2024/01/01 by Andrew Benjamin Bricker · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Irish and British Studies #Philippine History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/sq/quae041
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2024/12/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play, Marissa Nicosia offers a compelling account of how writers between 1590 and 1660, in chronicle plays and play pamphlets, thought about the future by performing the past. During both the Elizabethan succession crisis and the English Revolution, questions of monarchical succession were particularly fraught. In the earlier part of this period, it was chronicle plays that revealed “pressing anxieties about the institution of hereditary monarchy, the line of succession, and the tenuous relationships among competing claimants to the throne,” just as the play pamphlets of the mid-seventeenth century “projected possible futures beyond the present moment” (4). Both forms thus offered a way to speculate about the future through the immediate and the distant past. In doing so, authors “simultaneously documented what was and imagined what might be” (1). This is a provocative argument, which Nicosia convincingly builds through the careful consideration of various literary forms, their materiality, and both new and old terminology. One key term is built directly into her title: “chronicle play,” a genre devised by E. M. W. Tillyard to designate dramatic works that largely depict English history after the Norman conquest. Nicosia both reinvigorates the term and expands its usage. In doing so, she joins a group of scholars who understand this genre as something more than the mere reproduction of chronicle history. Instead, these are works squarely oriented not only to the past but also the future, and especially to the future rule of Queen Elizabeth I.