Shakespeare Recycled is a new, revised edition of Graham Holderness'
Shakespeare's History, first published in 1985. That influential and
widely admired book has now been thoroughly revised, with new sections
on theoretical developments such as new historicism, deconstruction,
feminism and postmodernism, which bear on the analysis of history and
the interpretation of historical drama. Shakespeare Recycled, the only
full-length cultural materialist treatment of Shakespeare's second
tetralogy, questions the tendency of deconstruction and postmodernism to
eliminate altogether the category of history from the dramatic text,
displacing it to an eternal present of provisional re-readings. By means
of an intensive theoretical investigation of Tudor historiography,
Shakespeare Recycled defines the historiographical contexts of the
plays' original production and their status as performance art, and
identifies within their formal strategies and uses of genre a
distinctive form of historiographical writing. Contrary to new
historicist readings of the plays, which see them negatively as
endorsing forms of ideological dominence, Shakespeare Recycled argues,
in detailed readings of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, that the plays
can be seen affirmatively, as positive acts of historiographical
reconstruction, capable of registering and offering resistance to forms
of ideological dominance.
