SOURCE: “Introduction 2: History,” in Shakespeare's History, Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1985, pp. 14-39.

In the essay below, Holderness maintains that many of Shakespeare's plays, especially the English history plays, were intentional acts of historiography. In particular, Holderness analyzes the second tetralogy (Richard II through Henry V) and argues that the historiography offered in these plays was a new, emergent form with a bourgeois viewpoint.

The argument of this book could, and ideally should, be applied more broadly than the scope of the enterprise allows. Although it is based on an underlying hypothesis that most of Shakespeare's plays were conscious and deliberate acts of historiography, it adheres to that group of plays categorised as ‘Histories’ as early as the First Folio of 1623, and uncontroversially acknowledged as ‘English History Plays’ ever since. From the whole range of Shakespeare's drama of national history (the series of eight plays which together constitute a...