Shakespeare, the Queen's Men, and the Elizabethan Performance of History [Paperback]

This book studies the Shakespearean history play, examining the work of the Queen's Men and their influence on Shakespeare.Through innovative readings of plays including The Famous Victories of Henry V and Richard III, this book examines the repertory of the Queen's Men and their influence on the dramatic imagination of Shakespeare. Drawing on contemporary performance theory, Walsh provides a fresh perspective on the Shakespearean history play.Through innovative readings of plays including The Famous Victories of Henry V and Richard III, this book examines the repertory of the Queen's Men and their influence on the dramatic imagination of Shakespeare. Drawing on contemporary performance theory, Walsh provides a fresh perspective on the Shakespearean history play.The Elizabethan history play was one of the most prevalent dramatic genres of the 1590s, and so was a major contribution to Elizabethan historical culture. The genre has been well served by critical studies that emphasize politics and ideology; however, there has been less interest in the way history is interrogated as an idea in these plays. Drawing in period-sensitive ways on the field of contemporary performance theory, this book looks at the Shakespearean history play from a fresh angle, by first analyzing the foundational work of the Queen's Men, the playing company that invented the popular history play. Through innovative readings of their plays including The Famous Victories of Henry V before moving on to Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, Richard III, and Henry V, this book investigates how the Queen's Men's self-consciousness about performance helped to shape Shakespeare's dramatic and historical imagination.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 dolã%