not just a question of having to‘inject the spirit of his period into the
ancient world’, of the playwright explaining and making intelligible the
past event to an audience with less than perfect knowledge of it, by for-
cing them to appear in some sense similar. Rather, it’s the playwright
picking out and highlighting features of her own society and social con-
ditions, which happen to correspond objectively to those of some past
time, and dramatising those on stage.^42
This produces the third somewhat counterintuitive conclusion from
Lukács’work. Because history plays explore the author’s time as much as
the time in which they are set, and because their goal is to dramatise the
conflicts that both times have in common, there is no special reason why
any of the events depicted on stage need to have happened and, perhaps
even more strange, there is no particular reason whyanyof the characters
need to have real, historical counterparts. TakeKing Lear, for example,
which is based on a dubious chronicle about a (probably legendary) king
called‘Leir’. The play is set in a historical period characterised by sudden
change, conflict and upheaval. The fact that (for all we know) none of
these people ever existed doesn’t make the play badas a history play,as
long as the conflicts and collisions depicted in the play resonate appro-
priately with the conflicts in Shakespeare’s day.^43 Clearly, if history plays
can feature nothing but legendary characters andfictional plots, then we
have come a long way from our initial conception of a history play, the
typical features of which were given at the start. These included (at least
some) significant characters who correspond to real, historicalfigures, and
a certain minimal commitment to depicting events that really happened.
Against history plays as history
Thefinal answer would, of course, be no: it didn’t happen like that. This,
I’ll be suggesting, is the right answer to give. But in fact, I want to
suggest, there are two different ways of interpreting the question: hence,
there are two different questions, each of which should be answered‘no’,
but for different reasons. To understand why this is, it might be helpful
to distinguish between two different uses of the word‘history’:first, when
we say, for example, that there has been violence throughout human his-
tory, we use‘history’ to refer to past events or a process of (usually,
although not always) human development across time. The violence was a
feature of past, human societies, hence of our history. But we also talk
about‘history’in a completely different sense, as a kind of academic or
intellectual discipline. This discipline is (now) paradigmatically under-
taken by academics or intellectuals– it might involve writing books,
studying sources, making arguments based on the evidence, and so on. As
a matter of fact, the word‘history’comes from the Greek wordʽıστορία
86 From the World to the Stage