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 HOW
Shakespeare
P U T P O L I TI C S O N T H E S TA G E

Power and Succession in

the History Plays

PETER LAKE
HOW SHAKESPEARE PUT POLITICS ON THE STAGE

i
ii
 HOW
SHAKESPEARE
PUT POLITICS on the STAGE
POWER and SUCCESSION in the HISTORY PLAYS

PETER LAKE

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

iii
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty
Cunningham of the Class for 1917, Yale College.

Copyright © 2016 Peter Lake

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
U.S. Office: sales.press@yale.edu yalebooks.com
Europe Office: sales@yaleup.co.uk yalebooks.co.uk

Typeset in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lake, Peter, author.

Title: How Shakespeare put politics on the stage : power and succession in
the history plays / Peter Lake.
Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017316 | ISBN 9780300222715 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Histories. | Historical
drama, English—History and criticism. | Literature and history. |
Politics in literature. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain. |
LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare. | HISTORY / Modern / 16th Century. |
POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory.
Classification: LCC PR2982 .L35 2016 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017316

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

iv
For San, the first person not to finish this book

v
vi
 Contents

Introduction and acknowledgements ix

Part I
Contexts and structures

Part II
Past into present and future: 2 and 3 Henry VI and the politics of
lost legitimacy
1 Losing legitimacy: monarchical weakness and the descent
into disorder 69
2 Disorder dissected (i): the inversion of the gender order 82
3 Disorder dissected (ii): the inversion of the social order 96
4 Hereditary ‘right’ and political legitimacy anatomised 108

Part III
Happy endings and alternative outcomes: 1 Henry VI and Richard III
5 How not to go there: 1 Henry VI as prequel and alternative ending 125
6 Richard III: political ends, providential means 149
7 Going Roman: Richard III and Titus Andronicus compared 171

Part IV
How (not) to depose a tyrant: King John and Richard II
8 The Elizabethan resonances of the reign of King John 181
9 The first time as polemic, the second time as play: Shakespeare’s King John
and The troublesome reign compared 195
10 Richard II, or the rights and wrongs of resistance 236
11 Shakespeare and Parsons – again 270

vii
viii Contents

Part V
The Essexian circle squared, or a user’s guide to the politics of popularity,
honour and legitimacy
12 The loss of legitimacy and the politics of commodity dissected 291
13 Learning to be a bastard: Hal’s second (plebeian) nature 320
14 Festive Falstaff: of popularity, puritans and princes 331
15 Henry V and the fruits of legitimacy 349

Part VI
Using plays to read plays: the court politics of the dramatic riposte
16 Contemporary readings: Oldcastle/Falstaff, Cobham/Essex 401
17 Oldcastle redivivus 417

Part VII
Julius Caesar: the dangers of playing pagan and republican
politics in a Christian monarchy
18 The state we’re in 437
19 The politics of honour (in a popular state) 442
20 Performing honour and the politics of popularity (in a popular
state) 463
21 The politics of popularity and faction (in a popular state) 476
22 The politics of prodigy, prophecy and providence (in a pagan state) 492
23 Between Henry V and Hamlet 501

Part VIII
Disillusion: Christian and pagan style
24 Hamlet 511
25 The morning after the night before: Troilus and Cressida as
retrospect 534

Conclusion 568
Notes 604
Index 650
 Introduction and acknowledgements

I started to think about the basic questions that lie behind this book during
performances of various Shakespeare plays that I saw during the 1990s. Crucial
here were a production of Troilus and Cressida at the National Theatre and a
student production in Cambridge of King John. While I was watching Troilus,
it occurred to me that a play about an interminable war, the rationale for which
no one on either side can coherently recall, and the justice of which no one
can quite defend, might have had a certain resonance in 1601, when the
play was apparently written. I also thought that a play that pits a faction
of policy-makers, led by an old and rather dull man, Nestor, and his altogether
more ruthless and astute younger protégé, Ulysses, against a faction of soldiers,
a rivalry in which the soldiers view the policy wonks with contempt because
of their weakness, and the policy wonks view the soldiers with contempt
because of their stupidity, might have reminded its first audiences of the late
Elizabethan political scene as it first polarised between the Essex faction and
the Cecils, and then imploded into the debacle of the Essex rebellion
But what really got my attention was a short exchange from the first scene
of Shakespeare’s King John. As John and the king of France dispute John’s claim
to the throne of England, John proclaims ‘our strong possession is our right for
us’, only to be corrected by his mother who reminds him, in a remarkable stage
whisper, ‘your strong possession much more than your right’. These few words
seemed to me to have a dramatic impact on the meaning of the play. They show
that both John and his mother know that he is a usurper and that his nephew,
Arthur, is the true king and that much of the posing about ‘right’ that follows is
empty non-sense. The exchange sets up the bastard’s (and indeed the audi-
ence’s) realisation that the politics of princes are the politics of what the bastard
calls ‘commodity’; a question of possession and of might, rather than of right.
The play shows John struggling first to secure control of his nephew Arthur’s
person and then trying to have him killed. John is responsible for Arthur’s
death, but desperate to put the blame for that death on the person he has chosen
to do the deed. All of which seemed to me to establish a quite striking parallel
between King John and Queen Elizabeth, on the one hand, and Arthur and
Mary, queen of Scots, on the other.1

ix
x I n t r o d u c t i o n a n d a c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s

