Shakespeare: My Favorite Historical Fiction Writer?

A brief foray into the history plays and their relationship to history.

Hi everyone!

This week, I’m re-evaluating how I see the genre of historical fiction and its authors, including Billy Shakes.

The Long History of Historical Fiction

Since I’m writing a historical novel, I tend to think first of contemporary examples — aka other novels — when I hear the words “historical fiction.”¹ Since my novel-in-progress takes place during Henry VIII’s reign, my mind usually heads straight to my literary North Star: the brilliant trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s most effective advisor, by Hilary Mantel.²

However, writing about Hamnet last week — Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about the illness and death of Shakespeare’s son — reminded me that historical fiction has a much longer history.

The beginning of canonical western literature as we know it actually started with historical fiction. I’m talking about Homer’s Iliad: an oral epic poem about the Trojan War, an event from the 12th or 13th century BCE first written down in the 8th century BCE. It’s true that The Iliad includes mythical heroes like Achilles, as well as the Greek gods themselves. But behind the myth surely lies actual conflicts between the Greeks and the Trojans.

What does this tell us? That humans have been fascinated with the exploits of our forebears since the beginning of written literature.

And that brings me back to Shakespeare.

Interlude: My History with Shakespeare

The first Shakespeare play I read was The Tempest, in eighth grade. Ninth grade, English Honors, saw us tackle Romeo and Juliet. Tenth grade was American literature, so it wasn’t until junior year of high school that we returned to British literature and read both Hamlet and Macbeth. My high school Shakespeare curriculum ended with AP English, in which we read The Taming of the Shrew. Looking back at this somewhat unconventional path through Shakespeare, I notice a few things. My eighth grade teacher likely chose The Tempest for its magical theme. It made sense to tackle the two greatest tragedies in 11th grade, though Taming of the Shrew seems quite an idiosyncratic choice.

When I taught high school English for two years, I did Macbeth with the ninth graders one year and The Merchant of Venice the other. Merchant worked better, I think. I opted for Antony and Cleopatra for my juniors instead of Hamlet, figuring they would likely encounter that play at some point in college. I regret that slightly now, as one student expressed their wish to read Hamlet. (But then again, just read it on your own, no?)

I then had the unbelievable good fortune to take Shakespeare with Phyllis Rackin my freshman (or first) year of undergrad. Phyllis is an exemplary scholar of Shakespeare who did groundbreaking work on gender in the plays.

We started with Richard II, for the simple reason that she loved it. It’s now one of my favorites. I can’t remember all of the ones we read, but I got to check Othello, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antony and Cleopatra, and Richard III off my unread list.

In a world where we’re obsessed with tracking and gamifying everything — counting our steps with pedometers, learning language on an app where an overenthusiastic owl gives you points — it’s easy to fall into the trap of just reading a Shakespeare play to read it. To achieve the goal of having read them all.

Last week, I wrote about potentially choosing a play to read for this year. Amusingly, I realized that there were a couple of plays that I may have read but just can’t remember. I’m pretty sure I’ve read one, if not two, of the three parts of Henry VI — but which one(s) have I missed? I think I read both parts of Henry IV, but maybe I haven’t? I was pretty sure I hadn’t read King John, but I checked it off as read in the table of contents of my Norton Shakespeare, so I guess I have?

My biggest gap is in the comedies, which are my least favorite of the three types identified by the compilers of the First Folio in 1623: comedies, histories, and tragedies. (The Norton adds the genre of “Romance,” though I’ve also seen those plays categorized as “problem plays.” )

If you’d asked me as a teenager and early college student, I’d have said of course the tragedies were my favorite.

But now, I think it’s the histories.

I’ll choose a play for this year soon, and you’ll be the first to know.

Myth-Making and Myth-Busting

The modern conception of genius authors like Shakespeare places a lot of emphasis on originality: creation ex nihilo (Latin for “out of nothing”).

This is bullshit.

I was once told that all stories boil down to two main concerns: Eros and Thanatos, or sex and death. (To my surprise, I just learned that that’s a Freudian concept, this idea that everything can be reduced to what he called the “life drive” and the “death drive.” Ah, Freud. Great close reader of Hamlet.)

