SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Historical Imagination,” in Renaissance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, March, 1997, pp. 27-40.

In the following essay, Dean compares Shakespeare's treatment of historical fact and politics in his history plays, focusing on Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.

If there is one view about Shakespeare which can be said to be shared by most of the critics of the last ten years, it is that he is—and not just in the history plays—a political writer. But in this, it is argued, he has no choice: all literature is political, and all criticism, in consequence, ideological. A glance at the editor's introduction to the 1992 ‘New Casebook’ on Shakespeare's History Plays: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry IV’, aimed at an undergraduate readership, reveals how embedded such assumptions have become: in New Historicism, we read, ‘literature can be seen to enact a type of political discourse’, criticism being a ‘verbal and structural investigation...