That realisation in turn prompted a series of linked questions: if I noticed

those parallels, might not members of an Elizabethan audience have noticed
them as well? And if they did, where might the consequent chains of associa-
tion and application of the action on stage to contemporary events and concerns
have led them? And what might such processes of interpretation have to tell us
about the relationship of the drama to its audience, and indeed to the politics
of late Elizabethan England? And what might those sorts of connection tell us,
in turn, about the nature of the late Elizabethan political scene, and the ways in
which contemporaries actually thought about ‘politics’?
These remained relatively idle thoughts of the sort that occur to you while
watching a play. However, some years later, reading an entirely different set of texts
convinced me that such questions might have real potential and indeed signifi-
cance, as subjects of historical research and enquiry. I had become interested in a
number of Catholic pamphlets that sought to describe the Elizabethan regime as
a conspiracy of evil counsel, a functional tyranny, yet one without a tyrannical
monarch at its heart. Reading perhaps the greatest of them, Leicester’s common-
wealth, I noticed how frequently and insistently that tract returned to certain inci-
dents in recent and indeed remote English history as guides to what was happening
now in England, to what would happen next, if something were not done now
about the succession question and the conspiracy of evil counsel now surrounding
the queen. The historical figures, incidents and reigns in question – those of
Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, and King John were precisely the
ones about which Shakespeare and others were later to write plays. That struck me
as interesting and I came to wonder how far we might read both plays and
pamphlets as comments upon, indeed as ways to recuperate the contemporary
understandings of, essentially the same historical conjuncture or set of issues.
In 2002 I was given a fellowship to work for a year at the Folger Shakespeare
Library, on a project centred on the Roman Catholic tracts. A central task that
year was to get to grips with Robert Parsons’ great book The conference about
the next succession. In so doing, I discovered how Parsons used the reigns of
King John and of Richard II to show the English polity working precisely as he
said it could and should; that is to say, as an elective monarchy with a residual
power inherent in the commonwealth to resist or depose tyrants and to divert
the course of hereditary succession in the name of the common or general
good. While I was at the Folger, no doubt intoxicated by the plethora of
Shakespeareana with which that wonderful institution surrounds its readers, I
decided, more or less as an experiment, to write an account of Shakespeare’s
plays about King John and Richard II from the perspective provided by Parsons.
One thing led to another, and I embarked on an attempt to read other of his
history plays in a similar light.
While what I found upon doing this was all news to me, I rapidly discov-
ered that it was news to no one else, and that it was virtually impossible for me
 I n t r o d u c t i o n a n d a c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s xi

at least to say much of anything very novel about Shakespeare. However, I also
formed the impression, which I retain, that it might be possible to use some of
Shakespeare’s plays, read in conjunction with my Catholic texts and other such
materials, as a way to something interesting and important about the politics
and political culture of the 1590s.
Initially, I envisioned a book that would encompass a full-scale analysis
of the tracts and the plays, all integrated into something like a political narra-
tive. Very rapidly, however, I came to realise that such a project could not
be coherently encompassed within one volume, however capacious. So what
had started out as one book became two, and over the next decade or more,
I proceeded to work on the two in tandem. This was not always a conscious
choice. In 2006–7 I was on a fellowship at the Huntington, ostensibly to finish
a book on Shakespeare’s history plays, but found myself spending a good part
of the second half of that year working on the Catholic project, diverted thereto
by, amongst other things, a lunch time talk on Parsons’ Conference by Paulina
Kewes and a brilliant article by Alex Gajda on The state of Christendom.
This meant that neither project got finished as quickly as, at various points,
I intended, or indeed as I told a number of grant-giving bodies, the Folger and
the Huntington, and indeed the Guggenheim, amongst them, to all of whom I
apologise, and whom I thank for their support, which is now (at long last)
bearing fruit with the publication of this book. Initially I had intended to finish
the Shakespeare book first, but the crucial stimulus to get the Catholic mate-
rials in shape came with an invitation to give the Ford lectures in 2011, an
expanded version of which has now been published by OUP under the title
Bad Queen Bess? Libels, secret histories and the politics of publicity in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I. Getting that done brought the Shakespeare material into
sharper focus and enables me now to cite that book here rather than to reca-
pitulate at length the materials contained therein.
The other ‘delay’ proceeded from the need to read my way into the vast
body of literary criticism that has been devoted to these plays. Initially I had
hoped to integrate the plays into an essentially historical analysis and thus
escape the duty of engaging head on with the critical literature. Not because I
doubted its value, but because I doubted my ability to come to terms effectively
with so vast and sophisticated a body of writing. While I still doubt my capaci-
ties in that regard, the more seriously I engaged with the plays the more deeply
I had to read in the critical literature. And so I embarked upon what amounted
to a series of graduate courses, self-taught by someone who did not know what
he was talking about for the benefit of someone else who knew even less. The
somewhat inadequate results are distributed throughout the text and notes
of this book. As the reader will see, I have read promiscuously across different
styles and moments of literary criticism, citing and using often rather anti-
quated critical books, rather than trying to keep sedulously up to date with the
xii I n t r o d u c t i o n a n d a c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s

