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Shakespeare’s original audience had an advantage over modern readers since they would have been familiar with the then relatively recent history portrayed and dramatized in his “histories”—including the eight plays that chronicle (more or less) the upheavals of a roughly 85-year period in English history that historians have labeled the Wars of the Roses.
Starting near the beginning of the fifteenth century, England’s royal family was locked in a power struggle that periodically erupted into violence. The name “Wars of the Roses” references the symbols of the two related but competing families: the Lancasters, symbolized by a red rose, and the Yorks, symbolized by a white rose. Shakespeare covers these events of this period in a series of eight connected history plays, roughly organized into two four-play sequences knowns as “tetralogies.” The first tetralogy, which was written later in Shakespeare’s career, includes Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V. The second tetralogy, written earlier, includes Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, Henry VI, Part 3, and Richard III. In each of these histories, Shakespeare often plays fast and loose with the facts, stretching and altering the timeline to suit his dramatic purposes. However, the plays are generally based upon historical records.
The problems began in the late fourteenth century with the death of the long-reigning King Edward III, of the house of Plantagenet. Edward III had seven sons, of whom the third and fourth became the fathers of dynasties. The elder was called John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, and his younger brother was called Edmund of Langley, duke of York. Their descendants formed two important clans—the Lancasters and the Yorks. Both clans derived from royal blood, and both produced ambitious men who were willing to fight for the throne. The Lancasters and their allies are sometimes called the Lancastrians; the Yorks and their allies are called the Yorkists.
After the death of Edward III in 1377, King Richard II—who was descended from Edward’s deceased eldest son and was thus neither a York nor a Lancaster—ruled for twenty-two years. However, he was eventually overthrown by his cousin, a Lancaster named Henry Bolingbroke, who was the son of John of Gaunt. Bolingbroke became Henry IV in 1399. He was succeeded by his son, Henry V, in 1413, who in turn was succeeded by his son, Henry VI, in 1421.
But in the late fifteenth century, fighting broke out again, this time between Lancasters and Yorks. After a bloody struggle, the Lancastrian Henry VI was deposed in 1461, and the head of the house of York took the throne as King Edward IV. Henry VI briefly resumed the kingship in 1470, but again he was deposed. In 1471, Henry’s son and destined heir, known as Edward, Prince of Wales (a title always given to the current heir to the throne), was killed in battle, and Henry was put to death. The sons of the York family—King Edward IV, the duke of Clarence, and their younger brother the duke of Gloucester—were victorious.
However, as Shakespeare famously depicts in Richard III, Edward’s youngest brother, Richard, the duke of Gloucester, had plans to take the throne for himself. A man so renowned for his viciousness that he developed a posthumous reputation for being horribly malformed, Richard schemed either to kill or imprison the many individuals who stood between him and the Crown.
This final play in the sequence concludes with the event that brought an end to the Wars of the Roses. Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry Tudor, his opponent and successor, was a descendant of a secondary arm of the Lancaster family and the earl of Richmond. He was soon crowned Henry VII, initiating the reign of the Tudor dynasty, which included his son, Henry VIII (the subject of a less well-known Shakespeare history) and Elizabeth I, who reigned during most of Shakespeare’s lifetime.
