Shakespeare the Historian

In a major reassessment of Shakespeare's dominant dramatic genre, Paola Pugliatti explores the historiographical quality of Shakespeare's histories. Her main assumption is that Shakespeare's staging of English history helped to shape a new historiography. In particular, multi-perspectivism in the treatment of political issues produced a problem-oriented kind of historical perspective. This exploited the opportunities offered by the theatrical medium, and inaugurated a drama which portrayed history as a critical outlook on a world of problems and retrospective possibilities, rather than as unconditional belief in, or even worship of, a world of facts.