most recent trends. I have at least tried to stay abreast of the torrent of publica-
tions on these plays, and some of the most recent writing about them – like
Margreta de Grazia’s Hamlet without Hamlet, David Womersley’s magisterial
Divinity and state, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacClean’s and Brian Walsh’s
books on the Queen’s Men, MacClean and Lawrence Manley’s on Lord Strange’s
Men, or Andras Kisery’s Hamlet’s moment – has been of major significance in
shaping what follows. But in general I have used and cited materials that speak
to the central concerns of the book and thus omitted or passed over in silence
some enormously important modes of critical thought and very distinguished
works of criticism. The result, I am afraid, is eclectic, episodic and inadequate.
Thus, while I have benefited an enormous amount from the exercise, indeed
I think it has transformed the book, as an outsider to Shakespeare studies I also
know that to people who really know and care about this material my efforts
can only appear both amateurish and opinionated.
One of the downsides of taking forever to finish something is that whatever
trends or fashions the project might have been riding on or engaging with
when it was first conceived are likely to be over and done with by the time it is
finished. This book is no exception. I started it at what turned out to be the fag
end of the period when historicism was a real force in literary studies. Indeed I
was encouraged to take the very considerable risks involved in dealing with
literary texts for historical purposes by the example of various essentially
literary scholars, talking rather a lot about ‘history’. If they could use versions
of history for their essentially literary purposes, then surely turnaround was
fair play and I could use various literary texts for my own essentially historical
ones. And indeed, while different, perhaps the two enterprises might even have
something to say to one another.
Since then historicism in literary studies seems to me, if not definitively to
have had its day, then certainly to have long passed its zenith. Of the emergent
approaches struggling to displace historicism at the forefront of Shakespeare
studies, the one to which I might be thought to have the most to say was the
religious turn. But of late that has taken an almost comically ahistorical form,
with theology replacing high theory as the abstract language of choice in and
through which to draw an extremely constricted range of canonical texts into
dialogue with a variety of urgently contemporary concerns.
The (until recently) intensely controversial topic of Shakespeare’s own
religious views, centred on the claim that he might have been some sort of
Catholic, has also lost much of its allure, and all of its capacity to shock. Indeed
of late a whole slew of scholars seem to have come, by admittedly somewhat
different routes, to the conclusion that Shakespeare probably wasn’t a Catholic;
that even if he was, given the state of the evidence, it is impossible to tell for
sure; and that anyway, since we are dealing with literary texts not pamphlets or
tracts, and since religious belief itself is an ineffably elusive topic, it does not
 I n t r o d u c t i o n a n d a c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s xiii

