Social Circulation and Historical Culture: A Shakespeare Myth in Sevenoaks

This thesis explores a provincial myth in the context of local historical culture and with reference to what Daniel Woolf has called ‘the social circulation of the past’. The myth identifies Sevenoaks School as a ‘grammar school’ cited by Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2.

The thesis examines the processes by which the myth developed, focussing on elements of the myth and on several central texts: Lambarde’s A Perambulation of Kent; Henry VI Part 2; a handwritten local history; and Jack Cade in Victorian adventure fiction for boys. In discussing the interaction of print and oral culture, the thesis argues for a revised understanding of Lambarde’s work on Sevenoaks and illustrates how some elements of this local historical culture remained unrecorded, outside formal history writing, until the nineteenth century. It also proposes a new understanding of the school’s wider reputation in the early modern period, with reference to previously unexamined evidence of boarding scholars.

The thesis concludes that the myth evolved from the early modern social circulation of the past in print and oral culture, custom, memory and landscape, and that it flourished in the early twentieth century in a historical culture infused with the ‘cult’ of Shakespeare and the rural, romantic nostalgia of ‘Englishness’ expressed in the arts and literature of the time.