Shakespeare’s Histories and the Elements

This work investigates the presence of elemental imagery in Shakespeare’s English history plays, arguing that it provides him with an illuminating means of examining political processes and how they shape ideas of history. This study provides a contribution to scholarship in offering a comprehensive critical reading of the histories through the lens of elemental theory. It surveys a variety of early modern writings that articulate elemental views—drawing upon Aristotelian and Empedoclean concepts across disciplines—and that left a profound imprint on Shakespeare’s imagination. In this context, I explore impressions of the four elements—fire, air, water, and earth—intimately associated with both state and man, particularly through notions of contesting forces, changeability, mutability, and decay. These impressions, often illustrated through humoral confusion, also foreground the human dimension within this political vision.
Alongside these persistent elemental features, which collectively construct a dire political vision suggesting a cyclical view of history, a comparison of the ways in which elemental imagery is shaped in each play reveals a distinctive typification of each historical reign or monarch. While, in the rare case of King John, Shakespeare exhibits a marked tendency to cluster elemental imagery around pivotal moments, typically a combination of two elements is selected in each play for their dominance as the focal point for analyzing its imagery. Particular attention is given to the intricate and transformative relationships these elements undergo within a play, in comparison to other plays in the histories, or between a play and its sources.
One influential source is the annotations in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), which take the form of Latin citations drawn from a vast range of literary works. Their significance as possible inspirations for Shakespeare’s imagination, and their added value to commentary on the historical text—largely unmapped and unexplored—is further expanded in the appendices.