then we may have misunderstood the task of the historian in thinking
about the past.
Further Reading
Relatively little has been written on philosophy and history plays. The
discussion in Lukács (1983) is still highly interesting, although the intel-
lectual ground has shifted and many of his reference points are likely to be
unfamiliar to the contemporary reader. Heller (2002) treats Shakespeare as
a‘philosopher of history’. Rokem (2000) focuses on post-war theatrical
representations of the French Revolution and the Holocaust. I recommend
Frayn’s‘Postscript’to his history play,Democracy, which gives a playwright’s
perspective on constructing a piece of drama out of real, historical events.
Some of the material from this chapter appears in Stern (2012).
Notes
1 Herodotus (2007: 3).
2 Some claim that Aeschylus fought at or witnessed Salamis; but this is not known for sure.
3 Aeschylus (1961: 130–1).
4 See below for more detail on what I take to be a‘history play’. The use of the term‘history play’
in relation to Aeschylus is obviously anachronistic: not only would he not have used the term
‘history play’–he would not have even known the word‘history’in that sense because, as we
have seen, he was writing before Herodotus. Our subject here is not the history of the term or
the appearance of the separate genre, which seems to have arisen in Renaissance England, but
with the concept of representing the past on the stage. Nonetheless, many of our examples are
explicitly‘history plays’and I assume that our guiding question is posed in the context of that
tradition.
5 As it happens, the earliest description we have of the performance of a tragedy–also in
Herodotus–features a play that depicts real and recent events. Phrynikos’Fall of Miletusreduces its
audience to tears, the play is banned and its author is fined a thousand drachmas. See Herodotus,
Book 6: 21 (2007: 435). For an extended reading of this anecdote, see Kottman (2008) Ch. 6.
6 Many of Aristophanes’comedies, such as The Clouds(which ridicules Socrates), have con-
temporary settings and depict real people; although one would not exactly class them as history
plays, rather as fictions set in contemporary Greece.
7 Examples include: Johnson’sHysteria,Churchill’sTop Girls,Frayn’sCopenhagen.
8 BT 10, p. 53.
9 Williams (2000: 395, 400)
10 Anecdotally: at a recent performance of a history play, a professor of English Literature said to
me:‘It’s a history play, so I expect it’s pretty much true.’A colleague, having been to see a his-
tory play, told me that if she’d discovered that certain historical characters were not at all as they
were portrayed in the play, she would have‘written in to complain’.
11 Some have taken the opposite view in related discussions. Ryle (1933) argues, for example, that
had thePickwick Papersbeen true, unknown to its author, it would in fact be a biography. This
strikes me as mistaken.‘Biography’, like‘history’and‘history play’, implies a certain engagement
between the author and the sources.
12 Frayn (2010: 251–287).
13 This, for example, is likely to be the case forThe Persians–how would Aeschylus have known
what was said at the Persian court? Indeed,The Persians–written before the first history–may
well fall foul of this criterion.96 From the World to the Stage