By transforming the chronicles of Tudor historians into drama, Shakespeare and his contemporaries brought English history onto the English stage. History and performance converged, attracting thousands of spectators. For the Elizabethans, history meant political history, particularly stories of kings and high officials, who were seen as embodying the health of the state. As William Baldwin put it in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), 'where offices are duly ministered, it can not be chosen, but the people are good, whereof must needs follow a good common weal. For if the officers be good, the people cannot be ill. Thus the goodness or badness of any realm lieth in the goodness or badness of the rulers.'

The evaluation of rulers, however, was not the only goal of sixteenth-century historiographers. They wanted to know not only whether Henry VI had been a good or bad king, but also why. What were the causes of political success and failure, and what lessons could be drawn from English political history? In these concerns, Tudor historians resembled students of history today. Where they differed was in their interest, or lack of it, in accuracy. For example, Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1587), the chroniclers most used by Shakespeare, gathered their narratives of medieval English history not from primary documents or eyewitness accounts, but from earlier chronicles and literary stories.