History and Literature: Past and Present

This term I attended a historiography lecture series titled, "History and Literature." Conveniently, my tutorials in Shakespeare and Historiography perfectly converge under this category. This post is a reflection on the interplay of these two disciplines.

I just returned from a very delightful tutorial on Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V. My tutor and I discussed what Shakespeare is like as a historian, and as it turns out, he no historian at all. Not by typical historiographical standards, at any rate. He is not necessarily interested in the accuracy of chronology or facts: although drawing from the Chronicles of Holinshed (one of the best sources on English history available in Shakespeare’s day), many of Shakespeare's details don't line up with Holinshed's historical data. Hotspur Percy and Prince Henry were actually thirty years apart, for instance, not the peers that Shakespeare presents them as. Shakespeare makes them peers, however, to make a more poignant comparison between the two characters.

It may be contended that Shakespeare wasn't really all that interested in conveying the past. What he found fascinating and important, however, were the themes of kingship, war, the nature of the state, and human character and responsibility. He looked to history to understand metahistorical ideas - principles that are true and pertinent across the span of all time, not only an isolated historical era. He granted himself a good deal of literary license in adjusting the historical details to convey his metahistorical ideas as poignantly as possible.

The license we allow to Shakespeare would never be granted to a historian, who is bound to a rigid standard of accuracy. We need historians to be accurate if we are to value truth in our understanding of the past. However, we also have need of those who are able to interpret the past, distill out the metahistorical principles, and present them to us in a palpable and compelling way. It may be, as in the case of Shakespeare, that the narrative best demonstrating those principles must sometimes compromise the accuracy of historical detail. Such compromise is not acceptable for the historian, but that is why we have literature. We need both Shakespeare and Gibbon, Homer and Thucydides, to help us understand the reality of how the world works. Historians can give us facts, and even interpretations of them, but it is up to the author or the playwright to present a didactic and winsome historical tale.

Of course I must give the caveat that the historian is not always cold and dry - he, too, can "literaturize" his work. And sometimes a writer of literature may stray so far from historical accuracy that the content of his work may be considered all his own invention. This is where the distinction between the two disciplines – between fact and creative imagination – begin to blur, and it is particularly important in these instances to look carefully at history and literature side-by-side to discern the truest and most edifying meaning we can.