ABSTRACT
Soon after Italian-born Polydore Vergil arrived in England for his extended stay, he began the vast canvas of the Anglica Historia. In this work Polydore wrote as an Italian, he said, and certainly as one of the last foreigners to make a successful career in Renaissance England. The naturalized father of English historiography was the first to bring order and coherence to the late medieval chronicles. Shakespeare's Richard II may be read as a back translation of Hall and Holinshed's versions: a restoration of Polydore's pellucid ethical vision obscured in the shapeless, sensationalist compilation that is Holinshed. Polydore acknowledges the three camps and attempts to chart a moderate, median path that is less categorical, or at least bi-partisan, compared to extreme Lancastrians and Ricardians. In so doing he might seem to make of himself a Yorkist by the cautious nature of his critical historicism.
