Publisher's Synopsis
In this study, McAlindon re-reads the two Henry plays - Shakespeare's highest achievement in the historical-political mode - in the light of the political and cultural history of the Tudor period. The book's format and methodology are designed for an over-all comprehensiveness of approach appropriate to an essentially historicist study. - - Shakespeare's Tudor History begins with an account of the plays' critical history from 1700 to the 1980s, asserting the importance of critical commentary before the postmodern criticism that has dominated the last two decades of the twentieth century. Given the close connection of Henry IV with the other histories, this chapter ranges fairly widely, and is to some extent, and of necessity, a critical history of all Shakespeare's English histories. - - The study then moves to an account of aspects of Tudor history that the author deems especially relevant to an understanding of Henry IV. Special emphasis is placed on the linked rebellions of 1536, 1547 and 1569, which haunted the government and its propagandists in the unstable last decades of the century when the state was threatened by a Catholic alliance of internal and external forces. Echoes of these rebellions are present in Henry IV, which seems to endorse the prevailing Tudor conception of history as repetitive and cyclical. - - In the second section of the book, McAlindon provides close readings of the text, structured individually around what he puts forward as the plays' three dominant concepts: Time, Truth and Grace. Rather than considering each in distinct outline, McAlindon shows the major concepts to overlap; he deals with each in relation to associated concepts of an arguably subordinate order.
