of Shakespeare ‘will usually be found to divide into two unequal movements (corresponding roughly to the first three acts and the last two acts) and that the division between them is such as to make it likely that in perfor- mance a major interval took place’, and that between these two parts we often find major changes of tone, characterization and even mode, since the second movements are frequently ‘less complex, lighter, or even thin- ner in texture’ than the first, which ‘sometimes allows Shakespeare to nar- row the emotional range with a view to tragic effect’.’’ The most notable examples of such plays happen to be history plays (e.g. Richard III, Richard ZI or King John), no doubt because the lack of classical pre- cedent encouraged Shakespeare to make freer experiments in the mixed tone. Midway in his career, with the two-part Henry IV , Shakespeare developed his earlier experiments on a larger scale, and the theatrical context of these plays must be briefly recalled.

In the twenty years from 1578 to 1598, eleven two-part plays were presented on the public stages in London: in the decade 1598 to 1608 the number rises to eighteen.20 The appearance in 1598/9 of Henry IV clearly alerted rival companies to the commercial possibilities of sequels, just as, according to the conclusions of Mary Thomas Crane, ‘there was a fashion of two-part Tumburlaine-like plays from around October of 1594 [follow- ing a revival of Tumburlaine] to October of 1596’.*’ The historical genre was especially connected with two-part composition, following Shake- speare’s lead: between 1597 and 1600 ten pairs of history plays were writ- ten, mostly by some combination of Chettle, Dekker, Drayton, Hathway, Munday and Wilson for production at the Rose.

These facts are conventionally explained as the reaction of a profiteer- ing group of hack writers to the productions of a genius who chanced to put to functional use what had previously been a mere publishing con- venience. 22 However, complementary although apparently independent

I n R. G. Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (Oxford, 1893), 372. ’’ Emrys Jones, The Orzgzm ofShakespeare (Oxford, 1971), 68, 81. *’ Statistics from S. Schoenbaum’s revision of Alfrrd Harbage, AnnaO ofEnglish Drama 975 t o

’ ’ Mary Thomas Crane, ‘The Shakespearean tetralogy’, Shakes 4, 36 (1985), 289. ’’ After an extensive survey of S . R . entries, Henslowe’s Diuly, title-pages and play-texts, Crane

summarizes four motives for the composition of plays in two or three parts: respect for the unity of time; a wish to capitalize on a popular play; specifically in imitation of Tamburlatne: and ‘because the playwright wanted to tell a story that was too long to be shown in one play’ (p. 295). This does not quite cover all cases. Crane does not appear to have seen J . M. R. Margeson’s paper referred to below. note 24.

1700 (London, 1964).

Forms of time 41 9

studies by G. K. Hunter and J. M. R. Margeson have established that, in a small group of plays, two-part structure does have a thematic as well as a formal significance. Hunter detects in Tamburlaine, H e n y I V , Marston’s Antonio plays and Chapman’s Byron plays an organizing principle analogous to that of the diptych, ‘in which repetition of shape and design focuses attention on what is parallel in the two parts’.23 Margeson, taking as his main example Chettle and Munday’s Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (1598), develops the theory that this technique involved ‘the shaping of the first part in a comic direc- tion, at least toward reconciliation, and of the second part in a tragic direction’, and adds that ‘in a larger context, the greenwood romance is a phase of art that complements pathetic tragedy . . . The use of the two parts seems , . . to have been a conventional mode of representing the mixed comedy and tragedy of life in an extended time ~equence.”~ Such a structure allows the dramatist the opportunity to oppose, or examine the relationship between, two visions of Time: as a process of growth and fruition shaped by a benevolent providence, or as a darkly inscrutable cycle of apparent meaninglessness. He can, moreover, integrate a linear presentation of a causal pattern with a spatial perspective asserting values which lie beyond the temporal.

The denigration of the Huntingdon plays by modern neo-humanist snobbery shows a dismal failure of critical acumen. To F. P. Wilson they were ‘not to be taken too seriously . . . . The Downfall has the informality of a pantomime, and The Death may be dismissed as an inferior t raged~.’’~ Even the plays’ Malone Society editor disdained them as ‘le drame moyen sensuel’, written ‘without running the risk of artistic distinction’. 26 Yet the structural sophistication of the authors is remarkable.

