The Purchase of the Past: The Elizabethan Past and the uses of History in Eighteenth-Century Britain

“The Purchase of the Past: The Elizabethan past and the uses of history in eighteenth-century Britain” examines the place of the late sixteenth-century Elizabethan and Shakespearean pasts in eighteenth-century popular culture and politics. Through an analysis of five moments, three times at which Elizabeth and the men of her era had particular purchase and twice when Shakespeare, as a historical person, was given particular cultural importance, “The Purchase of the Past” argues this period experienced a transformation in understandings of historical time and of history’s function in the present. These changes stemmed from the accumulation of a rationalized nationalist history, which popularized particular historical narratives, but, in so doing, marginalized alternative perspectives. These interpretations increasingly focused on the individual and on interior personal development, confining the Elizabethan past to an interesting cast of characters, limiting its ability to legitimize contemporary political issues and identities. Individuals participating in public discourses increasingly saw themselves as living in a modern moment whose origins lay in the age of Elizabeth. It was a modernity that celebrated a Protestant, commercial, imperial past, but was consequently deeply troubled about contemporary changes to the means of production and the emergence of new forms of social and political bonds. This understanding of the past meant that those who seriously harkened back to its ideas and priorities appeared to be illogical and out-of-step. This analysis of how one time period understood and used another in popular discourses and entertainments demonstrates how history has been an integral part of the modernizing, imperial, and nationalizing projects.