In this chapter, I shall be concerned with how Shakespeare’s two major tetralogies of history plays (1, 2, and 3 Henry VI and Richard III; and Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V) contend, as does The Faerie Queene, not only with the presence of female authority, but also with the potential alliances between female authority and ravishing literary effect. Produced in the same decade that The Faerie Queene was published, Shakespeare’s histories, like the two Spenserian stanzas above, base their impact both on the anticipated progression of royal succession, and, conversely, also on the interruption, disruption, and contention of that succession.3 In an association of interruption with ravishment that matches the dynamics of The Faerie Queene’s Book 3, the characters in the histories who are most theatrically compelling are, initially, those who most threaten this orderly succession of male rulers. (When I say “initially,” I am referring to the histories as a sequence beginning with 1 Henry VI and ending with Henry V, the order in which Shakespeare probably wrote the plays.)4 As the histories progress, however, the plays echo the movement of the two anomalous Spenserian stanzas I have just analyzed in that they increasingly become an experiment in wresting theatrical authority from the unlawful female to the lawful male—in other words, a theatrical experiment in making what is kingly also ravishing. In the process of this experiment, the sequence of histories absorbs and shapes the political desires of its audience, which become theatrical desires as well: to witness and partake of a compelling masculine, rather than feminine, authority. At the same time, the histories progressively register the risk involved in that experiment, a risk that is elided in Spenser’s two stanzas by the apparently easy supersession of the first stanza by the second, but that is recalled in the theater whenever literarily induced pleasure is identified with the feminine.
Evaluating the gendered character of these plays requires first addressing two topics, one having to do with the genre of the history play itself, the second having to do with the gendered nature of the exchange between actors and audience in the Elizabethan public theater. Much more than “epic” or “romance”—which, although they never exist in unadulterated literary incarnations, at least had impressive pedigrees prior to Shakespeare’s era—“history” as an English literary form was invented in the sixteenth century. And arguably the history play, characterized by a plot that is drawn from English chronicles but that is not simply a transparent cover for a morality drama, was practically if not literally invented by Shakespeare.5 Although (as critics since Tillyard have asserted) the genre of the history play was made possible only through the sixteenth-century revolution in historiography—with its new emphasis on human rather than divine causes for earthly events; its new recognition of historical temporality and anachronism; and its new questioning of textual authority6—the fact remains that no playwright besides Shakespeare was so interested in thematizing these issues in terms of the chronicle history of England. Further, as Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin point out, of all the surviving history-play texts now known, only Shakespeare’s ten forays into the genre are so obsessively concerned with the topic of monarchy (rather than with other topics such as the relation between the king and the city of London).7
My sense is that Shakespeare so fully embraces the history-play genre and so focuses his history plays on monarchy because this ploy allows him to adapt The Faerie Queene to the stage. Or more precisely, the history plays afford a venue for engaging Spenserian concerns with gender, with authority, and with the intersections between gender, authority, and a variety of heterogeneous literary modes. During the same decade, the 1590s, that his romantic comedies reproduce the more obviously feminine elements of Spenser’s long poem—cross-dressed heroines, forests suited to wandering and enchantment, and even, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy queen herself—Shakespeare’s histories enter into The Faerie Queene’s internal debate regarding how to construct a masculine literary form out of English history.
Upon the face of it, the history play, insofar as it indeed partakes of innovations in historiographical practice, seems to be the ideal vehicle for furthering the cause of masculine authority. Not only is the Renaissance writing of history devoted, of course, almost entirely to masculine pursuits,8 but the very act of shaping the morass of human events into a condensed dramatic plot of a few hours’ playing time implements what Julia Kristeva calls the cultural norm of “men’s time”: “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression and arrival—in other words, the time of history.”9 In this sense a dramatic play, with its short length and its capacity to produce a noticeable and singular climax in Act 5, might be an even more effective means of showcasing masculine heroic action than the potentially baggy structure of the Virgilian twelve-book epic poem. The trick for Shakespeare, as for Spenser, is that Virgilian epic defines masculine action not only as victory in a given battle on a given day, but also as the activity of nation-building, which in an imperial, patriarchal system—as Henry VIII knew all too well—necessarily involves the aid of women as bearers of male heirs. Hence Spenserian and Shakespearean histories’ obsessive focus upon monarchical succession.
Hence, too, their focus upon the ruptures in that succession, given that sixteenth-century English history not only features a few authoritative women but also concludes in one authoritative woman, the stubbornly nonreproducing Elizabeth Tudor. In The Faerie Queene, the problem of discontinuous monarchical succession—a problem that only gained urgency in the 1590s, as Elizabeth passed her sixtieth birthday without having named an heir—tends to evince itself in two forms: in the concentrated recitations in Books 2 and 3 of England’s and Faery land’s genealogy of rule;10 and more diffusely, as I suggested in Chapter 2, in femininity’s propensity to disrupt the plans of male aristocratic heroes. In Shakespeare’s history plays, in contrast, monarchical succession (meriting rule, achieving rule, holding onto rule, passing rule to one’s son) is the entire topic of the action, even by and large in the comedic, non-aristocratic tavern scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV. In fact, the freighted issues of monarchical succession and of queenship’s role in monarchical succession become, in these plays, coterminous not only with the very course of history, but also, as I will discuss below, with the very course of the plays themselves—the plot and rhythm of each individual play, and also the succession of one play to the next. Like Books 5 and 6 of The Faerie Queene, each of the plays in these two history tetralogies suggests a variant upon the theme of the relation between femininity and the furtherance of national epic.
As well, these plays cogitate upon potential connections among gender, epic, and theatrical success. At the same time that the history play is trying, in epic fashion, to establish England’s national character and national history as masculine, its venue of production casts aspersions on that masculinity. Not only was the public theater a disreputable institution, one that flourished in the less-regulated “Liberties” of London alongside taverns and brothels,11 it was also one of very recent inception: the span of time from James Burbage’s construction in 1576 of the first permanent playhouse in London, the Theatre, to the first of Shakespeare’s history plays is perhaps twelve or fourteen years. As adolescent in years as the boy actors who took the parts of women, the public theater seemed an unlikely place to approximate the character of that most advanced and adult of Virgilian genres, epic. As well, contemporary analysts both pro- and anti-theater worried at the question of what effect, exactly, the experience of the theatrical event would have upon its audience. Stephen Orgel and Laura Levine have recently discussed the Renaissance perception of the theater as a sexualized exchange between actor and audience members.12 In this exchange any number of gender positions may be played out, given that, as some Renaissance commentators saw it, not only the actors but also the male audience members might transform, at least for the space of the performance, from male to female. At issue with Shakespeare’s history plays, then—as I discuss in this chapter—is the drama’s very suitability for presenting England’s history as national epic, and for honing its audience into suitable participants in that epic project. For that reason, in my view, the history plays