King John and Historiography

Abstract

Thinking about Renaissance English history plays, we typically but wrongly treat the chronicles as sources of a different color. Making Comedy of Errors from Menaechmi, or Measure for Measure from Promos and Cassandra, or a history play from Hall and Holinshed, Foxe and Stowe, are similar creative acts because Hall, Holinshed, Foxe, Stowe, Whetstone, Plautus, and their reified texts are, as sources, similar. Like the Elizabethans, we have trouble understanding that while we may be products of history, our histories are also products of history: the way we are determines our view of the way we or they were. A scholar of Shakespeare's sources makes an illuminating distinction: I Henry VI is so much a Chronicle play as a fantasia on historical themes.' The capital C is a nice touch: drama may be fantasia, but a Chronicle play has Historical-that is, factual and typographic-authority. I propose we admit that the chronicle, the fixed factual point in a still turning dramatic universe, is quite as much a Fantasia as 1 Henry VI. Chronicle and play differ most in the degree of cultural authority we, again like the Elizabethans, grant them: one a play, the other a History. Nowadays most of us know fifteenth-century English history almost exclusively from Shakespeare's plays; his fantasias now serve our culture much as the chronicles served him and his society. The works of early chroniclers or modern historians have become, handy-dandy, distant seconds to Shakespeare's fantasias. Everyone needs a place to stand, a moment's respite from the hermeneutic and circular dance, not least source-studiers, genre critics, or historiographers: thus we call Henry VIII a romance, Greene's James IV a comical or romantic history, 1 Henry VI a fantasia, Holinshed a Chronicle, and