Henry VIII (Vol. 56) - Ivo Kamps (essay date 1996)
Ivo Kamps (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: “Possible Pasts: Historiography and Legitimation in Henry VIII,” in College English, Vol. 58, No. 2, February, 1996, pp. 192-215.
[In the following essay, Kamps claims that Henry VIII emphasizes the “relative unimportance of individuals in the historical process” and resists the idealizing tendencies of literary history.]
The methods and politics of history writing intrigued Shakespeare throughout his career as a dramatist. Among his earliest plays, Shakespeare's first tetrology already offers a full-blown conception of the shape of English history, interlacing Machiavellian ideas, providentialism, and Tudor ideology (see Rackin 27-9). The second tetrology, culminating in Henry V, successfully dramatized a more complex grasp of the past, tarnishing the popular Elizabethan notion of the “great man” who bends history to his will (see Kamps 94-104). Even in a late romance...
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