by William Shakespeare (1981)
"containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence, the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes, his tyrannicall usurpation, with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death" (Subtitle of the 1597 edition.)
William Shakespeare
"Richard is King. A monarch ordained by God to lead his people. But he is also a man of very human weakness. A man whose vanity threatens to divide the great houses of England and drag his people into a dynastic civil war that will last 100 years"--Container.
Philip Hicks
This book shows how our idea of history was shaped by historians and their readers in eighteenth-century England. Philip Hicks reinterprets the historical writing of the early-modern era as a vibrant clash between ancient models for historical composition and a modernizing culture characterized by party politics, print, Christianity and antiquarian erudition, and traces the social, literary and political implications of neoclassical history for English culture at large. By paying unprecedented attention to historical genres and audiences, this study overturns the orthodox view of David Hume as simply a 'philosophical historian' and portrays him instead as a celebrated peer of Livy and Tacitus. By resuscitating neoclassical historiography, both Hume and the 1st Earl of Clarendon breathed life into their disparate political programs; by failing to come to grips with neoclassical ideals, Jonathan Swift and Lord Bolingbroke languished in the coveted role of Thucydidean historian of one's own times.
Julie A. Carlson
It is widely held that the romantic age was essentially undramatic and antitheatrical. Julie A. Carlson's original study focuses on the plays written by the canonical romantic poets, as contributions to political and aesthetic reform. Departing from the attention given by recent new-historicist studies to the theatricality of revolution, it asks instead how romantic theatre represents this connection and why it has been neglected by scholars of romanticism. Taking Coleridge as its representative case and the mid-point of his career as the central focus, the book modifies a number of standard assumptions about romanticism: that emphasis on imagination implies an antitheatrical aesthetic; that early rejection of radicalism leads to a disengagement from politics; and that formulations of nationhood demand the separation of private and public spheres. By highlighting the period during which Coleridge wrote most extensively for and about the theatre, this book recovers a large body of unfamiliar texts and the genre that displays most prominently the tensions that threaten Coleridge's (and romanticism's) aesthetic and national thinking. The project of procuring the English public's identification with the reflective space of theatre as a site of nationalist politics ultimately founders, and not only in Coleridge's work. Professor Carlson reveals these plays' inability to find a role for women in the dramas of state as symptomatic of anxieties about women which drive the age's antitheatricality. Her re-examination of romantic bardolatry, theatre criticism by Hazlitt, Hunt and Lamb, and the history plays of the second-generation romantics, confirms the Coleridgean investment in contemplative male figures, in the gender politics which underlie his drama, Remorse. Her conclusion is that romantic drama's 'closeting' of Shakespeare, and the ultimate disavowal of its stakes in the stage, serve to preserve both poetry and masculinity from active bodies of women.
John Dryden
Written in 1677, Dryden's heroic drama 'All For Love, or, The World Well Lost' is his best-known and most performed play. It is a tragedy written in blank verse and is an attempt on Dryden's part to reinvigorate serious drama. It is an acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra', and focuses on the last hours of the lives of its hero and heroine.