This chapter provides a survey of the most common scholarly assumptions about the nature of a history play – that it is tragic, historically accurate, relates to a broader nationalistic agenda and that exclusion of the female is fundamental to the genre – and looks at how reading plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their most prominent female characters troubles these preconceptions. It first explores how the sub-genre of romantic histories challenges the assumption that a history play is concerned with historical accuracy. Reading Shakespeare’s co-authored Edward III as an example of this genre demonstrates its influence on the rest of his canon. It then re-evaluates the stereotype that foreign characters – especially foreign female characters – are always a threat against which the English national identity can be defined by contrast. It takes Margaret of Anjou as a case study in reading female characters not as women but as dramatic devices. The final section looks again to the tone of the plays to unpick how scenes of overwhelming female emotion can be seen as essential features of the history play genre and part of what contributed to the genre’s popularity in the eras when it was most frequently performed.

Shakespeare’s Henry V shapes popular consciousness of England/Britain at war, yet resists accusations of jingoism. Its national imagining involves conscientious doubts about the justice of war itself. Chapter 5 shows that this appealingly inward, conscientious dimension of English national identity on stage is predicated on Scotland’s occlusion. Scotland was a major player in the Hundred Years’ War. Henry IV kidnapped the child heir to the Scots throne, James I. Henry V then forced James to fight his subjects, the Scots, in France. Yet Shakespeare carefully avoids acknowledging Scotland as a kingdom. He develops, from earlier history plays, a metaphorical plot that produces the idea of England’s island integrity as an effect of its king’s chaste reformation. In this plot, England is threatened by the wild incontinence of its royal heir until his reformation effectively secures England’s insularity, enabling English advancement ‘beyond sea’ to France. The analogy between royal self-chastening and English insular sea-power is traced through Greene’s Bacon and Bungay, Marlowe’s Edward II, the anonymous Edward III to Henry IV 1 & 2 and Henry V.

Chapter 3 examines the phenomenon of “nations” at the medieval English universities, that is, the means by which students were segregated as northern or southern within the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge (determined by whether they hailed from North or South of the Trent), and these distinctions of provenance were based on the models at Bologna and Paris. This chapter demonstrates several instances of marked violence between the “nations” at Oxford and Cambridge, focusing primarily on the Stamford Schism of the early-1330s wherein several northern students fled Oxford, under persecution, for a studium at Stamford (Lincolnshire) where they engaged an extant learning community. King Edward III recognized the threat posed to England’s universities by such flight and he moved quickly to settle the matter. The intense rivalries in the Schism are evident in two overlooked Latin poems written by students during the conflict, which this chapter analyses. The proceeding years of negotiation to end the Schism illustrate the importance of the universities to England’s burgeoning nationalism and, thus, the role that the North–South divide played in it.

This chapter examines the latticework of links between Shakespeare and Spenser, telling a tale of two writers. One goes to London to become poet and playwright, the other to Dublin with dreams of a dramatic career, where he finds his theatre of worldlings is a theatre of war. If Spenser’s influence on Shakespeare, especially early Shakespeare, is seldom discussed, Shakespeare’s influence on Spenser remains an even more neglected topic. Spenser is crucial here, since that poet’s Irish residence necessitates a broadening of horizons, and he is viewed as part of a recognizable circle. Shakespeare, a lifelong co-author and collaborator influenced by several of Spenser’s Irish contemporaries, is too often viewed in isolation. From the Spenser–Harvey correspondence and the early histories onwards, this study tracks the collaborative underpinnings of both writers’ work, charting their influences from a shared reliance on Holinshed to a common concern with innovation in form and genre.

The relationship of plays to their sources has always been important evidence of chronology, authorship, and the derivation of textual variants. Such evidence has been particularly important to studies of Shakespeare’s early plays. But for centuries source scholarship has been based on random anecdotes: a scholar reading one text notices something about it that reminds them of another text. We can now re-evaluate those anecdotal findings by testing them systematically against digital databases. Such tests establish that Margaret's long speech at the beginning of Scene 2 of The First Part of the Contention is based on a passage in Hall's chronicle, whereas the variants in the Folio text of 2 Henry VI instead draw upon Holinshed's chronicle. This evidence supports revision rather than memorial reconstruction. Likewise, the links between the Contention speech and Edward II are best explained by Marlowe's authorship of both.

This chapter concludes the detailed examination of co-rule with two responsibilities most intimately connected with lordship in medieval thought and modern scholarship: war and justice. During the succession dispute, the Montfortists raised the standard complaint that a woman could not undertake these duties, but the Penthièvre case argued that inheritance and shared power circumvented this objection. Jeanne’s actual engagement with responsibilities of jurisdiction and warfare demonstrates that although her role expanded in Charles’ absence, she continually acted in her own right rather than as a proxy or intercessor, two dynamics strongly linked to women’s exercise of power (and particularly to queenship). This independence allowed Jeanne to use power-sharing as an active strategy to stabilize her and Charles’ position during periods of protracted negotiations, as two case studies show. At the same time, theoretical and practical distinctions made between performing these seigneurial responsibilities in service to one’s lord, and one’s own exercise of lordship, embedded the gender dynamics of spousal co-rule within the negotiation of power across the French sociopolitical structure.

Geoffrey Chaucer lived and wrote his poetry during a period of unprecedented political instability in late medieval England. Parliamentary crises, baronial rebellion, popular revolt, disastrous foreign war, weak government, authoritarian rule and, finally, outright deposition made the years between c.1370 and c.1400 both momentous and dangerous times to witness. Chaucer was not immune to these events and his career as a servant of the crown can be seen to have suffered. Yet, political commentary – overt or indirect – is curiously absent from his work. Scholars have traditionally explained this in terms of his keen and calculated sense of self-preservation, but I suggest that Chaucer was displaying an ambiguous and detached political stance that was commonplace amongst his contemporaries. Scholarly attention on the polarised nature of the late fourteenth-century polity ignores the fact that most people looked on the political conflicts of these years with deep anxiety, mixed with a determination to remain steadfastly neutral. In this, Chaucer – the man and his work – was wholly representative of his age.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.