Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses Plays: Rhetoric and the Elizabethan World
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

Shakespeare in his Wars of the Roses plays (history plays) uses rhetoric as a tool to examine three major areas of contemporary Elizabethan life: societal, governmental, and religious. Rhetoric was useful as a commenting tool to avoid clerical and temporal censorship of his ideas, to cloak his ideas in a manner as to enable the audiences of his plays (produced in public playhouses and at Court) to decide themselves how they felt about their life, and as a literary facility to add drama and tension to his plays. This course studies the eight plays Shakespeare focused on in The Wars of the Roses historic time to understand the plays and how the use of rhetoric in them made possible his airing his own views without fear of outright societal, governmental,or religious rejection.