Holinshed’s Nation: Ideals, Memory and Practical Policy in the Chronicles, by Igor Djordjevic

Abstract

Time was when Holinshed’s Chronicles were thought valuable only as a source-mine for Shakespeare and as the prime exhibit of the capacious and baggy mindlessness of the sixteenth-century chronicling tradition. But in recent years there has been a growing recognition that the two great editions of 1577 and 1587 should be studied more systematically in their own right. Literary scholars have joined with historians in demonstrating that the volumes offer an important series of insights into political and cultural values, rhetorical strategies, and views of nationhood in Elizabethan England. Much of the engagement with Holinshed has been prompted by Annabel Patterson’s Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (1994; rev. ante, cxii [1997], 462–4), which made a persuasive case for the range of evidence that can be adduced from the volumes, though her reading of the liberal nature of the authors’ political agenda has not convinced most subsequent commentators. Issues raised by Patterson, and many other themes, are addressed in the comprehensive interdisciplinary Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2012. Igor Djordjevic’s book contributes to this process of reassessment, offering a new analysis of a specific part of the Chronicles—that covering the cycle of English history from 1376 to 1485. This section of Holinshed is already reasonably well-known because of its Shakespearian connotations. However, Djordjevic takes this familiar cycle and places it in a broad historical context of debates about political power, the role of the commons, and nationhood. Since his training is in literature he also dwells on the rhetorical strategies employed in the writing of historical narrative. These broad themes are constantly interrogated by close comparison of the two editions: here he makes a most valuable contribution to the current pattern of Holinshed research. A precise reading of a series of incidents—the fall of Richard II, the Agincourt campaign, and the collapse of Henry VI’s regime among them—shows again and again that the two editions display different attitudes. These usually indicate that Raphael Holinshed, as the first co-ordinating editor, was disposed to leave his readership a certain freedom to form their own judgements, while his successors were more deeply concerned with the need for obedience in church and state. The 1587 edition resounds with sententious judgements on the fall of princes and the dangers of the commoners. Djordjevic is surely right to suggest that this is not only a consequence of different editorial attitudes, but also reflects the darkening political landscape of the pre-Armada years. The book has valuable chapters on the people and the commonwealth, and on ways in which ideas of nationhood are debated and contested through the incidents of fifteenth-century chivalric politics.