Abstract
The drama of history can be found in dramatic history. Chronicle and history plays are important representations of the past even if they are more fictional than some might like in the pursuit of truth. What happened in the past has much to do with the question of who is interpreting the past and how. Historical representation and the interpretation of that representation are crucial and contested in the claim of history. Historical verisimilitude is as difficult as any verisimilitude. Time and space, the viewer and the viewed recede. The attempt at truth may well be asymptotic and is part of the drama of meaning. Mutability is part of the search for the immutable. Change is part of the desire to find something closer to the truth. All history seems revisionary. The dramatic history during the reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts represents a past whose presence was immediate on the stage. Some of those plays we have in the traces of texts. Shakespeare is best known for the history play, but others produced chronicle and history plays that provide a drama of history.1
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Notes
Thanks to Anne Lancashire for her seminar on drama of the 1580s in 1979–80 when my first work on historical drama of the 1580s began. Here I shall note some relevant material that has appeared on the histories after I completed the original work contained in this chapter. See Richard Helgerson, “Murder in Faversham: Holinshed’s Impertinent History,” The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93–105
Paul Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the De Casibus Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)
Graham Holderness, The Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
Derek Cohen, Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003)
Richard Helgerson, “Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists of History,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2002).
See, for instance, Don Ricks, Shakespeare’s Emergent Form: A Study of the Structures of the “Henry VI” Plays (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1968)
David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: “Henry VI” and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)
Paul Bacquet, Les pièces historiques de Shakespeare: La première tétralogie et “Le roi Jean” vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978).
Richard Simpson, “The Politics of Shakespeare’s Historical Plays,” The New Shakespeare’ Society’s Transactions (1874), 402–5.
Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984)
Jonathan Hart, “Afterword,” Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare’s History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 242–50.
Honor McCuskor, John Bale, Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1942), 32–47
Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (1957; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 34; see also Ribner, 33–39.
For a more detailed discussion of this and other aspects of this play, see Jonathan Hart, “Henry VIII: the Play as History and Anti-History,” Aevum: Rassegna di Scienze Storiche-Linguistiche e Filologiche 3 (1991): 561–70 (which was forthcoming at the time of writing), and for a revised version as chapter 8 in Shakespeare: Poetry, History, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Thomas Kyd, “The Spanish Tragedy,” in Elizabethan and Stuart Plays, eds. Charles Read Baskervill et al. (New York: Henry Holt, 1934), 424.
See F. P Wilson, Marlowe and Early Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 106
Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2–6.
Anonymous, “The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth,” in William Shakespeare, The History of Henry IV (Part One), ed. Maynard Mack (Signet) (New York: New American Library, 1965).
William Shakespeare, The First Part of Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (London: Methuen, 1962).
Emst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. 7–41.
See Marie Axton, The Queens Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).
Ben Jonson, Sejanus, ed. Jonas A. Barish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). See Barish’s Introduction, 1–24; Ribner, History Play, 290–99; Matthew H. Wikander, The Play of Truth & State: Historical Drama From Shakespeare To Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); 50–57, 62–64; Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature to Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1975), esp. 3–5, 30–32.
William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes (1957; London: Methuen, 1968). For an illuminating view of Henry VIII, see Wikander, pp. 36–49, for an interesting but almost opposite view, see Alexander Leggatt, “Henry VIII and the Ideal England,” Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985): 131–43.
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© 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2011). Dramatic History. In: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118140_8
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