Shakespeare the Historian

Summary

Nearly thirty years after the emergence of new historicism and cultural materialism in Shakespeare studies, we have had ample time to make and lose the acquaintance of a figure who quietly underwrote these literary-historical labours: Shakespeare the Historian. In a book of that name published in 1996, Paola Pugliatti imagined a Shakespeare who showed an active interest in not only the past and historical events unfolding around him, but also emerging forms of historiography. But this Shakespeare, a theorist as well as a chronicler of the past, has not found a permanent place in the scholarly, much less the popular, imagination. Certainly, the failure of Shakespeare the Historian to make his mark in literary studies has something to do with new historicist methodology, in which social energies ‘circulate’ and there can be a ‘Textuality of History’ without the explicit intervention of a reading-writing subject – that is, an Author. Another factor might be the resurgence, among writers ranging from William Kerrigan to Harold Bloom, of Shakespeare as an avatar for a Romantic or modern sensibility. The rise and fall of Shakespeare the Historian cannot be attributed solely to the vagaries of critical orientation, however. The history of Shakespearian biography has its own story to tell about Shakespeare's interests and intellectual habits. In this essay, I consider how the figure of Shakespeare the Historian gradually takes shape in a dialectic among critical, biographical and editorial discourse, suggesting that the phenomenon offers an evocative case of what Kenneth Burke would call ‘impure motives’ – a working out of different agendas, not necessarily even fully formed, that coalesces loosely into a consensus story about Shakespeare as a particular kind of cultural icon. At the same time, the fading of Shakespeare the Historian as an authoritative figure in recent times suggests how entrenched biographical traditions can be. This excursion into meta-biography will, I hope, suggest not only why the concept of Shakespeare as a historian is so difficult to sustain, but also how the figure might be re-imagined for a different Shakespearian historiography.