Holinshed Chronicles: England, Scotland, and Ireland. Volume 1, Complete

Here is the raw material of English history, before Shakespeare transformed it into tragedy and history play. Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, first published in 1577, was the great compendium of British history its Elizabethan readers consulted for stories of kings, conquests, and legendary origins. This volume traces England's story from the mythic earliest inhabitants through the Norman Conquest and into the reign of William Rufus, the red-faced king whose brief and brutal reign ended in an arrow in the New Forest. The chroniclers work in a peculiar register: part medieval legend, part Renaissance inquiry, dismissing tales of giants while still recording the prophetic dreams and omens that would later become Macbeth's witches. It is history as Elizabethans understood it, messy and providential and alive with pattern. And it was the primary source for Shakespeare's most towering dramas. Open these pages and you are reading what the Bard read.