SIR William Belford’s words, spoken in Act II of Thomas Shadwell’s late
seventeenth-century play, The Squire of Alsatia, articulate the problems of
history with conspicuous ease. As Belford comments to his brother, no history
can be complete. Instead, all historical description is based on acts of interpretation,
leading to accounts which may, or may not, conXict with those oVered by
other tellers and other tales. In this sense, gaps and absences necessarily beset the
historian; not all can be known, and a change of perspective inevitably brings
new, and diVerent, considerations to the fore. A single true—and all-encompassing—
history is an illusion.