Peter Saccio - Shakespeares English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama

This new edition is not prompted by fresh discoveries about the rudimentary facts of English medieval history: the same kings fought the same battles and died in the same years. The chapters that follow, recounting the events of these kings' reigns and the changes Shakespeare made to put them on the stage, remain the same, save for errors and infelicities that I have amended. But over the past two decades a great deal of work has been done by historians, Shakespearean scholars, and the people who create Shakespearean theatre. This edition also provides access to what I consider to be the most enlightening of that work.

The most important statement that I must make as I introduce a second edition is this: no longer is the fifteenth century a neglected period of English history. Since Shakespeare's English Kings appeared in 1977, for example, the English Monarchs series of biographies (now published by Yale) has added impressive volumes on Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III. Detailed studies have altered and enriched the way we understand the nature of royal rule and the way kings arrived at the decisions they did. The Afterword at the end of this second edition discusses what historians have lately taught us about the Plantagenets. It also speaks of new interpretations in Shakespearean scholarship. The Further Bibliography serves as a

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specific guide to this work. One fascinating result of recent research and reinterpetation is that Shakespeare's account of the kings now seems closer than before to history as we now understand it. Artistic instinct and necessity led him to make changes in the chronicles he read, but he knew how his late medieval characters looked at things.

The present widespread availability of Shakespeare also makes a new edition of this book appropriate. In 1977 the only movie versions of Shakespeare's history plays generally available were Laurence Olivier's films of Henry V ( 1944) and Richard III ( 1955), and Orson Welles's condensation of the Henry IV plays into Chimes at Midnight ( 1966). One had to go to a cinema to see them. Videocassettes and the making of new versions for film or for video have changed all that. BBC-TV has taped the complete works of Shakespeare, doing a fair job with some of the plays. By filming Henry V in 1989 Kenneth Branagh proved again that large audiences will attend a Shakespearean history, and thereby initiated a spate of Shakespearean films that has included Ian McKellan resetting of Richard III in a fascist Britain of the 1930s. As I write, the Academy Award for best movie has just been given to a fantasy biography called Shakespeare in Love, in which the screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard risk several references to the Henry VI plays.

It is not simply the younger media that make Shakespeare more available. For stage productions of the history plays in 1977, one generally had to go to Britain. Now the Royal Shakespeare Company is willing not only to produce such a seldom performed play as Henry VIII but also to tour it to New York and Washington. The Public Theater has produced the complete works in New York. Regional Shakespeare theatres have multiplied in America, led by the venerable and distinguished Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where, in 1995, the actor Derrick Lee Weeden played the most carefully motivated and lucidly expressive Bolingbroke I have yet seen.

This book makes accessible to the audiences of such productions information that they will find useful for understanding the plays.

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My delight in Weeden's performance in Richard II was tinged with sadness for the two theatregoers sitting behind me, who sporadically tried to figure out (in suitably hushed tones) whether Bolingbroke and Henry and Hereford and Derby were all the same person. They were not alone in their problem. The notable scholars editing the Norton Shakespeare ( 1997) heroically condense an account of Shakespeare's kings into their endpapers: the result is breathless and not without error.

It is naturally gratifying to an author to find that his book has maintained usefulness over twenty-two years, and is still sufficiently sought after to be worth updating. Scholars usually thank other scholars at the end of a preface. I am delighted to thank the students, the theatre people, and the general readers who have found some instruction and pleasure in my effort to narrate medieval history in a form that makes Shakespeare more accessible to them. And I am glad to say once more that the credit for the original idea belongs to James Steffensen, then at Wesleyan University, lately my colleague at Dartmouth. To his memory this new edition is dedicated.

Sanborn House Peter Saccio

Dartmouth College

November 1999

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