King John is a provocatively problematic play. In terms of its provenance alone, there have been keenly debated exchanges about its genealogical relationship to its main source, with editors of scholarly editions arguing on either side for Shakespeare's play as a source for the anonymous The Troublesome Reign of John King of England and for the latter as a source for the former. While the majority prefer to see Troublesome Reign as the source, and the most recent accounts of this have been quite dismissive of the opposite camp, the debate in its entirety has led to useful close readings of the anonymous play. Discussion concerning other known sources (Holinshed, Foxe, Hall) and an analogue, Radulph of Coggeshall's English Chronicle (written in Latin), has been somewhat less heated, and there are far fewer arguments for a direct use of its other dramatic analogue, Bale's King Johan. But there are resonances, if not replications, between Bale's and Shakespeare's plays that, if properly investigated, might reinforce some of the more recent scholarly excursions on Shakespeare's behalf, and there is a strong temptation to imagine, if not actually believe, that Shakespeare 'worked with the old play in his head, if not in his hand'.

With Nathan Drake, ‘we are well aware, that, to many of our readers, the chronological discussion incident to a new arrangement, will be lamented as tedious and uninteresting; the more so, as nothing absolutely certain can be expected as the result’.

This chapter places the Brontënarratives in three intersecting contexts: the changing social circumstances in which their work appeared, the changing literary context in which works of narrative were created and understood by Victorian people, and certain ideological factors which unite these two. The key term is 'character', and here we need to distinguish two quite separate meanings. There is, first, the modern sense of character as the literary depiction of psychologically complex personalities. But there is also a Victorian sense of character (hereafter designated 'character') as a desirable moral quality. I will argue that the Brontënovels were written at a point in literary history when the modern 'psychological' understanding of character emerged as a significant criterion in the judgement of fiction, and a more open enquiry into the nature of human behaviour contested moral orthodoxies. The tussle between the two engages key issues: what is the private cost of public image? What pressure does the ideological environment exert on personal behaviour? How can writers of fiction represent the contest between them?

To be thought to be ‘of good character’ was, in most circles of the literate population of Victorian Britain, an absolute requirement of those entering employment.It was also essential for those entering respectable marriage.

By transforming the chronicles of Tudor historians into drama, Shakespeare and his contemporaries brought English history onto the English stage. History and performance converged, attracting thousands of spectators. For the Elizabethans, history meant political history, particularly stories of kings and high officials, who were seen as embodying the health of the state. As William Baldwin put it in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), 'where offices are duly ministered, it can not be chosen, but the people are good, whereof must needs follow a good common weal. For if the officers be good, the people cannot be ill. Thus the goodness or badness of any realm lieth in the goodness or badness of the rulers.'

The evaluation of rulers, however, was not the only goal of sixteenth-century historiographers. They wanted to know not only whether Henry VI had been a good or bad king, but also why. What were the causes of political success and failure, and what lessons could be drawn from English political history? In these concerns, Tudor historians resembled students of history today. Where they differed was in their interest, or lack of it, in accuracy. For example, Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1587), the chroniclers most used by Shakespeare, gathered their narratives of medieval English history not from primary documents or eyewitness accounts, but from earlier chronicles and literary stories.

In September 1841, Charlotte Brontë wrote an audacious letter soliciting funds for a European venture:

The eldest Brontë daughter proposed a living narrative of self-improvement, attainable by those who, like the hero of The Professor, direct their energies towards an ambitious goal: 'Hope smiles on Effort!' She requested cash: “the needful”,as it is characterised in the northern industrial idiom of Charlotte's first novel: 'I must live, and to live I must have what you call “the needful”; which I can only get by working' (P, 44). The Professor is a narrative of selfhelp, like Mrs Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). Pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps, the practice of frugality and business probity, taking careful initiatives in pursuit of financial independence and security, were major themes in Charlotte's life. Her managing mind initiated the idea of a school, further education in Belgium and the submission of the sisters' first novels in June 1846: a three-volume work comprising 'three distinct and unconnected tales', Charlotte's The Professor (then entitled The Master), Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey (CBL I, 461).

