In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays
that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara
Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power
relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean
society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a
broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative
structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory,
and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical
representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to
recuperate and redirect their social energies. By giving special
emphasis to theatrical reproduction as a form of textuality and to the
intertextual relations between drama and other forms of history writing,
Hodgdon situates performance as a type of new historicism and shows how
theatrical productions, like critical discourse, participate in cultural
work. Through a study of playtexts and selected performance texts, she
negotiates between the critical and theatrical guises of Shakespeare to
assess how past and present-day theatrical practice has appropriated his
work to serve particular institutional and social practices.
Originally published in 1991.
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