Shakespeare's Tetralogies

Of course, Shakespeare never intended for anyone to read the two tetralogies straight through in chronological order -- he may never have intended anyone to read them at all.  But that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile exercise to try them out in historical order, from Richard II straight through to Richard III.  The effect of doing so is rather curious, and it presents a compelling insight into what Shakespeare might have meant by his notion of history. 

History, at the time, was a literary art that had little concern for factual detail, and drama had in the eras preceding Shakespeare always been the stuff of moral pageantry.  Combining the two together as Shakespeare did was a new invention being pioneered in his time.  Indeed, Shakespeare has been said to have invented the history play himself, though to argue so might be to slight some of the efforts of his contemporaries.  Certainly, though, the history play was a new thing, and Shakespeare proved himself adept at unlocking its potential.  The result is that the moral certitude that provided the backbone of the medieval morality play was vanquished.  Even that walking vice, Richard of Gloucester, is a curious character, one with dimension, and not the flat emblem at work in plays of past eras.  Enter a world of moral complexity, of something altogether more real and more recognizably human.

As for the notion of history, the insight that Shakespeare seems to offer here is that it moves.  I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, in his Second Inaugural, about the coming of the US Civil War.  After a brief but far-reaching account of the circumstances leading up the war, Lincoln simply states, "And the war came."  Ultimately, the mechanisms and motives of history are lost somewhere in the details, and we are left with a series of moving images attached to a result.  From the perspective of the present, the events of the past always seem inevitable -- because we have no other past to take its place.  Eventually, the names of individuals characters blur and become indistinct, and we are left merely with a sense of the inexorable sweep of it all.

Reading the two tetralogies from start to finish, I realized that the chronological approach captures the sweep of history, but it doesn't make for the dramatic arc that formed as Shakespeare wrote the plays.  To end with the first tetralogy is to see England at its worst -- that is, history at it its worst, because Shakespeare's England is a stand-in for the bigger world and its history.  In the first tetralogy, we see a nation taken to the brink of failure.  That it is redeemed by the first triumph of the Tudor dynasty in the final pages of text does little to dispel the sense of collapse that dominates the series, which shakes the foundations of the notion of kingship and threatens to call the whole thing out as a fiction.  We wonder how the puissant seed of glorious Henry V could produce such a milksop as Henry VI.  If that's the case, then all indeed is vanity. 

To build up, then, to Henry V, to end his long run of history plays on that note of rousing national unity, may seem a little cheap, but it works.  This sequence re-establishes the myth of kingship, restores the political enterprise of the nation, gives the people what they want: a glimmering, shining moment of common purpose and shared glory.  Of course, it was all probably an accident of his career (possibly a result of the fact that there was, purportedly, already a play about Henry V written in the early 1590s), but by disposing of Henry VI early on, Shakespeare freed himself up to end the story on a flourish of triumph.  Revisionist history, as history generally is.