Historical Dramas Flashcards
Ralph Fox
‘the greatest writers are men who are not indifferent to the active lives of their times. Shakespeare in his historical plays was a keen politician’
Leonard Tennenhouse
‘together these chronicle history plays demonstrate, then, that authority goes to that contender who can seize hold of the symbols and signs legitimising authority and wrest them from his rivals, thus making him serve his own interests’
‘power is an inversion of legitimate authority which gains possession, as such, of the means of self-legitimisation.’
‘‘legitimate order can come into being only through disruption according to this principle, and it can maintain itself only through discontinuous and self-contradictory policies’
Phyllis Rackin
1st Tetralogy is in Machiavellian universe; 2nd tetralogy in providential, thus ‘inverting the progress of Renaissance historiography’; however this may be ‘self-consciously theatrical’
‘in Shakespeare’s history plays there is a persistent association between Machiavellianism and theatricality’
Jonathon Hart
2nd tetralogy uses ‘multiplicity’ rather than simply ‘double irony’ - playwright shares the ‘sympathetic detachment’ of the audience
Shakespeare’s view of history uses individuals as abstract, brief “exemplars” but is conscious of this
Jan Kott
“Shakespeare made history a blind mechanism rather than a rational or divine order”
Timothy Hampton - exemplar theory
Discusses SHakespeare’s use of ‘the exemplar theory of history’, to:
a) demonstrate the power of the past
b) undermine attempts to appropriate this power for political ends
Thus is a demysification of ‘the realtionship between politics and history’
Timothy Hampton - Shakespeare’s use of models
Suggests that in ‘Shakespeare the presentation of models from the past is accompanied by a sharp awareness that all heroes are first and foremost representations and that all action is, first, interpretation’’
What does Vivian Thomas say Shakespeare has?
A ‘double vision’ of history - as both ‘historical reality’ and the idealised ‘historical identity’
this allows the audeince to ‘observe…the creation of myth’
Jonathon Hart - history as abstraction
‘History abstracts from life and attempts briefly to represent the vast, confusing, and seemingly concrete events in life in which people participate’’
Jonathon Hart - irony
In the Second Tetralogy, shakespeare uses ‘multiplicity’ rather than ‘a double view of irony’ - he, like his audience, is detached from ALL the characters, balancing multiple points of view and emphasising complexity
