From beginning to end, Henry V is informed by an acute "metadramatic self-consciousness," which entails a close scrutiny of the discursive modes and conventions associated with the English
chronicle play. (8) Through a process of internal mirroring, the ideology of this particular form is opened up to critical inspection in ways that expose both the latent ambiguities and the coerciveness implicit in its discourse of native heroism.
The
chronicle play which was contemporaneous with early history plays simply served to string together a series of dramatic episodes from some period in the past, often with a crude didactic purpose.
Wright, '"The Historic of King Edward the Fourth": A
Chronicle Play on the Coventry Pageant Wagons', Medieval and Renaissance Drama in English, iii (1986), 69-81.
Finally, Couragemodell 1949, the third and last of the Brechtian "Modellbucher," renders a detailed account of Brecht's
chronicle play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder as produced by him in Berlin in 1949, once more with Weigel - needless to say - playing the lead; its publication too occurred posthumously, in 1958.
chronicle play or chronicle historyor also called history play.
More complex and multivalent than at first it appears, this particular
chronicle play not only presents itself as a panegyric of English heroism and national pride (including an allusion to the defeat of the Spanish Armada); (20) it also casts a critical light upon the problems inherent in absolute monarchy as exemplified by the dangerous conduct of a figure such as Edward III who is at once glamorous and repellent, brave and unfeeling, virtuous and potentially vicious.
Composed of 12 scenes, the work is a
chronicle play of the Thirty Years' War and is based on the picaresque novel Simplicissimus (1669) by Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen.
As dramatists they developed the Senecan revenge tragedy, the use of bigger - than - life characters, the
chronicle play, and the romantic comedy.
Saint Joan
Chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue by Shaw, George Bernard, performed in 1923 and published in 1924.
They transformed the native dramatic inheritance of interlude and
chronicle play into a potentially great drama by writing plays of quality and diversity.
The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 reawakened within Shaw ideas for a
chronicle play about her.