Furness: Holinshed's Chronicles (1577)

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Holinshed's Chronicles (1577)

hen The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland was first published in 1577, it was the most impressive British history England had ever seen. While the book is often referred to as "Holinshed's Chronicles," Raphael Holinshed was not its sole author. An English printer, R. Wolfe, started the project and employed Holinshed to organize the compilation of the history (after Wolfe's death, another set of printers took over the financing of the chronicles). Holinshed wrote the histories of England and Scotland, William Harrison supplied a description of England and Scotland, and Richard Stanyhurst supplied a description of Ireland. The text provided a geographical description of each region, and an account of its past, traced back to prehistorical and legendary origins and continuing up through the sixteenth century. The Chronicles' sources are multiple, including old and contemporary histories, eye-witness accounts, documents, and anecdotes. Each history is organized as a sequence of monarchs, including the name of the king or queen and the year of his or her reign. A second edition of the Chronicles appeared in 1587 after Holinshed's death in 1580. This text was greatly enlarged and augmented by several contributors, including John Hooker (Vowell), Abraham Fleming, Francis Boteville, and John Stow, while the woodcut illustrations were eliminated. Shakespeare used this 1587 edition for source material for many of his plays, including the history plays, Macbeth, and King Lear. Aside from the elimination of the woodcuts, the new compilers added and deleted texts and marginal comments; the moralistic comments and marginal Latin tags added by Abraham Fleming, in particular, reveal a later contributor's effort to moralize British history. Comparing the Chronicles' textual and Shakespeare's stage versions of the lives of Britain's kings and queens has long occupied scholars, but it is also a useful way for teachers and students to see how Shakespeare's deviations from his source materials (mediated by other sources, of course) help to highlight the choices he made when constructing his plays. Some of these changes were necessary for theatrical effect, some deepened or complicated characters, and some shifted the entire political and social implications of the story. As Russ McDonald describes Shakespeare's uses of Holinshed:

The Chronicle should be regarded as a vast warehouse full of character studies, dates, details of battles, genealogical data, digression on motives and consequences, Tudor political orthodoxy, and unintended subversions of that orthodoxy. --The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, p. 113-114.

We have scanned the 1577 edition for two reasons: first, because it is held in the Furness Collection, and second, because it contains the woodcut illustrations. The Chronicles has traditionally interested scholars because of the Shakespeare connection, but it is also a fascinating record of complex historical consciousness in sixteenth-century England.

--Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania

Bibliography:

F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967)

Russ McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents (Boston: St. Martin's 1996).

Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)

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