Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama ISBN-13: 9780389209881

ISBN-13: 9780389209881

Binding: Hardcover

Author: Holderness, Graham

Release Date: 09-04-1992

Languages: English

Edition: Subsequent

Number Of Pages: 272

Package Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches

Details: Product Description Shakespeare Recycled is a new, revised edition of Graham Holderness Shakespeares History, first published in 1985. That influential and widely admired book has now been thoroughly revised, with new sections on theoretical developments such as new historicism, deconstruction, feminism and postmodernism, which bear on the analysis of history and the interpretation of historical drama.Shakespeare Recycled, the only full-length cultural materialist treatment of Shakespeares second tetralogy, questions the tendency of deconstruction and postmodernism to eliminate altogether the category of history from the dramatic text, displacing it to an eternal present of provisional re-readings. By means of an intensive theoretical investigation of Tudor historiography, Shakespeare Recycled defines the historiographical contexts of the plays original production and their status as performance art, and identifies within their formal strategies and uses of genre a distinctive form of historiographical writing.Contrary to new historicist readings of the plays, which see them negatively as endorsing forms of ideological dominence, Shakespeare Recycled argues, in detailed readings of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, that the plays can be seen affirmatively, as positive acts of historiographical reconstruction, capable of registering and offering resistance to forms of ideological dominance. About the Author Graham Holderness is Professor of Humanities at Hatfield Polytechnic. He is author of numerous critical studies in Renaissance and modern literature and threatre.