'Enter Time, holding an hour-glass', to usher in a new generation. Like most of his contemporaries, Shakespeare was aware of time's destructive powers. Unlike most of them, he was also sensitive to its healing qualities. Before his own farewell to the stage, he gave a speaking part to this major actor of the human drama. Richard II played with time, and discovered too late that a king can shorten lives but not add one minute to his own, nor call back yesterday to correct fatal errors. At the end of the Plantagenet sequence Henry V, who has learnt from his predecessors' mistakes, 'weighs time to the utmost grain'.

Time as a devourer had become an obsessive theme for Renaissance authors. A desperate fight against oblivion inspired the writing strategies of the poets and dramatists, who turned to historians for materials to feed their anxieties. Their forebears, like all humble Christians, had little time for this earthly life and no great doubt of their ultimate salvation. For a majority of them, life was indeed an ordeal, a passage through a vale of tears, mercifully ended by death and the reward of eternal bliss. Their main fear was of the Devil, whose traps could lure the weak flesh to damnation. If man would but see reason, Hell was too heavy a price for any pleasures the earth could afford.

In performance, Richard of Gloucester emerges as the complete figure of the 'chameleon' prince previously featured in 3 Henry VI (3.2.191). This essay will argue that Shakespeare poetically reworked his sources to develop further the figure of Richard III as a degenerate monster. Richard's self-proclaimed deformity, a sign both of unnaturalness and enormity, is established at the very beginning of the play when Shakespeare's brilliant strategic placing of Richard's body and large histrionic presence emerges from its famous opening speech:

Discussion of Henry V is too often concerned solely with the character of its eponymous hero. Buoyed by the rich psychology of the resembling contrasts that infuse pairs of characters in 1 and 2 Henry IV, critics may be disappointed by the transmutation from prince to king. Una Ellis-Fermor declares 'it is in vain that we look for the personality of Henry behind the king, there is nothing else there', and she concludes that Henry has become 'a dead man walking'. Evaluation of Henry becomes inextricably entangled with unease about definitions of the heroic and disquiet about patriotic fervour. Michael Billington's assumption that 'We see more productions of Titus Andronicus than of Henry V these days' because the 'latter's undeniable patriotism' embarrasses us may reflect how Henry V has been misrepresented in recent years. Although discussion of character and of the military ethic have dominated the critical debate, the antipathy that the play can prompt may stem from a mistaken assumption about its focus. The priority in Henry V is not with exploring character but rather in the play's profound consideration of the theatrical construct. Shakespeare's investment in his choric architecture insists upon an intellectual engagement with the process whereby a creative partnership can be forged between stage and audience. The speech which opens Henry V presents in the form of an uncompromising direct address to its audience Shakespeare's dramatic manifesto.

In chapter 9 of Shirley, Charlotte Brontëgives us a brief, vivid description of the Yorke family's domestic life. Among the six children, the twelve-year-old Rose stands out for her strength of character. Although her strong-minded, dour mother would like to turn Rose into a copy of herself, 'a woman of dark and dreary duties', the girl is of a very different, independent mould. She has 'a mind full-set, thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew' and it 'is agony to her often to have these ideas trampled on and repressed' (S, 148). Later, Rose shares her impressions of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian with Caroline Helstone: the gothic romance, she says, feeds her longings to travel, and she expansively gestures to the breadth of her hunger for experience:

Tetralogy thinking

In its Summer 2000 programme, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the staging of Shakespeare's two tetralogies as a cycle called This England. The programme made a distinctive break with the past by conceding that the plays were 'originally conceived by Shakespeare at different times and written in non-chronological order', but, in order to preserve the integrity of the history play cycle, the programme went on to argue that the separate plays together 'form a collage of one man's insight into England's history'. No one authorial vision, or even one directorial vision, would dominate this cycle, and the plays were to be staged in all the different theatre spaces of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As a self-styled 'national' theatre, the RSC was swimming with the currents of the time, matching national devolution with a form of artistic devolution in which its various, disparate spaces were reconstellated as an architectural metaphor of the United Kingdom, with unity is sustained only through the acknowledgement of difference. In this way, the This England cycle both accepted that the plays are not a unified, complete work and presented an authorial, legitimate way of seeing the plays as a set of works on a shared theme.

