ABSTRACT
This book is an inquiry into what it means to inherit the past during the early modern period when a modern historical and national consciousness were just beginning to take shape in England. I began this book with the assumption that I could finally settle what history and memory meant in sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury England. This early assumption, of course, indicated my own sense that historical reflection was a process best done in the present, in archives that, if given time, will reveal an historical and a literary past as finally over, waiting for explication, or to use Leonard Barkan’s evocative term, ready for “unearthing.”2 The narratives of history-those from the great chronicles of Holinshed, Stow, and Hall that present the past as part of a progression that ineluctably moves toward a redemptive future-had perhaps influenced my own critical agenda. Those historical narratives, which form the basis for historical transmission during the early modern period, try to represent the past as a time transcended, buried under progress and destined for the archives. As I began to understand how my own inquiry into what it means to inherit the past echoed the questions about history, memory, and art from poets and playwrights in Renaissance England, this book became an exploration into the problem posed by concepts of historical transmission.
