Holinshed's Chronicles

"The Chronicles are a large compendium of fact and narration that Shakespeare used for over a third of his plays—the English histories (both tetralogies) as well as King Lear and Macbeth . The Chronicles are a collection of other writers that Holinshed put together; there are other chronicles from Hall and other people included, so they are not even all factually coherent. It’s not always a univocal text. And Shakespeare’s got a problem here: he’s got a lot of material—way more material than you can use in all of these plays. He’s also got way more time than you can accommodate in a drama in the whole reign of a king. With Henry IV, Prince Hal and Hotspur, Shakespeare builds the drama out of the collision of young men. This really isn’t in Holinshed. I think Hal wasn’t even at the Battle of Shrewsbury—he was a boy at the time—but Shakespeare brings him in and has him do that great final battle scene with Hotspur. It’s great stuff, but it never happened. It wasn’t even close to happening. And then you have Shakespeare taking a number of stories to create Macbeth. Macbeth actually reigned very well for ten years; he wasn’t a tyrant. It was Duncan who was morally compromised. Whereas Shakespeare created Duncan as a saintly figure who is purely the victim. And there’s no real Lady Macbeth to speak of there. There’s a weak prototype, but there’s nothing like the woman we get in Shakespeare. And Holinshed’s providential reading of history—that it’s all the working out of God’s plan—is highly questionable at the end of Macbeth , when we’ve had the witches and seen the way the politics works. It’s also highly questionable in Henry V , where you have the church people of Canterbury and Ely backing the war in France for entirely selfish political reasons, which is another scene that Shakespeare invents. The whole war in France—the whole patriotic endeavour—is seen in this ironic light. Maybe the whole thing is another kind of Gads Hill robbery: if you rob people, you go to prison; but if you rob kingdoms, then you become an epic national hero like Henry V. Shakespeare creates this ironic perspective, which is not in Holinshed, on the action. He’s always telescoping events, going against the grain, and focussing on complex human beings, and questioning the morality of the great movements and players in history. Moreover, Shakespeare gives Richard III a voice unlike anything in Holinshed. All those wild declamatory soliloquies and the theatrical wooing of Lady Anne, the preening partial performance motivated by his deformity—all of that wonderful stuff is all Shakespeare asking, ‘How can I create a tyrant who is compelling on stage?’ Shakespeare is also interested in the great intellectual debates of the day. And the great political question of the day is tyrannicide. Can you kill an anointed king? Can you knock off a tyrant? And the answer for some people is if he or she is a tyrant then you can, but that wasn’t the official line in England. The official line was that even if the bad king or queen is a tyrant, you have to simply suffer the reign. Shakespeare, unlike Holinshed, is really interested in these questions. In Richard II , he sets it up so that you can see Richard is a bad king and perhaps deserves deposition—but he laces it with these ambivalences. Richard himself becomes something else in the last two acts of the play, with that eloquent voice that on stage makes your heart go against your head and creates that magical confusion. You won’t find that sort of complexity in Holinshed. It’s in Julius Caesar , too. One construction of the play is that it is about what constitutes a tyrant. Is Caesar a tyrant in entrance —somebody who comes to power illegally? Or in practice —somebody who rules for himself rather than for the good of the commonwealth? Those are the classic definitions of tyranny. Shakespeare takes both and plays with them throughout Julius Caesar . Is Caesar a tyrant or isn’t he? There’s plenty of evidence on both sides. Who has the right to decide? These were the hottest questions in Europe. The Catholics in England were arguing for the justice of tyrannicide, and in France it was the Protestants. One of the great ironies is that the Protestant treatises in France and the Catholic treatises in England all used the same arguments and the same examples to slay or not to a slay a king, even though they’re from opposite sides. This debate informs the drama of Macbeth : we’re supposed to be horrified at the killing of King Duncan but also supposed to celebrate the killing of the second king, Macbeth. That’s really what the play asks us to do. But the only reason that works is that Shakespeare scants the coronation scene—Macbeth just comes in with the crown and we see him as a usurper—and in the second half of the play he’s called a tyrant about eight times and acts like one, especially in ordering the killing of Macduff’s wife and children. There’s also all that animal imagery—that he is really not a human being but a dog, and so on. The same thing happens in Richard III , when we’re supposed to accept the killing of that king; he’s described as a “boar”, as an animal. But you won’t find these complex ethical issues in Holinshed. It’s simply not that kind of chronicle. There are dates, a sense that this happened, then this happened. But to make it into drama, Shakespeare thinks about emotional reactions as well as intellectual issues. Petrarch (1304–1374) is a figure like Marx and Freud: he is inescapable. This posture of the lover who longs for a beloved underlies the Canzoniere , his set of sonnets. What’s fascinating about that is that he can’t quite get to the place where Dante is. Dante writes the purest example of a sequence wherein it’s not earthly love versus heavenly love, as Augustine put it. For Dante, earthly love leads to love of God; they are on a continuum. Beatrice becomes the one who brings him to Paradise in the Divine Comedy . But Petrarch never gets there. He talks about how he can’t get there; how love is a sin—“ errore. ” Love is a great cheat, a delusion. Finally, at the end of his career, he writes a renunciation of earthly love to the Virgin Mary. But that’s not the way the West went. Petrarch has his Laura, whilst Pierre de Ronsard has Cassandra, Marie, and Helen. It’s a very French variation to have three mistresses. But the West takes up Petrarch’s struggles: the idea of earthly desire, doubt, disappointment, unrequited eros coming from the beloved’s eye, the idea of lover experiencing contrary passions—“I burn, I freeze”—the idea of love as an obsession, as a stumbling block, as the only thing one would die for. All of that is Petrarch. He gives this intensely complicated legacy of anguish and love. “Petrarch gives this intensely complicated legacy of anguish and love” We see this in Shakespeare as well. We have “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth” in Sonnet 146. You also see it in Romeo and Juliet . You have that wonderful sonnet by Petrarch on the lover as a ship (189, Passa la nave mia ) which is then taken up by Sir Thomas Wyatt with his line “My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness.” And what does Romeo say at the end? When he’s about to commit suicide, he’s the ship at sea but he wants not to come to port but shipwreck: “Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide. Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on, The dashing rocks thy seasick, weary bark.” All of that would never have happened without Petrarch. Shakespeare seems to allude to Petrarch and the Petrarchan tradition in Sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” He’s playing with all the Petrarchan images and turning them on their head. But did Shakespeare actually read Petrarch, or did he just know of him through the writings of countless other sonneteers? It’s very hard to answer. We don’t have evidence of Shakespeare reading Petrarch in anything like the detail of his reading North’s Plutarch or Seneca and Plautus. We just don’t know. But we can see the power of the poetic tradition and the reception of these things in the power of his love poetry and his plays. I think so. T S Eliot borrowed from Shakespeare and borrowed from all over and said “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.” Eliot is a good example—he is someone who weaves a complicated fabric from Dante and medieval literature in his poetry , in the Four Quartets especially. I think it still would have worked for Shakespeare. And, of course, we also always have the editor’s great salvation and means of escape: the footnote! [ Laughs ]. “See Seneca, p. 32.” Fortunately, when we’re in the theatre, we just don’t care where the reference comes from."