Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 [Hardcover]

John Julius Norwich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2000

William Shakespeare may have been the greatest playwright in the English language, but how does he measure up as a historian? In this brilliant comparison between the events and characters in Shakespeare's history plays and the actual events that inspired them, acclaimed historian John Julius Norwich examines the nine works that together amount to an epic masterpiece on England's most fascinating period.

Beginning with the newly authenticated "Edward III," and proceeding through "Richard II; Henry IV Parts I" and "II; " and "Henry V; Henry VI Parts I, II," and "III; " and finally "Richard III," Norwich holds the plays up to the light of history, answering questions such as: Who was the real Falstaff? How realistic is Shakespeare's depiction of Joan of Arc? At the same time, he provides a vibrant narrative of medieval life from 1337 to 1485, the era of the 100 Years War and the Wars of the Roses. It was a time of uncertainty and incessant warfare, a time during which the crown was constantly contested, alliances were made and broken, peasants and townsmen alike arose in revolt. Here was the raw material that Shakespeare used to explore the role of the monarch and the meaning of statehood.

But where does history stop and drama begin? Norwich concludes that Shakespeare was a reliable enough historian. He was, however, always willing to take liberties with the facts for the sake of his drama. As Norwich explains,"In the vast majority of instances when Shakespeare departed from the historic truth he did so for the best of all reasons: to make a better play." Beyond assessing Shakespeare's accuracy, Norwich provides the crucial knowledge that will enhance everyone'sappreciation and understanding of these glorious plays.

No one but John Julius Norwich, praised for his three-part history of Byanztium, could weave drama and history together into such a lucid and absorbing account of a distant yet vitally important era. Illuminating and accessible, "Shakespeare's Kings" is an indispensable companion to Shakespeare's rich imagination -- an imagination that continues to inform the way we view the past today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If Shakespeare's complicated portrayal of the teeming womb of royal kings (Richard II) of England in his history plays has always confused you, then John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings is one solution to your problems. Watching Henry IV as a young boy, Norwich asked, where did history stop and drama begin? It is this question that Shakespeare's Kings seeks to answer, as it chronicles the historical events of the reigns of the monarchs of England dramatized in Shakespeare's plays. Beginning with Edward III, Norwich details the turbulent reign of Richard II, the rise of Henry IV, and the triumphs of Henry V, the disastrous reign of Henry VI, the Wars of the Roses, the evil of Richard III, and the painful birth of the Tudor monarchy.

Norwich sheds interesting light on what Shakespeare did with his sources (particularly Holinshed), as he provides chapters that detail the history of a particular monarch, which is then tested against Shakespeare's play of that particular king. This throws up some interesting points, such as the fact that the great nationalist John of Gaunt in Richard II was actually a deeply unpopular, patrician figure. The book also contains some wonderful illustrations and excellent tables of family trees, maps and an appendix that offers the entirety of Edward III, only recently (and still controversially) accepted into the canon by Shakespeare scholars.

However, the general reader should also treat Norwich's claim to historical objectivity with some caution. Shakespeare's Kings is almost completely ignorant of recent critical and historical studies of Shakespeare and historical studies of the monarchs under consideration. Norwich argues that Shakespeare would never have claimed historical accuracy--and to establish just how close he came has been one of the principal purposes of this book--because he was a dramatist, not a historian. But this obscures the extent to which history and literature are invariably entwined and nowhere more so than in Shakespeare. But there's the rub. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

This is a painstakingly sensible book, suitable for die-hard Shakespeare lovers. The author of the massive, three-part Byzantium turns here to the equally byzantine world of late medieval England, providing a complex context for the bard's nine Histories (including the recently authenticated Edward III) and asking: How accurate were Shakespeare's royal portraits? The canvas stretches from the Hundred Years War to the end of the Wars of the Roses. Norwich, structuring his book as political narrative, helpfully fills in gaps between the action of the plays. The book will be useful as a historical primer for those already familiar with the plays (or films: many will associate Henry V with Kenneth Branagh, or Richard III with Ian McKellen), but it lacks intellectual muscle, and the awkwardly intermittent analyses of accuracy obscure the natural flair of the author's prose. Norwich is conscientious in reconstructing detail, but his larger claims are meager. We learn, for instance, that Shakespeare has a "cavalier approach to chronology" and that his portraits sometimes fall prey to personal prejudice, but that with the great exception of Richard III (already vilified by Thomas More), the bold historical outlines are generally on the money. In his epilogue, the author briefly places the Histories against the backdrop of new Elizabethan self-confidence: England, "the only possible hero" in this long, sordid drama, craved the telling of its tale in the most accessible literary form of the day. Yet the elusive intellectual prey--the making of national identity--escapes through the thickets of history. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First American Edition edition (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068481434X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684814346
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #845,193 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointment, November 26, 2000

