The introduction explores how a popular sense of ‘Shakespearean’ history continues to influence historical drama today, looking to the Broadway play and subsequent HBO drama All the Way as an example. I then introduce the key concepts I will use to interrogate standing assumptions about ‘Shakespearean’ history, including the framework for feminist Shakespearean analysis first proposed by Lisa Jardine (1989), who argued for drawing upon archival materials to combat misleading assumptions about the role of women in both the plays and the early modern period itself; Henry S. Turner’s ‘New Theatricality’ (2012), though I instead suggest the term ‘dramaturgy’, borrowed from the theatre to reflect the inextricability of literary analysis and staging practise; and Pascale Aebischer’s concept of ‘negotiated reading’, which ‘deliberately seek[s] out opaque signs, empty spaces, silences, marginalised sign-clusters and characters’ and proposes the utility of reading early modern texts alongside contemporary performance. Finally, I introduce my own key concept: historical dramaturgy, the process of adapting historical sources into dramatic form. Female characters, I argue, can provide the key for understanding how Shakespeare’s historical dramaturgy works, and thus how he as a dramatist understood the form and purpose of history.