Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play Historical Futures, 1590-1660

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past.

Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

Marissa Nicosia, Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature, Pennsylvania State University - Abington College

Marissa Nicosia is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at the Pennsylvania State University - Abington College where she teaches, researches, and writes about literature, temporality, food history, and material texts. She is co-editor of Renaissance Futures, a special volume of Explorations in Renaissance Culture (2019), and Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Introduction: Historical Futures
1. Almanac Time: William Shakespeare's 1 &2 Henry IV and Sir John Oldcastle
2. Succession and Prolepsis: Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me and William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII
3. Counterfactual Pretenders: William Shakespeare's Richard III and John Ford's Perkin Warbeck
4. Bad News: Historical Futures in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century Play Pamphlet
5. Commonplace Mourning: Imagining the Future after the Execution of King Charles I
Coda: Future History: Mike Bartlett's Charles III