hbachrach essay

historical accuracy is Good, Actually

So the Hamilton discourse is back. The #Hamilcourse? (why does no one on that marketing team get how plays on words work? you can’t just put ‘hamil’ in front of literally any word!!!) Part of this has entailed historians tweeting to point out various historical inaccuracies in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, and fans responding, ‘who cares?’ Which all in all is probably fair enough.

I hate accuracy nitpicking. Nothing annoys me more than someone saying they refuse to watch a Jane Austen film because of the modern-looking hair. When you’re condensing the vast sprawl of historical events into a play or movie or book, things have to be omitted and changed to make something you can actually contain in around two hours, and frankly a lot of those things (like hair) do not matter. This is inevitable and fine.

Historical accuracy also becomes a stick with which to bludgeon people, especially marginalized people. I saw Emma Smith give a fantastic talk on this topic, referencing the infamous Margaret of Anjou swan tweet. Basically, the (itself inaccurate!) rallying cry of ‘it’s historically inaccurate for Black people to exist in that time period/women to do anything/homosexual romance to happen before the modern era/etc!’ is an inevitable and deeply annoying part of the backlash to any historical story that attempts to talk about anyone but white men.

Depictions of marginalized people are also left vulnerable to these accusations because their presence in standard historical records is almost inevitably less robust. It’s hard to find queer stories that aren’t located in police records, or personal lives of enslaved people, or pre-modern (and later, frankly) women existing beyond the registration of their marriage. Historical inaccuracy, anachronism, creative gap-filling, what-have-you is an important tool for people to find a place for themselves within a history that has not recorded the presence of people like them.

Now for the inevitable… but. Hamilton is a myth-making tool. The creators have claimed it’s just a story, not a historical document, and if we accept that as true and ignore the fact that the producers invited high school history students to see it, curated museum exhibitions around it, a historian gets royalties for it, and it explicitly in the text refers to itself as designed to preserve Alexander Hamilton’s unjustly lost legacy… it’s still an adaptation of a (historical) text, and therefore it’s still interesting to think about what it chose to amend, erase, or ignore from its source materials. It’s interesting to think about the image of early America and the lost, ideal founding father that Miranda wanted to create/rescue from centuries of white supremacist history-telling, and what had to be changed to allow that to happen.

So sure, someone pointing out that the tomcat line– you know, the one Hamilton explicitly breaks the fourth wall to reassure us is true– isn’t true… doesn’t really matter. It’s just a fun fact! That’s fine! People sneering in the comments that it’s just a story and no one cares are seriously missing the point, no one is saying this invalidates the whole musical.

But what about slavery? What about immigration? What about the core, inclusive messages that the musical takes such pains to allude to? Does it matter that the Schuylers owned slaves and Hamilton, despite belonging to the New York Manumission Society, hired slave labor throughout his life and never seems to have made any effort to push abolitionist ideals in law? Does it matter that he advocated for nativist immigration policies, perhaps out of his own shame at his illegitimate Caribbean background– a background he successfully hid for his entire career? Does it matter that Hamilton’s disdain for the French Revolution, painted with the benefit of hindsight as sharp pragmatism, was probably rooted in his belief that poor people, Americans included, were generally too stupid to be trusted with having a hand in government?

(Citation… I was obsessed with Alexander Hamilton in high school, fully ten years before the musical existed. Yes, really.)

Hamilton is fairly overtly by and for people who are desperate to be allowed to believe in America. They know that Thomas Jefferson is Bad Now because he was a rapist and a brutal slave owner; they kinda know the same about George Washington, though the musical doesn’t want them to think about that too hard because he’s Hamilton’s daddy figure. We aren’t able to like the guys on our dollar bills anymore, the guys we grew up hearing were heroes. But what if the founding was reimagined as the story of young, scrappy and hungry immigrants? Marginalized people fighting for a land of their own against smug white guys? What if we told you there was a way, despite the racism and sexism and xenophobia and brutality, to be inspired by the story of America’s founding– and by extension, America itself and being American– just like they taught you to be in elementary school?

But because of its omissions, Hamilton seeks to grant this permission not by grappling with the actual problems we now have with these guys– a task that might be impossible– but instead by unearthing a new, squeaky-clean founding father who we can love without complications. Sure, Hamilton is a #problematicfave because he cheats on his wife and is a bit of a loudmouth, but that’s nothing compared to, you know, enslaving people. And this is why I think historically inaccuracy in favor of progressive ideals can be just as frustrating and potentially damaging as inaccuracy in favor of regressive or bigoted ones.

