SOURCE: “History for the Elizabethans,” in Shakespeare: The Chronicles, Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1962, pp. 7-12.

In the essay below, Leech argues that while Shakespeare does honor sixteenth-century attitudes toward the value of history to some degree, the playwright also transcends—both in literary expertise and poetic insight—the chronicles he used as source material.

Most of us to-day know that history does not repeat itself, that few things are more dangerous than responding to present circumstances as if they duplicated those that a previous generation had to cope with. Of course, some of our public men and some of our military strategists do exactly that, but the colder manner of contemplation, difficult to maintain in a position of power, makes us recognise a dynamic principle in men and society. Such a principle is incompatible with the notion of repetition. In the sixteenth century, however, men commonly saw...