ABSTRACT
For Shakespeare's contemporaries his history plays were dramatisations of English history of comparatively recent date. Each play can be regarded as the chapter of a Tudor chronicle, as part of a narrative of historical process. According to the concepts of the time the plays are based on the historical patterns of repetition and variation as well as on the belief in order as a fundamental principle of the universe and as an absolute necessity for the state. Shakespeare's dramatic fiction is a 'secularised representation of supposed historical fact' (Holderness, 1988, p. 13) and motivated partly by the 'desire to understand the present through a knowledge of the past' (Leech, 1962, p. 10), as is all historical writing. So close are the plays to the writings of the Tudor historians in their generic and sociological characteristics that the term 'English history' has become an equivalent to the term 'English history play'.
