No play of the period is more preoccupied with memorial artifice than John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: especially striking are three episodes involving the Duchess herself. In the opening scene her wooing of Antonio is coloured by oddly disturbing references to ‘a winding sheet’ and to ‘the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’; while in Act 4, her murder is prefaced by a piece of macabre theatre, when Bosola enters in the guise of an old man, announcing himself a ‘tomb-maker’ whose ‘trade is to flatter the dead’. Advising the Duchess that ‘I am come to make thy tomb’, he proceeds to discourse on the iconographic niceties of ‘fashion in the grave’, before bringing her ‘By degrees to mortification’. But the tomb he promises never appears, becoming instead a conspicuous absence at the centre of the action. Focusing on the haunted graveyard of the Echo scene (5.3), the essay argues that this absence is closely bound up with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of the idolized Protestant hero, Prince Henry, and thus with the dissident politics on which Webster's great tragedy is grounded.

Between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, England’s dramatic enlargement in commerce, manufacturing, and territory encouraged this peripheral north-western European power to view it as not only desirable but practicable to secure to itself a silk industry and to supply itself with homegrown silk. This chapter considers firstly the increasing familiarity with silk within the British Isles, and the motivations and incentives that followed for producing silk domestically – paying close attention to the experimentation and measures introduced under James I, who offered particular patronage to sericulture. While novel initiatives and flagship projects brought some attention and investment, low temperatures and issues with expertise compromised production in England. The trials did constitute a breakthrough in understanding however, and stimulated extensive projection in new colonies under the auspices of the Virginia Company in North America. The goal of silk production prompted Virginians to introduce international experts, new buildings and literature, and new policy initiatives – albeit in the face of the dramatic and all-consuming rise of tobacco culture. The final part of the chapter highlights how a second wave of Virginian experimentation in the 1650s and 1660s brought more focus to women’s roles and embedded sericulture within economic and scientific ideas about English colonialism.

Reason of state discourses see a renewed preoccupation with the divide between public and private. Even as there is an increased understanding of the need to keep state secrets, there are likewise increasing attempts to peer into hearts and minds of rulers. At the centre of this tension is the counsellor, whose position between public and private remains in contention. It is the emerging language of ‘interests’ which shows this tension most clearly. The counsellor is to advise according to the interest of the state, and not his own private interest. The more public a counsellor can be, the more likely he is to give advice in line with this state interest. Three problems emerge from this model, however. First, how can the counsellor be both secretive and public? Second, how can a private individual abandon his personal interests? And, third, a recurring issue, what if the counsellor knows the state’s interests better than the monarch: should his counsel then become command? These are the issues which come to the fore in the mid-seventeenth century, born of tensions apparent in the reason of state tradition.

In chapter 14, John H. Astington considers the building put up at Whitehall Palace in 1606/7, and destroyed by fire early in 1619. Planned in the first few years of the king’s reign, the design of the interior in particular seems to have aimed to create a new style at Whitehall Palace. The architect was probably Robert Stickells. For plays, the king and his family might have wanted to be nearer to the actors; a royal seat brought forward to nearer the middle of the hall would have allowed space for rising ranks of seating to the rear. For masques, the area in front of the scenic stage was required for both orchestra and singers, and principally for the dancers, who performed in the area formed by the central floor of the building. Besides, Astington explains, the room was also used for court ceremonial of one kind and another: it was the largest gathering place within Whitehall Palace. Finally, Astington’s chapter also deals with what is known about the disposition of audience and performance space for these varying events, and suggests some conclusions about the role of the Banqueting House as a multiple-use space at a particular historical moment.

Murat Öğütcü focuses on Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), a play which, with its charismatic male monarch, has been too often associated with or set against the late Elizabethan period. As a result, the significance of its performance at the Jacobean court in 1605 has been overlooked. Locating the play before the Jacobean court, Öğütcü compares the dramatised monarch and the real one, while reminding us that no other history play was performed at the court of James I, probably because it traces the ascendancy of a king rather than his decline. The performance of Henry V at the court was in fact more than a reminder of recent Jacobean victories. Yet, while the monarch tried to fashion himself as an Anglo-Scottish Henry V, some members of the audience possibly interpreted Prince Hal as James, who indulged in spending time with his favourites and leaving most of administration to his subjects. The Jacobean Henry V analysed by Öğütcü is thus a problematic performance of idealised masculinity meant to highlight the crucial issues of the time: dissimulation, treason, royal favouritism, war and peace, and a united Britain.