Shakespeare’s plays suggest not so much a preoccupation with war as his recognition of its inescapability. He seems never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but no doubt had spoken to people who had. But most of what Shakespeare knew came from books. Chief among these were the chronicles he depended upon for his histories, primarily the group project we refer to as “Holinshed.” What he found was that warfare is more or less indistinguishable over time, a fact revealed in the tedious repetition of battle accounts, further blurred by the echoing of aristocratic family names over generations – and, in the often-overlooked source of the 1577 Holinshed, in which the recycling of a limited number of woodcuts to illustrate events separated by hundreds of years reveals the dispiriting reality. Ironically, it is in Henry V, Shakespeare’s seemingly most triumphal presentation of English military heroism, in which “the question of these wars” finds an answer.

2 September 1642 is perhaps the best-known date in the history of the English theatre. On that day, Parliament ordered the theatres closed:

While this has often been taken as the order that ended playing for the eighteen years of the interregnum, in truth it neither accomplished that nor intended to. Parliament in September of 1642 ordered a temporary stay of playing, not unlike those that followed the deaths of Prince Henry or of King James, when it was similarly held ‘that these tymes doe not suit such playes and idle shewes’. No doubt many who voted for it hoped that the injunction would permanently remain in effect, but the explicit intent of the bill before Parliament was to stop playing at a particularly charged moment, one that demanded ‘sad and pious Solemnity’ rather than public sport, and that proposed, ‘instead of playgoing’, determined efforts to effect ‘Repentence, Reconciliation, and Peace with God’.

History in Shakespeare's England: from Caxton to Camden

Shakespeare's artistry uncannily animates the past. As one near contemporary insists, in a commendatory poem in the second edition of Shakespeare's collected plays (1632), the plays energetically present 'what story [i.e., history] coldly tells', and they even more literally enliven history in their ability 'to raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse'. The stage makes the past present and allows its audiences vicarious emotional participation. When historical characters are represented in the theatre, 'the present age / Joys in their joy and trembles at their rage'. For the commendatory poet, this is value enough; we are 'by elaborate play / Tortured and tickled'.

Yet the representation of the past was of more serious concern to many in Shakespeare's England. History was unquestionably among the most influential forms of writing circulating among the ranks of an increasingly literate populace, and history plays were written not least to exploit in the theatre the enthusiasm for history that was evident in the bookstalls. But to understand what these history plays were (and were not) for the audiences that saw them, it is necessary to think about how the more traditional forms of history writing were understood and valued.