ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the relationship in two of Shakespeare's plays, one from the second tetralogy and the other from the end of Shakespeare's career. It provides to indicate some ways that Shakespeare's historical drama deploys the tools of fiction in grappling with the problem of memory and its relation to history. In both plays, Rumour's household, the theatrical audience, is the space where history emerges out of the varied, contradictory, true voices of the past to be 'retail'd through all posterity.' That household also includes the whole of the country since Rumour's reach extends to anywhere there are people. 2 Henry IV, by opening under the sign of Rumour, and Henry VIII, or All is True, with its choric invocation of 'chosen truth,' make explicit the importance of fiction to the production of memorable theatrical histories. Rumour incarnates the problematic connection between truth and fiction and memory with its 'smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.'
