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Edward IV's Secret Familiarities and the Politics of Proximity in Elizabethan History Plays

Tremulously erected where the Wars of the Roses blossomed, the court of Edward IV fascinated Elizabethans increasingly hungry for the drama of their own past. More, Hall, Holinshed, and Stow dealt in different ways with the reign. Churchyard, Chute, Daniel, Drayton, Deloney, Heywood, Shakespeare, and Sidney countered with their own distinct renderings for the page and stage. Paul Murray Kendall has outlined certain facets of the allure: "The court was like a tropical garden not altogether reclaimed from jungle: overheated, luxuriant in blooms of pageantry and the varicolored plumage of tilting knights, rustling with the endless whisperings of faction, dense with suspicions and halfhidden hatreds."2 In a handful of decades, writers found personalities such as Jack Cade and Jane Shore, the king-making Warwick, Margaret of Anjou, and Richard III, of course. Here were plots and complots, debates over succession and Salic law, not to mention murders, plebeian uprisings, favorites, and mistresses. For every contemporary issue, the fifteenth-century world served as a kind of prism, dispensing reflections of "us" and "them" and those who came before. In their introduction to Shakespeare's 2 and 3 Henry VI, Robert K. Turner, Jr. and George Walton Williams suggest that more than glamorous resemblance prompted this "special fascination" with Edward IV's reign: "The times were near enough to be influential and well remembered, yet far enough away to be safely idealized. Readily available were extensive historical and legendary accounts devoted wholly or partially to fifteenth-century personages and happenings. "3 To put it succinctly, being "near enough" and "far enough" made the period exceedingly useful to historians, poets, and playwrights alike. Together, they could demand, as Edward Hall did in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, that their readers grasp the Tudor age in terms of fifteenthcentury disjunctions: