This book is not the first to study the connection between history-writing and the renaissance history play. Not surprisingly, I am therefore indebted to those who surveyed the field before. Three claims in particular that emerge from earlier studies help to frame the present inquiry. First, members of all social classes in the Elizabethan and Stuart epochs turned to history to locate and legitimate personal and family identities that had become unsettled in a climate of unprecedented social and economic mobility and religious and political turmoil. But at the same time that people turned to history for much needed stability and continuity, it became increasingly clear that “Historiographic writing no longer had a direct, unequivocal relation with historical truth. Alternative accounts of historical events and opposed interpretations of their causes and significance now threatened each other's credibility.” These two opposing tendencies which are admirably elaborated upon by Phyllis Rackin in Stages of History, and which seek for certainty where there is much ambiguity, are exploited magnificently and provocatively by a small number of Stuart playwrights. The third contextual marker of this study – the one that firmly links historiography to the drama – derives from Irving Ribner who, taking his cue from Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, characterized the history play as a type of drama that based itself on one or more of the English chronicles and sought to achieve the authentic purposes of renaissance historiography.