The End of the English History Play in Perkin Warbeck

In the early seventeenth century, history as a discipline was being constituted through a series of exclusions of historiographic practices that earlier had enjoyed widespread acceptance. Conversely, as historiography was being distinguished by its prohibitions against practices decidedly literary, literature came to be marked by disinterest. John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck appears a generation after the heyday of the English history play, and its central concern is to explore the fissures between the literary and the authentically historical. It is a history play about the end of history plays.