Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

W. Shakespeare’s importance for the development of the English language, literature and 
theatre. 
 
Shakespeare appears to have written one comedy and one history play a year at the start 
of his career and indeed down through the end of the 1590s, when he turned to problem plays, 
tragedies, and then late romances in the 1600s (again,
approximately two plays a year). Titus Andronicus (c. 1589–1592) and Romeo and Juliet
(1594–1596), as tragedies in the first productive decade or so of Shakespeare’s career, vary this 
pattern but do so in ways that tend to confirm the overall pattern of an abiding commitment to 
romantic comedies and history plays. To be sure, the history plays dramatize some awesomely 
tragic events, including the violent deaths of King John, Richard II, Lord Talbot, Humphrey 
Duke of Lancaster, the Duke of Suffolk, Richard Plantagenet, Henry VI and his son the crown 
prince Edward, the Duke of Clarence, Lord Hastings, Richard III’s two princely nephews 
murdered in the Tower of London, the Duke of Buckingham, Richard III himself, and many 
others. The titles of the early history plays, in their original published forms, proclaim them to be
The Life and Death of King John , The Tragedy of Richard the Second, and so on, interspersed 

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with other titles that do not mention tragedy: The History of Henry the Fourth , The Second 
Part of the History of King Henry the Fourth, and The Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth.
Early quarto versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI were published as The First Part of the Contention 
Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard 
Duke of York (i.e., Richard Plantagenet), and the Death of King Henry the Sixth.
The English history play, as written by Shakespeare, is thus a compos-ite and informal 
kind of dramatic entertainment made up from disparate historical and theatrical materials. In fact, 
as David Kastan has cogently argued, 7 the English history play is not really a genre at all. 
That is, it conforms to no recognized theoretical definitions of dramatic genre as set forth in 
Aristotle and neo-Aristotelian tradition. It can end tragically or not tragically, or (as in Richard 
II ) a blend of both. History is open-ended; its story is dictated to a significant extent by what 
happened in the course of events rather than by the literary shaping of a fiction, though to be sure 
these concepts can overlap. “The English History Play” indicates the subject matter of the plays 
more than it names and identifies a theatrical genre. As such, it lends itself to the pragmatic 
varieties of form that we find in the plays Shakespeare wrote. The genre was very popular in 
London in the 1590s not so much for its literary form as for its celebration of late medieval 
English history and England’s emergence under Queen Elizabeth I into something approaching 
nationhood.
Shakespeare’s earliest English history plays, in a four-part series consisting of Henry VI 
Parts I , II, and III and then Richard III, adopt a striking and perhaps surprising way of 
responding to England’s great victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. Ultimately, they 
celebrate England’s emergence as a great nation, but as they make their uncertain way toward 
politi-cal resolution, they explore in terrifying detail the hazards of the civil war that England 
had endured throughout most of the fifteenth century. That painful struggle concludes at last with 
the defeat of Richard III by Henry Tudor, now Henry VII, in 1485 at Bosworth Field. The three
Henry VI plays are all about civil conflict with resolution nowhere yet to be found. Taken 
individually or collectively, they are virtually unrelieved in their
dark portrayal of disorder. In 1 Henry VI (a play that may or may not have been the first of the 
series to be written), the English military forces in France lose most of their territorial holdings 
in that country. 9 Shakespeare sees the defeat as the consequence of political division at home 
in a time of Henry VI’s minority kingship and of a consequent struggle for power among rival 
factions at court. The death at Bordeaux of the valiant Lord Talbot in the company of his son 
John is a major blow to England’s prestige and authority in France. The French, led by the 
spineless dauphin and the witch Joan of Arc, are for the most part a craven and obscenely 
ludicrous lot, capable of winning only because Lord Talbot is betrayed by cynical English oppor-
tunists vying for supremacy. One of the most unscrupulous, the Earl of David BevingtonSuffolk, 
taking Margaret of Anjou prisoner in the campaign at Angiers, is so infatuated with her beauty 
that he arranges to take her back to England as a prospective bride for young Henry VI, hoping 
thereby to enjoy her privately as his mistress. The guileless and pious young Henry, falling in 
love with her mere picture, agrees to this marriage negotiation in place of what would have been 
a vastly more profitable marriage alliance with the daughter of the Earl of Armagnac; Margaret’s 
father, Reigner, though Duke of Anjou and titular King of Naples, is in fact a penniless aristocrat
with no dowry to offer. The good advice of Henry’s virtuous uncle, Duke Humphrey of 
Gloucester, is thus blithely ignored. King Henry’s surren-der to the self-serving counsel of 
Suffolk and to the supposed charms of Margaret is symptomatic of a nearly universal decline in 
moral order and integrity. The play ends with no hope in sight.2 Henry VI anatomizes the 
headlong collapse into civil conflict that follows defeat in France. The two houses of York and 
Lancaster, bitter
rivals since the overthrow of Richard II by his Lancastrian first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who 
is named King Henry IV in 1399, fall into open opposition once the popular Henry V has died in 
1422. The young and otherworldly Henry VI, historically only a year old at the time of his 