really matter much either way.2 Certainly, that is not a question with which
this book will be much concerned, the focus here being not so much on the
nature of Shakespeare’s personal beliefs, for which (outside of the plays) we
have almost no evidence, but rather on the ways in which at least some of his
plays – in the present instance, those concerned, in the most general sense of
the words, with history and therefore with politics – intersected with, fed off
and fed into a range of other contemporary concerns and events. I want, in
short, to use the plays to reconstruct the political scene, or, if you prefer, the
political imaginary, of the Elizabethan fin de siècle. At the most general level, I
want to treat them as evidence for how contemporaries thought about politics
and/or history as process, a series of interactions between individuals bent on
realising their particular aims and defending their particular interests in a
variety of institutional, cultural and political contexts or settings. More specifi-
cally, I want to use them to see how contemporaries thought about the linked
(and almost equally forbidden) topics of succession, tyranny and resistance,
usurpation and war. At a slightly higher level of abstraction, I want to use the
plays in order to watch Shakespeare and his audiences think about (monar-
chical) legitimacy; about what it was, how it might be lost and, once lost, how
it might be recovered again.
In the protracted period during which this book has been written I have
accumulated many debts. I have been in receipt of grants from the Folger
Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library and the Guggenheim Foundation.
I have benefited from the advice and kindness of a number of Shakespeare
scholars whose capacity to listen to, and even to read, some of this stuff without
derision, indeed, at times with every appearance of serious interest, has been a
great encouragement and relief. I would like to thank Heather James and
Rebecca Lemon who, along with Cyndia Clegg, and above all Markuu Peltonen,
made my time at the Huntington not merely pleasurable but intellectually
stimulating. Heather in particular took a great deal of time and trouble over the
ravings of an historian who had wandered into her field. David Kastan and
Deborah Shuger’s willingness, over a period of years, to give an interloper like
me the time of day has always been a great comfort and I have also taken
encouragement from the seriousness with which Constance Jordan has always
taken my forays into territory that she has made her own. Pat Parker was also
very kind during my stay at the Folger. David Loewenstein’s comments on a
paper on Julius Caesar were also very valuable.
At Vanderbilt, despite her very different interests and approach, Lynn
Enterline has consistently encouraged me to keep going. Michael Neill’s friend-
ship and advice has also been very important, as has that of Jonathan Lamb and
Bridget Orr, both at Princeton and Vanderbilt. Finishing, in the summer of
2015, a (long overdue) piece, commissioned by Michael Neill, played a crucial
role in resolving various structural issues, and I would like to thank Michael for
xiv I n t r o d u c t i o n a n d a c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s

his good humour and encouragement under what must have been rather trying
circumstances. Many of the ideas canvassed in this book were first broached
in undergraduate seminars taught at Princeton University, some of them
co-taught with Nigel Smith, whose friendship and enthusiasm, not to mention
advice and erudition, have been crucial.
I always come away from conversations with Richard McCoy both informed
and encouraged, and Joad Raymond has been similarly kind. I am grateful to
Jeff Dhoty for asking me to comment on a SAA seminar at Vancouver in 2015.
Jeff was also a participant at a SAA seminar that I ran with Andras Kisery on
the public sphere and the drama. His interests and mine overlap closely and his
book on the public sphere will make an important contribution to many of the
topics discussed in this book.
However, amongst literary scholars, my greatest debt is to Andras Kisery.
We first met when we had both just arrived at Vanderbilt and ever since he has
been a constant source of advice and criticism. We are working on cognate
topics, and Andras has been incredibly generous, both in sharing his own work
and in reading and talking about mine.
Amongst historians, Paul Hammer has always been extremely generous in
sharing his deep knowledge of things Essexian. I have an article on the history
plays and the public sphere forthcoming in a collection edited by Malcolm
Smuts, and Malcolm’s comments on that piece and related topics have had a
considerable impact on what follows. I have, of course, also relied on the conver-
sation and friendship of the usual suspects. Ann Hughes, Richard Cust, Nicholas
Tyacke and Michael Questier have all listened to me on this subject with more
forbearance than I deserve and responded to extraordinarily beneficial effect.
Tom Cogswell’s interest in the drama as a form of political commentary has had
a formative influence. Simon Adams’ often caustic scepticism has had a benefi-
cial effect, although, as even the most cursory reader will see, it has not brought
me entirely to my senses. While we did not always agree, conversations with (the
late) Kevin Sharpe always had a tonic effect. I miss him a great deal. Noah
Millstone’s forthcoming work on politic history and the circulation of news, and
more generally on the narrative templates contemporaries used to think and talk
about politics, is of central significance for the argument of this book, and Noah
has been very generous in talking about our shared interests and listening to me
rant on about the drama. But here my greatest debt is to Alex Gajda whose inter-
ests in this topic intersect very closely with mine. Alex has provided extraordi-
narily astute advice and insight (not to mention, information) over a period of
years, when she had much better things to do.
Over the past twelve years or so I have given papers based on the argument
of this book at the universities of Syracuse, Miami, Rutgers and Warwick
(once each) and at Oxford (three times) and London (more times than I care
to remember), at NYU and the Shakespeare Institute, and (four times) at the
 I n t r o d u c t i o n a n d a c k n ow l e d g e m e n t s xv

