Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events. |
Contents
Historical Futures | 1 |
William Shakespeares 1 2 Henry IV and Sir John Oldcastle | 23 |
Samuel Rowleys When You See Me You Know Me and William Shakespeare and John Fletchers Henry VIII | 60 |
William Shakespeares Richard III and John Fords Perkin Warbeck | 85 |
Historical Futures in the MidSeventeenthCentury Play Pamphlet | 111 |
Imagining the Future after the Execution of King Charles I | 142 |
Mike Bartletts King Charles III | 167 |
Bibliography | 174 |
| 192 | |
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Astrology audience British Library Cambridge University Press Charles III chronicle plays cited parenthetically commonplaces counterfactual counterfeit couplets Craftie Cromwell Cromwell's Conspiracy Crouch crown Culture death Drama Early Modern England edited Edward EEBO Elizabethan English Chronicle Play English Civil Wars execution Falstaff Folger Shakespeare Library Ford's genre heirs Henry IV plays Henry VIII hereditary monarchy historical futures History Plays Huntington Library imagined Katherine King Charles King Henry Lilly Literary Literature London Manchester University Press Marchamont Nedham Marissa Nicosia medieval Mercurius Pragmaticus narrative Nedham newsbook Oxford University Press Palgrave paper stage Parliament past performance Perkin Warbeck play pamphlets play's playbooks playwrights poet-journalists political possible futures present Prince Printed prognostication prolepsis prophecy prophetic readers reading reign Renaissance Richard Richard III Rowley's royal royalist scene Shakespeare and Fletcher's Shakespeare's History Sir John Oldcastle Stuart subsequent quotations succession temporal theater Thomas throne Tudor University of Pennsylvania William Andrews Clark William Lilly writing