Remembering, Replaying, and Rereading Henry VIII

The Courtier’s Henry

Igor Djordjevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040259900
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table 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”1
• 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