Shakespeares history plays, with their insistent depictions of
leadership and its discontents, have prompted very different critical
views over the last four centuries. This book introduces students to
the key critical debates under five headings: genre, history and
politics, gender and sexuality, language, and performance.The Guide
serves both to enhance students enjoyment of the history plays and to
broaden their critical repertoire. By presenting ten recent critical
interventions in the field, it provides a compendium of current
scholarship. These articles are contextualised with brief critical
overviews and annotated suggestions for further reading. An additional
chapter on pre-twentieth-century criticism is mainly in narrative form
but excerpts significant early views by Johnson, Hazlitt and Coleridge.