Kaylee! I Have Internet Again (and btw here's my rough draft, part 1)

Dear Kaylee,
Your advice to me in class this morning was SO helpful. I think it needed to be cut. Here is an edited version of the first part of my paper.
 <3 <3 <3 Lizy

Part I: An Echo of the Tudors

Scholars, writers, and ordinary people alike have always been fascinated by the tumultuous events of the Tudor dynasty. “From Shakespeare’s day to today, we have been obsessed with the Tudor period: the colourful lives of the monarchs, the complex rises and falls of both the servants of the crown and the nobility, the fact that ordinary people could make their way into the highest offices of the kingdom” (Morris). We are fascinated, perhaps, by the idea that the people who lived during those times have something to say to us, particularly the renowned playwright William Shakespeare who lived during the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, and during the first years of the reign of her successor James I, and received the patronage of both. Those who observe the historical record closely understand that much of the turmoil during the reign of Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, and the strained family relations of his children have to do with Henry's quest for a legitimate heir. Consequently, his daughters Elizabeth and Mary both struggled to obtain legitimacy in one way or another during their lifetimes in order to secure their claims to the throne. The search for personal legitimacy was the driving force behind the lives of the Tudor monarchs. Shakespeare's plays contain echoes of the traumatic events and chaotic personalities of the Tudor dynasty that suggest that he is recreating the tragic world of the Tudors in his plays to address how the issue of legitimacy affected them. For this paper, I will consider the plays Richard III, King Lear, and King John, as they are thematically the most relevant to the issue of legitimacy in Tudor times.

Shakespeare's play Richard III is traditionally considered heavily embedded with Tudor propaganda, as it is depiction of the fall of the House of York as it lead to the rise of the Tudor dynasty. However, it is also a thematic treatise on the legitimacy of the Tudors themselves. In his paper “Shakespeare's King Richard III and the Problematics of Tudor Bastardy” Maurice Hunt claims that it is also an open discussion of the questions of legitimacy surrounding Henry VIII's heirs, revealing“the emergence of a paradigm of illegitimate legitimacy (or legitimate illegitimacy), a composite reproduced in the discourse on royal bastardy in King Richard III.” Richard III meets my criteria for analysis because it depicts the overturn of true legitimacy by an usurper because of how he smears the legitimacy of others, and how this overturn is reversed.

The play King John is considered an anomaly among Shakespeare's history plays, but it has a very frightening similarity to the Tudors in that it depicts the struggle for the English throne between members of a single family. Scholar Robert Lane points out that “Indeed, it is more than plausible that Shakespeare chose King John's reign because its legitimacy--the fundamental focus of the play--turned on strikingly similar issues (Lane). During the Tudor dynasty as in times before as depicted by Shakespeare, the throne of England was a highly coveted prize, but whoever wanted to claim it had to prove they had more legitimate credentials—such as birth and religious creed—than their oppnents. However, most of the contenders in both instances are very closely related. One would think that since these people are so closely related they would treat each other with love, but the desire for power has overpowered all of these affections. Shakespeare's depiction of this medieval royal family applies to the Tudors in that the struggle for monarchy and the legitimacy to secure it is a matter of life and death as well as war and peace.

While both of these plays have been demonstrated by Hunt and Lane to be thematically relevant, King Lear also includes a thematic discourse on issues of division within a royal family as well as on legitimacy itself. It is the subplot of the Earl of Glouchester and the division between his sons which merits critical attention because of how the illegitimate Edmund questions and changes his own legitimacy. There are parallels to the Tudor family in King Lear such that legitimacy is a label applied by others, individuals of questionable seek to change in themselves and others, and that false legitimacy is self-destructive while true legitimacy has nothing to do with birth. The struggle for legitimacy in Shakespeare's plays, therefore, is Shakespeare's commentary on how the monarchs of his day struggled with theirs.