ABSTRACT
Until about 1600 many plays about English history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were staged. Some were popular romps, mixing comic working-class characters with idealized portraits of jovial monarchs who were at one with their subjects. An example of this would be Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). Shakespeare’s plays were, however, much more closely based on serious records like the Tudor chronicles. But they did not deal solely with kings, queens and lords. They generally gave some sort of portrait of the nation as a whole, with peasants, workers and soldiers having roles to play, often in a comic sub-plot of some sort.
