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Essex’s ambitions to ‘become an other Henry the 4 th ’. 4 Essex’s circle has also been strongly associated with the English manifestation of broader intellectual trends: the political thought associated with Roman history, especially Tacitus, which electrified European literati in the later sixteenth century, and the directed reading of history with a serious political purpose
The subject of Britain reads key early seventeenth-century texts by Bacon, Daniel, Drayton, Hume, Jonson, Shakespeare and Speed within the context of the triple monarchy of King James VI and I, whose desire to create a united Britain unleashed serious debate and reflection concerning nationhood and national sovereignty. This book traces writing on Britain through a variety of discursive forms: succession literature, panegyric, union tracts and treatises, plays, maps and histories. Attending to the emergence of new ideologies and new ways of thinking about collective identities, The subject of Britain seeks to advance knowledge by foregrounding instances of fruitful cultural production in this period. Bacon’s and Hume’s pronouncements on the common ancestry, the cultural proximity of Britain’s inhabitants, for instance, evinces Jacobean imaginings of peoples and nations joining together, however tenuously. By focusing on texts printed in not just London but also Edinburgh as well as manuscript material that circulated across Britain, this book sheds valuable light on literary and extra-literary texts in relation to the wider geopolitical context that informed, indeed enabled, their production. By combining the historical study of literary and non-literary texts with the history of political thought and the history of the book broadly defined, The subject of Britain offers a fresh approach to a signal moment in the history of early modern Britain. Given its interdisciplinary nature, this book will appeal to literary historians and historians of early modern Britain as well as undergraduates and postgraduates.
highlight philosophical similarities between himself and Sidney’, thus casting Sidney as ‘a courtier-soldier who had rejected the effeminate lures of pastoralism to embrace a stern Stoic moral and political philosophy’. 2 In doing so, Davis argues, Greville wished to represent Sidney and the Arcadia as intellectual precursors to the Tacitean political thought beginning to emerge at the same time in the circle of Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, who had become Greville’s patron. 3 The ‘Tacitean political thought’ that became associated with the Essex
fostering not only a deeper understanding of early modern texts and writing subjects but also innovative ways of reading and interpreting early modern texts and subjectivities. Third, by combining the historical study of literary and non-literary texts with the history of political thought and the history of the book broadly defined, my research offers fresh approaches to early modern literature and culture. Exploring writing on political and cultural union spawned by the ‘union of the crowns of England and Scotland’, 10 a topic that remains unexplored in book
, largely intuitively), what Ethan Shagan argues was a wholesale transformation of the very concept of moderation in early modern English legal and political thought, one in which the classical virtues became a tool of radical, and often physically violent, forms of coercion and repression. As Shagan suggests, this paradoxical reconfiguration of moderation into a mode of coercive violence offered
English Political Thought, 1570–1640 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1995 ), p. 74 . 13 Brady, The Chief Governors , p. 297. 14 Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit , p. 65
(eds), Scots and Britons: Scottish political thought and the union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65. For an argument against the ephemerality of occasional texts, although one that does not focus on 1603 succession literature, see Malcolm Smuts, ‘Occasional events, literary texts and historical interpretation’, in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer (eds), Neo-historicism, Studies in Renaissance Literature, History, and Politics (London: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 179–98. 11 Samuel Rowlands, Aue Cæsar (London, 1603), B3 v
loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly); but as a man born under an excellent Sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men’s abilities’. 110 Bacon’s nativity, it seems, can be moulded and wrought to suit the occasion. To dismiss Bacon’s union writing as the product of a subject at once out of and in search of royal favour, however, risks foreclosing fruitful avenues of study. Bacon’s political writings on Anglo-Scottish union bear witness to an author seriously engaging in early modern political thought; indeed, his union tracts
intervention. 38 This subtle distinction, between ‘debate’ and ‘factionalism’, has a bearing on the reading of Sidney’s Arcadia , begun in the late 1570s and continued and revised in the early 1580s, but first published in the 1590s. As we saw in Chapter Six , Fulke Greville wished, in the 1590 edition of the Arcadia , to associate Sidney and the Arcadia with the Tacitean political thought gaining prominence in the circle of the earl of Essex. 39 In doing so, Greville paid particular attention to the Arcadia ’s portraits of stoical ‘constancy in the face of
Edinburgh Mathematicians and Scottish Political Culture at the Union of the Crowns ’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1994 ), pp. 187–212 . 49 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls