John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), is alleged to have said that he knew no English history but what he had learned from Shakespeare. The irony of Marlborough's claim was that Shakespeare's ten history plays, covering a century and a half between them, could eclipse the infinitely broader, complex narrative of the English nation. A similar type of irony may be discerned in the modern reception of the Shakespearean history play. Here, the experience of many readers and theatre-goers with the Shakespeare histories tends to be inversely proportional to their familiarity with the genesis and history of the history play as a literary genre in an early modern European context, in England and abroad. The same individual who might now visit Blenheim Palace at Woodstock under the assumption that the Duke of Marlborough was a wealthy tobacconist, is likely also to live under the delusion that Shakespeare invented the history play. But as G. K. Hunter has rightly noted, 'Shakespeare could not, any more than God, invent ex nihilo.' Shakespeare had predecessors but also contemporaries who practised the history play, and although it seems beyond doubt, as Richard Helgerson has argued, that 'Shakespeare did make a larger contribution to that genre than anyone else', these contemporaries provide an indispensable framework within which the unique achievement of Shakespeare may be appreciated. One of the aims of this essay is to bring into focus Shakespeare's accomplishment within the immediate English contexts of the new genre. In addition, this essay seeks to position Shakespeare and the early modern project of historical drama in its no less relevant, though frequently neglected, European framework.