Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s History Plays: 1952–1983
- Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements
- Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories
- The Nature of Topicality in Love’s Labour’s Lost
- The Tragic Substructure of the Henry IV Plays
- Hal and the Regent
- The Rite of Violence in I Henry IV
- The Fortunes of Oldcastle
- Hand D in Sir Thomas More: An Essay in Misinterpretation
- Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
- Henry VIII and the Ideal England
- The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII
- ‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Figurenposition in King Lear
- ‘Very like a whale’: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest
- Shakespeare’s Medical Imagination
- Shakespeare in the Theatrical Criticism of Henry Morley
- Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London 1983–4
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
Hal and the Regent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s History Plays: 1952–1983
- Shakespeare and History: Divergencies and Agreements
- Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories
- The Nature of Topicality in Love’s Labour’s Lost
- The Tragic Substructure of the Henry IV Plays
- Hal and the Regent
- The Rite of Violence in I Henry IV
- The Fortunes of Oldcastle
- Hand D in Sir Thomas More: An Essay in Misinterpretation
- Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
- Henry VIII and the Ideal England
- The Strangeness of a Dramatic Style: Rumour in Henry VIII
- ‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Figurenposition in King Lear
- ‘Very like a whale’: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest
- Shakespeare’s Medical Imagination
- Shakespeare in the Theatrical Criticism of Henry Morley
- Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London 1983–4
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
Summary
It is a cliché that the English get their history from Shakespeare and their theology from Milton. As a result of Shakespeare’s rewriting of history for the purposes of drama, Henry V is a national hero and Richard III a national villain. The influence of the history plays on subsequent perceptions of pre-Elizabethan history is widely recognized; their influence on later English history is less well documented. In this article I shall show how certain public, polemical, and parodic perceptions of the future George IV, up to and during the Regency years, were mediated through Shakespeare.
The most socially and politically influential art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was caricature. In the 1790s James Gillray developed a reputation as one of the foremost artists of his age; his works 'were bought up with unparalleled eagerness, and circulated not only throughout England, but all over Europe'. Nathaniel Wraxall wrote of the famous ' Carlo Khan' prints in which James Sayers attacked C. J. Fox, 'It is difficult to conceive the moral operation and wide diffusion of these caricatures through every part of the country.'
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- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 69 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986