ABSTRACT
It has long been a critical truism that the end of the sixteenth century witnessed a noticeable cultural concern with historical matters. Shakespeare was by no means the only playwright engaged in dealing with historical topics in the period; neither was he the sole writer who did so with any conscious sense of historicity. What seems to me to be worth studying in play-texts by other writers from the late sixteenth century about historical topics and figures is the interplay between two distinct historical moments; they comment on both their original historical material and on the present that can, sometimes problematically, resemble it.
