The sacramental rhetoric and iconography of the Lancastrian Tetralogy significantly contribute to our recognition that the theological center of Shakespeare's historical drama is distinctively Anglican. Shakespeare (whether he personally was an Anglican churchman) invokes in the Lancaster plays the symbols and speech definitive of the Protestant Reformation in order to illustrate dramatically the Crown's convictions of the transcendent purpose of the English nation in human history, especially as that purpose had been defined by Tudor historiography. Shakespeare's histories demonstrate a conviction, broadly conceived and illustrated, of faith in the providential destiny of a nation whose very birth and sustenance in adversity form a sign of its election to grace and divine favor.Furthermore, Shakespeare's Lancaster plays, by continuing the didactic tradition of the medieval stage, embrace the precepts of Tudor monarchy and apply those principles of government and Reformation theology to the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare's histories therefore interpret history; they do not recollect it--except in the spirit of sixteenth-century imagination, harmonized with legend and myth. Consequently, the Lancaster cycle of histories constitutes a unified dramatic quartet in which history as fact is eschewed in favor of history as progressive revelatory sign, a vision enabled by mythography derived from the emblems and rhetoric of the sixteenth-century Anglican Christian tradition. / Department of English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/182136 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Wright, Daniel L. |
| Contributors | Thornburg, Thomas R. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | vii, 332 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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