Challenging the currently orthodox "New Historicist" conception of Shakespeare's English history plays as a kind of "radically secular" historiography, this thesis attempts to show how Shakespeare's first chronicle play, 1--3HenryVI, was informed by and expressive of Protestant providential historiography. By comparing the texts of the plays with Foxe's Acts and Monuments, the central text of Elizabethan Protestant historiography, the author attempts to show how Foxe's influential history functioned both as an important source for Shakespeare's view of the past in 1--3HenryVI and as a vital intertext in terms of which the play would have been construed as history by Shakespeare's audience. At the heart of this source/intertext dynamic is the figure of Antichrist, a powerful historiographical symbol in Foxe which is adumbrated in Shakespeare's dramaturgy, giving the plays' representation of the violence of the Wars of the Roses era an ineluctably providential character. Having traced the Foxeian intertext in Shakespeare's play, the author concludes by suggesting that, again contrary to the secularizing bent of much recent "New Historicist" criticism, it is precisely because 1--3HenryVI spoke the language of Protestant providential history that Shakespeare's play was significantly "political" in its original late-Elizabethan historical moment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.29833 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Leitch, Rory. |
| Contributors | Lieblein, Leanore (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: 001738059, proquestno: MQ54997, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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