Remember that great part in ‘Yorktown’ when Hercules Mulligan bursts out of a bunch of coats to reveal that while working as a tailor, he was also a spy? Yeah, he was doing that in partnership with his slave Cato, who was allowed through enemy lines because he was enslaved and therefore nobody suspected him of anything. And the shown never even alludes to him. Because our good guys have to be good people, they have to be a version of early Americans we can root for now (and obviously because having a Black actor directly depicted as owning a slave desperately complicates the conceit behind the casting). They have to believe what we believe. But doing that doesn’t just erase inconvenient facts for the sake of ‘just good storytelling,’ as the case of Cato demonstrates– it erases actual people and the realities of their lives.

This is where the question of identity that I mentioned before gets sticky. I understand the urge to find– to speak, as an example, from my own experience– not only cool queer people in the historical record, but cool queer people who recognizably share that identity. I understand, even though I don’t share, the frustration with being told that it’s ahistorical to think about those categories of identity before a certain point in history. The same can be said for race, disability, and a lot of other identities. It feels like yet another use of the historical accuracy bludgeon: “He wouldn’t have called himself gay, you people didn’t exist then.” But I don’t think that’s always what’s being said.

At least when I think about or say these things, it’s an attempt at nuance. The things we see as immovable and inevitable about identities just… aren’t. Our present era is not the apex of understanding, where suddenly we fully grasp every human category in an objectively correct way. If you want to do justice to the experiences of marginalized people in the past, you have to try understand them in their own language and on their own terms. Doing so will sometimes result in something much more contemporary-feeling than we expect, and the historical accuracy bludgeon will come out, but oh well.  And sometimes it won’t… but it may still result in something more interesting and radical than just painting the present over whatever’s there.

Of course it’s also fine to say you don’t care and Emily Dickinson is going to be a lesbian girlboss. But I think that creates problems.

I’m digressing slightly because Hamilton doesn’t really deal with those kinds of identities (even though in 2014, Lin-Manuel Miranda implied to me in tweet that there would be a Hamilton/Laurens/Lafayette love triangle and that was a lie, this show is super straight). But the show does do this with immigrants, using Hamilton and Lafayette to suggest that not only was the concept of an immigrant exactly the same back then as it is now, but immigrants– especially Caribbean immigrants– faced exactly the same types of prejudices. And maybe it doesn’t matter that thinking about Lafayette as an immigrant just… does not capture who he was or what he was seen to be doing by others. Isn’t it more important for a group of people who, especially now, are treated not only as less than American but often as less than human, to be granted an essential, heroic piece of America’s founding? I mean, yes, obviously (if they even want it). But as with the case of Cato, there were also people who were actually perceived as immigrants by the culture at large, people whom Hamilton’s own exclusionary rhetoric targeted, a category that was inevitably complicated in ways that have no contemporary parallel by the fact that the new USA had just been a colony, who are thereby erased. Both things can be true at once.

And because I’d be betraying my #brand if I didn’t mention women… we see this constantly in historical stories about women, where a patina of contemporary feminism is apparently a requirement. Angelica Schuyler sings that she wants to meet Thomas Jefferson (which, incidentally, she did) and “compel him to include women in the sequel” to the Declaration of Independence. And listen, maybe this is descending to the level of stupid nitpicking, but why not have Angelica shout out the female intellectual tradition that was already emerging at that point? Why not have her be a fan of Phyllis Wheatley’s pro-revolution poetry (which would have brought the show’s references to specific historical Black people up to… two)? Why frame her as the only woman, even amongst her sisters, who cares about or understands politics, or who recognizes the limits of her gender role in society? I realize it makes no sense for her to pop up in the second act like “I was also in Paris and just read this amazing pamphlet by Mary Wollstonecraft, it really is a sequel to the Declaration of Independence, wow, other women do think like I do but also not exactly the same as all you out there in the audience because it’s the 1790s!”, but the deeply cliche framing of one of the romantic leads as Not Like Other Girls (“some men say that I’m intense or I’m insane”) is, once again, such a disservice to all the  historical women who were trying to do that work, just in terms that can seem insufficient from the vantage point of the twenty-first century.

And I just want to be clear: I think Hamilton is an amazing show. Some of the songs and lyrics make my brain hurt, they’re so good. The line ‘I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory’ was one of those moments in art where you’re like, ‘it’s extremely rude of you to have put my own personal individual thoughts and feelings on a stage for everyone here to look at.’ I think the second act is kind of a mess, but most second acts of musicals are. Hamilton is great. 