The Downfall is framed, and periodically interrupted, by a group of actors rehearsing for royal performance a play on Robin Hood. The whole action is located in early Tudor times by the presence, as author and actor, of Skelton, whose characteristic jingling rhymes are parodied with some skill and whose presence, like that of Gower in Pericles, lends a consciously historical perspective to the play. The authors are also aware of a background of popular and literary tradition within which they are working, and with which they take some liberties. The dramatization of

G. K . Hunter, ‘ H e n y I V and the Elizabethan two-part play’, Rev Engl S t , n.s. 5 (1954), reprinted in Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (Liverpool, 1978), pp. 303-18 (quotation from p. 304). For an addition to Hunter’s list see my ‘Friar Bacon and Frzar Bungay andJohn of Bordeaux: a dramatic diptych, Engl Lung N , 18 (1978), 262-6.

*‘ J. M. R. Margeson, ‘Dramatic form: the Huntingdon plays’, Stud Engl L , 14 (1974), 233-4.

’‘ J. C. Meagher, ‘Hackwriting and the Huntingdon plays’, in Elizabethan Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966), 199. All references to these plays are to Meagher’s Malone Society Reprint editions (Oxford, 1965 for 1964, 1967 for 1965), with spelling and punctuation modernized.

F. P. Wilson, Shakespearian and Other Studies, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1969), 49.

420 Paul Dean

the events of John’s usurpation during Richard the Lionheart’s absence at the crusades occupies most of the play, counterpoised with the formation of an alternative, uncorrupt ‘court’ in the Forest presided over by Hun- tingdon/Robin Hood. A spectator or reader who comes to the play with conventional expectations will be taken aback - as is admitted in the play itself, about three-quarters of the way through, when the actors step out of their parts to argue about Skelton’s treatment of his material. Sir John Eltham laments the absence of

jests of Robin Hood, No merry morrises of Friar Tuck, No pleasant skipping up and down the wood, No hunting songs, no courting of the buck

(Downfall, 11. 2210-13)

Skelton, rebutting these charges, argues that other plays have sufficiently depicted such ‘mirthful’ matter’, whereas

Our play expresses noble Robert’s wrong, His mild forgetting treacherous injury: The Abbot’s malice, rakd in cinders long, Breaks out at last with Robin’s Tragedy.

(Downfall, 11. 2226-9)

Skelton distinguishes his projected de casibus treatment of the Robin Hood story, embodied in a ‘tale tragical, by whose treachery, and base in- jury, / Robin the good, called Robin Hood, died in Shenvood (11. 2244-6), from that found, for instance, in May-game plays or the ballads and legends of popular lore. When, at the end of the play, Eltham again points out important omissions, he adds that ‘There are a many things / That ask long time to tell them lineally: /But ten times longer will the action be’ (11. 2805-7). This use of ‘lineally’ (unrecorded in the OED) is surely remarkable: Mary Thomas Crane sees it as a rather em- barrassed attempt to defend the plays in the face of waning enthusiasm for two-part productions,*’ but it seems to me to be used as a technical term. However that may be, there can be no doubt that two parts were in- tended from the outset and that The Death is not a catchpenny sequel, *’ for Skelton asks Eltham if he will ‘crave the King / To see two parts’ and apologizes to the audience for ‘this play’s unfinished end’ (11. 2810- 1 1 , 2819), promising that ‘the second part shall presently be penned’ (1. 2822) - which does not necessarily mean that it had not been: Skelton is speak- ing in character, as the ‘author’.

The Downfall’s combination of a serious political plot with light- hearted pastoral episodes, as well as its use of such motifs as disguise,

’’ Crane, ‘The Shakespearean tetralogy’, 291 -2. Thus I believe Giorgio Melchiori is quite wrong to say that ‘there would have been no Death of

Robert, Earl of Huntingdon if his Downfall had been a flop’ (‘The corridors of history: Shakespeare the re-maker’, P Br Acad, 7 2 (1987 for 1986), 168).

