Igor Djordjevic - “Jacobean Drama’s Walking Dead: Reconsidering the English ‘History Play’”
When and Where
Speakers
Description
It has been a truism for a very long time among critics of early modern English historical drama that the “history play” as a genre “died” at some point in the first decade of the 17th century. This talk will interrogate the critical notion about the genre’s death through the cluster of "Henry VIII" plays that emerged between 1600-1613, and suggest that the history play may have "survived" in a mutated form resembling the one typical of the Lord Admiral’s Men's authorial syndicate of the late 1590s.
Igor Djordjevic is the Chair of the Department of English and Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature at Glendon College, York University. The author of the books Holinshed’s Nation: Ideals, Memory, and Practical Policy in the Chronicles, and King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory, his research interests are in the history of reading and the relationship between English cultural memory and the various forms of and approaches to historical writing in the early modern period.