McLoughlin, Joshua George; (2024) Unpossible History in Early Modern England: History Plays and Historical Culture from Reformation to Restoration. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis offers the first account of the origins, significance, and ramifications of ‘unpossible history’ in early modern English historical culture, from the Henrician Reformation to the Restoration, with a particular focus on historical drama. I coin the term ‘unpossible history’ to group historians and dramatists including John Bale, John Foxe, Raphael Holinshed, Abraham Fleming, Samuel Rowley, Edward Herbert, John Crouch, Samuel Sheppard, Thomas May, John Rushworth, Thomas Fuller, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish and others who made the ‘toile’ of history the subject of historical representation and raised doubts about the possibility of historical consensus. I trace the origins of unpossible history to the breakdown of historical consensus in the Henrician Reformation and demonstrate the significance of unpossible history by showing that it recurs at key moments in English historical culture and provides a framework for interpreting many forms of history. Each chapter centres around historical drama because it was an especially prominent point of exchange between different historical sources, forms and genres. My study examines the ramifications of unpossible history by demonstrating its continuing influence on historical culture in the late seventeenth century. In doing so, this thesis makes original contributions to two fields: the ‘history of history’ and scholarship on historical drama. The thesis revises scholarly assumptions in the ‘history of history’ that the Civil War marked the collapse of consensus in English historiography, arguing instead that the Henrician Reformation unleashed a wave of self-conscious doubt about the possibility of historical consensus. It gives a new interpretation of the significance of early modern historical drama, showing how history plays, from the 1530s to the mid-seventeenth century, are not just plays of history but also plays about history, in which history – its forms, its media, its transmission, its possibilities and impossibilities – is at stake. In so doing, I show that one way of understanding history in early modern England – as a ‘mirror’ of the political present – has dominated scholarship on historical drama. By contrast, this study examines early modern forms of history alongside the sources and genres from which they adapted not only content but also their ‘protocols’ and ‘strategies of historical interpretation’. It restores historical drama and other imaginative genres to the ‘history of history’ and emphasises the importance of historical culture to our understanding of early modern literature.

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