The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

History play

History play: A drama that makes use of historical events, personages, places, or times. Such plays have a greater tendency than historical novels to “document” a particular event or the life of a particular person. Sometimes the term history play is used more specifically to refer to Elizabethan chronicle plays.

EXAMPLES: Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1593); William Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599); George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923), about the life of Joan of Arc. Unto These Hills, a play originally written by Kermit Hunter in 1950 and substantially revised from 2006 to 2008, recounts the history of the Cherokee Indians and their forced relocation from Georgia to Oklahoma in the 1830s along the “Trail of Tears.”

Contemporary history plays include David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), about the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “history musical” Hamilton (2015), which was inspired by Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (2004), a biography of a Founding Father and first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s program to commission thirty-seven new plays — the number of plays in the Shakespearean canon — representing moments of change in America; productions so far include UNIVERSES’ Party People (2012), which chronicles the experiences of the Black Panthers and Puerto Rican Young Lords, and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (2015), which examines America’s industrial decline through the collapse of a factory town.