Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

More than seventy historical dramas were written in England between the middle of the sixteenth century and the Revolution, the greater number of them seeing the light of day during the closing decade and a half of Elizabeth's reign. To appreciate this large and important body of plays it is vital not merely to identify its historical sources – that is, for instance, to ask what bits of Halle or Holinshed we can identify in Shakespeare – but understand why in his first tetralogy Shakespeare more or less follows Edward Hall's providential pro-Tudor historical vision while he resolutely undermines that very same vision in Henry V and Henry VIII. To begin to address this and other similar questions, it is necessary to investigate first the various developments in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography in England. In particular, it is crucial to understand that the proliferation of new and innovative historiographical methods, styles, and goals that arose in the sixteenth century helped wreck whatever univocality may have existed concerning, among other things, England's Trojan heritage and the providential shape of its history. This proliferation did not produce a national identity crisis by any means, but it did generate enough variety of interpretation, contradiction, and disagreement to provide a basis from which to contest from within Elizabethan and early ... log in or subscribe to read full text