Stages of History

Phyllis Rackin

ISBN 10: 0801496985 / ISBN 13: 9780801496981

Published by PLYMBRIDGE DISTRIBUTORS LTD Okt 1990, 1990

About this Item

Neuware - Phyllis Rackin offers a fresh approach to Shakespeares English history plays, rereading them in the context of a world were rapid cultural change transforms historical consciousness and gave the study of history a new urgency.

Seller Inventory # 9780801496981

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Stages of History
• Publisher: PLYMBRIDGE DISTRIBUTORS LTD Okt 1990
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801496985
• ISBN 13: 9780801496981
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 0W x 0H x 0D millimeters 0 millimeters width by 0 millimeters height by 0 millimeters depth

About this title

Synopsis

Phyllis Rackin offers a fresh approach to Shakespeare's English history plays, rereading them in the context of a world where rapid cultural change transformed historical consciousness and gave the study of history a new urgency.

Rackin situates Shakespeare's English chronicles among multiple discourses, particularly the controversies surrounding the functions of poetry, theater, and history. She focuses on areas of contention in Renaissance historiography that are also areas of concern in recent criticism-historical authority and causation, the problems of anachronism and nostalgia, and the historical construction of class and gender. She analyzes the ways in which the presence of history in Shakespeare's theater participated―and its representation in subsequent criticism still participates―in the contests between opposed theories of history and between the different ideological interests and historiographic practices they authorize.

Celebrating the heroic struggles of the past and recording the patriarchal genealogies of kings and nobles, Tudor historians provided an implicit rationale for the hierarchical order of their own time; but the new public theater where socially heterogeneous audiences came together to watch common players enact the roles of their social superiors was widely perceived as subverting that order. Examining such sociohistorical factors as the roles of women and common men and the conditions of theatrical performance, Rackin explores what happened when elite historical discourse was trans porteto the public commercial theater. She argues that Shakespeare's chronicles transformed univocal historical writing into polyphonic theatrical scripts that expressed the contradictions of Elizabethan culture.

About the Author

Phyllis Rackin is Professor of English in General Honors at the University of Pennsylvania.