Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets
In Our Time: Culture
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History Writing in the Elizabethan Period
History writing in the elizabethan period is an attempt to shore things up with a narrative which can make sense of this great disjunction between catholicism and protestantism at the reformation. So it's about forming the nation through describing it history, i think thats that's definitely a feature. On the other hand, though, the history plays don't present an entirely comfortable or triumphant narrative. So they're not entirely comforting, if in some way that's their role. They give us a historical past, and therefore perhaps a historical future, which is very fractured,. Where it's difficult to discern a through line, or a kind a narrative which rewards virtue, or which rewards
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