“A history of possibilities”: The use of history in the interpretation of William Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy
Jiménez-Justiniano, José
Jiménez-Justiniano, José
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Abstract
During the second half of the twentieth century, scholars and literary critics have
tried to escape master narratives, the epic stories of European supremacy, set in place by
historicists like Leopold von Ranke. The most significant effort to destabilize these
historicist totalities in literary studies today is that of the New Historicists, who have
turned their attention to the marginalized—the accidents, the defects, and the abhorrent—
in history. Unfortunately, they have only been able to replace one totality with another,
leaving the readers trapped in the same predicament. This thesis examines how the
historiographical assumptions of the last two centuries have affected the way history is
used to analyze William Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy. Finally, it returns to Stephen
Greenblatt’s promise to combine the traditional and subversive elements of a culture, in
this case chivalry and the Machiavellian doctrine, in order to produce a more complex
interpretation of the literary texts.
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2006
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Keywords
Chivalry in literature, History-periodization-history and criticism-inaccuracies, Shakespeare, William-works-analysis, Shakespeare, William-plays-Second Tetralogy-analysis