| Some recent critics have begun to view Shakespeare's English history plays, and especially those plays of his second tetralogy, as not just unreflective depictions of historical matter but as actual historiographical investigations. This same sense of Shakespeare's intellectual involvement with his source material is also part of the current reevaluation of his Roman plays. But there have been as yet no thorough examinations of Shakespeare's views of the nature of history itself.;History was too important a concept to the Renaissance imagination to exclude it from a consideration of drama, and it was too important to Shakespeare to ignore his continual dramatic presentation of it. This dissertation, then, attempts to put Shakespeare in the context of Renaissance historiography by tracing certain themes about the nature of history---themes such as time, progeny, fame, reputation, and memory---through an overview of his various genres. These themes develop from the rather commonplace idea that progeny saves the individual from the destructive effects of time to the more complex notion found in the romance plays that history is an unstable narrative whose destructive nature must be countered by suppressing the consciousness of its means of construction.;By taking this approach, we get a better sense of what Shakespeare thought of both the nature of history and the process of history-writing than we would through an examination of only a particular genre, such as the English history or Roman play, for Shakespeare's interest in and meditations upon history and historical consciousness run through all his plays, not merely the obviously historical ones. |
