Although the Brontës' lives are obviously inscribed within a world of Victorian religion from their births as daughters of a clergyman to the final death of survivor Charlotte in the loving arms of her curate husband, although their works are filled with striking and prominent religious characters and scenes turning on religious issues, critics of the twentieth century did not much view the Brontës within religious structures of understanding. Issues of psychology, sexuality, feminism, social power, even the apparently far-removed worlds of colonial and imperial England preoccupied us far more. Nor was this merely a matter of the good reasons, which I shall attempt to provide below, for not inscribing the Brontës into one or another simple religious construction, of their age or ours; and for not seeing their vision as ultimately focused, as say Christina Rossetti's was, on religion, especially not on religious ultimates. Even their world of death was not seen as the traditional one of death and the afterlife but, as with the Brontës' other contemporary Dickens, this world of the dead and dying.

On the whole, unless the religious issues were so central as to brook no avoidance – for instance in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the priest Hopkins’ sonnets, Newman’s Apologia, or the very different representations of Trollope’s familiar world of Barsetshire clerical politics – we did not search with interest for religious themes.As the twentieth century turned away from those overstuffed Victorian memoirs of life and letters, they turned away from the obvious but rather unwelcome evidence of the age’s obsession with religion.

The two parts of Henry IV dramatise Prince Hal's coming of age amidst the political unrest following his father's usurpation of the throne of Richard II. The consequences of that usurpation weigh heavily upon King Henry: civil broils prolonged by those lords who helped him to the crown and now feel abandoned by him; fear of a rival claimant, Edmund Mortimer, whom Richard designated his heir; and an acute awareness that by killing Richard, he has violated - and made impossible to assume for himself - the divine right of kings. Such obstacles help to explain why his son Hal chooses to idle away his time in a tavern rather than at court. But Hal must learn to surmount them if he is to succeed his father, and in the royal narrative of Henry IV, which chronicles his progress from the taverns of Eastcheap to his coronation at Westminster, he does so: he defeats the rebels, transforms himself from wastrel to responsible heir, and strives to prove that linear succession can serve as a legitimate alternative to divine right. In dramatising his success, the two Henry IV plays offer a comic view of fifteenth-century history. Yet they also address political and social issues pertinent to Elizabethan England, and their popularity for Shakespeare's audiences no doubt resulted in part from their use of the past to comment on the present.

1. Pale Sisters! reared amid the purple sea

2. Of windy moorland, where, remote, ye plied

3. All household arts, meek, passion-taught and free,

4. Kinship your joy and Fantasy your guide!

5. Ah! Who again ’mid English heaths shall see

6. Such strength in frailest weakness, or so fierce

7. Behest on tender women laid, to pierce

8. The world’s dull ear with burning poetry?

9. Whence was your spell? and at what magic spring,

10. Under what guardian Muse, drank ye so deep

11. That still ye call and we are listening;

12. That still ye plain to us and we must weep?

13. Ask of the winds that haunt the moors, what breath

14. Blows in their storms, outlasting life and death!

Myth or myths?

A sombre moor – a treeless expanse of barely inhabited upland swept by savage storms. Three solitary figures, struggling against the wind or, perhaps, sitting in the austere parsonage, reading, writing and eagerly conversing about life, and literature, and love. From their talk rise other figures in similar landscapes, suffering, even tragic, but likewise bold and eager in claiming their share of 'life, fire, incident'. Jane and Rochester, Catherine and Heathcliff are names that shape the dreams of the young and haunt the minds of the old.

The Brontë sisters are not obviously difficult writers. Indeed, they may seem all too easily accessible. Generations of readers have thrilled to the passion of Cathy and Heathcliff, identified with the sufferings of Lucy Snowe and Agnes Grey, succumbed to Mr Rochester's dark allure. These are not texts which seem to require elucidation, but stories which millions have urgently, if often incoherently, felt to be speaking of and to their own most intimate concerns. And if - as Charlotte Brontë acknowledged, in the Biographical Notice with which, in 1850, she prefaced her sisters' novels - their strangeness has needed explanation, explanation has seemed readily to hand. Since the publication of that Notice, and of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë seven years later, the key to the Brontë s' works has been found - straightforwardly or more indirectly, both by ordinary reader and professional academic - in the peculiar circumstances of their authors' brief and tragic lives. The story of those lives has, indeed, assumed an almost mythic place in the English cultural imagination: after Shakespeare's Stratford, Haworth Parsonage is England's most visited literary shrine.

