Shakespeare's Early History Plays: Politics at Play On the Elizabeth Stage

This study examines the early history plays - the first tetralogy and "King John" - as plays, not only by analyzing their theatrical dimensions but also by connecting their staging with the playhouse as a social institution and with the theatricality of Elizabethan culture in the 1590s, especially the Queen's exploitation of opportunities to dramatize her self before her various audiences.;Professor Watson discusses the stagecraft in its relationships to an age in which politics had been aestheticized and aesthetics politicized, in which all history was contemporary history, in which such ideological concerns as the wars in the Low Countries and the factions at Court were immediate and explosive for his audiences.