In Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes poetry from history, claiming that “the distinction between historian and poet...consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Yet despite their different intentions, history has continued to remain a subject of drama from Aristotle’s time until the present day, often serving to enact the tension between truth and believability in order to highlight the porous boundary between fact and fiction. The relationship between history and theater has furthermore become a recurrent theme in theoretical discourses by Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Turner, Lukacs, Althusser, and Balabar, all of whom to varying degrees have examined the link between performance and the cultural moment in which it originated. This session draws on this deeply rooted connection between history and performance in order to examine the intersection of fact and fiction in theatrical works’ interpretations of past figures and events. By focusing on the alterations that these plays make to their portrayals of prior events, these papers demonstrate that the histories they present yield new insights not only into a collective past but into the shared present of the societies in which they were written.

After the presider’s brief introductions, speakers will give 13-minute papers to allow at least 15 minutes of discussion after presentations. Amy Scott opens the session by focusing on Shakespeare’s revisions to the historical chronicles in his depiction of the title character of Henry VI. Foregrounding the play’s own textual background as part of a series of history plays, Scott argues that Shakespeare intentionally recasts the title character’s legendary passivity as what she terms an “introspective performativity.” She argues that, although Shakespeare’s Henry VI is often critiqued as an observer whose effeminate mourning stands at odds with the masculine demands of kingship, the title character’s passivity acts as a potent corrective to the relentless, retributive violence dramatized earlier in the tetralogy.

Next, Claire Sommers similarly draws on gender paradigms to examine the dramatic representations of Cleopatra in Renaissance English drama. She positions the figure of Cleopatra as a counterpoint by which to critically examine Queen Elizabeth I and to juxtapose the Egyptian civilization’s demise with the British empire’s emergence. By tracing the evolution of Cleopatra’s depiction in early modern closet dramas and theatrical performances, Sommers contends that the shifting representations of her marital, age, parental, and racial statuses articulate fluctuating appraisals of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and her decision to remain a virgin.

Then Rachel Spencer focuses on Mary Pix’s late 17^th-century Queen Catharine as a retelling of Shakespeare’s Henry V. She argues that Pix explicitly relies on the audience’s familiarity with prior literary, theatrical, and historical renderings of the title character. Paying attention to how the play focalizes Katherine at the expense of her husband Henry V, Spencer characterizes Pix’s drama as an inventive and compelling attempt at ‘she-history’ — an alternative, woman-centered mode of thinking through English history and Englishness that could only have arisen from a theatre culture that, in its own moment, was wrestling with its own problems relating to gender, tradition, and social hierarchy.

Finally, Cassidy Holahan looks at the historical deviations in a harlequinade centered around thief and prison-breaker Jack Sheppard that was staged at Drury Lane during the 19^th century. Holahan argues that Sheppard represents a rare theatrical example of the “middling figure” that Lukács ascribed to the novel. By analyzing the intersections between Jack Sheppard as a character trope and Jack Sheppard as a historical figure, Holahan argues that his theatrical depiction represents a broader 19^th century engagement with both economic inequalities and the construction of historical character.

Our presenters are all women early career scholars who represent public and private universities from different regions of the United States (Missouri, Texas, Nevada) and Canada. We comprise different ranks and stages of the profession (Assistant Professor, Lecturer, Instructor, PhD Candidate). Although we are affiliated with English departments, our backgrounds and research interests include Comparative Literature, Theatre Studies, and Critical Theory. Our presentations represent histories from ancient Egypt and 15^th, 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th century England and the plays we discuss span the 16^th-19^th centuries. The plays we examine pivot around marginalized historical figures so that they can engage with gender, racial, and economic inequalities. All of these presentations analyze early modern dramas and/or historical subjects, thus centering a discipline and time period that has been historically underrepresented at the MLA.