And that’s why we need to offer it the respect due to a great, popular, influential work of art and actually rigorously examine it. It’s not enough to dismiss a cultural juggernaut as ‘just a story,’ partly because nothing is ever ‘just a story’– but especially not when it’s dealing with a country’s founding myths, and especially not when it’s a once-in-a-generation artistic phenomenon. More people will see Hamilton calling out Jefferson (but not Washington) about owning slaves in a rap this year than will see the musical 1776‘s number where a southerner calls out all the northerners in the room, including the historically explicitly anti-slavery #problematicfave protagonist John Adams, for their participation in the triangle trade, for their deep embeddedness in the slave economy despite the fact that they have not enslaved anyone and disdain those who do.

1776‘s triangle trade song doesn’t offer any solutions. Jefferson, mortified at being called out for hypocrisy for including anti-slavery passages in the first place, allows them to be stricken from the draft of the Declaration of Independence. Adams is furious, but can’t do anything. The room full of white men move on, kicking the can down the road in order to pursue the immediate goal. It’s not very satisfying. But then again, it wasn’t a very satisfying moment in our history. The musical’s climax of hard-won victory, startlingly triumphant for a scene that’s literally names being read out while dudes sign a paper, is irrevocably tainted by what we know has been left out of that paper. We feel good, but not that good. I’m not saying it’s a perfect musical by any stretch, but it does what Hamilton by definition cannot do: allows historical accuracy to complicate its message, to make us uncomfortable.

And I get the impulse to say, ‘Hamilton is just a story! Let me have this story I can feel good about!’ because that’s exactly the impulse the musical itself is expressing and hoping to tap into in its audience. Please, please, just let me feel like America isn’t absolute shit. Let me feel like it doesn’t hate BIPOC on some sick, primal level. Let me feel the way I felt my freshman year of college when I stood in a tent on the lawn and watched Obama be elected for the first time on a giant outdoor screen and just wept while around me, students fully, unironically chanted ‘USA!’. Even typing that makes me want to crawl out of my skin now. I was so, so ignorant then, it’s embarrassing. But man that complete ignorance felt good.

We don’t get to have that. Because Hamilton’s inaccuracies demonstrate what letting American history be ‘just a story’ costs. Yes, there’s a Black George Washington. But there are no Black Patriots. Our heroes are “just like their country… young, scrappy, and hungry” but there are no Native Americans remind them that the land really isn’t that young, and isn’t theirs. It’s a nice story about what America might have been, but it’s no less false and no less troubling– though perhaps more subtly so– than the versions about glorious white guys in wigs. Those omissions matter. No matter the story.

 

hbachrach essay, review

Quilted History: Emilia and Swive

Leaving Swive a few nights ago, I found myself thinking about story quilts, which I dimly remember learning about in elementary school. Some of the most famous examples are the late nineteenth century work of Harriet Powers, who used quilted squares to tell Bible narratives and records of events of her lifetime, such as a meteor shower. It’s believed, therefore, that the style originated with American slaves, though early evidence seems (understandably) scant.

I also found myself thinking about Emilia, another recent Globe new writing commission that sought to reimagine a famous early modern woman through a contemporary feminist lens.

Both Swive (which is about Queen Elizabeth from the accession of her brother King Edward to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, sort of) and Emilia (the highly fictionalized life and times of poet Emilia Lanyer) share a fragmented structure, a vision of history that is more episodic than smoothly narrative, and is concerned less with direct cause-and-effect continuity of either event or character development than in creating what comes to seem like a collage of a life–or, perhaps, like a narrative patchwork.

It’s a structure that’s partly enabled by both plays’ framing devices, which place the older version of their central character character looking back on and partially narrating her own life. The narration can fill the gaps the patches leave, or draw out implications they don’t have time to show; it also enhances the impressionistic and highly subjective feel of this structure. This is not the entirety of these women’s lives, but their recollections of the moments that really mattered, partly enacted by a second actor playing their younger selves, someone who both is and is not the person they are now.

