ABSTRACT
By the end of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare had written ten historical plays dealing with rebellion and civil war, nine of them about English and one about Roman history. In two of these plays, Richard II and Julius Caesar, he shows considerable interest in representing the past as past and acknowledging the cultural distinctiveness of particular societies. But as many of the critics we have been considering perceived, what attracted him to his chosen historical material was not so much the remoteness and distinctiveness of the past as its connections - of resemblance or causality or both - with the problems and concerns of Tudor England. Even Julius Caesar (1599) confirms the claim that most history is an interpretation of the past dictated by a sense of contemporary relevance.1 Admittedly, it was a favourite Tudor exercise - in orations, pro clamations, homilies, and civic pageants - to contrast the present with the past: specifically, the peace and concord of sixteenth-century England with the strife and discord of the time between Richard II and Henry VII. And this seems to have expressed a generally accepted idea, one which could be endorsed even by those who were severely critical of the government. Thus the Catholic author of Leicester's Commonwealth (1584) acknowledges that ‘the keys of all concord remain knit together’ in the line of Henry VII, which unites the contrary claims of ‘the two adversary houses’ of Lancaster and York; he adds:
I remember well what Phillipe Comines setteth down in his history of our country’s calamity by that contention of those two houses distinguished by the red rose and the white, but yet both in their arms might justly have borne the color of red with a fiery sword in a black field to signify the abundance of blood and mortality which ensued in our country by that most woeful and cruel contention.
