he explicitly praises Shakespeare as better history (i.e. better at representing
specific historical conflicts) than Schiller, even though Schiller is more
historically accurate.^34 The key distinction, therefore, is that which he draws
between‘historicism’(i.e. getting the historical facts right) and what he calls
‘real historicalfidelity’, which for him involves the appropriate expression
of the historical collision of social forces.^35 Inspired by Lukács’argument,
for example, Agnes Heller defends the anachronistic chiming clock in
Julius Caesar, on the grounds that it adds to the drama of the play in a
way that aids ourhistoricalunderstanding of Rome–this even though
there could have been no chiming clock at the time.^36
Given the brief account of Lukács’theory, it hardly seems appropriate to
offer objections as such. What I propose to offer, instead, are a few pointers
towards some peculiar and controversial assumptions, features and results
of his theory. These should be enough to highlight just where the major
points of contention lie. To begin with, Lukács isn’t just interested in
the historical period in which the play is set. He is also interested in the
historical period in which the play is written.^37 Just as certain historical
periods are more suitable forsettingplays, so (he thinks) some historical
periods are more suitable for writing plays. Drama’s ‘relatively short,
intensive periods of flowering’, then, are the lucky combination of
appropriate setting and writing times.^38 It’s not just that Shakespeare
chose well in writing a history play about the end of republican Rome;
it’s that he had the good fortune to live in a time when writing plays was
the appropriate literary genre. Other dramatists–the French tragedians,
for example–were not so lucky.^39 Later literary authors, writing about
the very same historical events, would write novels instead.^40 This
prompts the question: which features of a period make it suitable for
writing plays? The answer is similar to the answer he gives for the suit-
ability of a time for setting plays: it’s a matter of periods of brief, intense
historical conflict and upheaval. A successful historical play will be the
result of a kind of resonance–a set of relevantly similar conflicts–between
the time of the author and the time in which the play is set. Speaking of
Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Lukács says:‘[Shakespeare] was able to adapt
from Plutarch’s history those features which the two periods had in
common. [...] The generalised form of the drama reveals the features
which the two ages hold objectively in common.’^41
A challenging conclusion of Lukács’theory, then, is that a history play
is just as much (if not more) about the time in which it was written as it
is about the time in which it is set. There is a weak sense in which we
can all agree about that: history books and history plays must relate their
subject matter to their readership or audience–what the readers and
audience members already know and assume is a crucial factor in what to
include and omit. But Lukács is saying something more than that: it’s
History in the making 85