Shakespeare: The Histories

Download or read book Shakespeare: The Histories written by Graham Holderness and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-01-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham Holderness provides a new treatment of Shakespeare's historical dramas by reviewing past sources in light of modern theory, thus redefining the world about which Shakespeare wrote. He begins with the social and cultural context in which these "historical" plays of chivalric antiquity and masculine virtue were written and suggests that the world depicted in the plays represented a male-dominated aristocracy preoccupied with war and violence. The book reveals antiquity's contradictions in all their glamour and glory, their absurdities and arrogance, and provides alternative contexts for reading Shakespeare's history plays.