https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7682-5426
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Sonia Aires Lima, Nicosia, Marissa. Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590–1660, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 60, Issue 4, October 2024, Pages 514–515, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae067
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Time is inescapable and inevitable. In Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play, Marissa Nicosia offers her own perspective on the subject in the context of the English chronicle play. The author argues that the genre represents speculative futures: when dramatists adapted chronicle history for the stage and published their plays from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, they were both documenting the historical past and imagining a possible future. Nicosia’s work is divided into five chapters, each analysing a play that the author suggests emerges from, or intersects with, contemporary concerns surrounding two significant political events: the Elizabethan succession crisis and the English Revolution. The Coda offers a twenty-first century take on the English chronicle play and some closing remarks.
Chapter 1, ‘Almanac Time: William Shakespeare’s 1 & 2 Henry iv and Sir John Oldcastle’, explains the role of almanacs in chronicle plays, asserting that the past events depicted in the plot, and the possible futures discussed in printed pamphlets, acquire validity when indexed by the almanac. According to Nicosia, almanac time contributes to a triangulation between the present of reading or viewing, the diegetic time of a play on stage and the past and future of the nation. Chapter 2, ‘Succession and Prolepsis: Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me and William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry viii’, explores the relationship between ‘Truth’ and ‘Time’ and how it applies to chronicles dealing with issues of royal succession, namely the Elizabethan succession crisis, the death of the queen and the rise of King James i. Chapter 3, ‘Counterfactual Prophecies: William Shakespeare’s Richard iii and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck’, examines prophecy – counterfactual narrative – in English chronicle plays, noting how they introduce imagined futures that may occur alongside those that never will. Chapter 4, ‘Bad News: Historical Futures in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century Play Pamphlet’, focuses on pamphlet theatre. Here, Oliver Cromwell is the centre of a discussion of theatre as a mixture of journalism and drama, combining political commentary with aspects of the dramatic genre, namely characters and relationships, space and time, and dramatic tension. Chapter 5, ‘Commonplace Mourning: Imagining the Future after the Execution of King Charles i’, looks at the use of chronicle plays to represent the national future in the aftermath of the trial and execution of Charles i, exploring the material and metaphorical tactics of chronicle plays to predict the future of the monarchy in a time of crisis. Finally, the Coda discusses Mike Bartlett’s King Charles iii: A Future History Play (2014), a speculative verse play in five acts that imagines the aftermath of Queen Elizabeth ii’s death, reinventing the chronicle play for the twenty-first century.
