Edward IV's secret familiarities and the politics of proximity in Elizabethan history plays.

But here the similarity ends, for Heywood, unlike Shakespeare, explores the age's dominant version of Jane Shore, inventing her husband's departure and return and their romantic death together. It is an extraordinary expansion of the source materials that uses theatrical techniques to emphasize the provocative strands in More's rendition of the woman. We see Jane "lady-like attired" on the wharf where Master Shore prepares to depart. The husband does not even recognize his wife and so must discover from a waterman that the woman is "Mistrisse Shore, the kings beloued; / A special friend to suitors at the court" (2E, 81). Supplicants gather around the kings "friend," and Heywood quite effectively creates two discrepant views of Jane's royal acquaintance that exceed, in their complexity, the thought at work in Of all the kings that ever here did raigne, Edward named fourth, as first in praise I name.

--Sir Philip Sidney(1)

Tremulously erected where the Wars of the Roses blossomed, the court of Edward IV fascinated Elizabethans increasingly hungry for the drama of their own past. More, Hall, Holinshed, and Stow dealt in different ways with the reign. Churchyard, Chute, Daniel, Drayton, Deloney, Heywood, Shakespeare, and Sidney countered with their own distinct renderings for the page and stage. Paul Murray Kendall has outlined certain facets of the allure: "The court was like a tropical garden not altogether reclaimed from jungle: overheated, luxuriant in blooms of pageantry and the varicolored plumage of tilting knights, rustling with the endless whisperings of faction, dense with suspicions and half-hidden hatreds."(2) In a handful of decades, writers found personalities such as Jack Cade and Jane Shore, the king-making Warwick, Margaret of Anjou, and Richard III, of course. Here were plots and complots, debates over succession and Salic law, not to mention murders, plebeian uprisings, favorites, and mistresses. For every contemporary issue, the fifteenth-century world served as a kind of prism, dispensing reflections of "us" and "them" and those who came before. In their introduction to Shakespeare's 2 and 3 Henry VI, Robert K. Turner, Jr. and George Walton Williams suggest that more than glamorous resemblance prompted this "special fascination" with Edward IV's reign: "The times were near enough to be influential and well remembered, yet far enough away to be safely idealized. Readily available were extensive historical and legendary accounts devoted wholly or partially to fifteenth-century personages and happenings."(3) To put it succinctly, being "near enough" and "far enough" made the period exceedingly useful to historians, poets, and playwrights alike. Together, they could demand, as Edward Hall did in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, that their readers grasp the Tudor age in terms of fifteenth-century disjunctions:

What noble man liveth at this daie, or what gentleman of any auncient stocke or progeny is clere, whose linage hath not ben infested and plaged with this unnaturall devision [of the Wars of the Roses]. All the other discordes, sectes and faccions almoste lively florishe and continue at this present tyme, to the great displesure and preiudice of all the christian publike welth.(4)

How could anyone think about the "union" of Tudor rule without recollecting the "unnaturall devision" of the immediate past, without recognizing the continuity of discords, sects and factions?(5) The aforementioned writers certainly could not, but this confluence of projects must not be taken as an indication of interpretive agreement--far from it. Edward's fractured reign existed as a sensational aesthetic and ideological prize.

This essay aims at setting out what was at stake in the competition for control of the idea of Edward IV's court. To do so, it returns to a reign marked by excesses in order to raise a series of exorbitant questions about the content of history plays and the relation of sixteenth-century writers to each other. Perhaps because history plays owe something to a world of "facts" their content seems more determined, more restrained, than that of comedies and tragedies.(6) Restraint, we cautiously admit, leads to principles of selection on the part of writers and literary critics; institutions, offices, and battles tend to be priviledged over those things--affections, trysts, and charms--conceived as excesses. Following this model, twentieth-century critics cite Nashe's praise for Talbot on the stage as one of the grand illustrations of the genre's sixteenth-century worth. Meanwhile, Edward IV's mistress receives slight attention, even though Jane Shore's life inspired a host of retellings by Renaissance writers who relished her excesses. The example of Talbot and Shore marks the curious, almost unconsidered boundary between source and analogue. The source represents the controlling past, the analogue, the uncanny present or forgotten past made out of the same historical materials. In most of the criticism directed toward history plays, these two categories remain separated and hierarchized; the critic judges the significance of Talbot and Shore in terms of the individual playwright's handling of the source material in which the figures appear. By contrast, analogues are curiosities. Understanding the idea of Edward's court in Shakespeare's first tetralogy would mean paying attention to the playwright's inherently valuable decisions with respect to his sources. If he elides Jane Shore's affections in his tale of Ricardian politics, we accept this selection and proceed to think about Richard and Margaret. That sources, analogues, and versions by contemporaries all give Jane different voices is merely interesting. In the pages that follow, I try to restore a certain immoderateness to the content of individual history plays dealing with Edward IV. To particular treatments of source material, I add the sometimes harmonizing, sometimes conflicting voices of other writers' versions. In sum, I try to restore the environment of competition with its attendant extravagances--critical, formal, and moral.(7)

Shakespeare blocks such a project--at least the Shakespeare constructed by centuries of cultural investment. I am referring to the idea of the playwright as a repository for origins and wholeness that, in discussions of the history play, owes much to Schlegel's nineteenth-century desire to imagine, instead often history plays, a single history poem: "For the poet evidently intended them to form one great whole. It is, as it were, an historical heroic poem in the dramatic form, of which the separate plays constitute the rhapsodies."(8) This search for completeness, for a whole, continuous form, remains the ultimate burden on all subsequent criticism of the genre. Among modern commentators, Irving Ribner and Robert Ornstein have made the most strident and compelling cases for understanding "the history play" as a Shakespearean grail. Ribner labors to connect Shakespeare's whole by excluding the works of his contemporaries, what he calls "historical will-o'-the-wisps."(9) More dramatically, Ornstein praises Shakespeare for being the originator of the form and declares that "apart from the contributions of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Greene, the tradition of the Elizabethan History Play consists of a handful of anonymous plays which are primarily interesting because of their possible relationship to Shakespearean drama."(10) In Ornstein's hands, analogues and contemporaries fade away into anonymity. Regardless of the degree to which these appeals to wholeness and practices of exclusion are foregrounded in their discussions, most critics of the genre and of Shakespeare depend on them.