الفهرس 
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Abstract
New historicism succeeded in bringing both literature and history into the field of literary studies under the shade of criticism. After a long argumentative debate about new historicism and how it functions concerning literature and history, one may deduce some important issues. Though both literature and history can be read in isolation as two separate entities with no reference to each other, both can be read as part of the other as well. History, none denies, is a record of the facts that occurred in one of the countries or in the whole world. As a consequence, it is a prototype of all important events that occurred at a specific period in a specific country.
Comparatively, literature seems to be but a reflection of the society where it is produced, and it is also a man-produced object just like history. Since literature can be such a reflection of its society, it comprises within itself some hints of the facts recorded as history. Some differences may emerge between historical and literary discourses. Some of these differences are: the way language is used, the incidents or the arrangement of the incidents and details. Another one is that the facts recorded as history are written in a factual and scientific type of discourse; whereas, literature is written in a fictional type depending on
he can read or extract the history of a certain period from the literature produced in it. Brannigan claims that it is the essence of the new historicist analysis that ”Reading literature as one source among many for reading the past, and reading the power relations of past societies and cultures, is the common focus of new historicist analysis” (81). To new historicists, literature works as if it were history because in it lies the peoples’ conflicts, economic and political changes in their society, But, history can never work as a kind of literature because history is not written in the same way as literature is. And " ~ "his is what appears from the analysis of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Aristotle’s claim that a tragedy ”nrefers to stick to the historic names” is actually what one may notice in most of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies; e.g. Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Antony & Cleopatra. Thus, I have chosen Shakespeare’s Macbeth to discuss historically in the last chapter, because it pictures the historical, political and social life of Scotland at a specific era. Shakespeare depended on Holinshed’s chronicles to derive the outline and facts of this story However, the way Shakespeare draws Macbeth is wholly different from Holinshed’s in the ”way” it is written. Shakespeare has adopted some of Holinshed’s actual words, yet he has his own technical presentation of acts, scenes, dialogue and characters. Shakespeare thus ”deals freely with his source, making Duncan old and venerable, instead of young and