English Chronicle Histories

Abstract

Although Shakespeare also wrote comedies from the start (see Chapter 6), his early theatrical reputation seems to have rested mainly on his English chronicle histories, a dramatic mode he largely pioneered.¹ Greene’s taunt against the ‘upstart crow’ quoted from 3 Henry VI; later in 1592 Thomas Nashe paid tribute to a scene from 1 Henry VI (IV.vii):

How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after he had Iain two hundred years in his tomb he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.

(Pierce Penniless)

To call chronicle histories a clearly-defined genre would be overstating the case. Early quartos of Richard II and Richard III, for example, described them both as tragedies, while the 1608 quarto of King Lear, which we classify confidently as a tragedy, called it a ‘true chronicle history’.² But the term broadly identified a class of drama whose main preoccupation was the facts of history; and Heminge and Condeil found it useful in their division of the first folio.