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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.
Royal successions will prompt observers of all kinds to look back at the reign that has passed, and also forward to that which is dawning. This book represents both the breadth and the quality of succession literature across the Stuart era (1603-1714). It includes at least one example of each significant kind of writing: a proclamation announcing a change of reign, diary entries, sermons, a newspaper report, two speeches by incoming monarchs and so forth. But there is also a consistent focus on poetry. Proclamations of Lord King James to the Crown (1603), his speech delivered in the Parliament (1604), the poems of Sir John Davies (1603) are among those featured in the first part of the book. Part II includes an anonymously authored news report details the royal marriage of King Charles and Lady Henrietta Maria (1625). Following this, the book presents the newsbook, Mercurius Politicus (December 1653), which provides an account of Oliver's inauguration as Protector and offers a wealth of detail about ceremonial proceedings. Part IV has a diary entry of Samuel Pepys recounting the return of Stuart brothers and describing the ceremonies that greeted Charles at Dover, and providing details arising from Pepys's proximity to unfolding events. The fifth part includes a coronation sermon (April 1685), presenting extracts from Francis Turner's discussion of Solomon's title and his consideration of the relationship between Solomon and the nation of Israel. The Observator's response on William's death (April 1702), penned by John Tutchin, is also featured in the book.
of their new monarch, an opportunity, judging by the plethora of extant texts that constitutes the succession literature of 1603, they seized. 4 These texts, the product of early modern England’s burgeoning print culture, appeared in many shapes and sizes: ballads, epistles, genealogies, maps, narrations, panegyrics, royal proclamations, sermons, songs, speeches and welcomes. 5 This diverse material, moreover, was produced by a socially heterogeneous group of writers: civic authorities, clergymen, lawyers, MPs, pamphleteers, playwrights, poets, satirists and
General introduction Royal successions are moments of national transition. The shift from one reign to another can invoke uncertainty and anxiety, anticipation and hope. Successions will prompt observers of all kinds to look back at the reign that has passed, and also forward to that which is dawning. They are occasions that concentrate minds on the values and structures of the nation. Succession literature, as presented in this anthology, includes all types of writing that respond to these moments. It is a category that includes a lot of material that we might
she assumed the throne at the age of thirty-seven without an heir. Her only child to survive infancy, William, Duke of Gloucester, had died at the age of eleven in 1700. At this point parliament passed the Act of Settlement, which stipulated that, should she remain childless and the Pretender remain a Catholic, 294 Part VII: 1702 the crown would pass after her death to the Hanoverian electors. Although some efforts were made in vain to convert James Francis Edward, this law virtually ensured that Anne would be the last Stuart monarch. The succession literature
University Press , 2018 ); Mark Knights , ‘ The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715 ’, in Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae (eds), Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2019 ), pp. 319 – 35 . 3
authors of succession literature, was not overcome by the euphoria of the occasion. Far from a regnocentric poem, To the Maiestie of King James immediately seeks to place limits on a monarch who, in The Trve Lawe of Free Monarchies , heralded his absolutist political theories. 22 The centrepiece of Drayton’s gratulatory poem is an account of James’s ‘true descent’. 23 This account of James’s lineage draws upon the conventional topoi for invention of laus , or praise. 24 A major topos of praise is genus , or praise through descent. Divided into gens (race
the need for a critical vocabulary that goes beyond a pro- and anti-union opposition. Moreover, the strain of English nationalism forged during Elizabeth’s reign, especially after 1588, that English history plays of the 1590s at once incorporate and interrogate was never matched by an equivalent ‘British nationalism’ on Jacobean London’s stages. 15 The first chapter attends to English responses to King James VI’s accession to England’s throne as registered in the rich and various texts that constitute 1603 succession literature. Bruce Galloway’s description of
, 1947); David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1968); Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies. Recent studies include: Robert Lane, ‘“The sequence of posterity”: Shakespeare’s King John and the succession controversy’, Studies in Philology, 92 (1995), 460–81; Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001) and ‘Harington’s gossip’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 221–41; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser and the Stuart succession’, Literature and
book explore chronologically several key addressing campaigns. Chapter two focuses on the addresses issued to Richard Cromwell on his accession as Lord Protector in September 1658, a moment often identified as critical to the development of the loyal address as a political form. The chapter supports Mark Knights’ observation that addresses operated as both ‘accession’ and ‘succession’ literature: that is that they both acknowledged and also debated the legitimacy of the new ruler. 62 In the case of the addresses to Richard