It seems important to this structure that both of these plays are at their core not really about a woman who must discover herself, as the traditional biographic coming-of-age narrative depicts, but one who must make herself seen by others in spite of the constraints of early modern English culture. Through the patchwork recollection of their lives, both Elizabeth and Emilia are able to make the audience see and understand truths about themselves and their remarkable abilities that their contemporaries could not. The essential relationship of the play faces outward, demonstratively, not inwards. It’s sort of logical, therefore, that other characters in both plays are almost exclusively antagonists, representatives of society and its oppressive attitudes. Swive emphasizes this with its tightly doubled cast of four: Dudley, Elizabeth’s would-be lover, is the same as her stepfather Seymour, who possibly molested her. Both plays have a difficult relationship with the idea of heterosexual romantic love (while simultaneously vilifying the notion of queer female desire) that perhaps stems from this sense that the men who love and are loved by these women also represent the threat of subsumption into the patriarchal, inferior position of ‘wife.’

Like most folk crafts, quilting and story quilts are a feminized art form. Similarly, I’ve been wondering how or if Emilia and Swive’s structural similarities can been seen as reaching towards a feminized form of historical narrative. There are certainly similarities between this style and the historical works of Caryl Churchill– I think Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is probably more effective than either of these plays at creating a collage effect, a fuller expression of this impulse to undermine traditional historical narratives not only through destabilizing narrative linearity, but by rejecting the notion of ‘great man’ history that can be told through focus on the achievements of a single figure rather than the experiences of a collective.

Thus Light Shining in Buckinghamshire makes no effort to centralize around a single character and thus can use its diffuse structure to achieve scope without worrying about specificity in the same way these biographical plays have to. These plays seem to be seeking a dramaturgical middle ground between innovation and tradition, attempting to simultaneously appropriate and deconstruct the dramaturgy that has long been used to spotlight male historical figures by casting that light on women– at once skeptical of the storytelling structures that have held men up, but wanting women to get their chance to stand center-stage anyway. 

hbachrach essay

Staging History in The Lehman Trilogy

I’ve been thinking about how the structure of a play itself can reflect its historiographical interests– conscious or otherwise. An interesting case in point is The Lehman Trilogy, adapted by Ben Power from an Italian play by Stefano Massini, and now playing at the National Theatre. It tells the story of the rise of the Lehman Brothers firm, from the arrival of the founding brothers in America in the 1840s to its dissolution during the crash of 2008. It is performed by only three actors– Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles– who between them take on dozens of roles– all of which, through this casting, become refractions of and variations on the original brother they played.

This multi-role casting lends cohesion and continuity to what is otherwise a sprawling story, generations passing on and passing off the torch to the next. It allows us to feel some attachment to later-generation characters who are not as fully developed as their forebears. I was surprised to learn that this was not the case with Massini’s original play: either Powers or director Sam Mendes decided to reduce the original large cast to just three. I think it works artistically for these reasons, but it also is a huge historiographical shift. Instead of an epic story with a cast of dozens, reflecting the sprawl of history, it becomes the story of three great men.

I mean this not in the sense that they are necessarily good or awesome, but that they were powerful and influential– the sense intended in the ‘great man’ theory, or great man history, a historiographical concept first attributed to Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s. It’s a succinct idea, in his words: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

By filtering the entire history of the Lehman Brothers through three actors– and attributing to them the invention of a variety of essential concepts, like that of brokers between farms and manufacturers, government-subsidized building projects, and other economic concepts I only barely understand– they become (literally, in terms of onstage imagery) the only people who can or do make history. The modern banking system is shaped by them and no one else.

This also places the emphasis on the man part of great man. Unsurprisingly, there are a fraction as many female characters as male characters, and none are very important. And because the way the female characters are depicted by these male actors– with exaggerated falsettos and coy expressions– the audience on the night I saw the performance laughed, without fail, every time a female character entered or spoke. The very presence of women in history became laughable, their very speech a joke. Naturally, the casting means that anyone who isn’t white (admittedly not many people in the world of banking, but the Lehman Brothers do get their start dealing with plantations, and there is an oft-referenced but never depicted black overseer character) also cannot exist.

While it can feel inevitable that historical stories center on men in particular– they were the ones doing everything, how could women be involved?– the case of a play like The Lehman Trilogy draws attention to the fact that such assumptions really are just assumptions, not givens. The extreme narrowing of focus forces attention onto everything that is squeezed out of the three-man frame, a reminder of all the stories that this play– and so many histories– leave out. Though artistically successful, and buoyed by three splendid performances, the decision to make three white men the center of history is not the only way to tell this, or any other story.