Forms of time 42 1

triangular love relationships and rival courts, places it in a line of ‘romance’ histories, many of which also feature Robin Hood: and, as more and more characters - Ely, Fitzwater, Warman, John himself - are drawn from the wicked court of John into the regenerative forest, romance emerges as the dominant mode, its supremacy being confirmed by the final appearance there of a returned King Richard, his forgiveness of his enemies and his restoration to his rightful position of Robin whose guest he consents to be at a feast. This too is a traditional device of romance history, but its use here is especially neat, for Richard is a figure both historical and legendary (cf. his vestigial presence in Shakespeare’s King John, as the historical father of the unhistorical Bastard), and both modes of which the play is composed converge upon him.

Yet if The Death is no mere sequel to The Downfall the relationship between them is not patterned symmetrically: the plays are not congruent with the parts, and Professor Hunter excluded them from his group of diptych-like plays. The Downfall really ends at line 863 of The Death with Robin’s funeral: thereafter a wholly new play, Matilda’s Tragedy, begins. This too is explicit in the text:

FRIAR: Here doth the friar leave with grievance: Robin is dead, that grac’d his entrance: And being dead, he craves his audience, With this short play they would have patience.

(Enter CHESTER)

CHESTER: Nay, Friar, at request of thy kind friend, Let not thy play so soon be at an end. Though Robin Hood be dead, his yeomen gone, And that thou thinkst there now remains not one To act another scene or two for thee, Yet know full well, to please this company, We mean to end Matilda’s Tragedy.

FRIAR: Off then, I wish you, with your Kendal green: Let not sad grief in fresh array be seen. Matilda’s story is replete with tears, Wrongs, desolations, ruins, deadly fears. In and attire ye: though I tired be, Yet will I tell my mistress’ tragedy.

(Death, 11. 860-77)

There has, even before this, been some indication that we are not in the same world as in the Downfall: there is no distancing and reassuring frame (the Friar is himself now, not Skelton playing a friar), we observe a new interest in historical retrospect at odds with the never-land of the greenwood (e.g. Death, 11. 370-91, 581-609, 718-31), and the new character Doncaster imports into that world the harsh figure of the

422 Paul Dean

Machiavel villain, a role later transferred to John. At 1. 831 we have the plain declaration: ‘Our mirth is turned into moan, / Our merry sport to tragic funeral.’

Following Robin’s murder, virtuous death and burial, Matilda’s Tragedy eschews the relief of pastoral, such comedy as there is (e.g. in the scene where Brand overhears the Abbess and Monk tempting Matilda to give herself to the king) being of the grotesque kind we associate with Webster or Tourneur: all the interest is on John’s pursuit of Matilda and the personal and national corruption which follow. (The story is treated from this angle in an interesting but neglected play, Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda (1631), which shows debts to the Huntingdom plays.) Yet there is not a complete severance of interests from the Downfall - if we understand that to include the first 860 lines of the Death too: for Matilda’s Tragedy, like the Downfall, begins with emblematic dumbshows, and ends with the death by poisoning of the chief character, who forgives the killers, followed by an elaborate tableau centring around the bier. The political theme too is similar: ‘Lust being lord, there is no trust in kings’ (Death, 1. 1879) - which takes us right back to Campaspe - and once again the characters are organized into triangular groups (lohn/Matilda/Lester (on behalf of Wigmore) and John/Isabel/Hugh). The difference of mode, none the less, dictates a change of emphasis: in Matilda’s Tragedy there is no regenerative locale in which evil characters may repent and be forgiven. The nunnery, which might have functioned in that way, is itself corrupt. Ethical conflict is in- teriorized: there is no refuge for the virtuous but the consciousness of their own virtue. Romance, and the idealized vision of monarchic govern- ment which it encourages, are banished: at the end of the play Oxford dissuades the other lords from deserting John in favour of the French king, and John resumes the burden of rule, intending to expiate his crimes. This is not quite realism, but it gives the feel of chronicle mun- danity to the conclusion.

