Ivic, C (2019) Staging the past in Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V. In: True Lies: Shakespeare, History and Fiction, 1 June 2019, Shakespeare's Globe, London.
Abstract
Shakespeare's English histories owe much to the voluminous chronicle sources that he drew upon to bring the past to life on the early modern stage. Of course, the history plays do much more than simply re-enact historical events. The Bard's histories differ from his chronicle sources primarily as staged play-texts. As performance texts made up of multiple characters and voices, conflicting narratives as well as instances of memory and forgetting, the histories not only play with official history but also interrogate and parody the historical record. Genre--i.e., the Saturnalian comedy of the two Henry IV plays and the national epic-cum-romance that is Henry V--also distinguishes these plays from their source material, and it conditions their attitude to the past (and the present). Those who who attended performances of Shakespeare's history plays witnessed a version of the past that was simultaneously an examination of the past as well as of the uses of the past.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PE English |
| Divisions: | School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities |
| Related URLs: | |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Jan 2020 10:51 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Apr 2022 15:44 |
| URI / Page ID: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/12284 |
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