Trying to describe the outcome of the Wars of the Roses — the fall of the House of York — in genre terms has long been an uncertain business. When Shakespeare completed his first tetralogy with Richard III, which ends with the collapse of Yorkist hopes at Bosworth Field, the printers of the earliest quarto editions of the play were confident that the work they were hawking was The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. After Shakespeare’s death, however, his friends and colleagues from the King’s Men weren’t so sure; while the play they printed in the first folio of 1623 had an individual title page that still referred to it as a ‘tragedy’, the main contents page and running heads of this most authoritative edition of Shakespeare’s collected works gave it a much more neutral billing — The Life and Death of Richard the Third — and placed it not alongside the tragedies but among the histories.
This conflicted re-description was due to the fact that when he first started writing, Shakespeare could use ‘tragedy’ to mean ‘fall’, since this was the dominant meaning of the term, derived from a medieval European de casibus tradition (which told stories of the decline of princes and their dynasties); but by the end of his career, Shakespeare had so expanded the possibilities of tragedy in English — with flawed heroes who fell, but who also demanded intimate, affective connection with audiences — that the established meaning of the term was destabilised and altered for ever.
Thomas Penn’s gripping new study tries to reclaim the idea that the fall of the House of York is not just history, but ‘An English Tragedy’. There’s plenty to recommend this since much of the narrative resembles a de casibus chronicle of an eminent family falling from grace and power.
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