ABSTRACT
Often, if not always, the spectators gathered around the platform stage in one of the London playhouses would quickly come to understand that what they saw performed on stage was neither London nor the early afternoon. Despite a growing interest in questions of temporality and a reconsideration of the relation between medieval and early modern culture, criticism of Shakespeare's history plays has hardly explored the full range of Elizabethan uses of the past. In the aftermath of poststructuralist interventions, the assumption that every age constructs its own past, or indeed multiple pasts, has become a critical commonplace. History is constantly rewritten; views on the past are diverse and always in flux. The title of a recent collection of essays edited by Helen Cooper, Peter Holland, and Ruth Morse succinctly captures the implications of such a view for Shakespeare's representation of historical events: Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents.
