| This dissertation investigates the striking contrast between narrative and dramatic forms of early modern history writing in their representations of late medieval English queens, revealing that royal women---whether as political agents in narrative history or as excluded subjects in historical drama---were crucial to early modern historiography's construction of England's native past. While previous literary scholars often assume that early modern historical narratives written between 1513 and 1622 marginalize women's historical participation in politics, I argue instead that these texts often represented women as astute political players whose public actions had legitimate consequences for the state. Thomas More, Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall, and other early modern historiographers used sympathetic narrative strategies, including invented dialogues and interior perspectives, to privilege women as ideal historical agents. Yet when dramatists writing for the commercial stage, including William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, and John Ford, revised their source narrative intertexts, they repeatedly rejected the complex view of women's authority found in the narratives. Instead, they recast women as alternatively threatening to or isolated from politics in order to critique dynastic politics and pursue fantasies of solely masculine governance.;This study analyzes history writing ranging from the chronicle history of Edward Hall and Polydore Vergil, the political histories of Thomas More and Francis Bacon, and the Protestant martyrology of John Foxe, to the canonical Shakespearean works and lesser-known dramas that comprised the history play genre, most popular in the 1590s but written as late as the 1630s. Unlike previous literary critics who view historical narratives primarily as source texts for history plays, I treat the narratives and plays as intertexts whose disjunctions have real effects on audiences and readers. I analyze Richard III, The True Tragedy of Richard III, Edward IV, Henry VIII, and Perkin Warbeck as thoughtful dramatic revisions of narrative history that invite readers and audiences to recall the contrastive historical accounts available across these genres. By juxtaposing intertextual histories, I show how competing representations of female figures informed popular historical consciousness and conceptions of women's participation in the emerging national identity of Tudor and Stuart England. |
