The Decline of the Chronicle and Shakespeare's History Plays

Summary

Almost one-third of Shakespeare's production as a dramatist consists of plays whose themes are clearly historical. His apparently keen interest in history has often been explained by the fact that he was influenced by the main ideological trends of his time (Tudor political theory, humanist civic history, Machiavellianism, Tacitism, Republicanism) or indeed that he was particularly sensitive to political events around him (Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and/or contemporary continental history). However, strangely, the fact that Shakespeare turned to history in the early 1590s (and returned to it regularly for a decade or so) is rarely set in the context of the significant changes taking place on the ‘market of history’ during the same period, when the manner in which history was produced and consumed – and eventually conceived – was shifting.

It is not perhaps entirely fortuitous that the chronicle, which had been (since the late middle ages) the dominant historical genre of printed history, was in decline by the late 1580s, at a time when the production of histories on the Elizabethan stages was especially prolific and successful. In the 1590s the chronicle was commercially on the wane, even if, paradoxically, its cultural influence on other genres remained strong, as we shall see. The peak years for the publication of chronicles had been between 1550 and 1579, but the number of reprints and of new editions fell sharply in the next decade and then dwindled gradually until 1640 when the figures picked up very slightly. The Elizabethan chronicle was costly to produce and, while the interest in it had been great, the market for such works was pretty much glutted by 1600. The 1577 copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (STC 13568) retailed at 26s bound and 20s unbound.