I would edit this slightly: all good stories are about sex and death. As human animals, we are wired biologically to keep our own bodies going and to ensure our DNA continues by procreating. We are, in that sense, no better than viruses: our simple goal is to survive.

What differentiates us from other animals and the rest of the biological world is our ability to reflect on these impulses and make meaning out of them.³

My point is that none of Shakespeare’s stories are original in nature. They, too, are all about sex or death or both, and they borrow heavily from their ancient Greek and Roman forebears. The comedies are essentially boy-meets-girl rom coms that riff off of plots by authors like Seneca. The tragedies follow Aristotle’s conventions for tragedy that he laid out in his Poetics, which he created using the plays of the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles as a model (especially Oedipus the King): noble-born hero has fatal character flaw that brings about his downfall and that of everyone he loves, everybody dies, the End.

The histories are essentially tragedies, but about real events.

Shakespeare wrote ten histories that we know of: King John, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, and All Is True (about Henry VIII).⁴

With the exception of King John and All Is True, the plays focus on the period in English history between the deposition of Richard II in 1399 and the death of Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. It was a messy time that featured the peak of England’s upset victory over France in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 but mostly concerned the horrific civil war known as the Wars of the Roses (a huge influence on George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series).

For Shakespeare’s playgoers, these events were between one and two centuries old, but they would have felt very contemporary in the questions they raised about the nature of kingship. (Famously, before the rebellion of Elizabeth I’s former favorite the earl of Essex in 1601, some of his supporters had asked Shakespeare’s company to perform Richard II. The queen is purported to have snapped, “I am Richard II! Know you not that?” upon hearing about the performance. Also, Shakespeare definitely wrote Macbeth to kiss up to King James I of England, since the Scottish king portrayed himself as distantly related to Banquo, Macbeth’s friend-turned-foe who is unjustly murdered by the tyrant.)

By writing about history, Shakespeare isn’t making anything up in terms of plot. He’s not even making much up in terms of character: these figures had very clear reputations, thanks to historical texts like Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, first published in 1577.

As an example, let’s take a look at Richard III, probably the most famous of the history plays. We know Shakespeare used Holinshed for inspiration, as well as other texts like Sir (later Saint) Thomas More’s ca.1513 text History of King Richard the Third.⁵ It’s from these texts that he takes certain character traits, like Richard often gnawing on his lip, the rumor that he was born with teeth, and especially his crooked spine.

(The late Anthony Sher playing Richard III in a 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production.)

Shakespeare’s genius was in taking these traits and then portraying Richard as an unbelievably seductive, fun man despite them. In the play, Richard is a crookbacked schemer who covets the throne and will do anything to get it. His opening soliloquy is a masterpiece, as seductive as the opening speech Milton’s Satan will give nearly a century later in Paradise Lost.

I can’t quote the whole thing here (it’s 40 lines), but here’s a taste. He opens the soliloquy by announcing his brother’s rise to the kingship:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York (1.1.1-2)

Yet, Richard’s life is not glorious, because he is a hunchbacked, lame ugly man — so “rudely stamped….That dogs bark at me as I halt by them” (1.1.16, 23).

But while his looks mean he cannot be a hero, he’s still ambitious. So, he aims for the opposite role:

And therefore since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determinèd⁶ to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (1.1.28-31)

And oh boy, does Richard achieve villainhood. (Villain status: unlocked, in gamer speak.) He reminds us that the bad boys are the fun ones — at least until the bodies start piling up.

In fact, his evil wiles are so attractive that the next scene sees him promptly seducing the last woman you’d imagine would warm to him: Anne Neville, the widow of a man Richard killed in battle.⁷ But not just any man: Prince Edward, the heir to his father Henry VI’s throne. With the deaths of Prince Edward and Henry VI, Richard’s brother Edward IV became king.

In the play, Richard approaches Anne at her father-in-law’s funeral. (Talk about gall!) While she initially berates him, he eventually talks her into marrying him.

