Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between William Shakespeare's English history plays with reproductive technologies and representational media spanning several centuries. These artifacts have in common with Shakespeare's histories a preoccupation with undead afterlives. The book deals with the luminous spiral, arguing that Shakespeare constitutes history at the threshold of possibility between dead and alive, object and subject, and that his histories occupy this threshold with a multitude of other reproductive technologies. The chapter then looks at an object from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London: a cigarette box of Richard II's relics. Through its opening, the box comes to function like a wormhole—a portal through which one can “literally touch history.” Contesting the dominant critical assumption that historical consciousness means chronological specificity, the book rethinks what history is and does by contextualizing Shakespeare's plays within the ongoing human enterprise of representing and relating to the dead.