Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama

Shakespeare Recycled is a new, revised edition of Graham Holderness’ Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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.