In a major reassessment of Shakespeare's dominant dramatic genre, Paola Pugliatti explores the historiographical quality of Shakespeare's histories. Her main assumption is that Shakespeare's staging of English history helped to shape a new historiography. In particular, multi-perspectivism in the treatment of political issues produced a problem-oriented kind of historical perspective. This exploited the opportunities offered by the theatrical medium, and inaugurated a drama which portrayed history as a critical outlook on a world of problems and retrospective possibilities, rather than as unconditional belief in, or even worship of, a world of facts.

Autorentext

PAOLA PUGLIATTI is Professor of English at the University of Florence. She was previously Chair of English at the University of Pisa, and has taught at Bologna and at the University of Messina. She has written extensively on the metaphysical poets, Shakespeare, Joyce and modernism, the theory of the novel and literary genres. In 1993 she was appointed member of the Advisory Board of the International Shakespeare Association, and has been invited to read papers at several conferences, both in Italy and elsewhere. For the last five years she has been directing a students' theatre group in Florence whose productions include Shakespeare's Henry VIII, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - PART 1: HISTORY 'WITH PARTED EYE' - Meaning, the Author and the Reader - The Tudor Historians' Dialogue with the Dead - Perspectivism - The Contribution of the Theatrical Medium - The Fictionalisation of History and the Issue of Verisimilitude - PART 2: CROSS-EXAMINING POLITICAL ISSUES - The Scribbled Form of Authority in King John - Time, Space and the Instability of History in the Henry IV Sequence - The Strange Tongues on Henry V - Jack Cade: An Unpopular Popular Hero - PART 3: THRESHOLDS AND MARGINS - 'Bastards and Else': Less than History - Notes - Index