John Heminges and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and the compilers of the first collection of his plays in the First Folio (1623), would have been surprised at critical reaction to their organisation of the volume. Gathering plays about England under the rubric of History and plays about Rome under the rubric of Tragedy, they could have intended no serious generic distinction. In the parlance of the time the terms overlapped and interpenetrated. Both histories and tragedies related stories of past ‘contentions’ as well as the lives and deaths of famous figures. The 1594 Quarto of 2 Henry VI featured the ‘Contention’ between the houses of York and Lancaster as well as the ‘tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester’; similarly, the Quartos of Richard II (1597) and Richard III (1597) both offered ‘Tragedy’ to their readers on the title-pages. Titus Andronicus appeared in the Stationers’ Register, the official record book of the London company of Stationers (booksellers and printers), as ‘a Noble Roman History’; the 1594 Quarto, however, advertised the play as The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus.

John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), is alleged to have said that he knew no English history but what he had learned from Shakespeare. The irony of Marlborough's claim was that Shakespeare's ten history plays, covering a century and a half between them, could eclipse the infinitely broader, complex narrative of the English nation. A similar type of irony may be discerned in the modern reception of the Shakespearean history play. Here, the experience of many readers and theatre-goers with the Shakespeare histories tends to be inversely proportional to their familiarity with the genesis and history of the history play as a literary genre in an early modern European context, in England and abroad. The same individual who might now visit Blenheim Palace at Woodstock under the assumption that the Duke of Marlborough was a wealthy tobacconist, is likely also to live under the delusion that Shakespeare invented the history play. But as G. K. Hunter has rightly noted, 'Shakespeare could not, any more than God, invent ex nihilo.' Shakespeare had predecessors but also contemporaries who practised the history play, and although it seems beyond doubt, as Richard Helgerson has argued, that 'Shakespeare did make a larger contribution to that genre than anyone else', these contemporaries provide an indispensable framework within which the unique achievement of Shakespeare may be appreciated. One of the aims of this essay is to bring into focus Shakespeare's accomplishment within the immediate English contexts of the new genre. In addition, this essay seeks to position Shakespeare and the early modern project of historical drama in its no less relevant, though frequently neglected, European framework.

At times Fitzgerald and his contemporaries gained enough perspective on their sense of feeling dispossessed to recognize it as an old story – as we see, for example, in Glenway Wescott’s Goodbye, Wisconsin (1928), where displaced Midwesterners become “a sort of vagrant chosen race like the Jews.” But for the most part they left such ties unexplored. Rather than reach out to recent immigrants, women, or African Americans, they remained almost as jealous of their status and control as Tom Buchanan is of his. Cowley notes, for example, that “the admired writers of the generation were men in the great majority” and adds that they were also “white, middle-class, mostly Protestant by upbringing, and mostly English and Scottish by descent,” without stopping to wonder whether such a configuration was more created than given and, if created, by whom and in whose interests and, further, why, once created, it gained such easy acceptance in the United States during Coolidge’s presidency. In the process, he ignores issues that now leap out at us.

Cowley’s “admired writers” thought of themselves as rejecting the prejudices and provincialisms of their day. They bemoaned the Senate’s acts in the aftermath of the war; denounced the KKK, the Red Scare, and the persecution of Sacco and Vanzetti; and condemned the vulgar materialism and ruthless profiteering of businessmen. Such pronouncements fit their sense of themselves as an oppressed minority of cultural loyalists. Yet many writers, including some Cowley admired, harbored and even expressed versions of the ambitions and prejudices they thought of themselves as rebelling against, a fact that may help to explain why their society rewarded them in ways that it did not reward black writers of Harlem, Jewish writers of New York’s East Side, or women writers anywhere, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York to Paris, many of whom it pushed into the marginalized tasks of running bookstores, editing small journals, and writing diaries.