The Making and Manufacturing of History

Abstract

‘History’ consists as much of interpretation as of bare facts. In some periods and places, interpretation actually comes to take precedence over fact. For the Elizabethans, as for modern totalitarian states, fact was so much subservient to interpretation that history became a form of mythology and propaganda. In the Henry IV plays, this becomes Shakespeare’s theme. On the one hand, he faithfully transmits one of the central historical myths to which his age subscribed. On the other, he shows the events of Henry’s reign being distorted even as they are made, according to local political necessity. He shows history being ‘made’, both in the sense of momentous things being done, and also in the sense of their falsification.