A mad king’s loyal kinsman is betrayed, and murdered by assassins. A sorceress summons the dead to divine the future. The queen has a secret affair with her husband’s cousin; when her lover is captured by pirates and beheaded, she is sent his head in a box. An uncle kills his nephews in cold blood to steal the crown. A set-piece battle sees a hero from across the water storm in, slay the false king and seize power.
This could easily be the back-of- the-box set summary of any given series of Game of Thrones, the sexy, pseudo-historical, ultraviolent blockbuster of our TV age.
In fact, it is the highlights reel of another long-form pop drama portraying a distant England torn to pieces by civil war. But whereas Game of Thrones was conceived in the mid-1990s by the American writer George RR Martin, this one was produced four centuries earlier by one of the strangest and sickest minds of the mid-1590s: a young dramatist called William Shakespeare.
Four plays make up the mini-cycle that is often, inelegantly, described as Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. They are the three parts of Henry VI plus Richard III, and together they tell the story of the Wars of the Roses — the conflict fought between rival factions in the royal house of Plantagenet, which began in the 1450s and ended in 1485, when the Tudors took the throne.
This Saturday that cycle comes to BBC2, the four plays crunched into three films under the title The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses. A starry cast includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Dame Judi Dench, Hugh Bonneville and the excellent Sophie Okonedo. In spirit and style the films show how close Shakespeare’s histories can come to matching the excesses of modern screenwriting: a fair orgy of live burnings, cheerful misogyny, pitched battles and nubile flesh, set against the backdrop of a world that purports to be (but is not) 15th-century England.
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The Wars of the Roses provide plenty of material for the budding dramatist, whatever century he or she works in. During three rough decades the crown changed hands violently five times.
This was a bad time to live through — but it is an enthralling one to reimagine. Shakespeare’s plays, written more than 100 years after the events they portrayed, were at the sharp end of popular culture in the 1590s, much as Game of Thrones is today. When Henry VI part I was performed at the Rose theatre on London’s Bankside in 1592, it was praised as “a rare exercise of virtue” and a welcome counterpoint to “these effeminate days of ours”. This was English history rebooted — with a pair of balls and plenty of action.
It should be said, though, that these history plays are not Shakespeare’s best. Still, bad Shakespeare is like bad wine. It is a lot better than no wine. In the 1590s these plays would have been understood by Elizabethan audiences as an allegorical swipe at the corrupt courtiers surrounding the ageing Virgin Queen, set against the familiar background of a badly fought foreign war. Today they speak to popular distrust of the politically ambitious and the amorality of war. And of course, they are played for maximum fighting and fornication, which helps.
At no point should anyone watching these enjoyable films expect to learn any actual English history. Shakespeare drew on chronicles written earlier in the 16th century — chiefly the English history of Raphael Holinshed and the damning account of Richard III’s reign written by Thomas More. But he threw historical accuracy out of the window from the first scene: after 50 lines of Henry VI part I, three decades of the Hundred Years War have been telescoped into a single sentence from a messenger; thereafter the history fits around the drama, and not vice versa.
Shakespeare toyed with history most mischievously with his creation of Richard III — a self-destructive, crook-backed spider, Iago-like in his hellish taste for ruining lives. The form Shakespeare gave Richard, wildly exaggerated although not entirely fictional, has warped the popular view of the real king ever since. The BBC’s films take these historical liberties a step further: huge chunks of Shakespeare and of history are cut and pasted, elided, deleted, placed out of sequence or simply invented.
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It is the 15th century, ladies and gentlemen, but not as you know it. Then again — so what? Like the legends of King Arthur before them, and Game of Thrones after them, Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays are a remix of English history; they do not seek to recreate it. And that is the way to enjoy them.
Dan Jones is the author of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (Faber, £9.99)