Viewed in this light, the Downfall and Death are seen to conform after all to the specifications of Professor Hunter and Mr Margeson. Imperfec- tions of construction (some of them due to an unsatisfactory text) remain, yet the combination of parallel actions and antithetical modes is firmly conceived and comes close to attaining a comprehensiveness of vision which we normally associate only with I and 2 Henry I V . Margeson’s comment that in the delineation of John ‘chronicle play and romance traditions of characterization meet without undue strain’29 can be applied to the two plays in general. Robin’s Tragedy, as we might call the whole of the Downfall and the Death up to line 860, ultimately affirms order despite Robin’s death, for he himself sees death as a reunion with a beneficent power of which the Forest-world is only a manifestation:

Margeson, ‘Dramatic form’, 226. 2 9

Forms of time 423

conversely, while Matilda S Tragedy emphasizes the heroine’s moral ex- cellence, she is isolated in an environment permeated by moral evil, from which death is a welcome release.

I shall interrupt chronological sequence and consider I and 2 Edward I V before I and 2 Henry I V . In fact the interruption is licensed by the uncer- tainties over the date and antecedents of Heywoods plays. In the absence of a modern critical edition” their relationship to the anonymous Siege of London (revived 1594) and The Tanner of Denmark ( = Tamworth?) (1592) must remain speculative. They were entered in the Stationers’ Register on 28 August 1599 and thus, in their final form, exploit the suc- cess of the Henry I V plays and perhaps also of Henry V , which most critics agree was complete by June 1599.

Edward I V is a compound of familiar elements. Its subject matter is based upon chronicle history but its treatment incorporates other modes. The title-page reference to Edwards ‘merie pastime with the Tanner of Tamworth’ relates it to the traditional escapist meeting of kings and com- moners to which Henry V and other romance histories also contribute.3’ There are in addition ballad analogues to the Jane Shore plot.’* Three main centres of interest - the court (including Edward’s relationship with Mistress Shore), the rebellion of Fauconbridge and the episodes involving Hobs the tanner - and each narrative is interwoven with the other two, although, as I shall argue, successful integration is not achieved. As in the Huntingdon plays, the action of Part I does not really end until some way through Part 2, when Edward dies and a new story begins, concentrating on Jane Shore’s ill-treatment by Richard 111. I shall discuss each of these narrative sequences in turn.

At the opening of Part I we are presented with a familiar situation; Edward has sent the Earl of Warwick to woo the French king’s daughter on his behalf. In Warwicks absence, however, Edward marries a com- moner, thus demeaning himself and allying himself mentally with the rebels (we notice that, although it is Edward who finally has Mistress Shore, Fauconbridge originally desired her - another hint at a parallel between monarch and pretender). In the forest, which he enters in dis- guise, Edward tolerates Hobs’s support of his rival, Henry, and con- descends to dine with the tanner and to flirt with his daughter. Edwards conclusion is again thoroughly conventional:

Proportioned with content sufficiency, Is merrier than the mighty state of kinges.

the meanest life

(p. 47)

l o The only edition remains the highly unsatisfactory Dramatic Works of Heywood by R. W.

” See Barton, ‘The King Disguised, passim. Shepherd (London, 1874): I give page references in the absence of lineation.

See J. L. Hames, ‘ “The Wofull Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore”: the popularity of an Elizabethan ballad’, Papers o f the Eibliographical Society of America, 71 (1977), 137-149.

424 Paul Dean

This pastoral idyll is, however, summoned only to be dismissed. In the licensed anarchy of the Forest, the king may dally with a humble girl: in the court he compounds the error of his inferior marriage (which Hobs sees through: ‘Much Queene, I trowel thees be but women’, p. 40) by in- triguing for Mistress Shore. This is condemned by the nobles on the usual ground (going back to Campmpe) that it will interfere with his political commitments, and by Mistress Shore’s husband and friends as a tyran- nical demand. Yet Edward not only gets his way, but ends Part I incor- rigibly flirting with a widow in return for money: and his military prowess is unaffected as is made clear by the decisive victory over the French with which Part 2 opens. Shortly after this, however, he dies.

