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Be Duke of Lancaster, let him be King. He is both King and Duke of Lancaster, And that the Lord of Westmerland shall maintain. (3 Henry VI, 1.1.86-88)1
LANCASTER RESONATES THROUGH BOTH THE FIRST AND SECOND tetralogies of Shakespeare's English history plays. As the name of one of the two royal houses that contested the throne from the deposition of Richard II (1399) to the defeat of Richard III by Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field (1485), including "Yorke, and Lancasters long iarres," it could hardly do otherwise.2 Yet the precise resonance of "Lancaster," what associations it might have had two centuries after the beginning of that historical sequence for Shakespeare's contemporaries generally and Shakespeare personally, has not been examined in detail. The possibility that Shakespeare spent some of his early "lost years" in Lancashire (the county of which Lancaster is county town) is a starting-point for this study, though it is not my theme. "Lancaster" has a national significance, not merely a local one, and in that respect its status in the history plays reveals nothing unequivocally biographical. But, as we shall see, an investigation of "Lancaster" and its resonances does associate Shakespeare with Roman Catholicism, however indirectly; if the future playwright is the "William Shakeshafte" mentioned in the 1581 will of the recusant Alexander Hoghton of Lea in Lancashire, one of the likeliest inferences is that he was, at least at that time, a Catholic recusant.3 This inquiry will also suggest new ways in which the second tetralogy, the sequence from Richard II to Henry V, may be seen as succession plays, obliquely addressing the tensions surrounding an aging queen with no acknowledged successor.4
THE DUCHY OF LANCASTER AND ITS ORIGINS
A necessary preliminary to any study of Shakespeare's relationship to Lancaster is a detailed archaeology of the duchy and its resonances in this period, bearing in mind that much of what we discuss will be speculative. In Elizabethan England Lancaster's primary association was as a unique constitutional anomaly. To this day a member of the British Cabinet is the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, marking "the historic importance of the Office . . . in the Royal Household."5 By the same token, within Lancashire and at gatherings of the duchy Her...