Richard II is a tour de force in verse with every character speaking poetry from beginning to end, but the play has many languages: its poetry is only one of them. Believed to have been written in 1595, Richard II is poised midway through the decade in which Shakespeare rewrote English history for the years 1398 to 1485. This play, whose second Quarto (1598) was the first of his published play-texts to have Shakespeare's name on its title-page, is also a key text for exploring his development as a writer. In 1679, thinking particularly of York's speech in 5.2 (lines 23-40), Dryden suggested that Shakespeare was able to 'infuse a natural passion into the mind', the implication being that he operated at a level deeper than the superficial 'noise' of bombastic poetry. Following the recognition of dramatic (as opposed to purely verbal) imagery in the early 1950s, in 1966 John Russell Brown stressed that understanding Richard's character involved more than merely analysing what he said: the importance of audiences being able to reach thoughts beyond words and read a subtext from them was seen as crucial to the 'stage reality' of Richard himself. For Russell Brown, Richard's silences and 'his last unthinking, physical reactions' were also part of languages that needed to be read.

Thus the thirteen-year-old Branwell recorded, with an acute sense of historical momentousness, his acquisition of various sets of toy soldiers, the 'Young Men', who were destined to have such an adventurous afterlife in the Brontëchildren's writings. The first set was given to him in 1824, the year in which four of his sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, left home for school. If the soldiers were meant to keep him company in the absence of all except the four-year-old Anne, the acquisition of three more sets in the following two years may have retained a connection with more traumatic losses: the deaths, in 1825, of his older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. When, in 1826, Charlotte, Emily and Anne pounced with delight on a new set of soldiers and each chose for herself the one who would become the projection and object of her special 'genius', the children had lost not only their mother, Maria Branwell, in 1821, but also these two sisters. The history of what the survivors 'really pretended did happen' to those toy soldiers carries the intensity of a story won, in part, from the harsh facts of childhood bereavement. Both a writing network and an imaginative safety net, the sagas of Angria and Gondal were the product of a collaborative sibling creativity which also included, like a ghostly memory, the ones who were dead. The poetry of the four Brontëchildren took root in those narratives.

Shakespeare’s plays on the reigns of English monarchs from King John to Henry V, together with his later groups of plays on ancient Rome, constitute what most of us think of as his history plays. A number of his other mature works have some connection with history and, though they do not form a group either in date of composition or in relation to one another, they illustrate Shakespeare’s developing concern with the nature of history and the issues it raises. I want to focus on two matters which came, I believe, to trouble him deeply, and provoked his most serious investigations of the processes by which we understand the past. The first of these matters may be briefly defined as the relation between history and myth. In the English history plays Shakespeare recreated Richard III cheerfully as the Yorkist monster we all love to hate, who prepared the way for the Tudor succession idealised in Queen Elizabeth. Also in the 1590s he established Henry V as a great, heroic English king whose glorious victories over the French might foreshadow later glorious victories over a Spanish enemy. It has become commonplace to stress the qualifications, even contradictions, in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry, whose ‘largess universal, like the sun’ (Chorus, Act 4) and religious scruples (4.1) hardly square with his threats to destroy Harfleur (3.4) and orders to kill the French prisoners (4.6); yet after all such anxieties are taken into account, including Falstaff’s send-up of heroic posturing and honour, the Henriad sequence remains to a significant degree a celebration of English history with a strong propagandist element appropriate to a decade when the country seemed to be under threat from the dominant power in Europe, Spain.

Genre

In 1623 when, seven years after Shakespeare's death, John Heminges and Henry Condell, the editors of First Folio (the first collected edition of Shakespeare's works), grouped roughly a third of Shakespeare's plays under the heading of 'histories', they confirmed a dramatic genre that Shakespeare himself seems to have endorsed: Polonius announced that 'the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history . . .' had arrived in Elsinore (Ham., 2.2.416). But Heminges and Condell also unloosed a host of critical problems - they seem to have recognised difficulties themselves. Troilus and Cressida, which they placed after Henry VIII, they entitled The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida. Yet this play is not included in the Folio's 'catalogue' or index of the tragedies, which are printed after the histories. In fact many have regarded Troilus as a 'history', which is how it had been categorised by the publisher of its Quarto version (1609) where it was entitled The Famous History of Troilus and Cresseid [sic]. In recent years critics have located Troilus among the 'problem plays' (plays that defy easy generic classification and which may be best approached by way of the ethical problems they explore).

Most biographies begin, as Dickens in David Copperfield famously said they should, at the beginning: that is, with the birth of their subject. Elizabeth Gaskell, however, took a different view, dedicating the first two chapters of her Life of Charlotte Brontë not to Charlotte, nor even to her ancestry, but to the place where she grew up and spent most of her adult life. In this way, Gaskell set Haworth at the forefront of the Brontëstory, deliberately linking place and subject in an exceptionally emphatic way. he explained why she did so quite candidly.

The reason why it was so necessary to do this is not immediately apparent to the modern reader, though it was obvious to Gaskell’s contemporaries. Jane Eyre had taken the literary world by storm when it appeared in 1847, but it was regarded in the terminology of the day as ‘a naughty book’.

