Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play de Marissa Nicosia

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660

Marissa Nicosia

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

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This is a carefully argued and meticulously researched book. The high production values of Oxford University Press are matched by Nicosia's attention to detail and judicious use of unusual primary sources alongside more obvious choices. This kind of wide-ranging approach to seventeenth-century writing is exemplary, and an excellent example of how the new generation of early modern literary scholars is transforming the discipline, at a time when one can only hope that that discipline can survive the current vicissitudes attacking humanities departments, and move forward into a brighter future that, like the chronicle plays, it is incumbent upon us to imagine.

Notă biografică

Marissa Nicosia is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at the Pennsylvania State University - Abington College where she teaches, researches, and writes about literature, temporality, food history, and material texts. She is co-editor of Renaissance Futures, a special volume of Explorations in Renaissance Culture (2019), and Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2021).