SOURCE: Pierce, Robert B. “Conclusion.” In Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State, pp. 241-56. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Pierce summarizes Shakespeare's representation of the family in his English history plays.

The family is so basic a human institution that in almost any play or group of plays it has an important role. Shakespeare's history plays are primarily concerned with the public life of his nation, the terrible hundred years of civil strife and wars against the French that haunted the imagination of Elizabethan England and that earlier time of crisis in the reign of King John. His plays express the deepest and most widespread feelings of his countrymen. To them political matters were not of merely theoretical concern; they dreaded the return of a chaos that they knew would involve them and their families in untold suffering. In our age we...