Staging History: The Dramatist as Historian in Early Modern England

My project challenges how playwrights are understood in early modern historiography, examining the dramatist as de facto historian in the period c.1560 - 1623, from the publication of Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc to that of Shakespeare's First Folio. My research addresses key problems in the existing scholarship: How should we define a 'history play?' What did people in early modern England understand by the concept?

Did dramatists have shared conceptions of history, or did multiple understandings of history exist simultaneously? What research methodologies did dramatists use, and how did they synthesize and adapt their sources? What did the past look like on stage?

The most significant problem in the study of early modern history plays is that there exists no scholarly consensus on what the term 'history play' actually means. Early modern plays have traditionally been divided into 'history', 'tragedy', and 'comedy', a typology derived from Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio. However, this typology is rife with problems, and is often contradicted by editions from Shakespeare's lifetime (e.g., the first quarto King Lear refers to it as a history).

My project aims to arrive at a workable definition for the term 'history play' based in historiography, defining it in a contextually-specific and historically sensitive manner.

Plays based on historical events and sources were not the only type of drama that made use of historical themes or pretexts; plays such as The Merchant of Venice are referred to as histories in quarto titles despite having no known historical basis, while others like Titus Andronicus have a historical setting but a fictional plot. I will address the diverse uses of the past in drama by constructing a database of all extant plays from the period featuring historical themes, recording information like titles, publication dates, sources, chronology, and setting.

This will allow for the identification of historiographical trends, enabling unprecedented comparison of playwrights' sources.

Key to understanding the role of playwright as de facto historian is exploring their research methods, and how they adapted their sources. My project conducts an in-depth historiographical survey of a broad range of history plays and the histories on which they are based (e.g., Holinshed's Chronicles or Foxe's Acts and Monuments), exploring how multiple (often contradictory) sources were synthesized and adapted for the stage.

One particularly significant shift in historical thought in the early modern period is the emergence of a 'visual sense' used in early modern drama? While it is generally accepted that some historical costuming was used in Classically-set plays, little work has been done to understand how history plays set in other periods were costumed.

Ultimately, my thesis aims to re-contextualise the history play as a genre, to correct significant misconceptions in the established historiography, and to improve our understanding of the role ideas about the past played in early modern society.