History Plays Sem 3- Unit 1

                                                                     HISTORY PLAYS

A history play (sometimes known as a chronicle play) is a dramatic work where the events of the plot are either partially or entirely drawn from history. It is also considered a theatrical genre. William Shakespeare wrote ten history plays, each focusing on an English monarch and the period in which he reigned.

Chronicle play, also called chronicle history or history play, drama with a theme from history consisting usually of loosely connected episodes chronologically arranged.

 

Plays of this type typically lay emphasis on the public welfare by pointing to the past as a lesson for the present, and the genre is often characterized by its assumption (belief) of a national consciousness in its audience. It has flourished in times of intensely nationalistic (patriotic) feeling, notably in England from the 1580s until the 1630s, by which time it was “out of fashion,” according to the prologue of John Ford’s play Perkin Warbeck. Early examples of the chronicle play include The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Life and Death of Jacke Straw, The Troublesome Raigne of John King of England, and The True Tragedie of Richard III. The genre came to maturity with the work of Christopher Marlowe (Edward II) and William Shakespeare (Henry VI, parts 2 and 3).

In An Apology for Actors (1612) the dramatist Thomas Heywood wrote that chronicle plays

At the same time, it was argued that the overthrow of a tyrant (such as Richard III, according to the Tudor reading of events) was right and proper.

Elizabethan dramatists drew their material from the wealth of chronicle (history/record) writing for which the age is renowned, notably Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke and the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande of Raphael Holinshed. The genre was a natural development from the morality plays of the Middle Ages. In a forerunner of the chronicle play, John Bale’s Kynge Johan, all the characters except the king himself are allegorical and have names such as Widow England, Sedition, and Private Wealth.

No age has matched the Elizabethan, either in England or elsewhere, in this kind of play. But chronicle plays are still sometimes written—for example, by the 20th-century English playwright John Arden (Left-Handed Liberty, Armstrong’s Last Goodnight)—and the genre corresponds in many respects, especially in its didactic purpose and episodic structure, with the influential 20th-century epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht in Germany and Tony Kushner in the United States, specifically Kushner’s AIDS drama Angels in America, which debuted on Broadway in 1993.

IN England, the chronicle play seems suddenly to have risen into vogue during the last decade of the sixteenth century. At first it was more like an epic poem than a dramatic composition, loosely constructed, covering the entire life of a king or hero.

Minor events were often invented, but in the more important happenings the authors usually made an attempt to follow history.

Three plays on the subject of King John illustrate the three stages of its development: the morality King John, by John Bale, written sometime before the accession of Mary in 1553;

a second play called The Troublesome Reign of King John, written between 1587 and 1591;

 and a third completely developed tragedy in the romantic style, the King John of Shakespeare.

The second of these pieces is a genuine example of the chronicle play. It is written in crude blank verse and contains a satirical episode concerning the monastic system of the period. 

Two dramas of this earlier time, The Famous Victories of Henry Fifth and The Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, formed the basis of Shakespeare's Henry V, and the second and third parts of Henry VI respectively.

THE CHRONICLE PLAY BECOMES DRAMA

In the midst of these efforts, while the chronicle play was still in its inferior stage, it was suddenly lifted into a position of distinction by the production of Marlowe's Edward II. Its appearance was an epoch (history)-making event. For the first time the English history play was pulled up into the tenseness of true drama. The characters are bold and vivid, conceived amply as taking part in the sweep of history. Here too is something of the power of Marlowe's "mighty line," and the skill which can portray a great figure overborne by the consequences of his own folly. Edward II is the first fine historical drama in the English language, and aside from the Shakespearean tragedies, the best in existence.