The treatment of rebellion is strongly reminiscent of Jack Straw and 2 Henry VI: indeed the rebel leader Fauconbridge shqws himself uncom- fortably aware of this lineage:

We do not rise like Tyler, Cade, and Straw, Bluebeard, and other of that rascal rout, Basely like tinkers or such muddy slaves, For mending measures or the price of corne, Or for some common in the wield of Kent Thats by some greedy cormorant enclos’d, But in the true and antient lawful1 right Of the redoubted house of Lancaster. (p. 9)

This attempt to distinguish the rebellion from its predecessors by putting it on to a more heroic plane is deflated by Fauconbridge’s own followers, who, as their names (Smoke, Chub, Spicing) and priorities show, repre- sent the instincts and physical appetites which are unleashed under cover of political statesmanship. If Fauconbridge looks like Heywood’s response to Hotspur, his followers’ values reflect, albeit very weakly, those of Falstaff. Heywood shows Fauconbridge unable to maintain his heroic stance; he quickly deteriorates, scheming to ensnare Mistress Shore, holding out grandiose dreams to Spicing, who scorns him - ‘thou art a rascal and a rebel, as I am’ (p. 21) - finally, in the face of execution, lamenting the vanity of human wishes with something like Hotspur’s grauitas:

. . . And for this life, this paltry little life, This blast of winde, which you have labour’d so, By iuries, sessions, and I know not what, To robbe me of, is of so vilde repute, That, to obtaine that I might liue mine age, I would not give the value of a point. (p. 54)

Hobs the tanner is ‘king’ in his own world, the forest, but once at court, brought face to face with the king he unwittingly entertained, he is overawed (contrast the behaviour of Williams in Henry V , 1V.viii). Heywood brings out the paradox which underlies the apparent escapism

Forms of time 42 5

of pastoral: the monarch’s agreeing to be his subjects’ equal is further evidence of his royal magnanimity; he has nothing to lose, and can amuse himself at the commoner’s discomfiture when the truth is revealed. The pastoral element here, unlike that in the Huntingdon plays (and unlike the Gloucestershire scenes in 2 Henry IV) , cannot be said to embody a vision of an alternative to the court which we have to take seriously.

Heywood plays off these three strands of narrative against each other only to expose them all as hopelessly contradictory, offering no decisive answer to the question ‘Wherein lies true monarchy?’. The titular king shows serious weaknesses, while the Utopias of which the pretender and the tanner dream - places where they will, in different ways, be ‘king’ - have their insubstantiality exposed. It is left to the common people to show some political wisdom, patriotism and genuine heroism, in response to the Lord Mayor’s invocation of the Jack Straw uprising, opposite in effect to Fauconbridge’s cited earlier:

Think that in Richard’s time even such a rebel Was then by Walworth, the lord Maior of London, Stabb’d dead in Smithfield. Then show yourselves as it befits the time, And let this find a hundred Walworths now . . . (p. 17)

Like Fauconbridge, the prentices invoke historical precedent, but unlike him they are quick to identify with the traditions they inherit: ‘The Chronicles of England can report / What memorable actions we have done’ (p. 18).

After Edward’s death ‘Jane Shore’s Tragedy’ begins, as Jane, like her namesake in The True Tragedy of Richard 111, is persecuted by the new king. As in The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon exploration (in so far as there has been any in Edward I V ) gives way to a dramaturgy more akin to the morality. After successive misfortunes - betrayed by her former friends Mistress Blague and Rufford, and deprived of her main supporter Aire - Jane becomes almost an emblematic figure in her hus- band’s eyes, as Elizabeth Drury did to Donne: ‘Oh vnconstant world, /Here lies a true anatomie of thee’ (p. 183). Plot development is replaced by a series of tableaux which seek to confirm, not to analyse, the rightness of Jane’s resignation to her fate, the culminating spectacle being the deaths of her and her husband, finally moved to a reconciliation, on either side of Aire’s coffin.

Heywood has brought together a great variety of material in these plays, but has not solved the problem of making the parts cohere. His use of polyphonic narrative and of two-part structure is loose and episodic when compared with the skill of the Huntingdon plays. Promising con- nections are made but abandoned under the pressure of new material, and the final triumph of moral exhortation represents a retreat from the complexity of the task undertaken. Heywood has failed to bring his

426 Paul Dean

romance material into a fruitful relationship (not necessarily ‘unity’ in Aristotelian terms) with his chronicle material. The general similarity between Edward IV and the Huntingdon plays should not make us jump to a similar judgement on their quality. Chettle and Munday prove themselves to have a sophisticated interest in the technical challenge of dramatizing opposed views of history: Heywood, Frankenstein-like, assembles fragments of the corpses of divergent traditions but cannot galvanize them into life.