 

hbachrach essay, link

A Critic Question

As I was writing my latest essay for Oregon ArtsWatch, I  found myself turning over a lot of questions about critical best practices. Both as a dramaturg and when I’m reviewing a piece, I find it important to approach a work in the spirit it was created. That is, to accept its premises and goals, to not evaluate it on the grounds of wishing it were something other than what it’s trying to be. But when does it become appropriate– or even important– to ask questions about what a show is trying to be?

Luckily for me, that question more or less exploded into the broader theatre world conversation between the time I submitted the piece and when it got published. This recent review of the musical Big River sparked a contentious conversation (and a snippy letter from the Encores! artistic director) about the role of a critic in discussing not only what a show is, but perhaps what it ought to be. I really admire Laura Collins-Hughes’s willingness to engage not only with the show’s aesthetic merits, but to ask questions about its treatment of gender and especially race. Seeing the backlash to Collins-Hughes’ work stiffened my own resolve on the topic. My piece isn’t really a review of Astoria, of course, and I would have framed the questions differently if it had been– but I still would have asked them.

There is, frankly, limited space on American stages– if one story is being told, another isn’t. If we really are committed to diversity, at some point, we do have to begin evaluating not just what plays are talking about, but what they’ve decided not to talk about.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

The Glass of History

In the New York Times a few weeks ago, there was an article about historical accuracy in Oscar-nominated films. The Academy loves accuracy, according to the article, which goes so far as to suggest that having the accuracy of the events it depicts questioned can even lose films Oscars they seemed poised to win.

Unsurprisingly, this made me think about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s histories are… not known for their complete accuracy, to say the least. The compression of time, conflation of events, and addition and subtraction of characters can make trying to pick the ‘truth’ out of most of the plays, frankly, pointless. Not that this stops people from trying, and you can easily find books and articles enumerating all the things Shakespeare got wrong.

Sometimes, knowing that Shakespeare changed a detail can illuminate something very interesting about his apparent intentions in structuring the drama. Knowing, for example, that the historical Queen Margaret was dead in France well before the events of Richard III, and the famous confrontation scenes between Richard and the female characters have almost no precedent in contemporary sources suggests that Shakespeare was much more interested in the female characters than many contemporary productions seem to be.

But very often, as with the linked article’s suggestion that inaccuracy loses Oscars, the claim of historical inaccuracy seems intended to double as a value judgment. Or, on the opposite scale, “revealing” that many of his details really are accurate after all seems meant to serve as a vindication.

It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s audiences didn’t care. None of the Elizabethan or Jacobean history plays have the kind of scrupulous accuracy that today’s audiences seem to demand.

In 1765, Samuel Johnson published his Preface to Shakespeare, which included an entire section enumerating Shakespeare’s faults and flaws. He alludes to inaccuracy, sort of, but specifically refers only to Shakespeare’s tendency towards anachronism, which I would argue is not quite the same as nitpicking all the ways in which he changed around timelines or conflated characters. If there’s anyone you’d expect to be a stickler for facts, it’s a neoclassicist like Johnson– but that doesn’t turn out to be the case.

Writing in 1817, Romantic critic William Hazlitt does briefly note the relative historical accuracy of Shakespeare’s plays, but proclaims them uniformly correct: ‘his plays are in this respect the glass of history’. And, he notes, the places where Shakespeare has had to fictionalize are as good as, if not better than, real history.

In 1837, a printer named Charles Knight embarked on a project to produce an illustrated edition of Shakespeare. He was far from the first to do this, but he intended to distinguish his version in one important way: rather than stage-inspired illustrations, he wanted engravings of the actual settings, the real historical personages, and historically accurate clothing and architecture. In this aim, his Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespere was, intentionally or otherwise, keeping step with emerging theatrical trends.

Around the 1830s, British actors began returning to what they saw as Shakespeare’s roots. Restoration adaptations which had superseded Shakespeare’s texts in some cases began to be restored (others would last even into the 20th century), and there was a new interest in creating productions with historically accurate, highly detailed sets and costumes. It seems only logical that, with a surging interest in representing the historical periods of Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare’s own inconsistent depiction of that history would become newly noticeable– and perhaps newly irritating.

These days, of course, directors are much more likely to say to hell with history and set the plays in any time or place they wish. Our obsession with historical accuracy has drifted away from Shakespeare to more naturalistic forms of media, where we seem to expect that, because the action looks realistic, it ought to fact-check against reality, too.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Tell My Story: Shakespeare and Hamilton

I wasn’t going to write about Hamilton, because after the utter flood of coverage, what’s left to say? But I love history plays, and have spend huge portions of the past year and a half thinking about them– and the more I thought about them in relation to Hamilton, the more of a pattern I began to see with regards to the female characters.

