Shakespeare Recycled: the Making of Historical Drama

Abstract

This book is an exercise in reading Shakespeare's history plays as history. It sets out to challenge Tillyard's view that the plays may be read as historical evidence for the providence-driven theory of history and as defences of Tudor legitimacy, but are negligible as works of history. The author argues that Elizabethan ideas of history were far less homogenous than Tillyard allows and that the notion of political order as a reflection and component of the natural, divinely appointed world was already being superseded by more rational and scientific analyses at the time Shakespeare was writing.