ABSTRACT
IT IS no part of this work's purpose to discuss the historical accuracy of Shakespeare's history-plays in the light of modern research-though the reader may find the Chronological Tables of some value in this respect-but only to provide material to facilitate comparison between the plays and their major sources. As the labours of C. L. Kingsford have shown, 1 much more material on the reigns covered in the English Histories survived than either Shakespeare or the chroniclers on whom he drew can possibly have known. But many Tudor chroniclers used manuscript sources, and writers such as Hall, Stow and Holinshed were inheritors of a long tradition of chronicle-writing, research into which has shown the growth of many legends, the accretion of anecdotes, the ascription of motives, which Shakespeare used probably without caring whence they came. Until recently editors underestimated his attention to authorities and assumed that he depended almost entirely on Holinshed. Those days are past, and there has grown among scholars an opposite tendency to regard the Histories as British Museum pieces, creative researchpapers. If scholars cannot be great playwrights at least there is some satisfaction in finding that the great playwright was himself a scholar with a liking for the rare, unprinted authority. There is no sure proof of this, however. Shakespeare may have consulted a few manuscripts, but he seems to have worked almost entirely from the printed sources popular in his day. So this sketch will be concerned with works published from Caxton onwards which he could without much difficulty have consulted. 2
One of the earliest chronicles which Shakespeare is likely to
have seen was the Brut, 'the first of our printed histories', much used by writers such as Polydore Vergil, Hall, Stow and Holinshed. This history of Britain from the days oflegend was originally written in French in two versions, one perhaps composed by the Black Prince's Treasurer, William Pakington, and translated into English in the last quarter of the fourteenth century with a continuation to 1377. Later extensions took it to 1419, 1430, 1461 and 1475.1 The version available to Shakespeare was that adapted and first printed by William Caxton in 1480 as Chronicles of England. Most of the Brut was in prose, but some versions include crude verses by John Page on Henry V's siege of Rouen, and elsewhere verse-accounts of Agincourt and Har-£leur seem to have been paraphrased. One of the most popular history books in the early sixteenth century, it was often reprinted.
