King of Legend, King of History: Shakespeare’s Reclamation of the Leir Story

Abstract

The earliest historical accounts of the origins of Britain, those penned by Gildas (ca. 540) and Bede (ca. 731), begin with the Roman conquest of the British Isles by Julius Caesar, implying that Britain prior to Roman occupation is unknowable. It is not until Geoffrey of Monmouth’s publication of Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136) that the people of Medieval England gain a national narrative predating Caesar’s arrival upon British shores. Geoffrey’s story, known as the Galfridian account, claims to have been translated from an ancient text and reckons the history of Britain all the way back to Brutus, grandson of Trojan Aeneas. In its time, it was accepted as history, but by the British Renaissance, historians had all but abandoned the Galfridian tradition of British antiquity as imaginative non-history.