Dramatic History: On the Diachronic and Synchronic in the Study of Early English Drama.

This article presents information about the book "The Oxford English Literary History," vol.2, "Reform and Cultural Revolution," by James Simpson. This book is both stunning in its intellectual breadth and critical honesty and astonishing in its eccentric approach to writing a literary history. Simpson opens his introduction with a straightforward statement of his thesis, which is reformulated in each chapter and underscored throughout: that the institutional simplifications and centralizations of the sixteenth century provoked correlative simplifications and narrowings in literature.