ABSTRACT
To discuss the politics of Shakespeare's history plays, I must again draw two kinds of comparison: one comparison allows one to understand this particular dramatic form in relation to others that we consider literary: romantic comedy, tragedy and the court masque. My objective in this is to determine what figures allow the materials of chronicle history to authorize the state in characteristically Elizabethan ways. But this in turn requires me to make another kind of comparison, one that understands aesthetic strategies as political strategies. To argue that theatrical spectacles displayed the power of the state, I will show how the figures organizing materials for the stage also shaped policies of state. I will use Henry VIII and Hamlet as test cases in proving this point. In addition to isolating the political strategies which major chronicle history plays share with romantic comedy, one can also see why Henry VIII is a play of another kind even though it draws upon the materials of chronicle history. By the same token, Hamlet must be placed with the chronicle histories in terms of its strategies of representation rather than with the Jacobean tragedies in terms of which literary tradition has identified it.
