Sorting Out the Roses

In the last decade of the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote eight major history plays dealing with the royal persons of England - their struggles, triumphs, and defeats - who reigned between 1398 and 1485.

The Shakespeare scholar finds it useful to organize these plays into two tetralogies: first, Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V; second, Henry VI Parts I, II, and III, and Richard III. Each of the two sequences has a distinct unity. The first develops the success of the House of Lancaster, culminating in the spectacular victories of the young hero-king, Henry V (formerly the playboy Prince Hal). The second develops the decline and fall of the House of York, and the eventual establishment of the Tudor dynasty in the person of Henry VII.

For the potential reader of Professor Saccio's book, a word on what it is not. It is not a book on Shakespeare - or perhaps one should say that only in a very secondary way is it a book on Shakespeare. "I aim to provide a brief coherent account of English history in the reigns concerned, concentrating on the persons and the issues that Shakespeare dramatized," Saccio writes. This, then, is a book on the historical basis of the plays, not on the plays themselves.

As such it succeeds admirably. Anyone with a taste for that kind of history in which personality looms large, in which politics is a matter of personal strength, ambition, and strategy rather than national policy, will enjoy this volume. The drive to power, the elimination of rivals, the revenge upon enemies - these are conspicuous motivations in the men and women of both tetralogies, and Saccio develops them well.

When he turns to the plays themselves, he does so primarily to show how Shakespeare modified the stuff of history to create effective drama, or how the playwright followed the Tudor line regarding English history. Thus Shakespeare heightened characteristics to create conflicts, compressed time in the interest of tightened narrative, and altered the ages of his characters for dramatic purpose.

Henry IV Part I, for example, especially in the characters Prince Hal and Hotspur, illustrates some of these kinds of modification. Instead of being the natural young rivals Shakespeare presents, they were a generation apart, Hotspur actually being older than Hal's father. The delightful parts of the play, those featuring Falstaff and the madcap Prince Hal, are much more Shakespearean fiction than historical fact.

On Shakespeare's adoption of "the Tudor party line, Saccio, like other students of Shakespeare, notes that the Tudors, with their shaky claim to the throne, felt the need to vilify the last Yorkist king, Richard III, and to stress the pacifying and unifying role of Henry VII, the first Tudor, after nearly a century of turmoil under the houses of Lancaster and York.

This is a solid, useful book.

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KING'S:History, Chronicle, and DramaBy Professor Peter SaccioOxford, 1977. 268 pp. $13.95

Professor Pratt, a specialist in Renaissanceliterature, is chairman of the Department ofEnglish at Ohio Wesleyan University.