Futures of the Past and Changing Temporal Horizons

The paper considers early modern history plays' curious relation to the future.It is interested in the ideological and dramaturgical constraints that dramatists faced when historical characters turned towards the future.Focussing primarily on three plays, the paper seeks to cut across the Tudor-Stuart divide which frequently constrains discussions of early modern history plays: from one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, 1 Henry VI (1592), to two of his last plays, Macbeth (1606) and Henry VIII or All is True (1613).Together with shorter references to other plays, these three works will serve to illustrate four perspectives on and attitudes towards 'the future(s) of the past' -the future as past, the future as present, a past future as nostalgic promise, and the problem of looking beyond the now of performance to a further future.At the same time, a comparison of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays will make it possible to trace what the paper proposes to call 'changing historical horizons' in the early modern period.