ABSTRACT
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315018577/389c1d69-bf6d-4f43-8610-58d40a6d0a1a/content/Inline_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> C.L. Kingsford terminated his study of English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century at 1485, appending a chapter on the sixteenth-century histories. No more adequate work has appeared, and the several general histories of historiography which have been published in recent years give very spare accounts of the Tudor histories. 1 Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, for instance, in one of the latest of these works gives just a little over one page to the subject of “humanist historiography in England,” and he mentions—and barely mentions—only Polydore Vergil, Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Camden, and Francis Bacon. Fueter in his more comprehensive survey of modern historiography devotes twelve pages to the English Renaissance and is the only one of these writers to link English historical writing to various movements on the Continent. But to the histories which are perhaps most important to the study of the literature of the period and certainly most important to the study of Shakespeare he gives only one short paragraph (I have the French translation before me):
Les nombreuses CHRONIQUES (de Hall, Holinshed, Grafton, Stow, etc.), parues dans le cours du xvie siècle sont sans aucune importance pour notre histoire. Elles correspondent a peu pres aux nouvelles editions contemporaines des Grandes Chroniques de France et sont comme elles informes et sans critique. Elles étaient destinées í à la bourgeoisie et á la petite noblesse; elles étaient loyalistes, comme le souhaitaient ces deux classes, qui avaient tire le plus grand profit du gouvernement fort des Tudors, et qui étaient peu sensibles aux besoins intellectuels. La plupart ne sont pas de vrais ouvrages d'histoire, mais de grossieres compilations, des produits fabriques pour les masses, souvent d'ailleurs confectionnés non par des écrivains de profession, mais par des libraires. 2
