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This chapter first outlines some of the issues and problems raised by Scotland and Scottish history for English readers in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. It then shows how closely engaged William Shakespeare was with questions generated by his understanding of Scottish history, concentrating especially on Hamlet, a play that has already been persuasively read as a work informed by an understanding of Scottish affairs and politics. Hamlet's last action before he dies is to kill Claudius, showing that his soliloquy has a prophetic purpose in the plot. Claudius's reign bears striking similarities to that of Kenneth III. A key reign in George Buchanan's History of Scotland was that of Kenneth III, who ended the long tradition of elective monarchy in Scotland. Buchanan's sense of the significance of Kenneth's reign is encapsulated in the version narrated in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle of Scotland.
The motivations that animated the conflict that marked the final nine years of Elizabeth's reign in Ireland are obscure. This chapter argues that political brinkmanship related to the royal succession played a very prominent role in shaping the conflict, a role hitherto unappreciated. The succession informed the strategic thinking of many of the most prominent actors in the ‘Nine Year's War’ at critical junctures. It is argued that Tyrone and Essex each sought to gather around himself a wider interest among the Irish aristocracy and gentry in the hope of using that political capital to advance his own aim in the context of a foreseen Jacobean succession. The battle lines of the conflict hid the strategic games being played in the context of anticipated dynastic change.
closing years of the queen's reign. In recovering their history here, I hope to show that biblical drama remained a vital and enduring presence throughout the Elizabethan era, from parish communities in provincial towns to the great amphitheatres of London. The discussion which follows examines the plays in order of their civic, parish, educational, and professional sponsorship and affiliation. Civic or guilds-based biblical drama The most extensively studied biblical plays of Elizabeth's reign are the great mystery cycles
A woman gives birth to a monster. An army of mice invades a rural area. Three suns are seen in the sky. Today, such phenomena epitomize the intellectually marginal, relegated to the journalism of the supermarket checkout line. There have been, however, many societies where these events were not marginal, but important clues to understanding the nature of the cosmos and the destiny of human society. The transformation of this attitude to one resembling ours in a particular society, that of late Stuart England, is the subject of this book. One term that the people of seventeenth-century England used to refer to such bizarre natural phenomena was 'prodigy'. The word had many uses, but its core meaning was that of a strange and aberrant event, the occurrence of which appeared to be outside the usual order of nature. The most important status a prodigy could have was that of a providential sign from God. Prodigies had been interpreted as divine messages since ancient times. Prodigies were a particularly important site for competing discourses concerning God, nature, and politics because England lacked an official body or profession charged with the investigation and interpretation of alleged wonder. Prodigies were involved in the major political crises of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, from the Restoration itself to the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crises, to the revolution of 1688 and the accession of the House of Hanover.
In Renaissance drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child. Drawing on a wide range of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crisis in early modern England, reading them in relation to witchcraft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State. The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstandingly heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of this book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority. The book aims to read bastardy from a positive perspective as a subversive presence in Renaissance drama. Standing up for bastards does not mean denying the villainy of characters like Edmund. Instead, it focuses on their power to challenge the dominant patriarchal culture. The image of the bastard as outsider is typical. This is hardly surprising in a society organised round paternal authority. The family structure was a fundamental basis for political and social order in Renaissance England.
early thirties, all of these writers might well have met each other in sixteenth-century London, a city estimated to have a population of two hundred thousand. In writing Spenser's epitaph, William Camden, the principal chronicler of Elizabeth's reign, said that he had surpassed Chaucer and that he was the greatest poet of his age, anglicorum poetarum nostri seculi facile princeps . 2 Since his death in 1599
nature of contemporary religious controversy. Walker also argues that beyond the linguistic and physical disorientation, the interlude pursues a deliberate affective strategy, cueing audience responses to shift several times through the evolving drama to powerful creative effect. In the final chapter of this part, Paul Whitfield White challenges the accepted consensus concerning the decline of biblical drama in early modern England. He argues that during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign, and continuing into the seventeenth century, all of the major patronised
power structure supported education more strongly than it had in the 1540s. Spenser was fortunate to have been born during Elizabeth's reign (1558–1603). Less than a decade after Elizabeth's death and the accession of the Stuart king, Sir Francis Bacon was to counsel James I against increasing educational opportunities. By 1611 Bacon subscribed to the opinion that there were too many grammar schools and that an excessive number could be
collective investment; a faction gravitated toward him because he had the charisma to manage it. And he had the courtly pedigree to realize such ambitions: Essex was the stepson of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—the premier courtier of Elizabeth's reign—and close friends with Sir Philip Sidney—the famed shepherd knight whose premature death in 1586 was cause for national mourning. Essex capitalized upon this position with actions that increased his visibility and made him the center of widespread attention. For example, public spectacles—such as the annual Accession Day
and extensive uses of print, and a flexible prose style shaped by a number of biblical, dramatic and literary analogues. Away from the open theatricality of the playhouse and the scaffold, deathbed narratives stage exemplary domestic piety both to edify wider communities and to construct enduring histories about private sites of public intrigue and scandal. The late-Elizabethan deathbed: print and the polemics of dying Up to the final years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, as Patrick Collinson and Jessica Martin have shown, it was