"More than History can Pattern": Shakespeare and Historicism

This article explores current debates in Shakespeare studies regarding the claims of historicism and presentism. The article focuses upon Cymbeline and its fascination with the ways in which our attempts both to reconstruct the past and to understand the present are bound up with narrative. It is argued that Cymbeline exposes the limitations of a particular form of historicising reading; that is, a historicism that confines its attention to a literary text's political contexts. At the same time, however, Cymbeline demonstrates our insatiable need for historical narratives as a way of making sense of the world, and even of fashioning our identity, and thus also problematises some of the bolder claims of presentism. The article suggests that a consideration of Cymbeline's literary and historical sources, rather than its political contexts, illuminates Shakespeare's own interest in the philosophy and poetics of history