Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama

by Ivo Kamps

• ISBN13: 9780521561556
• ISBN10: 0521561558
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This study explores the Stuart history play, a genre often viewed as an inferior or degenerate version of the exemplary Elizabethan dramatic form. Writing in the shadow of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Stuart playwrights have traditionally been evaluated through the aesthetic assumptions and political concerns of the sixteenth century. Ivo Kamps's study traces the development of Jacobite drama in the radically changed literary and political environment of the seventeenth century. He shows how historiographical developments in this period materially affected the structure of the history play. As audiences became increasingly sceptical of the comparatively simple teleological narratives of the Tudor era, a demand for new ways of staging history emerged. Kamps demonstrates how Stuart drama capitalised on this new awareness of historical narrative to undermine inherited forms of literary and political authority. This book is the first sustained attempt to account for a neglected genre, and a sophisticated reading of the relationship between literature, history and political power.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Renaissance historiography

2. Historiography and Tudor historical drama: the example of Bale's King Johan

3. Thomas Heywood and the Princess Elizabeth: disrupting diachronic history

4. Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the question of history

5. 'No meete matters to be wrytten or treated vpon': The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt

6. Perkin Warbeck and the failure of historiography

Conclusion.