'Once upon a time four gifted children built themselves a dream world, magnificently wrought and marvellously beautiful.' So begins the first serious study of the Brontë s' juvenile writings, Fannie Ratchford's The Brontë s' Web of Childhood, published in 1941. Ratchford's description of the juvenilia as 'a dream world' where the children 'found escape from the discipline and restraints of ordinary life' seems apt when one reads the journal Charlotte kept as a young teacher at Roe Head School. After one particularly tedious day in October 1836, she complained:

The dream Charlotte refers to is, of course, the romantic saga of love, war, passion, and revenge that she and her siblings had been writing together for nearly a decade.

Shirley was written in circumstances very different from any of the Brontës' previous works. It was not merely that its writing was interrupted by the deaths of Branwell, of Emily, of Anne; that this was the first of the extraordinary productions of that extraordinary family to be completed outside of that intimate circle of excited, hopeful discussion of which Charlotte Brontë's first biographer was to tell. Less striking, in retrospect, but perhaps no less significant is the fact that Shirley was the first of the Brontënovels to be written by a famous author. Charlotte's long apprenticeship in literature had culminated in success. One, at least, of those youthful 'scribblemaniacs' now had an established place amongst the writers of the day.

‘There has been no higher point in the whole history of English fiction’ writes Raymond Williams of the year in which Shirley was conceived. Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Kingsley’s Yeast were all appearing in parts; Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton was to be published before Shirley was complete.And it was against her famous contemporaries that its author measured herself. ‘Mr Thackeray, Mr Dickens, Mrs Marsh, & c., doubtless enjoyed facilities for observation such as I have not’, Charlotte Brontë had written to her publisher just before the appearance of Jane Eyre.‘Certainly they possess a knowledge of the world, whether intuitive or acquired, such as I can lay no claim to – and this gives their writings an importance and a variety greatly beyond what I can offer the public.’

Thomas Heywood, defending the theatre in his Apology for Actors (c.1612), writes that through drama everyone knows the history of England from William the Conqueror, nay even from Brutus. If not that full range, Shakespeare's history plays did nevertheless offer spectators and readers an opportunity to learn a significant part of English history. These theatre participants might expand and reinforce that knowledge through pageants and masques that constituted another major form of drama; these entertainments form the focus of this essay.

The Induction of 2 Henry IV can serve to open this subject. According to the stage directions, Rumour enters, ‘painted full of tongues’ and speaks: ‘Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?’ (1–2). This Rumour spreads continual slanders, a ‘pipe / Blown by surmises, Jealousy’s conjectures’ (15–16). But, Rumour asks, ‘what need I thus /My well-known body to anatomise?’ (20–1).

Jane Eyre is today a classic, canonical text, beloved of generations of readers. A passionate, headstrong narrative of a young woman confronting the world with obstinate integrity, it treats of marginality and loneliness, of the desire for adventure, intimacy and independence. Its heroine confronts myriad dangers and oppressions but survives to tell a tale of triumph and even revenge. Advertising itself as an autobiography – the title-page of the first edition reads Jane Eyre: An Autobiography edited by Currer Bell – it draws generically also on romance and quest narrative, fairy tale, the gothic novel, and the Bildungsroman. Densely allusive, it reflects its author's familiarity with the Bible, Milton and Shakespeare, and with works as diverse as Pilgrim's Progress and The Arabian Nights.Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is by comparison an obscure text. Though recently it has claimed the interest of feminist scholars for its focus on marital abuse and child custody, it has, in the one-hundred-and-fifty years since its publication, been neither well known nor well loved. Its dual narrative – the heroine's private diary framed by letters from her second husband to his brother-in-law – is often considered clumsy; its subject – a bad marriage and its consequences – depressing or uncongenial. The novel's frame of reference is religious rather than psychological; the Bible its most frequently quoted text. The heroine of The Tenant endures the degrading ordeal of her first marriage with piety and stoicism, trying to remain focused on doing her duty as she worries about her abusive husband's tainting and corruptive influence, even on herself. Only when she judges that maternal supersedes wifely duty does she flee him, abducting her child and hiding out in a distant county. The temperature of these texts, metaphorically speaking, is very different.

If, as many scholars believe, an early version of 2 Henry VI was the first history play Shakespeare wrote, then he began his dramatised version of the Tudor chronicles with Margaret's arrival at the English court. Although modern readers are unlikely to think of Margaret when recalling the memorable characters Shakespeare created, she is actually the subject of the earliest surviving reference to a Shakespearean character and to Shakespeare's work as a playwright. In 1592 Robert Greene complained about 'an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his “tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide”, supposes that he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country'. Even without the epithet 'Shake-scene', the identity of the upstart crow was probably clear to Greene's original readers, because 'his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide' echoes the charge 'O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide' (1.4.137) that York had levelled against Margaret in Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI. Greene's allusion, along with other evidence, has led James Forse to conclude that Shakespeare himself may have performed Margaret's part, but whether he did or not, it is clear that Margaret was a prominent and memorable character for Shakespeare's original audiences. She is the only character who appears in all four plays of the first 'tetralogy', and she plays a major role in shaping the course of the historical action in both Part 2 and Part 3 of Henry VI.