By 

jeffergray (Reisterstown, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 (Hardcover)

I very much enjoyed Norwich's three-volume history of Byzantium, and his two-volume history of the Normans in Sicily is also on my bookshelf awaiting my attention. But this book disappointed me. I had a sense as I read it that it had been written in haste. At first I wondered whether Norwich's house needed an expensive renovation, or whether the "Venice in Peril" fund that he did so much to sponsor was in immediate need of cash. Then I learned that a well-regarded English professor at Dartmouth College named Peter Saccio also brought out a similarly-themed -- indeed, similarly-titled -- book ("Shakespeare's English Kings") in the spring of this year. I'm left with the suspicion that Norwich's publishers may have gotten wind of the competitor volume and rushed him to get his into print.

Some evidence of haste can be seen if you compare the early chapters with the later ones. Up through Chapter 7, Norwich tries to integrate his discussion of the plays and the history. Commencing with Chapter 8, the history chapters are separate, and are then followed by chapters that summarize the action of each play, but with comments on their fidelity to history. Still, in reading the "play" chapters -- 10, 12, 14, 16, 19 -- I got really tired of the relentless (and sometimes unnecessary) synopsizing: "Next, in Act II, Scene III, this happens. Then, in Act II, Scene IV, this occurs." I had visions of Norwich sitting there with a copy of the play, summarizing the action scene-by-scene, and probably heaving a sigh of relief at how much easier these chapters were to write than the history ones were. However, I found them tedious going from the reader's perspective.

Moreover, the chapters on the Hundred Years' War verge at times on the incomprehensible. For example: "In April 1436, Bedford had been succeeded by Richard, Duke of York, now twenty-four, who was accompanied by his brother-in-law, Richard Nevill, Earl of Salisbury since the death of his father-in-law, killed before Orleans. Barely fourteen months later York had been replaced by Warwick, but had been reappointed after the latter's death in 1439. Meanwhile Charles VII had made his triumphal entry into Paris in November 1437, and a somewhat half-hearted peace conference near Calais in 1439 had come to nothing. The following year saw the release of Charles of Orleans . . . ." Reading passages like this, you have a sense that a chronology is simply being collapsed into the text, without much effort being invested in making it comprehensible or focusing on the main events.

Elsewhere, the text just needs pruning. For example, at page 231, is it really necessary to know the exact chronology of Margaret of Anjou's movements in March, April, and May 1445 as she travelled from Nancy in France to England for her marriage and coronation? Do we need to know that she traveled "by easy stages" from Nancy to Paris to Rouen? Should we care that she was sick for two weeks after her arrival in England, forcing a brief postponement of her wedding to Henry VI? And does it matter that history does not tell us exactly where she and her husband were between their marriage on April 23 and their entry into London on May 28? I can't imagine it does, but Norwich literally tells you that "Their movements over the next few weeks are unknown . . . ."

In addition to this extraneous, unpruned detail, there is another problem for which it is not fair to fully blame Norwich. In the course of the text, the reader is inundated with Somersets (four of them), Suffolks (no fewer than 7 earls, dukes, and countesses), Gloucesters (only three!), Norfolks, and Nevills. Of course, these were the family names of England's most powerful families during the period, so Norwich can't entirely help these recurrences -- but I did have a sense that he could have done a little more to distinguish them and help the reader keep them straight. Or perhaps a few of the more minor ones could just have been left out?

I was also disappointed that Norwich's reading of sources didn't seem to go much beyond those Shakespeare himself relied on. That may have been part and parcel of Norwich's objective -- to see how faithful Shakespeare was to his own sources -- but if you bought this book hoping to get, in the bargain, a good history of the years 1337-1483 in English history, it means that you'll be disappointed.

