SOURCE: Ryan, Kiernan. “The Future of History in Henry IV.” In Henry IV, Parts One and Two, edited by Nigel Wood, pp. 92-125. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Ryan analyzes Henry IV in terms of Frederic Jameson's Marxist theory of literature, finding that Shakespeare's plays demystify the hierarchical assumptions and teleological confusions associated with historical drama even as they portray standard ideologies.

I

As history plays engaged in dramatizing the fate of Crown and nation across a period two centuries before the time of Shakespeare and his audience, 1 and 2 Henry IV pose fundamental questions for the literary theory and critical practice of the present. What is the relationship between the reality of history and its creative representation, between the world of the past and the work's account of it? What is the political role of the work in its own world: to shore up or...