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accession, is unable to save his virtuous uncle, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, from the 
machinations of his political enemies. Richard Plantagenet, now Duke of York and scion of the 
Yorkist claim to the throne, unleashes the terrors of civil unrest by cynically encouraging the 
anarchic ambitions of a rebel leader from Kent named Jack Cade. Shakespeare luridly 
exaggerates the excesses of the Cade rebellion by combining details of that event (1450) with 
other outrages of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. As the play ends, open warfare commences 
between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians near St. Albans, historically in 1452–1453. War 
continues unabated in 3 Henry VI, perhaps the bloodiest play Shakespeare ever wrote. Brother 
kills brother and cousin kills cousin in a seemingly endless cycle of revengeful reciprocity. A 
nameless soldier on the field of battle in Yorkshire discovers that the “enemy” he has killed is his 
own father; simultaneously, a father learns that he has killed his only son (2.5). King Henry VI 
relinquishes military control of the Lancastrian forces to his remorseless wife, Margaret. The 
fortunes of war seesaw back and forth, first leaving the Yorkists in control, then the 
Lancastrians, then the Yorkists. Leaders on both sides, including the Duke of Clarence and the 
Earl of Warwick, shift loyalties when they find themselves betrayed by their erstwhile allies. 
Having thus violated their oaths of allegiance sworn in the name of God, they stand guilty of the 
heinous sin of perjury. By the play’s end, the Yorkists have won the upper hand, but at the 
expense of civil holocaust. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, younger brother of the newly crowned 
Edward VI and the Duke of Clarence, emerges with frightening clarity as the embodiment of 
conscienceless hatred and revenge. He and his brethren have won the crown, but Richard’s own 
plans for gaining supremacy are far from satisfied. Richard III thus commences on a false note 
of seeming peace under Yorkist rule. Richard himself is a stunning portrait in Machiavellianism. 
That the portrait is historically unfair, having been biased in favor of the Tudor regime that 
supplanted him in 1485, is all the more evidence of a dramatic design as Shakespeare works his 
way toward a sense of generic form for the English history play. In retrospect, we are invited to 
see that the overarching structure of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy is shaped toward its triumphant 
conclusion in Richard III with the ascension to the throne of Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth’s 
grandfather. The four-play series is a prolonged study in civil conflict, from which England 
emerges at long last, owing to the intervention of Henry Tudor. Arguably, the mysterious 
guiding hand of providence ultimately finds a meaningful purpose in civil conflict. Richard of 
Gloucester is the epitome of fratricidal strife as he plots against the lives of his brother Clarence, 
his two nephews (the eldest of whom, young Edward V, ought to reign in his stead), his sister-in-
law (Edward IV’s wife and then widow) and her family, and other members of the royal 
entourage, as well as political leaders like Lord Hastings and, ultimately, the Duke of 
Buckingham. Read in these terms, the dismal chronicle of the fifteenth century points forward to 
an eventual beneficent resolution: providence punishes the English people for their waywardness 
(much as the Jewish people are periodically made to suffer for their idola-try and wrongful living 
in the Old Testament account of their history) and then finally delivers the English from their 
self-inflicted tragic fall once they have learned to repent and vowed to better their lives.
To be sure, this history can also be read more skeptically, in human rather than 
providential terms, as a sobering account of the wages of willfulness and self-promotion. 
Providential and secular interpretations vie for our attention at every turn in these early history 
plays. Richard of Gloucester himself can be seen alternatively as a scourge of God imposed on a 
wayward people as heaven-sent punishment for their sins and as a plausibly human villain driven 
toward mad ambition as his warped way of thriving in a cutthroat political and social 
environment. His crippled body can be explained both as a portentous sign of innate evil and as a 
psycho-logical motivation for his antisocial behavior.
Where did Shakespeare find his conceptual design of civil war as a self-inflicted 
punishment on the English people, out of which they could then emerge into the triumph of 
Tudor stability under Queen Elizabeth I? In good part, he encountered this idea in Holinshed’s
Chronicles, published in a second edition in 1587. That great compilation includes accounts 

