To read Lear as connected to Union debates is not reductively topical: the story of Leir belongs to the Galfridian history on which England’s British claims were founded. Moreover, as a Senecan Oedipal tragedy, Shakespeare’s Lear responds to the ‘Oedipal Britain’ found in Elizabethan tragedies such as Gorboduc, Jocasta and The Misfortunes of Arthur. These are national tragedies that lament the natio/nation as lost place of origin, a mother destroyed by her children. Shakespeare’s Lear resists this identification. In Shakespeare’s Lear, the ostentatiously childless deaths of Goneril and Regan destroy the Galfridian prophetic future, while the doubling of Oedipus and Antigone in Lear/Cordelia and Gloucester/Edgar thoroughly ironises and makes impossible any tragic identification of nation and maternal birthplace. In consigning the futureless ‘state’ to Albany and Edgar, icons, respectively, of Scottish enmity and English sea-sovereignty, Shakespeare compounds the tragedy’s ironic relation to contemporary naturalisation debates.

The Introduction explains why the early modern history play needs to be reappraised through an examination of publishers and the publication process. It opens by considering the problems of author-centric approaches that tend to discuss Shakespeare’s English histories to the exclusion of other plays, dramatists, and agents of production. It shows how ideas of ‘history’ and performed ‘histories’ were defined, debated, and interpreted during the period. This evidence demands an approach to the history play that is alert to the participation of different individuals in constructing the genre. The second half of the Introduction directs attention towards the transmission of plays from stage to page and proposes that publication agents have actively controlled and shaped the printed history play through two interlinked agendas, which feature throughout the book: strategies of selection (seen through print contexts) and strategies of presentation (seen through print paratexts). Finally, the Introduction considers the origins of these print strategies in non-commercial and pre-playhouse drama and offers a short case study on the Inns of Court play Gorboduc.