Borges’ one-paragraph short story imagines an empire so committed to accuracy in mapping that the maps came to match the territory mapped exactly, making both map and geography useless. Work on the history plays sometimes falls to the same temptation as scholars add layers of qualifying adjectives to what purports to be the thing itself, a temptation we are led to by early modern title practice and its characteristic offers of a range of putative subgenres of “history” (“true,” “chronicle,” “famous” and so on). While not, perhaps, as useless as the map in Borges’ story, the development of this array of sub-genres obscures central questions about what the “history plays” actually are in terms of genre and how they give the impression that they offer some kind of historicity to audiences in the past and in the present. This chapter will argue that if there is a specific innovation in these plays it lies in the representational tools they use to create the touch of the real: a little touch of history in the theatre.

Where the previous chapter offered a description of a dramatic field in ferment by examining a range of plays and placing them in the context of theatre history, print culture, and literary history, this chapter turns to one of the most discussed of early modern genres: the history play of the 1580s and 1590s.