Huntington. When you are operating as far out of your comfort zone as I am in
this book, you need all the criticism and comment you can get, and I benefited
enormously from all of those interactions.
I should particularly like to thank Chris Fitter for inviting me to contribute
to a conference on Shakespeare and the social depth of politics at the Huntington
in spring 2015 and Lori-Ann Ferrell who has allowed me twice to present
material at the early modern seminar at the same venue. Lori-Ann’s friendship
and, in particular, her sustained interest in this project, have been a consider-
able source of encouragement over many years.
My wife, Sandy Solomon, shares, and, even when she does not entirely share,
is nearly always prepared to indulge, what has become my voracious appetite
for performances of early modern drama. Even when I despaired, she remained
convinced that I had something to say. Let’s hope she is right. Either way, her
interest in and enthusiasm for this project has been genuinely sustaining.
Finally, I have to thank Robert Baldock at Yale University Press for his
patience, forbearance and advice. Without his encouragement and support
neither this book (nor indeed The Antichrist’s lewd hat) would ever have seen
the light of day. The three readers’ reports from Yale, mediated by Robert’s typi-
cally tactful but firm interventions, played a crucial role in helping to shape the
final version of the book, which, during the past decade, has gone through
more iterations than I care to think about. Robert is a wonderful editor, and I
want to acknowledge a very considerable personal, professional and intellec-
tual debt to him.
I have used throughout editions of Shakespeare’s plays from the Arden
Shakespeare third series, except for King John and 2 Henry IV, where I
have used editions from the second series, edited by E.A.J. Honingman and
A.R. Humphreys, respectively.
xvi
 P AR T I
Contexts and structures

1
2 H ow S h a k e s p e a r e P u t P o l i t i c s o n t h e S ta g e

This section has a dual purpose. It is intended to address a set of linked issues,
both historical and historiographical. I want to outline some of the ideological,
political and institutional structures and contexts within which the plays under
discussion here were produced and consumed and, in so doing, relate the
current project to a range of recent scholarly writing on the period and these
plays. I will outline the ways in which a variety of Catholic tracts, produced
from the early 1570s until the mid 1590s, used history to conduct their critique
of the Elizabethan regime as a conspiracy of evil counsel and to delineate, and
prognosticate about, the succession crisis that they presented as the inevitable
result of the policies currently being pursued in the queen’s name. This, it
will emerge, was a propensity anything but limited to Catholic treatments
of this and related topics.
I will then survey the relevant developments in Elizabethan political history,
paying particular attention to the notions of ‘the monarchical republic’, ‘the
Elizabethan exclusion crisis’ and ‘the succession crisis’ that followed it. I will
also address the issue of the notion of ‘the post-reformation public sphere’, and
the various publics called into being by the different public pitches for support
made both by the regime and by its Catholic critics and enemies. At stake in
these exchanges was first interpretative and then political control over the
alternately terrifying and exhilarating prospects conjured by a now inveterately
unsettled succession, the war with Spain and what was now, given her relatively
advanced age, the increasingly imminent death of the queen. In so doing, I will
pay particular attention to recent work on the Queen’s Men, and stress the
contribution of the public theatre to the process whereby variously political
publics were created or enabled by the peculiar, both confessional and dynastic,
dynamics of the English post-reformation.
I will outline contemporary notions about the writing and reading of history
for use, paying particular attention to the ways in which putting history on
stage enabled audiences to feel not only that they were watching history take
place before their very eyes, but also that they were being made privy to the
ways in which politics really worked. Central here will be an emergent notion
of ‘politics’ as an increasingly coherent and distinct arena or mode of human
behaviour, susceptible to analysis and prognostication, very often through the
invocation and analysis of various ‘histories’. Finally I will discuss the vexed
question of censorship in this period and outline what I take to be the impact of
all these related factors and forces on the production and consumption of the
play texts that form the main subject of this book.
Throughout, both in my own analysis of the period and in my readings of
the plays, I will be concerned to demonstrate (and insist upon) the relative
autonomy of politics, conceived as the manoeuvres of a variety of political
agents or groups in contention for the control of events, of the discursive struc-
tures through which events were perceived and, ultimately, of the levers of
 C o n t e x t s a n d s t ru c t u r e s 3

power in the English monarchical state. Both here, and in the book more
generally, the aim is to rescue the plays from views of the political which either
see politics thus conceived as epiphenomenal, mere froth atop the wave of deep
structural, social or cultural change, or seek to submerge politics, as these plays
conceive and stage it, in the (often subterranean) workings of an hypostatised
and decentred, and thus, to my mind, thoroughly mystified and occluded,
notion of ‘Power’.

