Remembering, Replaying, and Rereading Henry VIII: The Courtier’s Henry

This book begins by asking about the memorial issues involved in the replaying of an old history play, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, at the Globe on 29 July 1628, but it is not primarily concerned with the memory of a single individual, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham who paid for the production, nor even of a single day, when he seemed to try to evoke the memories of a small group of people gathered at the theatre for a singular purpose. In order to resolve the mystery of what a group of people thought about the past in a single moment in time, this book studies Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline textual recollections that inform the moment in 1628. Tracing the ways in which Henry VIII was remembered across these years reveals a dominant approach to reading history in the early modern period, and the varied purposes of memorial activity itself.

Igor Djordjevic is an Associate Professor of Early Modern English Literature at York University, and the author of two previous books: Holinshed’s Nation: Ideals, Memory, and Practical Policy in the Chronicles (Routledge, 2010) and King John [Mis]remembered: the Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory (Routledge, 2015). His research interests are in the history of reading and the relationship between English cultural memory and historical writing in the early modern period.