The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles is a fascinating collection of essays. It covers a massive amount of ground but ultimately it is not clear that it coalesces as a coherent whole. But then, perhaps, Holinshed would have approved of this collection’s capacious nature. After all, the Chronicles are themselves an unwieldy monument to late Tudor historiography. Like them, The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles contains fascinating passages, strange stories, and interesting insights tucked away in unexpected corners. This is a collection in which almost all scholars of Tudor literature and history will find something that is interesting and useful.

The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles contains forty chapters and two appendixes. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that the quality of some of the chapters is varied. There are a number of contributions that do little more then tell the reader what Holinshed contains. More worrying, there are a few chapters in which the author seems to be slightly embarrassed to be writing on Holinshed and moves as quickly as possible to discuss another text or topic that is easier to define or understand. Indeed, if I have a criticism of the collection overall it is that while the editors have produced an impressive group of contributors, they appear not to have been fully successful in imposing a coherent approach to the Chronicles. This is a shame. The editors write in the prologue that, “the Chronicles have been routinely approached piecemeal by those looking to mine them for information relevant to other problems, authors, and works” (xxxv). This is undoubtedly the case but there are also a number of examples of precisely this approach being adopted in a few of the chapters of the Handbook. More generally there is a failure overall to create or find ways of writing about the Chronicles that embrace their multiauthorial, plural status. There are also a very few chapters that seem to be simply defeated by the Chronicles and end up trying to condense a particular topic to a manageable size.

These are, however, minor caveats. This is an impressive collection with a number of outstanding chapters. Jennifer Richards’s chapter “Rhetoric” is one of the strongest in the collection, partly because it treats the Chronicles as a literary text containing numerous different textual forms and devices. Felicity Heal has produced a fascinating chapter, “Readership and Reception,” which reminds one how influential and read the Chronicles were throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chapter “Religious Ideology” by Peter Marshall, like Richards’s, really grapples with the nature of the Chronicles’s plurality. Marshall writes, “Seeking out the heart and soul of Holinshed’s ‘religion,’ like trying to classify that of Shakespeare, can feel like opening a box of tricks in a hall of mirrors. The subject appears all around one, intensely dispersed and fragmented, and yet indistinct and perhaps not really there at all” (411). Marshall goes on to point out that the Chronicles’s lack of clarity over the English Reformation is entirely predictable, given that this reflected the state of the English church and, more generally, Christianity during Elizabeth’s reign. How could a text as self-aware as the Chronicles is in places — one, moreover, that was collectively produced — not have reflected the confused and refracted the nature of the Elizabethan religious (non)settlement?

Marshall’s reference to Shakespeare is a reminder of one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that the Chronicles are still studied today — their influence on the plays of Shakespeare. The collection does include a number of chapters on Shakespeare and the Chronicles. Paulina Kewes’s chapter, “History Plays and the Royal Succession,” is a judicious piece of work but there is a tension on the chapters discussing Holinshed and Shakespeare. This is a result of different ways in which the authorial roles or functions have been approached traditionally by critics working on the Chronicles and Shakespeare’s drama. Whereas scholars working on the latter have largely been prepared to use such phrases as “Shakespeare argues,” this would clearly be inappropriate in relation to Holinshed. This may, however, be about to change. One of the real achievements of Shakespeare author studies will be to draw out the extent to which many of Shakespeare’s plays were actually collaborative texts. Perhaps in the future Holinshed will look much less an aberration then it does now.

The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles is a fascinating collection of essays. It includes, alongside the chapters I have already mentioned, excellent work by Ian W. Archer, Steven Gunn, Thomas Freeman, and Susannah Monta. It will be a vital reference work for scholars for years to come and in particular for those writing on Elizabethan literature and drama.