Back to the future: Catholics and protestants learn the lessons of history
In a series of tracts, stretching from The treatise of treasons (1572), through
Leicester’s commonwealth (1584), the group of tracts known collectively as Cecil’s
commonwealth in the early 1590s, to Robert Parsons’ Conference about the next
succession, a variety of Catholic writers pictured the Elizabethan regime as a
conspiracy of evil counsel. These tracts claimed that on the back of paranoid
and entirely fantastical talk about a non-existent Catholic conspiracy – a
conspiracy that encompassed English Catholics, the king of Spain and Mary
Stuart – a group of atheistical, low-born, evil counsellors had persuaded the
queen that only they could save her from what they now habitually talked about
as a pervasive popish threat. They used this conviction to push aside their rivals
for power, the ancient, and largely Catholic, nobility, and then sought to commit
the queen to a series of foreign adventures in Scotland, France and the Low
Countries. Justified as pre-emptive strikes, necessary to counter a Catholic
threat that did not (yet) exist, the tracts explained that these escapades in fact
brought into existence the very threat that they were supposed to counter. By
allying the queen with a rout of protestant rebels against their lawful sovereigns,
in France and the Low Countries, the conspirators had alienated her from the
ancient allies of the English crown, the king of Spain being foremost amongst
them. Having come to monopolise all the crucial offices under and around the
throne, the conspirators and their hangers-on controlled not only the distribu-
tion of royal patronage, but who the queen saw and what she knew.
The final sophistication of this conspiracy to seize all power for themselves
involved the succession. Having persuaded Elizabeth not to marry, the queen’s
evil counsellors tried to turn her against her only heir – Mary Stuart – by
portraying the queen of Scots as the ultimate threat to the security of both
queen and realm. This, these tracts argued, was the very opposite of the truth,
for, as her lineal successor, her heir by blood, Mary Stuart was all that stood
between Elizabeth and the malign plans of her own counsellors. Once the
conspirators had prevailed upon Elizabeth to do away with Mary, the tracts
claimed, they would be at liberty to remove Elizabeth herself at their own
convenience and replace her with a candidate of their own choosing. According
to Leicester’s commonwealth, the Earl of Huntingdon, the possessor of a Yorkist
4 H ow S h a k e s p e a r e P u t P o l i t i c s o n t h e S ta g e

claim through the female line, and a frequently named protestant claimant for
the throne, should Elizabeth die without an heir of her body, was the preferred
candidate. This conspiracy was the ultimate treason which The treatise of trea-
sons, Leicester’s commonwealth and the group of texts known collectively as
Cecil’s commonwealth all claimed to unmask.
But, the pamphlets claimed, while the conspirators used the language of
confessional conflict and protestant zeal, religion had nothing to do with their
schemes. Thus the guilty men were presented not as crazed heretics desperate
to preserve the cause of true religion as they misguidedly understood it, but
rather as functional atheists, Machiavels, who were using religion as a mask for
the pursuit of their own private (and purely secular) interests and ambitions.
The identity of the leading Machiavels and evil counsellors and conspira-
tors varied, depending upon attendant political circumstance. The villains of
the piece in The treatise were William Cecil and his close ally and kinsman,
Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon, while Leicester’s commonwealth conferred that
role on the earl of Leicester. Then, in the early 1590s, with Leicester dead, the
tracts known collectively as Cecil’s commonwealth shifted attention back to the
personal and dynastic ambitions of Burghley and the Cecils.
What first led me to relate the plays to the tracts were the ways in which the
Catholic pamphlets deployed history to further their argument. Breaking with
the legitimist claims of the Stuarts and, in particular, reverting to the Yorkist
claim of Huntingdon, would, the Catholic tracts warned, reopen the dynastic
disputes that had caused the Wars of the Roses, only now that old dispute
would be greatly exacerbated by the almost certain involvement of foreign
princes, overdetermined by the influence of post-reformation confessional
conflict. Thus, Leicester’s commonwealth claimed, if you wanted to know just
what sort of disaster would be visited upon England by the machinations of
Leicester and his ilk in preventing the queen from marrying, removing the
legitimate heir to the throne and diverting the succession, you had merely to go
back to the future and refer yourself to the history of England in the previous
century. In this relatively recent past various combinations of noble and court
faction, dynastic uncertainty and ambition, had plunged the settled monar-
chical state established by the Lancastrians into civil war, reducing the
commonwealth to the sort of chaos through which new men and princes could
rise and eventually achieve supreme power.
The treatise of treasons embarked on a long comparison between the usurpa-
tion of Richard III and recent events in Elizabethan England, in particular the
plots and stratagems being undertaken now by Cecil and Bacon, a pair of evil
counsellors. The treatise referred to as the two English Catilines.1 According to
the The treatise, the first move of the evil counsellor was always to sow division
and faction in the midst of the royal family and court. Richard of Gloucester’s
efforts to spread dissension between ‘the two kindreds’ of Edward IV ‘and his
 C o n t e x t s a n d s t ru c t u r e s 5

