This chapter provides a survey of the most common scholarly assumptions about the nature of a history play – that it is tragic, historically accurate, relates to a broader nationalistic agenda and that exclusion of the female is fundamental to the genre – and looks at how reading plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their most prominent female characters troubles these preconceptions. It first explores how the sub-genre of romantic histories challenges the assumption that a history play is concerned with historical accuracy. Reading Shakespeare’s co-authored Edward III as an example of this genre demonstrates its influence on the rest of his canon. It then re-evaluates the stereotype that foreign characters – especially foreign female characters – are always a threat against which the English national identity can be defined by contrast. It takes Margaret of Anjou as a case study in reading female characters not as women but as dramatic devices. The final section looks again to the tone of the plays to unpick how scenes of overwhelming female emotion can be seen as essential features of the history play genre and part of what contributed to the genre’s popularity in the eras when it was most frequently performed.

A review of Collins’s engagements with Victorian theatre, in particular the melodramatic mode, and his dramatisation of some of his own novels

During the Victorian era, current events were copiously represented in newspapers and in popular entertainments of all genres: they recirculated through both media in mutually reinforcing ways. As Frederick Chesson polished his capacity to articulate performance critique and launched his journalistic career, George Cruikshanks comet-shaped illustration of the events of 1853 represents exactly how these conjoint realms were experienced by the Victorian public. As a political organiser, Chesson was initially allied with the Manchester School, opposing the Crimean War and promoting free trade. First on the Empire then the Star and Daily News, his journalism represents a broad engagement with liberal causes, Garrisonian abolitionism, opposition to imperialism, and advocacy for Indigenous peoples self-determination. His work epitomises activism nearly a century before the concept was coined. The ability to envision complex dramaturgies at work around him and at great distances from London enabled Chesson to advocate and remonstrate on behalf of the dispossessed and disadvantaged in forms of observational citizenship that align historical forces, human actions, and the imperative to care.