Shakespeare's history plays are not merely benign representations of various historical figures and events but the site of political, cultural, and ideological contestation at the time of their performance. Richard II documents two divergent theoretical approaches to sovereignty which are more applicable to the political climate in Shakespeare's time than Richard's. In this essay, I read this play through the lens of various political tracts and historical tendencies dominant in late Elizabethan England. Though such an analysis might best be understood as historical materialist in orientation, I offer a contextual analysis of various modes of early modern political thought drawing variously upon theoretical precepts associated with new historicism as well as the 'ideas in context' school associated with Quentin Skinner, among others. / Such an analysis reveals a shift in the mode of theoretical discourse. Richard's divine-right/monarchical approach to sovereignty based in an overarching ecclesiastical power base gives way to Bolingbroke's pragmatic and consensus driven politics. This shift mirrors the movement in late 16$ rm sp{th}$ and early 17$ rm sp{th}$ century England from traditional religious arguments offered by Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and residually by James I to a more secular political discourse inaugurated by Machiavelli and his English adherents and symptomatic of the reign of Elizabeth herself. Roughly speaking this modulation follows the pattern of paradigm shifts in the physical sciences exposed by Thomas Kuhn's influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The emergent theory, while marking a rapid and overwhelming reorientation of the terms and initial presuppositions of political discourse, draws in many crucial respects on the accrued tenets of the outgoing paradigm. The play therefore acts as a retroactive representation of a political reformation which occurred much later than the events depicted in the play.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.27927 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Bayer, Mark, 1973- |
| Contributors | Bristol, Michael D. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001619684, proquestno: MQ37186, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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