I would suggest getting your hands on copies of both this book and Peter Saccio's and comparing before you buy. Having seen how Norwich wrestled with the problem he set out to address in this volume, I'm actually pretty interested in seeing how Peter Saccio -- one of America's best interpreters of Shakespeare -- addressed the same task.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Satisfying...., May 27, 2001

By 

Rory Coker (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 (Paperback)

John Julius Norwich has been writing popular histories of the Middle Ages and Renaissance for about 50 years. What we have here sounds like a great idea, a comparison of the "history" in Shakespeare's history plays beginning with EDWARD III (only recently added to the canon) and ending with RICHARD III, with history itself. However, there is almost immediately a big problem. Is the comparison to be made with Shakespeare's contemporary sources, or is it to be made with findings of modern scholarship on the period? Norwich never seems to make up his mind, and the result is an often maddeningly uneven book.

In fact, much of the book reads as if it were a first draft. If I had read the excellent review elsewhere on these pages by "jeffergray," I probably wouldn't have purchased the book to begin with. Parts of the narrative would have to be greatly expanded for clarity, while other parts need to be compressed or eliminated altogether. It is particularly hopeless to try to keep track of the important historical characters that appear and reappear in the action. There are Nevills and Mortimers everywhere, not to mention Salisburys, Earls of Oxford, etc., etc. Norwich continually chides Shakespeare for getting his Mortimers confused, but he leaves the reader in an even worse confusion.

The book has a strange prissy note that will jar most readers. For example, Norwich seems so offended by Shakespeare's portrayal of Joan of Arc that he can scarcely bear to comment, but Shakespeare's cartoon of Joan is hardly more unhistorical--- indeed, perhaps more historical--- than the absurd warrior maid who has appeared in countless plays, novels and films during the past century. Norwich also continually winces at Shakespeare's word-play, for example in the dialogue between Princess Katherine and Henry V, although both to Elizabethan and modern ears it rings quite harmless. The real Henry V, a genocidal war criminal and insanely pious maniac, may have had no sense of humor at all, but Shakespeare's heroic Harry needs one, and it needs no apology.

There's a lot of interesting, even fascinating information here about a little-known period, but this is nowhere near the book it could and should have been. Recommended with grave reservations.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Royal Tome of Kings, March 11, 2001

By 

"pecdoc" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 (Paperback)

If you enjoy reading Shakespeare and are a history buff, prepare for sleepless nights, distracted work, and hunger pains. For your Book of Books is at hand and although you will be forced to ignore it for such trifling matters as sleep, work, or feeding, you will rush back to its pages "as schoolboys from their books." If history distracts you with countless dates and minute details, or if Shakespeare is not your cup of tea, the Amazon search engine is at the top of the page.

Norwich's work begins with an excellent introduction to the most fascinating of the English royal lineages, the Plantagenet Kings. It sets the context of the historical plays of Shakespeare, from the death of Edward II to the anticipated ascendancy of Henry VII. The author includes Edward III, a work recently attributed to Shakespeare, which in itself is a treasure. The ensuing chapters cover the events, politics, everyday life, and perspectives of each King's reign. In chronological order, each reign is examined in the context of the play(s) and the author notes when Shakespearian license has been used to prefect a play, albeit at the expense of historical accuracy. The writing is crisp, novel-like in its presentation, and certainly assertive in stating a position, pointing out an anachronism, or dissecting a motive of the monarch or the Bard. It is also not without controversy.

For example, Norwich too casually dismisses the claims of contemporary scholars that Richard III was personally vilified for political gain by the Tudors who usurped the throne upon his death. Shakespeare wrote his plays for an Elizabethan (Tudor) audience, so a bias should come as no surprise, and in fact is acknowledged by the author in his epilogue. But to discount the historical claims purely because the sainted Thomas More made them, and that More's work was substantiated by contemporary (Tudor) historians, is a slip in scholarship. People 500 years hence might well view the US Presidency at the close of the 20th Century as a period of moral turpitude and disgrace if only Republican historians were read, or of economic prosperity and compassion if Democratic treatises alone existed. The parallel is striking, and as with that Presidency, the reign of Richard III is probably best described as being somewhere between the emotional extremes. Indeed, "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

But this minor point should not deter you from devouring this book, especially if you like to "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." Its sad, and exhilarating, stories will become as familiar to you "as household words."