Abstract
In The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (1936) J. B. Black cautions us against too readily assuming that the literature of an age is necessarily a mirror of its history. In his view this is particularly the case in the literature of the Elizabethan period. In the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries we find much about contemporary life in its social aspect, but political power struggles, administrative machinery and legal and political institutions held little fascination for the writers of the time, who were as little interested in these matters as the multitude in the streets:
Politics and literature had not yet come together, but ran their courses in entirely different channels. As for the truly great writers, they are less parochial and more universal in their appeal than at any other period. Those who search for ‘political allusions’ in their works do not find much to reward them for their pains, and the little they do find is of comparatively small value.1
The kingly office is in truth a kind of generalship, irresponsible and perpetual … a generalship for life: and of such royalties some are hereditary and others elective.… There is another sort of monarchy not uncommon among barbarians, which nearly resembles tyranny. But even this is legal and hereditary.
(Aristotle’s Politics, iii. 14, tr. Benjamin Jowett)
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Notes
J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (1936; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 280–1.
Brian Redhead, Political Thought from Plato to NATO (London: BBC, Ariel Books, 1984) p. 9.
Cf. also A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth (London: Macmillan, 1953) p. 297ff.;
J. D. Mackie, The Early Tudors 1485–1558 (1952; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 188ff.
The musical imagery is noteworthy. Shakespeare constantly associates stability with harmony and anarchy with discord. See B. L. Joseph, Shakespeare’s Eden: The Commonwealth of England 1558–1629 (London: Blandford, 1971) p. 154ff.;
Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) pp. 74–8, 269–71 and 280. At the end of 3 Henry VI, King Edward looks forward to peace in musical terms: Sound, drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! For here, I hope, beings our lasting joy. Richard of Gloucester, on the other hand, speaks sneeringly of ‘this weak and piping time of peace’ and likens himself ‘to a chaos’. The Archbishop of Canterbury in eulogising the qualities of King Henry V draws the parallel between war and peace in musical terms: List his discourse in war, and you shall hear A fearful battle render’d you in music. (Henry V, I.i.43–4)
See A. C. Partridge, The Problem of Henry VIII Re-opened (1949);
J. Spedding, ‘On the Several Shares of Shakespeare and Fletcher in the Play of Henry VIII’, Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., XXXIV (Aug–Oct 1850) 115–24, 381–2.
Cf. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce, tr. Sian Reynolds (London: Collins, 1983) p. 472ff.
Philip Hughes, The Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1960) p. 260ff.
Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, p. 96; and cf. J. E. Neale, ‘Parliament and the Succession Question in 1562–3 and 1566’, English Historical Review, 1921, pp. 497–520.
The Wyatt rebellion had obviously threatened Elizabeth. Roger de Mortimer (1287–1330) had more or less ruled the realm through his liaison with Isabella, wife of Edward H, whom he probably had murdered. Edward III was in the meantime a mere figurehead. William de Montacute joined forces with Edward III, and Mortimer, after being tried for usurping royal power and for other crimes, was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1330. See May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century 1307–1399 (1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 90–102. John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln (1464–87), is another example of one who suffered from close association with the centre of state power. He was the son of the Duke of Suffolk and Elizabeth, sister of Edward IV, and was recognised heir presumptive during Richard III’s reign. He supported Lambert Simnel’s plot and was killed at Stoke Field, Nottingham, in 1487.
The Casket Letters were a notorious collection of documents. The Earl of Morton claimed to have found them in a silver casket in June 1567. If they were genuine they proved Mary’s responsibility for Darnley’s murder. The manuscripts included letters from Mary to Bothwell, French sonnets, a signed (but undated) promise to marry Bothwell and a marriage contract between the two. At subsequent inquiries Mary asked to see the documents but her request was not granted. The Casket Letters were lost after the execution for high treason of William Ruthven, fourth Baron Ruthven and Earl Gowrie in 1584. See Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, p. 102ff.; Andrew Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stuart (1912);
W. Goodall, Examination of the Letters Said to be Written by Mary Queen of Scots to James, Earl of Bothwell, 2 vols (1754);
T. F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (1890);
M. H. Armstrong Davison, The Casket Letters (London: Vision Press, 1965.
An excellent brief account of the matter will be found in J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) p. 158ff.
See A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement (London: Macmillan, 1972) p. 53ff.
See Alan Bold and Robert Giddings, Who Was Really Who in Fiction (London: Longman, 1987), entries for Duessa, Grantorto, Una.
See also A. C. Hamilton, Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (London: Hutchinson, 1961);
K. Williams, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: The World of Glass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Robert Persons (or Parsons, 1546–1610) was a Jesuit and controversialist, associated with Edmund Campion. Persons had his own printing-press and was involved in intrigues in England and in Spain, where he fiercely advocated the cause of Philip II. He was rector of the English College at Rome, where he died. He published over thirty polemical pamphlets, the most notorious being his Conference about the Next Succession (1594). See Letters and Memorials of Robert Persons, ed. Leo Hicks (London: Catholic Record Society, 1942).
Wiliam Lambarde (1536–1601) was the author of several legal and historical works. This conversation is quoted in Oscar James Campbell and Edward G. Quinn, The Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966) p. 445.
See A. L. Rowse, William Shakespeare: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1963) pp. 344–5.
Henry Cuffe, author and politician (1563–1601) was professor of Greek at Queen’s College, Oxford, and accompanied Essex to Cadiz as his secretary in 1596. He was faithful to Essex during his period of disgrace. He was tried for complicity in Essex’s treason and executed in 1601. For a biography of Southampton, see A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare’s Southampton (London: Macmillan, 1965).
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, 5th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) p. 6.
James I, The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 3rd edn, M. H. Abrams et al. (New York: Norton, 1974) I, 1640–1.
Ernesto Laclau, ‘Populist Rupture and Discourse’, Screen Education, no. 34 (1980) 87–93.
Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983) p. 91ff.
Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) pp. 198–9.
Gerrard Winstanley, The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced (1649), in The Norton Anthology, I, 1657.
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds), English Critical Texts, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) pp. 78 and 89–90.
By. See also Arthur Miziner, ‘The High Design of A King and No King’, Modern Philology, XXXVIII (1940).
See Terry Hawkes, That Old Shakespeherian Rag (London: Methuen, 1986);
Robert Giddings, ‘Mythologising Old Bill’, Listener 17 April 1986.
See T. B. Tomlinson, A Study of Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) p. 242ff.;
Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama, 5th edn (London: Methuen, 1965) p. 201ff.
Beaumont and Fletcher, A King and No King, I.i, in Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. J. St Loe Strachey (London: Ernest Benn, 1950) p. 5.
T. B. Macaulay, The History of England (1849–60) (London: Longman, 1862) I, 72.
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Giddings, R. (1988). A King and No King: Monarchy and Royalty as Discourse in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. In: Bloom, C. (eds) Jacobean Poetry and Prose. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19590-9_10
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