Shakespeare's Kings Read Free

of York · Denial at Clerkenwell 343
    Henry's landing · His progress · Bosworth 347
    After Bosworth · Fate of Richard's body 351
    19. King Richard III [1471-1485]
    The two legends · Dating of the play 355
    Acts I and II · Chronologies · Clarence's death · Queens' lamentations - Undramatic treatment of Richard's coup 357 Acts III and IV · Richard's progress to the throne · His murder of the
    Princes 361 Bosworth 365
    Epilogue 369 Chronological Table 375 Bibliography 379
    Appendix: Shakespeare's Edward III 383

    Henry V Henry VI
    Chained Swan Chained Antelope

    Edward IV and V Richard III
    Falcon and Fetterlock White Boar

    White Rose Red Rose Tudor Rose
    The White Rose had long existed as a Yorkist badge; the Red Rose as the emblem of Lancaster seems to have been an invention of Henry VII. Shakespeare's garden scene is therefore not only imaginary but also an anachronism.
    Introduction
    My own introduction to Shakespeare's history plays took place when I was fifteen, and was taken by my parents to see the two parts of King Henry IV, in consecutive matinee and evening performances, at the New Theatre in London. We all l oved Ralph Richardson's Falstaff and Laurence Olivier's blazing Hotspur, his hint of a stammer on every initial *w' giving a memorable impact to his last line; but my own chief delight, as I remember, was the feeling — for the first time in my life - of being transported in a time capsule back into the Middle Ages. These, I kept reminding myself, were real people — people of flesh and blood, people who had really lived, who were something more than figments of an author's imagination. But the question was already there in my mind: just how real were they? Where did history stop and drama begin? Twenty years later at the Aldwych, the miracle occurred again - with John Barton's and Peter Hall's superb The Wars of the Roses, spread now over two whole days. This time the feeling of transportation was even greater; this time too there was a magnificent programme, which included a full historical resume and, wonder of wonders, an immense Plantagenet family tree. Would that I still had it today; alas, it has vanished like so many other treasures, and it is, I suppose, in an attempt to replace it as much as anything else that I have written the book that you now hold in your hands.
    Perhaps, if I were to be perfectly accurate I should have called it Some of Shakespeare's Kings, for it is nothing if not selective. It has no business with mythical monarchs like Lear, nor with pseudo-historical ones like Cymbeline. It does not even consider King John - a play which, for all its faults, is all, or almost all, the work of Shakespeare -or Henry VIII, the major part of which is probably by John Fletcher. Its subject is that unhappy line of Plantagenet rulers who inspired the nine greatest of the history plays, that tremendous series that begins with Edward III, continues through the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V and the three parts of Henry VI, and ends with Richard III. Two Kings, although part of the Plantagenet line, remain unmentioned. Edward IV, under whom the English people enjoyed a dozen of the happiest and most peaceful years they had known for a century, appears in the second and third parts of Henry VI and again in Richard III; but has no play of his own. Nor (less surprisingly, since he occupied the throne for only a few weeks) does his son, the fragile little Edward V - although, as the most pitiable monarch in English history, he plays an important part in illustrating his uncle's villainy.
    The mention of Edward III may occasion some surprise; and I readily confess that if I had written this book a year earlier than in fact I did, it would never have occurred to me to include it. I had, I think, vaguely heard of it as an apocryphal play for which one or two nineteenth-century German scholars had tentatively suggested Shakespearean authorship, but I had certainly never read it; since it did not