The 1590s was a decade of war in Ireland, where the Earl of Essex struggled in vain to quell the rebellion of the irrepressible Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. For the first half of his career, all through the last years of old Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Shakespeare was a war poet. He had an obsessive interest in military life. Richard III, Titus Andronicus and all his sons, Othello, Iago and Cassio, Macbeth and the other Thanes, Hamlet’s armored father and young Fortinbras, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar, Coriolanus, Alcibiades, Henry IV and Sir John Falstaff, dozens of dukes, earls, and knights in the ranks of the history plays, Benedick and his colleagues in Much Ado About Nothing: all are soldiers, some by profession and others by force of circumstance. All are defined to a greater or lesser degree by the hunger to fill the vacuum left by battle and by war as the defining male action (which is not to say that Shakespeare failed to create a good line in female soldiers—Queen Margaret, Tamora Queen of Goths, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Cordelia and her sisters). But the most famous of all his soldiers would be King Henry V.

Having completed a sequence of four plays about the Wars of the Roses, then the rise and fall of Richard III, ending with the establishment of the Tudor dynasty following the battle of Bosworth Field, Shakespeare turned his mind to the preceding period of English history. In writing Richard II, which inexorably moves toward Henry Bullingbrook’s ascent of the throne as King Henry IV, Shakespeare was setting himself up for another cycle of plays that would inevitably climax in the short but triumphant reign of Bullingbrook’s son, King Henry V, victor over the French.

At the beginning of the fifth act of King Harry’s play, the Chorus describes his triumphal procession through the streets of London upon his return to England after his astonishing victory on the field of Agincourt. In the course of this speech, Shakespeare makes the most open and striking topical allusion anywhere in his works:

… But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens.
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in:
As by a lower but by loving likelihood,
Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him? Much more, and much more cause,
Did they this Harry.…

When these lines were first spoken on the stage of the newly built Globe Theatre in the summer of 1599, few audience members could have had any doubt what the Chorus was talking about. The “gracious empress” is Queen Elizabeth and “the general” is the Earl of Essex—the queen’s sometime favorite, embodiment of the martial code of chivalry and honor, leader of the war party in the long-standing debate at court over how to proceed in relation to Spain. At this moment he was leading his campaign against Tyrone in Ireland. The allusion is unmistakable.

Shakespeare does not let go of his habitual political caution. It is a “likelihood,” not a certainty, that Essex will bring rebellion broached on his sword and it is an open question how many people will turn out to cheer him. But there is still a boldness in the comparison. When “conqu’ring Caesar” crossed the Rubicon and returned to Rome, there was talk of him seizing an imperial crown and Brutus and his friends had to take drastic action to save the republic. Conversely, there were moments in late Elizabethan court politics when exasperation with the old childless queen’s refusal to name an heir led some to wonder whether there might not be a future for England in some form of Roman-style republican government, with the Privy Council serving as its Senate and a strong man such as Essex in the role of Consul. Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar that same year of 1599.

But Richard II, written a few years before, is another powerful shadow behind the allusion to Essex and Tyrone. After all, that too is a play in which an Irish war is of pivotal importance in demonstrating an English monarch’s failing grip on the handle of national power. Essex was often perceived as a Henry Bullingbrook figure, a no-nonsense military man greeted with acclaim whenever he rode through the streets of London, as he did before heading off on his French campaign in 1591. What is more, he claimed descent from Bullingbrook, which made some people worry that he had aspirations to the throne himself.

Shakespeare seems to have been aware of the Essex/Bullingbrook identification. At the climax of Richard II, he describes Bullingbrook in London, portraying him in a manner that draws on the public image of Essex:

… the duke, great Bullingbrook,
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed
Which his aspiring rider seemed to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course.
While all tongues cried ‘God save thee, Bullingbrook!’
You would have thought the very windows spake,
So many greedy looks of young and old
Through casements darted their desiring eyes
Upon his visage, and that all the walls
With painted imagery had said at once
‘Jesu preserve thee! Welcome, Bullingbrook!’
Whilst he, from one side to the other turning,
Bareheaded, lower than his proud steed’s neck,
Bespake them thus: ‘I thank you, countrymen’,
And thus still doing, thus he passed along.

There is no precedent in Shakespeare’s historical sources for this striking image of Bullingbrook’s popularity. It has been invented in order to establish a contrast with the deposed Richard, who follows in after with no man crying, “God save him,” and dust and rubbish being thrown out of the windows on his head. Shakespeare thus illustrates the process of the two cousins being like two buckets, one descending down a well as the other rises up. He also highlights the fickleness of the common people. At the same time, the close concentration on Bullingbrook’s management of his proud horse makes a point about his strong statecraft: good horsemanship was a traditional image of effective government. This sequence in the play was explicitly quoted apropos of Essex in more than one political intervention of the period.

In the Henry IV plays, however, Shakespeare conspicuously dropped the image of Bullingbrook, now king, as a popular figure. Far from showing himself among his people and exemplifying strong government, Henry IV skulks in his palace as his kingdom disintegrates around him, the penalty for his usurpation of his throne. The horseman and populist is his son Hal, who goes on to become Henry V, leading his men to triumph in battle. The description of his return to London after the victory at Agincourt clearly echoes that of the speech about his father at the corresponding moment in Richard II. As so often in Shakespeare, the wheel of history comes full circle.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s semiconcealed political intentions in making the allusion—one gets the sense that he is only somewhere a little over halfway to being an Essex man—it is easy to see how the two remarkably similar passages in Richard II and Henry V could have been perceived as pro-Essex. This perception drew him into exceptionally dangerous political territory.