Many more recent critics, trying to assess how Shakespeare’s history plays might intervene in contemporary political debates, have suggested that their role is rather to rehearse repressed anxieties about the Elizabethan succession. This argument goes that history plays try out different versions of monarchies in decline, different versions of power changing hands, so they are documents of political uncertainty rather than of historical triumph. The turn to history in the culture of the late sixteenth century can itself be seen as a sign of cultural anxiety – a turn to the past rather than a
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