Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Dialogues with the dead: history, performance, and Elizabethan theater
- 2 Theatrical time and historical time: the temporality of the past in The Famous Victories of Henry V
- 3 Figuring history: Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III
- 4 “Unkind division”: the double absence of performing history in I Henry VI
- 5 Richard III and Theatrum Historiae
- 6 Henry V and the extra-theatrical historical imagination
- Conclusion: traces of Henry/traces of history
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Dialogues with the dead: history, performance, and Elizabethan theater
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Dialogues with the dead: history, performance, and Elizabethan theater
- 2 Theatrical time and historical time: the temporality of the past in The Famous Victories of Henry V
- 3 Figuring history: Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III
- 4 “Unkind division”: the double absence of performing history in I Henry VI
- 5 Richard III and Theatrum Historiae
- 6 Henry V and the extra-theatrical historical imagination
- Conclusion: traces of Henry/traces of history
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the A-text of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the Emperor Charles V asks Faust to “raise” for him “Alexander the Great” and his “beauteous paramour.” The Emperor explains his request as a deep longing for the past: “It grieves my soul I never saw the man.” Marlowe's play gives voice to feelings of loss that permeate the historical culture of sixteenth-century England, where a heightened sensitivity emerged to the break between the past and the present or to what Andrew Escobedo has called the temporal “caesura” of historical distance. As Escobedo argues, sixteenth-century English culture evinces a “hankering after a knowledge of its origins […] yet nonetheless [is] predicated on its isolation from these origins.” I wish in this study to examine how theatrical performance contributed to and expanded on that historical outlook. The pages that follow provide a historical framework and a theoretical model for understanding how staging the past inflected historical consciousness in late-sixteenth-century England.
I will start with a three-part overview of the historical culture of the Elizabethan era, looking at its conceptual roots in the Italian Renaissance, its variety and increasingly self-reflexive nature, and its implication in notions of rupture, in particular the rupture of the Reformation. The historical consciousness of this culture, I will contend, is shaped by a need for history and an awareness that the past only exists when it is produced through potentially ephemeral human efforts. I then consider how, within the period's theatrical culture, there emerges a related outlook on performance: it is something which is desired and which is ultimately subject to disappearance.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009