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Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets

In Our Time: History

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The Dangers of History Writing in the Elizabethan Period

There was a threat of Catholicism returning in the Elizabethan period. History plays don't present an entirely comfortable or triumphant narrative, so they're not entirely comforting if that's their role. They give us historical past and therefore perhaps a historical future which is very fractured. Shakespeare doesn't write a play about Elizabeth. He doesn't talk about in his since modern times. Was that a worry for him? Did he deliberately avoid it? Were history plays regarded as dangerous? So 1599 is the point when the writing of history in drama and in other forms becomes much more regulated. That's the point when Shakespeare, there's the date of 1599, the last of those history playshecksman

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