Abstract
Civility, barbarism, and monstrosity all occupy the debate on time past. Temporality becomes a continuum in which people in the present reach into the past to project something into a present moving into the future. There is a typology between then and now that attempts to make sense of time or to give it an artistic or political shape. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were well aware of the challenges of time in terms of religion, politics, and art. This poet and playwright used many genres to explore the representation of history and was part of the Renaissance discovery of time.1
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Notes
Here I echo a phrase from a work I first read in the 1970s when I began to write on Shakespeare’s histories, that is, Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, 3 vols. (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983–1985)
Agnes Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
Although I discussed the German connection early on and in a few places, the most accessible work is Jonathan Hart, Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare’s History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge, 1962–75). See also Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977).
Peter Sacchio, Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, 2nd ed. (1977; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Katherine Bailey, “Shakespeare’s Histories,” British Heritage 22, no. 5 (2001): 52–55
Dominique Goy-Blanquet, “Elizabethan Historiography and Shakespeare’s Sources,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–70.
Mary Ann McGrail, “From Plagiaries to Sources,” Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 48 (1997): 169–85
Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Leonard Barkan, “What Did Shakespeare Read?” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, eds. Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–47
Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Athlone Press, 2001)
Leah Scragg, “Source Study,” Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 373–90
Aristotle, “On the Art of Poetry,” in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. T. S. Dorsch (1965; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 33–75.
Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (1941; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1945), bk. 10, 595A–608B.
W. Rhys Roberts, “References to Plato in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.” Classical Philology 19 (1924): 342–46
Everett Lee Hunt, “Plato and Aristotle on Rhetoric and Rhetoricians,” Essays on the Rhetoric of the Western World, ed. Edward P. J. Corbett, James L. Golden, and Goodwin F. Berquist (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1990), 129–61
Amâelie Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
Sara. J. Newman, “Aristotle’s Definition of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric: The Metaphors and Their Message,” Written Communication 18 (2001): 3–25.
See, for example, Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III (New York: Norton, 1956)
Peter Geyl, “Shakespeare as a Historian: A Fragment,” in Encounters in History (Cleveland: World, 1961), 49–83.
See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944)
A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2nd ed. rev. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1900), esp. 368–72
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets (1895; repr. London: Bell, 1883)
Edward Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke, 2nd ed. (London: Richard Grafton, 1548)
Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles..., 2nd ed. (London: [Henry Denham], 1587).
For another view, see Mercedes Maroto Camino, “‘My Honour I’ll Bequesh unto the Knife’: Public Heroism, Private Sacifice, and Early Modern Rapes of Lucrece,” in Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature, ed. Jonathan Hart (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 95–108.
I am using W. Jackson Bate’s term, “the burden of the past” and Harold Bloom’s “the anxiety of influence.” In his first edition Bloom exempts Shakespeare from the anxiety of influence, although I think Shakespeare felt Marlowe’s influence. See W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1970)
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
See John Gower, Book VIII, Confessio Amantis (London, 1554), cited in Hallett Smith, introduction to Pericles, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1480.
See Harold Jenkins, introduction to William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982).
G. Blakemore Evans, “The Additions Ascribed to Shakespeare,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1683–85. On Anthony Munday’s original manuscript, on Hand D and other matters regarding this play, see Giorgio Melchiori, “The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore: A Chronology of Revision,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (Autumn, 1986), 291–308.
Jonathan Hart, “The Tempest: Romance and Politics,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 49 (1996): 28.
L. C. Green, and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989), 221
Neal Salisbury, “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 239–40.
See Jonathan Hart, “Representing Spain: The Ambivalence of England and France to Spanish Colonization in the Americas,” CRCL/RCLC 25 1/2 (1998): 24–50
See Aristotle, “The Art of Poetry,” and G. Bernard Shaw, preface to Plays for Puritans (London: Contable, 1900)
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). Shakespeare’s Representation of History. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_6
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