Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Renaissance historiography
- 2 Historiography and Tudor historical drama: the example of Bale's King Johan
- 3 Thomas Heywood and the Princess Elizabeth: disrupting diachronic history
- 4 Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the question of history
- 5 “No meete matters to be wrytten or treated vpon”: The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt
- 6 Perkin Warbeck and the failure of historiography
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Historiography and Tudor historical drama: the example of Bale's King Johan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Renaissance historiography
- 2 Historiography and Tudor historical drama: the example of Bale's King Johan
- 3 Thomas Heywood and the Princess Elizabeth: disrupting diachronic history
- 4 Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the question of history
- 5 “No meete matters to be wrytten or treated vpon”: The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt
- 6 Perkin Warbeck and the failure of historiography
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Just as we have to resist the temptation to construe renaissance historiography in an orderly model of linear development, so we must withstand the urge to build a model of smooth and progressive development for the historical drama. But if we look for general tendencies rather than historical absolutes, we can assert that, under the influence of a growing sophistication in historical thought in general, the historical drama of the Stuart period exhibits a more complex historical consciousness than did its Elizabethan predecessor. As D. R. Woolf observes, “Over the first four decades of the seventeenth century, as more histories came to be written, and as the newer antiquarian scholarship began gradually to influence the writing of narratives, the interpretative corridor began to expand: cracks even appeared in the walls.” It should not be inferred, however, that the Tudor playwrights were simple-minded providentialists and the Stuart playwrights perspicacious antiquarians. In the narrative histories, the methodological innovations for the recovery of the past awkwardly share textual space with more traditional and ostensibly less rigorous approaches to history. The same holds true for Stuart historical drama. All the plays dealt with in this investigation accommodate features of medieval and early humanist historiography, even while disclosing simultaneously an early modern and deepening skepticism about the immediate import of divine providence, the stability of historical knowledge, and the objective truth or monolithic nature of historical accounts. The vital point of distinction here is that while the narrative histories usually do not seem particularly bothered by the coexistence of these contradictory approaches to the past, the Stuart drama self-consciously exploits them in order to intervene in the construction of the English past.
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- Information
- Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama , pp. 51 - 66Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997