SOURCE: “Telling the Truth with Authority: From Richard II to Richard II,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1995, pp. 111-28.

In the following essay, Morse studies the way Shakespeare presents historical truth in Richard II, maintaining that for Shakespeare, and for the medieval historians from whose work he drew, “truth” encompassed a range of possible representations.

In the course of Notker the Stammerer's famous Life of Charlemagne, he also wrote about matters associated with his own monastic life in St. Gall as part of the outlying Christian world: in one story, he interprets the spread of Roman-style chant into the Frankish territories. An explanation was already available—that two Frankish monks had been sent to Rome to learn how Roman monks sang, and that, upon their return to St. Gall, they oversaw monastic practice while they lived. With their deaths, the traditions were lost. In Notker's hands, the story...