In discussing I and 2 Henry IV I shall not be concerned with the question of their genesis, whether Shakespeare conceived one play or two or how, if at all, his mind changed in the writing. There is an extensive literature on these topics which shows no sign of abating.” However Shakespeare came to write them, the two parts of Henry IV are the most ambitious and suc- cessful attempt ever undertaken to bring romance and chronicle modes together. Their ‘symphonic complexity’, in A. R. Humphreys’ fine

defies complete analysis and I can mention only some of the ways in which this is done.

One major difference between these plays and the others I have dis- cussed is that they force us to recognize the limitations of our descriptive categories ‘romance’ and ‘chronicle’ themselve~.~~ There can be no neat equation of any part of either play with either term. We were able to identify Robin’s death and the initiation of Matilda’s tragedy as a clear turning-point in the Huntingdon plays, with Edward’s death and the in- itiation of Jane Shore’s tragedy functioning similarly in Edward IV . We also noted that both sets of plays ultimately abandon romance for demon- trative moralistic tragedy. The end of I Henry IVplays with such conven- tions only to frustrate them, for while Hotspur, ‘the king of honour’ (IV.i.lO), dies announcing the death of time itself (V.iv.81-2), Falstaff is comically resurrected and the business of living in a complex world resumes. The multi-facetedness of Shakespeare’s engagement with the historical mode is everywhere apparent. For instance, the whole concep- tion of the (historical) character of Hotspur owes much to the romance type of the chivalric hero, while the romance-pastoral of the Gloucester- shire scenes is suffused with the kind of quotidian detail (‘realism’)

’’ Rather than exhaust the reader with individual references I may simply cite Dennis Burden’s ‘Shakespeare’s history plays: 1952-1983’, Shakes Sum, 38 (1985), 13-14 and footnotes. Subsequently Professor Melchiori’s lecture (above, note 28) has reopened the question yet again, adding fresh discussion of the relationship between Henry I V and The Famow Victories of Henry V . The fact that the latter was originally a two-part play is naturally important for my purposes, but the textually corrupt state in which it survives makes me reluctant to build much upon it. ’‘ ‘Shakespeare and history: from antithesis to synthesis’, in John W. Mahon and Thomas A.

Pendleton (eds.), ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins (London, 1987), 99. I use Humphreys’ classic editions of the plays (Part I, London, 1960: Part 2, London, 1966) for references in this essay.

The occurrences of ‘chronicle’ in the plays themselves are interesting: see 1 Henry IV, I.iii.169, V.ii.57; 2 H e n y ZV, IV.iv.126. There is no comparable generic use of ‘romance’.

Forms of time 42 7

characteristic of chronicle. One sees the point of a recent description of these scenes as ‘the best Chekhov Shakespeare ever wrote’. 36 Again, where do we place Falstaff - a character derived from, and originally named after, an historical personage, in presenting whom Shakespeare conflates innumerable literary conventions and stock figures yet who achieves a ‘reality’ of presence so massive that it threatens to overwhelm the historical material? Each quality partakes of its opposite: what in the hands of other playrights could become a schematic antithesis is here, to borrow Donne’s word, an interinanimation.

Similarly we cannot apply Professor Margeson’s general rule that in two-part plays the first part tends towards comedy and the second towards tragedy. The main plot of I H e n y IV ends with rebellion checked but not eradicated; the subplot ends with Falstaff triumphant, but by a trick we may find disquieting: while the main plot of 2 Hen y Vends with Henry V triumphant, but preparing for war, and its subplot ends with Falstaff defeated, by a justice whose force we acknowledge. The balance of tragedy and comedy, detached judgement and sympathy, is brilliantly poised. Indeed, it is a further oversimplification to speak of ‘main plot’ and ‘subplot’ in this case. Such terms can be no more than an analytical convenience in plays in which the non-historical material is made to bear such a weight of meaning and to figure so largely in our final evaluation. The interrelationship between the three ‘worlds’ - court, tavern and rebel camp - in Part I is so close that each seems to take some colouration from the other, while the difficulty of knowing where to ‘place’ the Gloucester- shire scenes in Part 2 (Falstaffs ‘court’? A microcosm of the dying England of Henry IV? The nursery of anarchy for the new reign?) further illustrates the fineness of the organization. 37

