The aesthetic line of criticism displays characteristic double movements: restoring the status of the author as a free and independent witness to the lustorical processes and ideas addressed in his work and at the same time insisting on a more rigorous and complex historical methodology on the part of the critic（Holderness 1992b:30）.Along with the line of aesthetic criticism,there is another line of criticism-the "historiographical" approach to the history plays. Shakespeare's history plays are considered as contributions to the field of historiography,and as phenomena which should ultimately be associated with the practice of historical exegesis.If Tillyard was able to claim every play in the cannon as an illustration of the providential view of history,recent commentators see particular plays(and even characters）as embodiments of rival historiographies.
John W. Blanpied in Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories argued that "the [history] plays show us that Shakespeare was profoundly concerned with the idea of history,that is,as a category of experience with a distinctive nature,simultaneously implacable and ghostly,undeniable and elusive,and that he was determined to find the dramatic form that most truly expressed this special kind of reality"(12）. He was concemed with the ways the playwright acts in his historical material-how he manages to transform his own inevitable presence in the histories into the means of sounding out their vast and elusive energies. He also argued that Shakespeare comes to understand that " given the imperatives of his art,' history' cannot be conceived except dramatically"(13）.
Paola Pugliatti,in Shakespeare the Historian,proposed that Shakespeare's staging of English history helped to establish a new histonographical outlook.Through close examination of the playwright's varied methods and writing styles,she argued that Shakespeare achieved a radical multi-perspectivism or polyphony through which he was able to challenge the monologic practice of contemporary historical sources and cross-examine political issues,thus inaugurating problem-orientate critical historiography. Her argument is also for the ideological and structural importance of Shakespeare's cross-examination of history and historical representation,rather than his endorsement of particular positions. Like Norman Rabkin,whose influential application of the gestalt optical illusion that is simultaneously a rabbit and a duck to the "irreducible complexity of things" in Henry V,Pugliatti stressed the simultaneity of divergent perspectives rather than a single correct reading,thus foregrounding the concurring systems of a "multiplicity of histories"(72）. This approach to historical drama places a high value on early modern historiography,and long after the comparison of differences between history and poetry proposed by Aristotle,we are attracted to explore the contemporary relevance between historiography and literary fiction once again.
Though Shakespeare's history plays have attracted considerable attention of the critics all over the world,the study in China is relatively late compared with the research in the West.However,it has also made many achievements and is an integral part of the Shakespearean study in the world.In general,the study of Shakespeare's English history plays in China can be divided into three periods: the initial periodbefore 1978 years; the outbreak-the 1980s; the sustainable development period-the1990s to the present.
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