‘TALKING POLITICS’: TYRANNY, PARLIAMENT, AND CHRISTOPHER BROOKE'S THE GHOST OF RICHARD THE THIRD (1614)

Abstract

The career of the MP and poet Christopher Brooke, in particular his The ghost of Richard the third (1614) and his activity in the 1614 ‘addled’ parliament, forms the basis of this study of Jacobean political culture. Brooke's career foregrounds the close interaction of political and literary cultures in the period; he was a leading member of the political circle, the ‘Sireniacs’, which had strong parliamentary ties, and was one of the Inns of Court-based ‘oppositional’ Spenserian poets. Together with his fellow ‘Sireniac’ MPs, Brooke vehemently opposed the definition of impositions as the domain of absolute rather than ordinary powers of the crown because of the threat this posed to the rights of parliament and the subject. The ghost of Richard the third provides an example of parliamentary debates entering a wider print culture, where impositions merged with broader civic issues. Political language in this period was not confined to the realms of high theory and Brooke's poem illustrates the complex mediation of political discourses through literary forms. A humanist discourse of tyranny provided Brooke with a coded language, enabling him to articulate his concern for the health of the commonwealth and to address areas of ideological conflict in early Stuart political culture.