Chapter 6 - Poetry, Counsel, and Coercion in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays

Summary

This chapter explores how the conciliar and coercive discourses of Renaissance historiography and lyric poetry intersect in Shakespeare’s early history plays. It focuses on scenes of textual composition, and other engagements with the construction and interpretation of literary language, in plays including Edward III, Arden of Faversham, Richard III, The First Part of the Contention, and Titus Andronicus, to show how they illuminate the uneasy overlap between political advice and gendered, sexual coercion during Elizabeth I’s reign. The plays’ treatment of the coercive properties of poetry cast monarch and subject in fluid, shifting roles, and highlight the awkward ethical implications of mobile rhetorical authority, ultimately troubling the distinction between good and bad political advice. Moreover, the chapter considers the centrality of collaboration to the production of meaning, not just between actors, printers, and playwrights, but also of genres and discourses, within this intensely self-referential cluster of Shakespeare’s co-authored early works.