ABSTRACT
One notable feature of both of these accounts is their androcentrism. Both Nashe and Heywood seem to assume that history plays are about male heroes such as Talbot and produce their ravishing effects primarily upon male spectators. In this Nashe and Heywood both were and were not right. On the one hand, none of Shakespeare’s history plays has a female protagonist. Chronicle history, upon which these plays were largely based, took the reign of the individual monarch as its point of departure, and monarchs were, except in unusual circumstances, male. Moreover, the arenas most often visited in these chronicles-the battlefield and the courtwere typically regarded as the sites of masculine power and authority. When Holinshed’s 1577 Chronicles incorporates the story of how Arden of Faversham was killed in his own house by his wife and her lover, the narrative voice apologizes for doing so, saying that Arden’s murder may seem to be “but a private matter, and therefore as it were impertinent to this history” (quoted in Orlin 1994:16). History, in short, does not deal with private and domestic matters, but with public matters and affairs of state.
