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This book begins by asking about the memorial issues involved in the replaying of an old history play, Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, at the Globe on 29 July 1628, but it is not primarily concerned with the memory of a single individual, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham who paid for the production, nor even of a single day, when he seemed to try to evoke the memories of a small group of people gathered at the theatre for a singular purpose. In order to resolve the mystery of what a group of people thought about the past in a single moment in time, this book studies Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline textual recollections that inform the moment in 1628. Tracing the ways in which Henry VIII was remembered across these years reveals a dominant approach to reading history in the early modern period, and the varied purposes of memorial activity itself.
List of contents
List of Figures
Note on the Text
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Why This? Why Now?
1 Reading History: "Marry, how? Tropically"
2 Chronicle Origins: Nosce te ipsum
3 The Sun behind the Clouds
4 Staging Absent Majesty
5 The Pivot: Rowley's "Bluff King Hal"
6 "The times and titles now are altered strangely": Shakespeare and Fletcher's Coda
7 Henry in Hell: Memorial Transmission to 1628 and Beyond
8 A Poisonous Jest: The Haunting of 1628
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Igor Djordjevic is Associate Professor of Early Modern English Literature at York University, and the author of two previous books:
Holinshed's Nation: Ideals, Memory, and Practical Policy in the Chronicles (Routledge, 2010) and
King John [Mis]remembered: the Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral's Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory (Routledge, 2015). His research interests are in the history of reading and the relationship between English cultural memory and historical writing in the early modern period.
Summary
It traces the evolution of the memory of Henry VIII in the century after his death, studying on Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline literary and dramatic texts down to Cromwell’s Protectorate. Tracing the ways in which Henry VIII was remembered in the period reveals a dominant approach to reading history