This is brought home to us further when we consider Shakespeare’s mastery of the technical devices of his medium. Consider, for instance, the use of symbolically significant locations. The stock pastoral antithesis of city/country, court/forest are reworked to subtle effect, the no-man’s- land of the battlefield at the end of Part I prompting some telling ironies (‘What art thou/That counterfeit’st the person of a king?’ ‘The King himself . . .’, V.iv.27-9) and Prince John’s act of treachery in Part 2 tak- ing place in Gaultree Forest. There is no Garden of Eden into which men can escape from the tyranny of political circumstance: even Justice Shallow’s garden is invaded by Pistol with news of the king’s death. The action of both parts take place, we may say, in a fallen world; the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’” To take another example, ingenious

’6 Alexander Leggatt, ShakespeareS Political Drama (London, 1988), 106. ’’ The discussions of the Henry I V plays by A. P. Rossiter, Angel With H o r n (London, 1961),

esp. pp. 46-57, and Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago. 1971), 137-47, are surely among the best we have: my debt to them will be obvious. ’’ For a wide-ranging interpretation of the Histories along these lines see John Wilders, The Lost

Garden (London, 1978).

428 Paul Dean

though Chettle and Munday’s use of the play-within-the-play in The Downfall is, Shakespeare’s use of the same device in 1 Henry I V explores receding planes of reality and identity more deeply in one scene (1I.iv) than they do in an entire play, 39 and his use of Rumour at the opening of Part 2 suggests economically the unstable and hallucinatory world in which much of the action is set.

The most important quality which sets these plays apart from the others considered is, perhaps, the almost philosophical explicitness with which they meditate on Time. This becomes especially marked in Part 2, with its vision of human beings as ‘Time’s subjects’ (I.iii.110)40 and of Time as both a stream (IV.i.70) and a shaping force (III.ii.327). The most extensive discussion of this theme comes in I1I.i in the conversation between the king and Warwick. Henry recalls Richard 11’s prophecy of his own accession, which he himself ascribes to the compulsions of ‘necessity’ (1II.i. 73), whereupon Warwick expounds a philosophy of history which unites the medieval figural view with Neoplatonism:

There is a history of all men’s lives Figuring the nature of the times deceas’d; The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, who in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured. Such things become the hatch and brood of time; And by the necessary form of this King Richard might create a perfect guess . . .

(111. i .80-8)

Warwicks words, with their simultaneous affirmation of teleology and contingency, encapsulate the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s treatment of the historical process in these plays, whose own linearity - pointed up by this very discussion between Warwick and the king, who recall a past to which they are causally connected - is counterpoised by a spatial organiza- tion dependent upon repetition-with-variation, as Professor Hunter points out in his article.

Shakespeare then achieves an unprecedented integration between the form of their plays and their subject. ‘Form’ itself becomes a key word; beside the instances already quoted we may place Henry’s vision of his son’s accession as a prelude to a ‘time . . . to mock at form’ (Part 2,

”) Dennis Burden (above, note 33) does not discuss this specifically. See, e.g., W. F. McNeir, ‘Structure and theme in the first tavern scene of Henry I V , Part One’, in G. R. Smith (ed.), Essayson Shakespeare (Philadelphia, Pa, 1965), 67-83; R. L. McCuire, ‘The play-within-the-play in 1 Henry I V ’ , Shakes Q, 18 (1967), 47-52: J. Shaw, ‘The staging of parody and parallels in I Henry I V ’ , Shakes Sum, 20 (1967). 61-74; P. Gottschalk, ‘Hal and the “play extempore” in 1 Henry I V ’ , Tex St

4 0 L. C. Knights’s essay with this title, in Some Shakespearean Themes (London, 1959), retains its Lit, 15 (1974), 605-14.

importance.

Forms of t ime 429

IV.v.118). The ‘form’ of time is both its shape and its characteristic events (a conjunction of abstraction and particularity reminiscent of Sidney), just as the ‘form’ of a history play is both its overall conception of his- tory and the way in which the events which it dramatizes are shaped accordingly.

