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Norwich sheds interesting light on what Shakespeare did with his sources (particularly Holinshed), as he provides chapters that detail the history of a particular monarch, which is then tested against Shakespeare's play of that particular king. This throws up some interesting points, such as the fact that the great nationalist John of Gaunt in Richard II was actually a deeply unpopular, patrician figure. The book also contains some wonderful illustrations and excellent tables of family trees, maps and an appendix that offers the entirety of Edward III, only recently (and still controversially) accepted into the canon by Shakespeare scholars.
However, the general reader should also treat Norwich's claim to historical objectivity with some caution. Shakespeare's Kings is almost completely ignorant of recent critical and historical studies of either Shakespeare or historical studies of the monarchs under consideration. Norwich claims that Shakespeare would never have claimed historical accuracy--and to establish just how close to it he came has been one of the principal purposes of this book--but then he was not an historian; he was a dramatist. But this obscures the extent to which history and fiction are invariably entwined and nowhere more so than in Shakespeare. But there's the rub. --Jerry Brotton
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