Abstract
Colonization of American Indians, vagrancy, the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, witchcraft, topography, same-sex desire: what has contemporary criticism done to traditional conceptions of Shakespeare’s historical concerns? Any consensus over the substance of and rationale for his imaginative engagement with history has long dissipated. Of course, Shakespeare has always been considered a writer of history, but, increasingly, his works have been seen as always historical in representing cultural practices far beyond the primary sources included in modern editions. Even if limited to the ‘history plays’, any casual survey of recent monographs and articles would find these texts depicted as addressing a range of political and social topics apparently remote from their immediate concerns. The ‘return to history’ in critical thinking has increased both the amount of material to be considered as providing Shakespeare with sources, and also extended its range, promoting an understanding of ‘history itself as the commonplace book of Renaissance drama’.1
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Notes and References
Douglas Bruster, ‘New Light on the Old Historicism: Shakespeare and the Forms of Historicist Criticism’, Literature and History, 3rd series, 5 (1996): 1–18, 6.
Claire Colebrook, New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 22.
Bruster, ‘New Light on the Old Historicism’, 3.
Jean E. Howard, ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’, English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–43, 25.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 161–83, 166–7.
D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology and ‘The Light of Truth’ from the Acession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990), p. xiii.
Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7.
Margot Heinemann, ‘Political Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and M. Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 161–205, 177.
David Scott Kastan, ‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459–75, 461.
Ibid.: 469.
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 206–27, 225.
Janet Clare, ‘Historicism and the Question of Censorship in the Renaissance’, English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 155–76, 160. Clare’s essay is a critique of Foucault’s understanding of how ‘power is dispersed throughout a culture and operates in the same way as sin in medieval allegory, subtle and alluring’ (159).
James Holstun, ‘Ranting at the New Historicism’, English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 189–225, 197.
In Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 193–245.
Ibid., p. 214.
Ibid., p. 235.
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 150.
Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 28.
Ibid., pp. 118–19.
All citations will refer to the Arden edition of King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961).
David Norbrook, ‘The Emperor’s New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism’, Textual Practice 10 (1996): 329–57, 348–9.
Donald R. Kelley, ‘Elizabethan Political Thought’, in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 47–79, 50–3.
Martha A. Kurtz, ‘Rethinking Gender and Genre in the History Plays’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 36 (1996): 267–87.
T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 361.
Hanna H. Gray, ‘Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence’, Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–514, 512.
The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978).
Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 5.
The only substantial attempt to deploy the work of the Frankfurt School in relation to Shakespeare has been that of Hugh Grady in The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 272.
Catherine Gallagher, ‘Marxism and New Historicism’, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 37–48, 44–5.
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© 2001 Dermot Cavanagh
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Cavanagh, D. (2001). Shakespeare and History. In: Cartmell, D., Scott, M. (eds) Talking Shakespeare. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-98574-8_6
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