Departing from a generation of scholars who have read Shakespeare’s Henriad plays severally, I argue that they should be read as a coherent work of art. Despite the fact they were not originally performed or written together, only a holistic study of the plays can uncover the instructive nature and educational potential of these historical dramas. When read individually these plays are often understood to be about explorations of kingship, but read as a sequence, the Henriad plays also encourage communities to think about the theater as a place where they can take collective ownership of history. My dissertation,“We in it shall be remember’d.” Communal Thought in Shakespeare’s Henriad, offers a reconsideration of Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Reading these plays together, I argue that we can see how Shakespeare becomes visible to us, not only as an artist interested in monarchy and power, but as a writer who understands the metacognitive capacities of his audiences. The plays in sequence create a buckling effect of multiple layers of history imprinting themselves onto and over the previous plays, both in the sequence of Shakespeare’s tetralogy and in relation to earlier plays of the chronicle tradition by other writers. In the late 1500’s, when the history play genre flourished, the activity of playgoing was a new one. The separation between spectators and players was less distinct than it is today: for one thing, they could see each other clearly in the shared light of the outdoor playhouse. Shakespeare’s Henriad reflects the arc of this emerging distinction, situating the audience in the position of historical agents. Chapter One explores the way Shakespeare challenges audiences, both with anachronisms, and crowd scenes that engage the playgoers as co-creators by describing historical events as a form of theater that echoes the conditions of the drama’s performance. These moments serve to begin the distancing effect on the audience that the rest of the tetralogy pursues. Chapter Two examines how spectators are forced to question historical truth in 1 & 2 Henry IV, through the ways the reign of Richard II is surfaced as the subject of motivated reflection by a range of characters. Observing these characters misremembering events in the earlier play puts spectators in the position of impartial historial intermediaries. Chapter Three considers the connection between Henry V and Virgil’s Aeneid, and the impact of the epic genre on playgoers, who must become historical agents involved in doing the imaginative work of the play. That the audience is so explicitly referred to puts them in a unique position in the play as co-creators of its outcome. A Coda on The Merry Wives of Windsor sutures the three chapters, in order to point the way to what the dissertation will become as a book, presenting Merry Wives as a folkloric, pastoral denouement to the Henriad. The ritualistic mocking of Falstaff by the wives and the community documents a form of domestic history that is cyclical, enabling him to live on in our imaginations, in an alternative ending to the one he receives in Henry V. The design of these plays is to educate audiences on how to participate in history plays, and adapt them for their own uses. Achieving this, Shakespeare supersedes the earlier chronicle historiographical tradition, demonstrating that playing and play texts can dominate historical narratives. I contend that these plays facilitate the development of a new kind of historical lens through which audiences and readers of any era can view and experience history not merely as cyclical but as always emerging, constantly imprinting itself on what has come before. The unity of the plays is demonstrated by modern performances that take on the cycle as a whole. This unity, however, is a porous one, since the “intertheatricality” of the plays extends to other non-Shakespearean history plays and public entertainments that helped shape the public sphere that Shakespeare was engaged in. The plays demonstrate an historical layering in which earlier periods of time are brought into creative contact with each other and with the moments of composition and performance, both in Shakespeare’s lifetime and in subsequent centuries.