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The Historicity Of Shakespeare's English Queens, Winifred Constance Clink

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Critics, whether in the field of history or of literature, have generally agreed in their evaluation of the historical worth of Sheakespear's English history plays. Tillyard finds that the dramatist"... compressed into a popular and lively form an astonishing quantity of sheer historical fact.1 The historian, James Gairdner, proclaims him as an "unrivalled interpreter" who succeeds in presenting not only a general conception of the period from Richard II through the reign of Richard III, but nearly the entire sequence of important happenings. J. A. R. Marriott claims Shakespeare's history to be sound beyond question, and continues