'Divinytie and State': Narrative and Dramatic Representations of the English Past, 1516-1603

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the sixteenth century images of the national past were conditioned by considerations of religion. The Reformation, as has long been recognised, liberated great historiographical energies, and the English past was repeatedly re-imagined and re-written as the national religion was successively changed and inflected. However, the historiographical consequences of the Reformation have been more acknowledged than meticulously described. Therefore the first part of my monograph presents in more intimate detail than can be found in any existing account evidence for the textual dynamics that confessional change or tension introduced into historical writing about the English past from the first appearance of Fabyan's Chronicle in 1516 to the later Elizabethan editions of Foxe's Actes and Monuments. The second part builds on the conclusions of its predecessor by showing how the confessional energies which transformed and expanded the field of narrative historiography were equally, although often less overtly, present in the historical drama of the period. Here the temporal range extends from Bale's Kynge Johan (camp. 1538) to the second part of Heywood's If You Know Not Me (pub. 1606), and the discussion is focused upon two paradigmatic forms of character: the justified monarch and the martyred subject. The third part of the monograph takes the findings of its two predecessors, and tests them against the body of Shakespeare's historical drama in order to demonstrate the innovativeness and a-typicality of plays which have often (and mistakenly) been used to create the generic template of the Elizabethan history play. So the monograph promises to make a useful contribution to: a) our understanding of the historical writing of the sixteenth century, and in particular its relation to questions of religion; b) our understanding of Elizabethan historical drama, and of Shakespeare's place within it; and c) Shakespeare's relation to contemporary dramatists.