The Tudor Kings

The death of King Richard III was as close as William Shakespeare’s plays about English history came to his own present day for the vast majority of his career. It wasn’t until the very end of his time in London, when he presented Henry VIII as the misbegotten, unsatisfying coda to his tenure as a working playwright, that he continued the story of England’s monarchs. Yet it seems to me better for us to take up the subject of what came after Richard already today. For the Tudor dynasty that had Richard’s triumphant nemesis Henry VII as its patriarch was still on the throne as Shakespeare was making his name in London, affecting his life and his art in manifold ways; it was no accident that the tetralogy of plays we’ve just been exploring was, whatever else it might have been, partially rank Tudor propaganda. It can only aid our understanding of the man and his many plays that are still to come if we look now at the most recent history that Shakespeare knew, even if we can’t connect it…