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that had been commissioned by Henry VII as a propaganda weapon calculated to instruct the 
English people in ways of obedience to the new Tudor state.
That Shakespeare concurred with this ideological line, at least to the extent
of using it as a conceptual model for the English history play, is hardly surprising; his London 
audiences were fervently loyal to Queen Elizabeth, especially in the wake of the Armada victory 
of 1588. The design suited Shakespeare’s artistic purposes.
The design also bears a meaningful resemblance to the great religious drama of the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, namely to those plays sometimes called cycle plays (or Corpus 
Christi drama) because they dra-matize the history of the human race in a great cycle of episodes 
from God’s creation of the universe down to the Last Judgment. Ubiquitous in church liturgy and 
in medieval paintings and sculpture, visions of God’s wrath shape such narratives into a great 
cosmic struggle between good and evil, with evil achieving a multitude of seeming victories—
the murder of Abel by his cousin Cain, Herod’s massacre of the Innocents in an attempt to 
destroy the newborn Christ, and the arrest and crucifixion of Christ—only to be foiled at last in 
the magnificent benign irony of salva-tion history. Seen thus, every historical account is one in 
which evil ulti-mately overreaches and undoes itself: Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden 
prepares the way for the coming of Christ’s mother, Mary, as the second Eve, and the arrest and 
crucifixion of Christ by his enemies in a seeming victory for their dark cause becomes in fact the 
very means by which salvation is set in motion through Christ’s sacrifice and atonement. This 
ironic pattern is close to that of Richard III, whose self-serving villain ultimately and 
unknowingly prepares the way for the coming of the Tudor kings. We can well perceive 
salvation history as a conceptual backdrop for Shakespeare’s first historical cycle, even if he also 
examines the bleak horrors of civil war in secular terms. The great artistic benefit of salvation 
history is that it ultimately finds order in seeming disorder, meaning in apparent chaos.
A contrasting model for Shakespeare as he began fashioning the English history play may 
have been Christopher Marlowe’s two parts of Tamburlaine , 1588–1589. 10 Even though 
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays are not really history plays at all and certainly are not about 
English history, their audacity of vision and sweep of political and military narra-tive attempted 
something never undertaken before on stage. Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester is socially and 
morally quite unlike the Tamburlaine whom Marlowe unleashes as a figure of galvanic authority 
enabled to triumph by the corruptions of his exoticized Middle Eastern enemies. Yet Marlowe’s 
bold and Machiavellian image of self-willed achievement offers a radically revisionary view of 
human history that challenged and inspired Shakespeare even while he chose not to follow its 
transgressive ideas to their logical limit. Greene and Peele were among the London dramatists
of the 1580s and 1590s who could not resist the siren call of the Marlovian superhero. 
Shakespeare too was listening. He was unabashedly ready to expand his intellectual and dramatic 
horizons by taking ideas from his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, including 
Marlowe. Clearly, he learned a lot also from the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry V
(c. 1588), though that rambunctious potboiler was more important for Shakespeare’s 
development when he came to write his second tetralogy of Richard II to Henry V in 1595–
1599.