Shakespeare reinforces this relationship by harnessing the structural device of the triad (three ‘worlds’ - court, rebels, tavern - each with its own ‘king’) to the threefold division of Time into past, present and future. The rebels are obsessed by the past, by the thought of wrongs unatoned-for and of their own duty to seek retributive justice, and most of the historical recapitulations are presented through them (e.g. Part I , I.iii.143-84, IV.iii.52-105: Part 2, I.iii.91-108, II.iii.10-45). With them we may associate the compulsively reminiscent Shallow and Silence, who although not rebels are living reminders of the ‘good old times’ of merrymaking and wenching which have been elbowed aside by present political exigencies. These men make history in their imaginations, as, perhaps, the rebels do in theirs: so complex is the interplay of fact and memory that we can hardly know ‘what really happened’. It might be said of many other than Hotspur that they become absorbed in ‘a world of figures’ to the exclusion of ‘form’ (Part I , I.iii.207-8: note the Platonic term again). The present, characterized as ‘the unquiet time’, is marked by restlessness and uncertainty, which appear at court but also in the tavern which is far from being the locus amoenus of sentimental readers. Falstaff is, we are often told, ‘outside Time’, but this is to take him too much at his own valuation. He is the archetypal seizer of Time by the forelock, the man living from moment to moment confident of his ability to improvise his way out of difficulties, but his inability to see Time as patterned finally proves his undoing: his expected reward at the hands of the ‘royal Hal’ who has only ever existed in his own imagination proves to be History taking its revenge for his ignoring of it. What Falstaff shows is that we are trapped within Time, not that we can evade it. But whereas Falstaff might reflect, with Richard 11, ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me’ (Richard 11, V.v.49), Hal is able to recognize that ‘we play the fools with the time’ (2 Henry I V , II.ii.134) and to ‘redeem’ the time. Ac- cordingly, Hal is a linchpin between court and tavern and also between the various temporal divisions of experience, for he will give the lie to his father’s fears that he will be a Richard I1 redivivus, he will heal the coun- try of its past wounds, and it is his destiny to ‘be’ England’s future - a destiny of which he is aware from moment to moment in the present and towards which his actions are directed. Such points are forced on our at- tention by the way in which, in Part I , V.iv, he kills Hotspur literally and Falstaff symbolically, having absorbed the best of each in order to become a better person than either. As Richard Levin comments, ‘He knows when to act like Falstaff and when to act like Hotspur, and he can defeat them both in their own areas, outwitting the one in the tavern and

430 Paul Dean

outfighting the other on the battlefield.14’ His education progresses by a series of resolved antitheses which is also characteristic of the plotting and characterization of the plays themselves. The way in which characters are frequently compared to one another, either explicitly or obliquely by echo or parody, has often been not i~ed ,~’ and Shakespeare thereby invites us to consider the relationship between selfhood and role: this is his equivalent for the disguises in the other plays (although he uses physical disguise too). His using the other characters as role-models either positive or negative allows Shakespeare to carry to a point of high art the tradi- tional representative inclusiveness of the monarch in the history play.

After laying such stress on what makes these plays so different from the others I should like to conclude by summarizing what they have in com- mon. The threefold basis of action, discussed above, is found in many other plays, as are the use of symbolically significant locations, the triangular organization of characters, the dual nature of the monarch (here the monarch-to-be), the pastoral antithesis of court and country (or forest), the panoramic representation of all levels of society, the use of receding levels or planes of action, and the attempt to synthesize, or at least bring into fruitful equilibrium, diverse generic conventions and modes. The two parts of Henry I V did not spring ex nihilo from Shakespeare’s brain; they baffle the commentator not by their aloofness from previous historical drama but by the richness of their allusions to it. It remains true that part of the fascination of reading them alongside the Huntingdon plays and Edward IV is to become aware of the degree to which Shakespeare achieves a union of formal elegance with depth of meaning, where Munday and Chettle cannot sustain such a balance but retreat into mechanical moralising, and Heywood can construct in a piecemeal fashion without any deep urge towards coherence. Yet such a view of the Henry IV plays cannot be reached without the comparison, and in the as yet unwritten book which will supersede Ribner, we must hope that admiration for Shakespeare’s achievement will be accom- panied by recognition of the traditions upon which it depends.

‘I Levin, Multiple Plot, 106. 4 2 Humphreys (ed.), I Henry I V , p. xlvii, provides a dazzling conspectus of such relationships.