Pilgrims of Grace: Henry IV Historicized

Summary

PAST AND PRESENT

R. G. Collingwood once remarked that all historical writing is a selective process governed by a sense of contemporary relevance. Most historical critics who have sought to interpret Shakespeare’s interpretation of the past in 1 and 2 Henry IV seem to have been in agreement with this view. There has, however, been remarkable divergence among both recent and not-so-recent historicists on how the play (I shall use the singular term for convenience’s sake) connects with sixteenth-century practice and ideas; on how, in other words, we should define the context (or larger ‘text’) which makes most sense of its conceptual orientation. E. M. W. Tillyard tied the play to the Tudor, providentialist philosophy of history focused on the Wars of the Roses and the birth of the Tudor dynasty. But he saw in it nothing more specific to sixteenth-century political experience than a large, approving picture of Elizabethan England, rendered vivid by its social and topographical detail. Like Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell read the play as an uncomplicated endorsement of Tudor political orthodoxy; she was much concerned, however, to establish a central analogy with the Northern Rebellion of 1569–70 (an idea first advanced by Richard Simpson in 1874), as well as a number of politically significant parallels between some of the dramatis personae and contemporary individuals.