W. P.: The Case for William Patten's Contribution to Holinshed's Chronicles (1587)

Abstract

THE collaborative nature of the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles is well known, and we can identify with relative certainty the portions of the narrative supplied by Holinshed himself, William Harrison, Richard Stanyhurst, John Hooker, alias Vowell, Abraham Fleming, Francis Boteville, otherwise known as Francis Thynne, and John Stow. However, nothing at all is known about the contributor whose additions were signed ‘W. P.’ in the margins of the 1587 text, and which begin in the narrative of the reign of Henry V. Ascertaining the identity of W. P. would be important not only for the history of English historiography, but perhaps even more so for the critical corpus on Shakespeare's English history plays, because W. P.'s revised portrait of Joan of Arc is in fact the one that Shakespeare adopted for 1 Henry VI rather than Holinshed's original version from the 1577 Chronicles. W. P.'s interpolations into the chronicle text reveal an author who is an able stylist, a historian by vocation, one who is able to read and compile data out of French sources, and perhaps most importantly, a staunch English Protestant nationalist. The list of authors and textual sources supplied by the editor at the start of the first volume of the 1587 Chronicles does not answer the question of W. P.'s identity because the initials do not match any of the known contributors to the text. To be sure, it is entirely possible that W. P. was a contributor who chose to remain anonymous or did not have his name added to the list by the editors. But, if the list is indeed accurate and reliable, and we take it as the starting point in the search for the author's identity, there are only two likely candidates whose names match the initials W. P.: ‘William Patten of the expedition into Scotland 1574’ and ‘William Proctor of Wiats rebellion’ (I, A3v).1 A number of factors and coincidences suggest that W. P. could be William Patten. 1 Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1587).