ABSTRACT
The “historiographical” approach to history plays is a promising one. It has the potential to enhance our understanding of early modern historical culture and of the drama’s contribution to it. The overwhelming number of history plays written between 1580 and 1650 would seem to suggest that, for quite a few decades, history was the most prestigious subject a dramatist could pursue. The dramatic medium’s unparalleled ability to make history come alive before the eyes of a mass audience made it a potentially potent vehicle of cultural identity formation. The drama’s contribution to “transformations in the ways history was written and used” during the period has for example, as Paulina Kewes noted about the English history play, “gone largely unrecognised.” The play’s take on the general’s purported high treason and death is far from unequivocal. The dramatist’s depiction of the relations between the protagonist and the play’s other characters thus reprises patterns from Cervantes’ novel.
