Critical hermeneutics and Shakespeare's history plays

Critical hermeneutics and the Shakespearean history plays explore the dialectic between historiography and theatricality. Shunning its traditional focus on textual exegesis, critical hermeneutics admits questions of discontinuity and difference in its interpretation of historical meaning and being. The mediation of the theatre is advantageous to critical hermeneutics because distanciation is integral to its dialectic. In delivering plural historical perspectives, these "historiographies" open themselves to critical theory by explicitly problematizing truth and perception in, for example, Henry VIII.;The plays fuse history and theatricality from the start. The theatre superimposes itself on culture and history with utter precision in 1 Henry VI, while diachronic history manifests itself theatrically in 2 Henry VI. 3 Henry VI creates historiography from its distinctly self-reflexive theatrical world.;Ideology bifurcates history and the theatre in King John and Richard II, a new complication in the plays' theatrical texture. Ideology generates aporia enabling the Bastard to transform his firm belief in the bias of the world into a powerful affirmation of a quasi-transcendental "England." Nearly driven mad by his growing awareness of man's temporal historicity, Richard nevertheless retains to the end a strong, even pure, ideological hold on his being.;Theatricality produces varying patterns of intersubjectivity in 1 Henry IV as we surmount Hal's false consciousness with a "true" intersubjectivity of our own. The audience and performers share an intersubjective relationship in 2 Henry IV despite oppressive Lancastrian historiography. Hal's intersubjective limitations become our own in Henry V due to the Chorus' insistence on the indeterminacy of perception and truth.;Richard III and Henry VIII approach deconstructive historiography from opposite directions. Richard III deconstructs its pat, pro-Tudor conclusion by obscuring all secure points of historical reference in its ironic theatricality. Deconstructive historiography in Henry VIII affirms the nobility of characters, like Katherine, who resist Tudor historical revisionism. Historiography, imagination, and the representation of nearly contemporaneous events coincide theatrically here as deconstruction and critical hermeneutics produce pluralistic visions of our being in history.