Shakespeare: The Histories

by Graham Holderness

02 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.
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.

Genres: Shakespeare

231 pages, Hardcover

First published December 2, 1999

About the author

Writer and critic Graham Holderness has published over 40 books, many on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British cultural materialism, and is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory. He has published pioneering studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by Sulayman Al Bassam (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2014).

His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011). Extending these methods, and published in 2014, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014) and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014). His latest book is The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Hudson, 2016).

He is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. Graham Holderness has published two Shakespearean novels: The Prince of Denmark (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), and the historical fantasy novel Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2015). His poetry collection Craeft: poems from the Anglo-Saxon received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was in 2011 performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Reviews

[The Half-blood Reader]

College reads: I only read chapters/sections relevant to my studies, hence the dnf (Richard III)