wife’ and ‘the fine devices and fair set policies used to circumvent king
Edward IV in making away his brother the duke of Clarence’ not only proved
this general insight but were also near-perfect guides to what was happening
now, as an extended comparison between Richard’s manoeuvres and the recent
machinations designed to set Queen Elizabeth against her cousin and heir
Mary Stuart showed only too clearly.2 Richard’s purge of the queen’s relatives and
the summary execution of Hastings were compared to the recent arrest of
Norfolk, Arundel, Pembroke and Lumley.3 The rumours spread against the the
queen’s family, the Wydvilles, found their modern analogue in the rumours
spread against Mary Stuart and Norfolk. The wild tales told about Elizabeth
Wydville – that she was a ‘sorcerer, a witch and by necromancy’ had ‘wasted the
protector’s body and limbs’ – were directly comparable to the equally malign
and absurd whispering campaign now being directed against Mary Stuart.4
Then as now the pamphlet saw no shortage of creatures and catspaws able
and willing to do the great ones’ dirty work for them. ‘Among the clergy there
lacked no Shaws, nor now no Sampsons. Among the lawyers there wanted then
no Catesbies, nor now no Nortons.’5 Thus the pamphlet was able triumphantly
to conclude that what had happened before was now happening again (having
already almost happened during the duke of Northumberland’s attempted coup
at the end of Edward VI’s reign). And thus the past could provide not only a
guide to what was happening now, but also a dreadful warning of what was
going to happen next, if, that is, the lessons of history, conveniently encapsulated
in The treatise, were not heeded and preventative action taken immediately.
Such parallels and political lessons, culled from the history of both Edward
VI’s reign and of fifteenth-century England, represented a relatively minor
element in The treatise, but they played a rather more prominent role in
Leicester’s commonwealth. Leicester was compared to a whole slew of previous
overmighty subjects, ranging from Vortigern, Harold, Henry of Lancaster,
Richard of Warwick, Richard of Gloucester, John of Northumberland, and
others, who ‘by this mean [dominance of the court and patronage of the crown]
specially have pulled down their lawful sovereigns’.6 Particular attention was
paid also to ‘Richard Duke of York, in the time of King Henry VI’.7
The danger presented to stable monarchical rule by such overmighty
subjects and favourites was, of course, considerably compounded if the
monarch lacked an heir of his or her body, or if the succession was otherwise
uncertain; a point the tract drove home by citing the examples of Henry
Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster, under Richard II and Richard, duke of
Gloucester, under Edward IV and V.8 The defenders of the earl of Leicester
might argue that so great was his current authority and standing in the realm,
so high his favour with the queen, that he had no need to connive for yet further
preferment and greater power, but, the tract claimed, history told us otherwise.
After all, the Percies under Henry IV had had power enough, as had the
6 H ow S h a k e s p e a r e P u t P o l i t i c s o n t h e S ta g e

Nevilles under Edward IV.9 For such aspiring spirits nothing short of supreme
power would ever suffice.
Again, confronted by the (alleged) alliance between Leicester and Huntingdon
to advance the latter’s claim to the throne, the tract used recent history to predict
a falling out, and a final struggle for sovereign power, between the two earls,
using the fates of Lord Stanley under Henry VII, of the Duke of Buckingham
under Richard III and of the Percies under Henry IV, to illustrate what became
of kingmakers unless they got their retaliation in first.10
While Robert Parsons’ great tract of the mid 1590s, The conference about
the next succession, took much of the analysis of the previous pamphlets for
granted, concerning itself with the likely consequences of a succession now left
definitively unsettled, its discussion of the rights and wrongs of the succession
was drenched throughout with readings from a whole variety of histories;
histories culled from the Old Testament, from the ancient world, but also from
the annals and chronicles of medieval western Europe and particularly, of
course, of England. Such a detailed engagement with the particularities of
history, history which he found in and took from the chronicles, was central to
various of Parson’s purposes.11 It was central, first, to his drive to muddy the
genealogical waters, by casting doubt on the Stuart claim to the English throne
as so obviously the best that it could brook no legitimate challenge, but it was
also central to his attempt to characterise the English polity as a form of elec-
tive monarchy with powers inherent in what he termed the ‘commonwealth’ to
divert the succession from its obvious, hereditary course, and to discipline,
control, and even to depose and replace, a peccant monarch, when the demands
of the common good seemed to demand it.
As we shall see below, in making that last case, Parsons put particular stress
upon the reign of King John and the deposition of Richard II, as textbook
examples of how the English commonwealth could indeed depose tyrants and
divert the succession according to the demands of the political moment and
the common good. He also cited Richard III as a monarch of undoubted
dynastic legitimacy, deposed in favour of someone with a far more dubious
hereditary claim, by the (violent) action of a commonwealth united in opposi-
tion to tyranny, red in tooth and claw. Anyone, he claimed, who accepted the
deposition of Richard and the accession of Henry VII as legitimate, must, by
implication, also accept his version of England as an elective monarchy and a
commonwealth well able to defend itself against tyranny and divert the succes-
sion according to the promptings of the common good.
In taking this tack, in using history to guide their thoughts and prognosti-
cations about what an unsettled succession might bring to the realm, these
Catholic tracts were bending to their own purposes modes of thought and
argument used by other (protestant) groups and individuals, over the course of
the reign, for their own equally partisan confessional and political purposes.
 C o n t e x t s a n d s t ru c t u r e s 7

