Medievalbookshop — AGC0010 Griffin, Playing the Past

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Scanned image of the book’s front cover

Benjamin Griffin.
Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385-1600.
Published Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001.
ISBN 0859916154.
Binding: hardback, stitch bound; published without a dustjacket.
Printer: St. Edmundsbury Press, Bury St. Edmunds.
Size: 159×240×21mm.
Page count: xiii, 193pp.
Main language: English; other languages given in original followed by English translation.
Overall condition good: this copy is unused, but shows evidence of long-term storage, the usual mild scuffs etc., and in particular some mild bumping at either end of the spine; pages a bit yellowed with age.

This item £10.00
P&P inc. within the UK
(delivery outside the UK not currently available)

[Publisher’s price £50.00/$75.00]
Weight without packaging: 490g.

How to order this book

Two overlapping areas of English historical drama are examined in this study. The first is the large group of plays dramatising the lives of powerful people in the past of the English nation (native-subject drama), from the end of the fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, and the second is the select group of these plays produced in the 1580s, at the height of their flourishing. Griffin charts the development of historical drama from the Mass and Saint plays on Thomas Becket, through the Reformation and its legacy, to the later history plays, showing that the history play is neither Shakespeare’s nor an Elizabethan invention, but has its roots in medieval drama. The use made by Shakespeare and Marlowe of the various types of historical drama — the sacrificial, the festive and the formless genealogical — is discussed, and the decline of the history play examined, reviewing and amending critical explanations of the extinction of the genre.

Contents: Prolegomena to study of the history play; Saint, sacrifice & Reformation; Festive victories; “formlessness” & historical drama; History plays of the 1590s; “Which oft our stage hath shown”.
Appendices: Plays on English history, to 1642; Printed plays with “History” in title-page, 1577-1642; Plays in 2 or more parts, 1495-1642.

Illustrations: no
Maps & plans: no

Notes: at foot of page
Tables: no
Genealogies: no
Chronology: no
Glossary: no
Bibliography: 22pp
Index: yes

[BML/UB]
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