12 Facts About Shakespearean history

The Shakespearean history histories are biographies of English kings of the previous four centuries and include the standalones King John, Edward III and Henry VIII as well as a continuous sequence of eight plays.

Source for most of the English Shakespearean history plays, as well as for Macbeth and King Lear, is the well-known Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle of English Shakespearean history.

The source for the Roman Shakespearean history plays is Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared Together, in the translation made by Sir Thomas North in 1579.

Shakespeare's Shakespearean history plays focus on only a small part of the characters' lives, and frequently omit significant events for dramatic purposes.

Shakespeare was living in the reign of Elizabeth I, the last monarch of the House of Tudor, and his Shakespearean history plays are often regarded as Tudor propaganda because they show the dangers of civil war and celebrate the founders of the Tudor dynasty.

Related searches

Shakespearean history makes no mention of Edmund Mortimer, Richard's heir, in Richard II, an omission which strengthens the Lancastrian claim.

Shakespearean history implies that rebellion against a legitimate and pious king is wrong, and that only a monster such as Richard of Gloucester would have attempted it.

Some have suggested that Shakespearean history plays were quietly subsidised by the state, for propaganda purposes.

Shakespearean history brought noble poetry to the genre and a deep knowledge of human character.

Shakespearean history's chronicle plays, taken together in historical order, have been described as constituting a "great national epic".

Late 16th and early 17th century 'Roman Shakespearean history' plays—English plays based on episodes in Virgil, Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, and Plutarch—were, to varying degrees, successful on stage from the late 1580s to the 1630s.

Some of the events of these wars were dramatised by Shakespeare in the Shakespearean history plays Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V, Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, Henry VI, Part 3, and Richard III.