Shakespeare never wrote about King Arthur

There are a lot of subjects Shakespeare never covered, that a mind like mine wonders what it could have been like if he had.  The censorship laws of the time tell us why he never dramatized any stories from The Bible.  In addition to that is Alexander The Great, or the Julio-Claudian Dynasty.

But it’s easy to think of King Arthur as being the one most conspicuous in his absence.  He covered other semi or completely mythical Kings of Briton like Lear and Cymbeline.  Even Macbeth feels almost like it belongs in the same genre as Arthurian legend.

Other Elizabethans didn’t really write about Arthur much either.  There is one obscure Elizabethan play about Merlin that some speculate might have been a work of Shakespeare, but it’s generally not considered part of the canon.

The reason I want to bring this up here is because I think one particular set of Shakespeare plays possibly provides a good model for how Shakespeare would have handled the subject of Arthur.  The four plays known as the Henriad.

This idea of mine came about from how KyleKallgrenBHH tends to talk about the Henry plays in his videos, like his take on The Lion King, and The Chimes at Midnight, and the Branagh films, and talking about Thor in his video on The Avengers.

It becomes easy to think of the rather idealized portrait he paints of Henry V as being what his take on King Arthur would be.  With Henry IV then as Uther, and Richard II as Vortigern.  Falstaf could maybe be compared to Sir Kay. or maybe Ecktor with Kay, Bedivere and Gawain being Pistol, Nym and Bardolph.

Update April 2019: And maybe you could expand that to the War of the Roses plays resembling what supposedly happened after Arthur's death. With various Lancastrian figures being the 5 kings of Wales and Cornwall, and maybe Cardinal Henry Beaufort as Gildas.  And the house of Peredur being the house of York.