Beg to differ. Shakespeare had a lifelong love for Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and had familiarity with the then-current translations of various classical works. Using Renaissance Italy or classical Rome, or pre-Roman Britain to frame stories gave him a needed alibi when it came time to make commentary on the country.
The Tudors slaughtered people wholesale, and changed the acceptable religion of the country four times in a generation.
I’m not complaining exactly, the turmoil and oppression by Tudor and Jacobean dynasties led to the colonization of America and eventually the English Civil War. Some of my ancestors bailed when the gubmint marched into their small town and strung the local pastor from his own steeple.
Shakespeare lived and worked in the Tudor surveillance state, and had cousins tortured and executed. The master of the revels had to approve (or rewrite) every script before it was ever performed. His history plays were little more than Tudor propaganda in their conclusion, whatever he may have put into the script.
The ending of Richard III has the dream sequence where Henry VII is being told that he’s all good and Richard III is being told he’s all bad. Only after James I took the throne did Shakespeare let his hair down a little bit, finally getting around to Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon.
Other than their modern embrace of the quasi-mythical Boudicca, and the koranimals squatting in Britain, the British seem to look back fondly at Roman rule; there was even a commissioned epic poem that, analogous to the Aeneid, attributed the founding of Britain to a fictional Brutus, I think from Troy. Not unlike our own framers, they developed a love for the architecture as well.
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/homes/house1.jpg
I don't know if you could find a state in 16th Century Europe that did not employ methods we would find intolerable and indeed some of our ancestors in that time found intolerable. But, the at times wholesale slaughter of the Wars of the Roses had ended and thankfully so for most Englishmen.
Shakespeare's characters and stories are not wooden, however, far from it. You can see in the histories a dislike of the opportunism and machiavellianism that had infected politics in his day.
One of the more interesting themes Shakespeare develops is regicide. Obviously, he portrays it in Richard III but the general attitude of the history plays is that it is never justified. Shakespeare does explore the issue, however, outside England, in Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth. Perhaps the idea was still percolating in the 1640's.
I agree that the Tudors and Stuarts set the stage for the English Civil War, although I lay more blame on James I and Charles I's attempts to impose the idea of the divine right of kings on the English, who always regarded themselves as free people albeit governed by kings.
