Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on spellings
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The kingly vice: the tyrant in early Tudor drama
- 2 Sovereignty, counsel, and consent in Scotland: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis
- 3 Artful construction of the political realm: Buchanan and the legitimacy of resistance
- 4 Gorboduc: absolutist decision and the two bodies of the king
- 5 Tyranny added to usurpation: Richardus Tertius, The True Tragedy, and Richard III
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Gorboduc: absolutist decision and the two bodies of the king
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on spellings
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The kingly vice: the tyrant in early Tudor drama
- 2 Sovereignty, counsel, and consent in Scotland: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis
- 3 Artful construction of the political realm: Buchanan and the legitimacy of resistance
- 4 Gorboduc: absolutist decision and the two bodies of the king
- 5 Tyranny added to usurpation: Richardus Tertius, The True Tragedy, and Richard III
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1570, three years after Mary Stuart's deposition and her subsequent escape to England, Elizabeth I wrote in a letter addressed to the deposed monarch:
But if I should remember to you your contrary late dealings by your ministers to engender and nourish troubles in my realm, to bolden my subjects to become rebels, to instruct and aid them how to continue in the same, and in the end to make invasions into my realm, I should percase move you to continue in your fear … For otherwise surely both in honor and reason, not only for myself but for my people and my countries, I must be forced to change my course and, not with such remissness as I have used towards offenders, endanger myself, my state, and my realm.
The threat to her person, her state, and her realm that Elizabeth perceived in Mary was a spectre that had already haunted English politics for more than a decade and was destined to do so until Mary's execution in 1587. The Catholic French–Scottish Mary Stuart, who was Elizabeth's closest living relative, had been perceived as a potential usurper of the Tudor throne long before she lost her own. Elizabeth's unmarried state, coupled with her refusal to name an heir presumptive, made the question of succession ‘the most pressing political problem of the first three decades of her reign’. Written months after Mary's return to Scotland following a thirteen-year stay in France, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc is often seen as a dramatic comment on this phase of uncertainty and anxiety in English political history.
Performed first as a part of the Christmas revels at the Inns of Court in 1561–2 and then in the presence of Queen Elizabeth in January 1562, Gorboduc is regarded as not just the first proper Senecan tragedy in English but also as the first English history play.4 My aim is to demonstrate that the innovations in dramaturgy it represents are also inextricably tied up with innovations in forms of political thinking: the poetics of composition crucially inflect the politics of the play.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tyranny and UsurpationThe New Prince and Lawmaking Violence in Early Modern Drama, pp. 113 - 135Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019