Hailey Bachrach reveals how Shakespeare used female characters in deliberate and consistent ways across his history plays. Illuminating these patterns, she helps us understand these characters not as incidental or marginal presences, but as a key lens through which to understand Shakespeare's process for transforming history into drama. Shakespeare uses female characters to draw deliberate attention to the blurry line between history and fiction onstage, bringing to life the constrained but complex position of women not only in the past itself, but as characters in depictions of said past. In Shakespeare's historical landscape, female characters represent the impossibility of fully recovering voices the record has excluded, and the empowering potential of standing outside history that Shakespeare can only envision by drawing upon the theatre's material conditions. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

‘Elegantly and forcefully, Hailey Bachrach highlights the vital dramaturgical of role of women and characters in feminine figural positions in Shakespeare's history plays, revealing how gender in Shakespeare's histories is inextricably linked to political but also theatrical forms of power. The result is a compelling, invigorating study of the history plays that heralds the arrival of a new generation of feminist Shakespeare scholarship.'

Pascale Aebischer - Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies, University of Exeter