Shakespeare recycled - Graham Holderness

This book is an exercise in reading Shakespeare's history plays as history. It sets out to challenge Tillyard's view that the plays may be read as historical evidence for the providence-driven theory of history and as defences of Tudor legitimacy, but are negligible as works of history. The author argues that Elizabethan ideas of history were far less homogenous than Tillyard allows and that the notion of political order as a reflection and component of the natural, divinely appointed world was already being superseded by more rational and scientific analyses at the time Shakespeare was writing. Within the Shakespearean canon itself Holderess makes a distinction between those plays which render a fabulous or folkloric version of events ("Richard III" and "Henry VI Part One" both make crucial use of the supernatural) and those that limit the elements of fiction to emblematic dialogue or a clearly segregated comic sub-plot ("Richard II" and "Henry V"). He examines the plays that refer to the dynastic strife of 1399-1485, comparing them with their sources and other versions of the same events, and asks to what extent they may be read as serious histories.