History in the Making

I should like to draw attention to the exhibit currently being presented at the Folger in the Great Hall:  History in the Making: How Early Modern Britain Imagined Its Past, running until May 17, curators Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan. 

Description: "This exhibit considers the ways in which the early modern British made, and remade, their own history. "Making History" focuses on how key events, such as the controversial execution of Mary Queen of Scots or the murderous Gunpowder Plot, were interpreted in the period, as well as on crucial ideas that helped shaped those interpretations."

The Folger web site presents mini-displays on 8 topics related to the exhibit, all of which should be of compelling interest to Shakespeareans.  I have added to each a companion book or two for those who wish to delve deeper.

• Mary, Queen of Scots: Once proud queen of France, reduced to ruling a northern European backwater, held under house arrest for 18 years, indefatigable plotter, murderess, conspirator, charmer, and finally victim of the Realpolitik that dictated that even royal blood had to be spilled when absolutely necessary.  For an engaging, and well written narrative of Elizabeth's struggles with the execution of Mary, read Elizabeth Jenkins' Elizabeth the Great, and for a lively narrative about Walsingham's role in the revelation of Mary's plots, read Stephan Budiansky's Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage.
• The Brutus Myth.  Britain's own foundational story about Brutus, descendant of Aeneas, who makes his way to Britain, names it after himself, and proceeds to populate it.  On a related note, I have discovered a marvelous author who has just published her second volume in a series on ancient Britain, specifically during the period of Hadrian.  She is Ruth Downie.  Her first in the series was Medicus, her second, just out, Terra Incognita.  The best popular historical novelist to come along since Steven Saylor.
• Sir Phillip Sidney, son-in-law to Walsingham, nephew of Leicester, THE Elizabethan poet, soldier and courtier.  He died from a gangrenous wound to the thigh received while serving under Leicester at Zutphen.  At his funeral "The streets 'were so thronged with people that the mourners had scarcely room to pass; the houses likewise were as full as they might be, of which great multitude there were few or none that shed not some tears as the corpse passed by them.'"  Sidney is best known today for his Defence of Poesy, and the literary criticism it spawned.
• Providence.  Certainly, there were many in an age apt to credit the miraculous, who held a special belief in Providential favor for England and her rulers. Catholics, Protestants, and Puritans alike had their own take on providence, as did our man Shakespeare.  For an interesting book on this topic, see Henry Kelly's Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories.
• The Spanish Armada.  Precipitated in no small part by the execution of Mary, the engagement with the Armada was THE seminal event of the late Elizabethan period, which led to the great English fluorescence in literature and the arts.  The best book I have read on the Armada period is The Spanish Armada by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, though Neil Hanson's The Confident Hope of a Miracle is well worth reading.
• The Gunpowder Plot.  Remember, remember the fifth of November... a red letter day indeed.  The "miraculous" survival of the Stuart monarchy further fed the beliefs in providential England.  For a great treatment of Guy Fawkes and he and his co-conspirators motivations to blow up Mary's boy, read the great Antonia Frasier's Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot.
• The Great Fire.  Quite a while after our period of primary concern, yet not with respect to the theater and Shakespeare in the Restoration.  A thoroughly enjoyable book on the fire is The Dreadful Judgement, by Neil Hanson.
• The New Antiquarianism. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries "Several gentlemen and scholars became antiquarians, intent on collecting and preserving the traces of the past in manuscripts, coins, relics or ruins."  These included Stow, Camden and Dugdale, who have made various appearances throughout these blog posts.  Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History is a solid introductory history, which should lead to many more specialized works.  Of particular interest to literati ought to be two histories of England by leading novelists, those by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.  Austen's is a satire, but Dickens serious, if liberal, stuff for Victorian children, which became part of the school curriculum for a time.