He then turns to us and spills the tea:

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

I’l have her, but I’ll not keep her long.

What, I that killed her husband and his father,

To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of my hatred by,

Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

And I no friends to back my suit withal

But the plain devil and dissembling looks —

And yet to win her, all the world to nothing? Ha! (1.2.215-25)

Can you believe it? Richard asks us. This woman would be willing to marry ugly ol’ me after I KILLED her father-in-law and husband! And to agree to it at her father-in-law’s funeral?! What a dipshit! Ah, well. I’ll kill her soon enough, too.

It’s an asshole move, but you can’t help but nod in agreement. Yeah! What a dipshit!

(In reality, both of these marriages were politically motivated, arranged marriages, and Anne and Richard appear to have had a good relationship. Richard also did not kill Anne, though rumors spread that he had her poisoned before her death in 1485 so that he could marry his niece, Elizabeth of York. It’s more likely Anne died of tuberculosis.)

Ultimately, Shakespeare flattens the real Richard’s complex motives for his actions before and during his time as king, while he amps up Richard’s character into a fascinating portrait of what we might call a psychopath: someone lacking in empathy who can’t see past the big chip on his (uneven) shoulder.

Richard III has shaped our modern understanding of Richard III far more than any documents from his kingship — or from the other, earlier works by More and Holinshed.

And then history intervened.

Crooked Man in a Car Park

In 2012, Richard III’s bones were unearthed under a car park (aka parking lot) in Leicester in 2012, not far from Bosworth Field, where Richard died at the hands of Henry Tudor’s army.

The dig was primarily funded by the Richard III Society, a group that has existed since 1924 with the sole purpose of rehabilitating his reputation:

In the belief that many features of the traditional accounts of the character and career of Richard III are neither supported by sufficient evidence nor reasonably tenable, the Society aims to promote, in every possible way, research into the life and times of Richard III, and to secure a reassessment of the material relating to this period, and raise awareness of the role in history of this monarch.

Before Richard’s bones were found, many in the society maintained that his crooked back was an invention or exaggeration by historical and literary sources. But his bones actually showed severe scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. In Richard’s day, such deformities and disabilities were considered outward signs of a moral perversion. (Hence posthumous accusations that Anne Boleyn was born with an extra finger on one hand by her enemies.) So, Richard’s opening soliloquy in Richard III would have made sense to Elizabethan audiences. Such a physically crooked man could only be crooked morally as well.

(You can see the curve here, as well as the hole in his skull from the battlefield.)

While we still live in a terribly ableist world, we at least no longer make such direction connections between disability and morality. Nowadays, if we see him as a bad person — if not a bad king (more on that later) — it’s because Richard left quite a trail of dead bodies in his rise to power and his reign. The most notable of these were his 12 and 9 year-old nephews: Edward V of England (though never crowned) and Richard of Shrewsbury, duke of York.

There’s no conclusive proof about the fate of the so-called Princes in the Tower. (They were kept in the Tower of London, which at the time was the traditional lodgings for monarchs and consorts prior to their coronation and therefore not associated with all the executions that took place during Henry VIII’s reign.) But we know that they were never seen out in public after Richard’s coronation in 1483, and that’s a pretty bad look for Richard. He was also the one with the most to gain, as they were not just pretenders to the throne but, arguably, the true king and his next-in-line.

In recent years, historians have reconsidered Richard’s motives for all of his actions, including the likely (but not proven) death of the boy princes. It’s a complex story, but essentially historians don’t see Richard as a bloody psychopath who took the kingship in a maniacal grab for power. Instead, his focus was making sure his family — the House of York — stayed in charge, instead of letting the family of his brother’s wife take charge.⁸

Even so, the reality is that Richard killed a lot of people to gain, and then hold onto, the kingship. So, it was easy for the Tudor propaganda machine — including Shakespeare — to portray him as a villain. Shakespeare just makes his villainy far more interesting and delightful to watch than other writers.

