Written during his Catholic years, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1603) portrays the tyrannical regime of the Roman Emperor Tiberius and his favourite Sejanus, who aggressively lay claim to the inward secrets of their political opponents. Despite the play’s ostentatious historical accuracy, its concerns and vocabulary are thus frequently reminiscent of Elizabethan Catholic complaints about religious persecution under Elizabeth I. However, rather than simply condemning dissimulation as a response to persecution, Sejanus His Fall offers a rationale for prudent accommodation of a tyrannical regime that is grounded in a neo-Stoicist disjunction between inward and outward self and in a differentiated understanding of parrhesia, the rhetoric of free speech. Even though Jonson’s attitude towards dissimulation thus merits reconsideration, Sejanus simultaneously expresses deep distrust in theatricality, which is grounded not only in neo-Stoicist ethics but also in the Platonic association of the theatre with tyranny and the inherent theatricality of Machiavellian power politics.

This chapter explores ideas about orthodoxy and powerful necessity in Spanish Counter-Reformation reason-of-state discourse. Individual authors engaged in describing pragmatic politics and ways of imagining how to put these into practice, while simultaneously taking care to avoid association with Machiavelli. Through translations of Lipsius’ Latin Politica into the Spanish and Italian vernaculars, the chapter first shows how the translators explored ways to square Lipsius’ thought with the Christian-Ciceronian framework endorsed by Catholic orthodoxy. Lipsius recovered the concept of necessity that Machiavelli had reshaped into necessità, and enlisted it once more as a force that could legitimately overrule human law. The chapter then traces how authors in the Spanish monarchy subsequently conceived of necessity as a concept or tool that could legitimize amoral political behaviour, especially in the discussion about deceit. Necessity depended on circumstances that were impossible to define in advance, and this made it orthodox yet flexible. Both the translators and the authors of ‘true’ reason of state experimented with organizing knowledge and (historical) information, and its potential for creating meaning and legitimizing amoral political behaviour, as they tailored a language of reason of state that was both orthodox, and suited to the realities of the present.