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.

This chapter offers close readings of the Henry VI plays by Shakespeare (and his collaborators) in its exploration of a dramatic world convulsed by ‘incessant wars’. Late Elizabethan England remained thoroughly acquainted with the demands and traumas of resourcing multiple fields of conflict. Responding to the consuming debate surrounding militarism supported in late sixteenth-century publications and debate, these plays, written in the years directly following the defeat of the Armada, conjure up a tumultuous political landscape all too familiar to those attending the playhouse in the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign: the landscape of a nation beset by anxieties of suppressed religious and political identities as a consequence of unceasing military campaigns abroad, conspiracies at home, shifting allegiances of court factions and abiding questions surrounding the royal succession. Such texts spoke unflinchingly to the audience of what its world had been and what it might become again.

Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry V, and 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI might be thought to be nostalgic simply because they are history plays, reimagining and restaging a past that is, by definition, lost. Loss is certainly one of their central concerns: the loss of France, of land, of friends and family, and of identity, especially kingly identity. Versions of a lost and longed-for Eden can be found in all of these plays, and the heroes of the past are always greater than the protagonists (and actors, and audiences) of today. But as history plays, their nostalgia is also aesthetic, both cultivating and fulfilling a desire for a consistent, coherent vocabulary of symbols, discernible, stable points of origin, intelligible relationships of cause and effect, and even readily comprehensible design choices: the histories very often come to us in red and white, blue and gold. Perhaps above all, the histories feed our nostalgia for a past that is vivid, fixed, and whole, and therefore able to be understood.