Richard II (Vol. 39) | John R. Elliott, Jr. (essay date 1968)
John R. Elliott, Jr. (essay date 1968)
SOURCE: "History and Tragedy in Richard II," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Spring, 1968, pp. 253-71.
[In this essay, Elliott argues that Richard II is representative of a distinct genre, the political play, and that it differs from tragedy in several important aesthetic features, including dramatic structure, characterization, and thematic development.]
I
Students of the Elizabethan history play have been able to agree only that it is an ambiguous dramatic genre. Since the editors of the 1623 Folio set apart ten of Shakespeare's plays and distinguished them from Comedies and Tragedies by labeling them "Histories," it has been recognized that for Elizabethans these plays and others like them must have differed in some significant way from the more conventional forms of drama. Just what this difference was, however, remains unclear. Historical...
[The entire page is 7510 words long]
Navigate
