Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s History Plays: 1952–1983
- Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements
- Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories
- The Nature of Topicality in Love’s Labour’s Lost
- The Tragic Substructure of the Henry IV Plays
- Hal and the Regent
- The Rite of Violence in I Henry IV
- The Fortunes of Oldcastle
- Hand D in Sir Thomas More: An Essay in Misinterpretation
- Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
- Henry VIII and the Ideal England
- The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII
- ‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Figurenposition in King Lear
- ‘Very like a whale’: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest
- Shakespeare’s Medical Imagination
- Shakespeare in the Theatrical Criticism of Henry Morley
- Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London 1983–4
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s History Plays: 1952–1983
- Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements
- Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories
- The Nature of Topicality in Love’s Labour’s Lost
- The Tragic Substructure of the Henry IV Plays
- Hal and the Regent
- The Rite of Violence in I Henry IV
- The Fortunes of Oldcastle
- Hand D in Sir Thomas More: An Essay in Misinterpretation
- Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
- Henry VIII and the Ideal England
- The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII
- ‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Figurenposition in King Lear
- ‘Very like a whale’: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest
- Shakespeare’s Medical Imagination
- Shakespeare in the Theatrical Criticism of Henry Morley
- Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London 1983–4
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
Summary
Source studies of Shakespeare’s history plays usually focus on matters of direct influence. Most attempt to define Shakespeare’s dependence on those works that presumably inspired his own, the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed – to assess how much he borrowed from each and whether that borrowing confirms or contradicts a providential view of English history. Other studies discuss sources for his dramatic structures, such as hybrid political–morality plays, or for his rhetorical configurations. Seldom do such studies account for indirect or ‘deep’ sources – works that may have influenced Shakespeare’s conception of history more suggestively because less consciously recalled. In this essay I shall propose a deep source for the agricultural references in the history plays. These references are often dismissed as conventional for the time, stock metaphors for good and bad government, probably scriptural in origin, and of limited suggestive power. A closer examination of them and their origins, however, may reveal Shakespeare’s darker purpose.
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- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 37 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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