Shakespeare’s Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage

Like many of his fellow playwrights, Shakespeare turned to national history for inspiration. In this study, Dominique Goy-Blanquet provides a close comparison of the Henry VI plays and Richard III with their historical and theatrical sources, demonstrating how Shakespeare was able to meet not only the ideological but also the technical problems of turning history into drama, how by cutting, carving, shaping, casting his unwieldy material into performable plays, he matured into the most influential dramatist and historian of his time. Recent criticism of Shakespeare’s history plays has often consisted of fierce arguments over their ideological import and Shakespeare’s position on the spectrum of current political opinions. This book, however, stems from the belief that a more constructive starting point for research is the exploration of the technical problems raised by turning heavy narratives into performable plays, rather than the political motives that could inpire a playwright’s representation of national history. Illuminating and instructive, Shakespeare’s Early History Plays includes not only close investigation of the verbal, poetic, and political texture of the plays, but also provides a broad overview of the wider sixteenth-century historiographical contexts of the plays, and their significance to Shakespeare’s oeuvre more generally.