Shakespeare's English History Plays
Phyllis Rackin profile
T 3-6
Shakespeare wrote ten English history plays, all but one of them near the end of the sixteenth century, when the English history play was the most popular genre on the public stage. The subjects of these plays came from a historiographic tradition designed to preserve the names and record the heroic struggles of kings and noblemen and to justify patrilineal hereditary privilege. In Elizabethan England, however, both women and low-born men had considerable power and more authority than the ideology of a hereditary status system could accomodate. In Shakespeare's playhouse, which was open to anyone regardless of sex or status who could pay the price of admission, these contradictions opened a space where a status system that attempted to stabilize social difference by historiographic mythmaking was contested and reconstructed within a new arena of historiographic representation. Questions we will address include the tensions between the generic protocols of Renaissance historiography and the material conditions of Shakespeare's theater and his world and the ways in which the theatrical representations of medieval history in these plays participated in late sixteenth-century reconstructions of personal and national identity Course requirements include a review article on recent criticism and a class report and term paper on one of the plays.
updated 2006-10-18