I want to return to the idea of disability, though, and how discovering Richard’s bones can potentially give us some insight into a famous line from the end of Shakespeare’s play:

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! (5.7.7, 13)

Richard actually says this twice in the play, underscoring its importance. He has been, well, unhorsed on the battlefield at Bosworth and is seeking to regain the literal high ground over his enemies.

Richard had always been portrayed as a great warrior, even by his haters. Could he have been, though, with such a severe deformity?

Well, scholars had a chance to find out, thanks to a man named Dominic Smee with a remarkably similar form of severe scoliosis. In 2014, a Channel 4 documentary aired called Richard III: The New Evidence. Smee underwent training from medieval weapons and warfare experts, and even had a suit of armor made for him, to test whether someone with his capabilities could have led a calvary charge.

To everyone’s surprise, the armor and medieval saddle helped Smee immensely: they held his spine rigid in a position where he could ride and even hit targets with a lance without tiring too quickly. Since Richard would have been trained since childhood, it’s easy to imagine he would have been a formidable warrior —

As long as he was on a horse.

Smee’s limitations became clear when he tried to do hand-to-hand combat. The position of his ribs made it hard for him to breath deeply, and his stamina was therefore much less than that of people without his degree of curvature.

So, when Shakespeare’s Richard desperately wants a horse, he means it even more than other kings of the day. He fought best on horseback, simply because it suited his body far better than hand-to-hand fighting.

Through that line, the play actually reflects, not distorts, history. It gave us a clue to Richard’s lived experience that only clicked into place when his bones were unearthed.

Richard III was the last English king to die on the battlefield. The age of the medieval warrior king, and the Plantagenet dynasty, died with him.

Recommendations

Richard III. Because of course.

The Channel 4 documentary can be seen for free on YouTube here. It’s absolutely fascinating.

This Week’s Dose of K-pop: EXO 엑소 “Monster”

Richard III was not a monster, though he played one on the Shakespearean stage and certainly did some monstrous things.

And this song — one of my favorite K-pop songs, period — perfectly fits that soliloquy when he woos Anne Neville. Here’s just a sample of the lyrics (translated in English):

“You’re beautiful, my goddess
But you’re closed up, yeah yeah
I’ll knock so will you let me in?
I’ll give you a hidden thrill
There’s curiosity in your eyes
You’ve already fallen for me
Don’t be afraid
Love is the way”

And, of course, “You can call me monster.”

I chose the dance practice version because the main music video had some strobe lighting.

Enjoy! And thanks for reading if you made it this far. I didn’t anticipate this would be such a long one.

Love y’all,

Sara

1. In the business, these contemporaries are called comps (comparable titles), and you actually mention them in query letters to agents so that they get a sense of the type of book you’ve written.

2. A deep dive into Wolf Hall will be coming soon.

3. Animals scientists are increasingly suggesting that other animals might have these capabilities, so my statement here is probably somewhat inaccurate. But as far as we know, animals don’t weave stories that they share with each other and make meaning out of those stories.

4. Henry VI Part 3 was given the title of tragedy in the First Folio CHECK, and King Lear was published in three versions: one named The History of King Lear, one named The Tragedy of King Lear, and the First Folio tragedy that combined text from both of these earlier publications.)

5. I read it for my doctoral oral exams in 2006. It’s slim, but I genuinely remember little of it. That’s not true of Billy Shake’s Richard III.

6. The accent on the ‘e’ makes the word four syllables (de-ter-min-ed) instead of three (de-ter-mined) so it can fit the iambic pentameter meter, which requires ten syllables per line.

7. At least in the play. I’m not sure he actually was the one to deal the deathblow on the battlefield, since Edward died in battle.

8. When Edward IV died unexpectedly in his 40s, he named Richard as Lord Protector of the Prince of Wales (12 year-old Edward) in his will. Richard was determined to make sure he fulfilled that duty, whereas the Prince’s maternal family, the Woodvilles, wanted to control the kingdom and wanted Richard out.

A decisive man used to victory on the battlefield, Richard thought quickly and struck just as fast. It started with taking sole possession of the Prince and accusing his beloved uncle of treason and ended with Richard himself taking the crown.