Hamilton’s reclamation of the history play for minority voices is one of its most trumpeted elements– and for English-language drama, the history play is a genre that is deeply indebted to Shakespeare. In addition to his participation in the Shakespearean tradition of layering the patterns of tragedy onto the events of history, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s treatment of female characters in Hamilton also directly evokes tropes and structures made famous by Shakespeare.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous historical scenes is found in Richard II, and depicts privileged people who are nonetheless at the very margins of power: the Queen of England, wife of King Richard II, accidentally overhears from two gardeners’ gossip that her husband has been deposed, that she is no longer queen. She’s so far from power, it has evidently not occurred to anyone to even update her on what is going on.

In another famous scene, female characters are more actively shoved from power: in Henry IV Part One, Lady Percy begs her husband, Henry “Hotspur” Percy, to let her in on the rebellion that he’s planning. She obliquely suggests that she has a double right to the knowledge, as his wife and as the sister of his suspected co-conspirator. Hotspur flatly refuses, and though he agrees to allow her to follow him on his impending journey, he refuses to tell her where they’ll be going or why.

So far, so familiar. Wives left behind by duty-bound, ambition-fueled men, we see that all the time. We even see it in the first act of Hamilton with Eliza Hamilton’s repeated refrain of “isn’t this enough?”, to which Alexander’s implicit answer always turns out to be no.

But with both of these Shakespeare characters– and, indeed, with other women throughout his history plays– there is a slight twist. As King Richard, now deposed, is led away to prison, he bids farewell to his wife and leaves her with a final request: “In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire/With good old folks and let them tell thee tales/Of woeful ages long ado betid;/And ere thou bid good night, to quit their griefs,/Tell thou the lamentable tale of me.”

Lady Percy actually does this, positioning herself as the true bearer of her husband’s legacy after he is killed in battle, relating tales of his deeds when she thinks they have been forgotten: “[His honor] stuck upon him as the sun/In the grey vault of heaven, and by his light/Did all the chivalry of England move/To do brave acts […] He was the mark and glass, copy and book,/That fashioned others.”

Despite their explicit exclusion from their husbands’ actions, they become the bearers of their stories after their deaths. And the same can basically be said of Eliza in Hamilton. Her aim in most of her scenes echoes that of Lady Percy in most of hers: to persuade her husband to stay home, stay domestic, stay by her side. And both Harry Percy and Alexander Hamilton reject this offer repeatedly, committing great deeds (and not-so-great ones) in a world in which their wives aren’t welcome. Like Richard’s Queen’s eavesdropping revelation of her husband’s deposition, Eliza finds out her husband’s lurid secret when he publishes a pamphlet revealing it to the world.

Subsequently, in her only entirely solo number, “Burn,” Eliza undertakes to “eras[e herself] from the narrative/Let future historians wonder how/Eliza reacted when you broke her heart.” It’s an exciting example of how a dramatist can use gaps in the historical record to fill in a character’s arc– in this case, the fact that the real Eliza Hamilton, for some reason, destroyed her letters– but also points to what she clearly views as her future role: not a player in her own right, but a source of the information with which others may build her husband’s legacy. And, in the final number, when she “put[s herself] back in the narrative,” it is in precisely this role.

The closing number, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” provides an answer to the third clause of its title: Eliza will tell Alexander’s story. It details her fifty-year effort to tell her husband’s story– like Lady Percy, to remind others of the importance of a life she fears is being forgotten.

(It’s interesting, and probably too much to fully cover here, that this precise role also exists in In the Heights, but is filled by the main male character, Usnavi, while his female love interest yearns to escape and rejects the vision of neighborhood loyalty that Usnavi ultimately dedicates himself to upholding.)

The unique ways in which female characters interact with and ultimately propagate historical narratives are strikingly similar in Miranda’s musical and Shakespeare’s later history plays. The women are not quite in the room where it happens, but maybe listening at the door. In Shakespeare, there seems to be an implicit link between their exclusion from the direct action of the play and their ability to assume the role of narrator. It’s fascinating to see how directly this narrative pattern is echoed by Hamilton. If it’s not a conscious look back towards Shakespeare (which I certainly wouldn’t put past Miranda), it’s proof of how deeply embedded Shakespeare’s tropes and structures are within our impulses about how to dramatize history.