Ithaca College

     English Department chair Dan Breen, Associate Professor, has published an article titled “Shakespeare and History Writing” about the historiographical dimension of Shakespeare’s plays.  The article appears in Literature Compass, a highly-regarded online journal focusing on cutting-edge literary criticism. 

     As he writes in the article's abstract, in “Shakespeare and History Writing,” Dan “addresses recent developments in literary‐critical studies of Shakespeare's status within the wider field of early modern historiography.”  Traditionally, literature and history writing have been considered separate enterprises with different subject matter, claims, purposes, and narrative styles.  Nevertheless, generations of students have learned English history less from history writing than from Shakespeare’s history plays, such as 1-3 Henry VI and Richard III, four plays whose BBC versions garnered large TV audiences in the UK and the USA under the title The Hollow Crown. 

     Dan’s article explores scholarship’s recent breaching of the supposed walls dividing history writing and dramatic fiction; in his words, “recent developments have emerged from a longstanding scholarly conversation that links Shakespeare's English history plays to other forms of contemporary historical writing through their shared preoccupation with national politics” (p. 3) together with philosophy and religion.  The article surveys the contributions made by New Historicist criticism, performance studies, and studies of early modern material culture to this new understanding of Shakespeare as a playwright, arguing the ways in which, “more than anything else, the ‘new’ historiographically‐minded Shakespeare resembles an archetypal humanist” (p. 2).

Full citation:  Breen D. Shakespeare and History Writing, Literature Compass 2017;14:e12376. doi: 10.1111/lic3.12376.

Image:  William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, in a recently-identified anonymous portrait.