ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's dramatic fiction is a 'secularised representation of supposed historical fact' and motivated partly by the 'desire to understand the present through a knowledge of the past', as is all historical writing. Shakespeare's history plays originate from different stages of a period of transition and not only illustrate an Elizabethan's oscillation between stability and mutability but could even provide impulses that spread from the decaying genre of the history play to the rising genre of historiography. This chapter provides an idea of how the usage of body images can transform history into dramatic historiography and how an ideology such as the Tudor myth becomes material practice. Shakespeare lays emphasis on the patriarchal role of Henry Tudor, on his initiating the new and glorious age. The role of the Elizabeth cult is one feature that marks the plays' connection with the Tudor myth, and again it is with the usage of body images that Shakespeare's ideological writing becomes most explicit.
