A Fictional History: Shakespeare, England and the Importance of Historical Fiction
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document in English
literature
school essay
published 28/10/2007
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level : Advanced
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Summary
It is almost amazing, the overwhelming feeling of disgust that infiltrates a high school classroom whenever the subject is history. A kind of primitive competition to find the few kids who actually enjoy the class and bribe them for photocopies of notes and exam answers suffocates like a humid day. Add to the humiliation the impending doom of an essay test from a teacher who expects everyone to care enough about ex-presidents and military leaders to memorize precise battle plans and dramatic mistakes and it makes perfect sense that an entire junior class will quake at the thought of United States History. Even in college, notes fade to slight scribbles and heads fall, an hour and fifteen minutes of British monarchies and Roman empires barely distinguishable from any other opportunity for sleep. Yet history is tightly embedded in almost every other course in a liberal arts education, courses that students are honestly excited to attend. Literature that is merely a reflection of cultural movements, psychology that looks to some of the most famous individuals as its most important case studies. One cannot read Virgil’s Aeneid without knowing something about Augustus and the fall of Troy. And searching the years of George Washington’s childhood for hints at a future Revolutionary hero requires as much knowledge of history as it does psychology. So why is history such a dreaded subject? Why is it seen as a necessary evil instead of as a positive experience? The problem is that history dehumanizes.
Table of Contents
- Where as psychology is, in essence, a closer look at an individual, and literature is a journey with an individual, history is a bombardment of facts, dates and statistics that tell you everything a person did but not much about them.
- There is a reason that historical fiction is separated from ordinary fiction. The differentiation has nothing to do with the quality of the work; historical fiction can be as equally fulfilling as any piece of classical literature.
- However, the necessary creativity of historical fiction is also its most critical downfall. Inaccuracies occur, often in large numbers
- These inaccuracies, when viewed closely, are educational themselves. Although not as common with modern authors, most of the earlier composers of historical fiction had particular reasons for distorting the historical facts within their works.
- Another purposeful alteration to history occurs in his other play Henry VI Part 1. Its portrayal of Joan of Arc as a devil worshiper, calling imps to battle and burning on the stake with declarations of her own whoredom on her lips is as far as possible from the truth.
- As mentioned prior, historical fiction restores the humanity that textbooks eliminate when recalling merely the dates and critical facts of any specific event or person.
- A high school student would fair better reading a novel that captivates, even if not completely true, than falling asleep in a classroom of endless factual information.
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