This module looks at the invention of "the history play" in early modern England, from Shakespeare to John Ford. Historical drama had to be invented because, as Sir Philip Sidney explained, history was too messy to provide a basis for serious drama (by which he meant tragedy). This problem was underlined in early modern England because history itself was being reinvented, and radically different kinds of history were being written. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, history was becoming more than just Holinshed's Chronicles or the Bible. The Elizabethan history play responded to the radically different kinds of history being written and translated in early modern England: Tacitus, Plutarch, Macchiavelli, Thomas More, John Hayward and Francis Bacon. The course will examine the English and Roman history plays of Shakespeare, as well as plays by Marlowe, Jonson, and Ford.

Module Supervisor's Research into Subject Area
"Geography and Maps", in, Patricia Parker, ed., The Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia 5 volumes, (Greenwood Press, 2011).

""Mighty Space: The Ordinate and the Exorbitant in two Shakespeare Plays", in, Del Sapio Garbero, M., Isenberg, N., and Pennaccia, M., eds., Questioning Bodies in Shakespeares Rome, (V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2010), pp.259-74.

"Othello, Stanislavski and the Motives of Eloquence", in, W.B. Worthen M. Hodgdon, eds., A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, (Blackwell: Oxford, 2005), pp.267-84.

"King Lear and the Scene of Cartography", in, Bernhard Klein Andrew Gordon, eds., Literature, Mapping The Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001), pp.109-37.