Let us look first at a remarkable manuscript tract of 1566,12 written, at least

according to Treatise of treasons, by the puritan divine Thomas Sampson.
Sampson cited various sorts of histories to confirm his warning, directed
notionally to the queen herself, that it was ‘most certain that, unless the succes-
sion after you be, and that in time, appointed and ordered, England runneth to
most certain ruin and destruction’.13 As things stood, the tract argued, at the
queen’s death without an heir of her body, or a succession ‘ordered and stab-
lished’, there would be multiple contenders. The result would be a struggle for
the crown and, for all that ‘God doth (by his provident government) give king-
doms, make and depose kings’, if we judged the outcome according to ‘men’s
dealing, by which God bringeth his purpose to pass’, it was almost certain that
‘this quarrel’ would be won by the strongest party, ‘and might overcome right’.14
This, our author claimed, was a recipe for disaster; for since the outcome was
sure to be decided ‘in the field fighting, not in judgement pleading’ the ‘new
prince’ would inevitably come ‘into the realm wading in blood up to the neck,
continue in blood, whose end is oft also mixed with blood’.15
Even if, at the first, violence were to be averted and some attempt made to
elect a new prince, Sampson predicted disaster. Who would be the electors?
‘The multitude’? They were composed of ‘as many minds’ as heads and thus
‘always distract’. If ‘the few’, how would they bind the many to accept their final
decision? What if the electors could not agree? Would the winner then be
decided ‘by the greater part?’ Under such circumstances, our author asked, who
could assure ‘the chosen person of the consent and subjection of all?’16 Inevitably,
there would be winners and losers. The chosen monarch would have to favour
those who had, in Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘helped him to the crown’ or face their
disappointment and disaffection. Conversely, Sampson observed, ‘kings them-
selves do often times wax jealous, not only on the electors, but also on them by
whose special aid they have come to their kingdoms and think they, which can
do so much to make a king, can do too much to depose a king’.17
Frustrated candidates might turn factious,18 and the monarch not think
himself safe while any of his former rivals’ descendants remained alive. The
result would be dissension, strife and even civil war, transferred down the
generations, a point he illustrated from English history by the fates of ‘Maud,
Arthur, Edmund Mortimer and Edward, the son of Henry VI’.19 ‘See’, our author
concluded, ‘what it is to leave a kingdom uncommitted in the hands of ambi-
tious men. They disinherit, they kill, they divide, they fight, they covet, they
lose all.’20 Once started, such internecine strife could last for years, even for
generations, and thus so weaken the polity as to leave it easy prey to that most
dreadful of all fates, foreign invasion and rule.21
Here then, stated in relatively abstract terms, were the plot outlines and
central concerns of many of the plays discussed in this book; of the Henry VI
plays, of Richard II and Henry IV, indeed of Titus Andronicus, and even of
8 H ow S h a k e s p e a r e P u t P o l i t i c s o n t h e S ta g e

Hamlet. Moreover, these politique observations and prognostications were

everywhere illustrated by, and drawn out of, myriad historical examples taken
from Roman, ancient British, and English history, ‘since the conquest’.
The reigns of Roman emperors both early and late were cited to show the
wisdom and necessity of settling the succession, and the dreadful consequences
of failing to do so. From the early history of Britain the fates of King Lucius and
of Ferrex and Porrex, famously the subject of the play Gorboduc by Thomas
Norton and Thomas Sackville which, just like Sampson’s tract, pressed the
queen both to marry and settle the succession in her lifetime, were also cited at
length. All of which drew from our author the observation that ‘the fruit of
such strifes is civil, and therefore the most cruel and dangerous, war’.22
From more recent English history our author noted with approval the
efforts of the childless Richard I and Richard II to settle the succession; the first
by appointing ‘Arthur, son of his brother to be his successor’, and the second by
holding a parliament at Westminster in which ‘Edmund earl of Mortimer was
declared next heir to succeed’, ‘lest, as the history saith, there should be any
doubt or contention for the inheritance of the throne’. He also cited the repeated,
and rather more successful, efforts of both Henry IV and the queen’s own
father, Henry VIII, to settle the succession, ensuring that the crown did, in fact,
pass in orderly fashion from Edward to Mary, and ‘to yourself last of all’;23 an
arrangement that the propensity of the modern English to be ‘led by known
and allowed law’ had made stick, even ‘against the attempt of the Duke of
Northumberland’ at the end of Edward’s reign.24
It was thus easy, our author claimed, just from ‘the histories since the
conquest’ to see the dreadful effects of unsettled or contested successions. But
perhaps our author’s most daring recourse to English history occurred in the
quite remarkable section of the work in which he exhorted the parliament to
order the succession, if necessary, in the teeth not only of royal opposition,
but even, it seems, of a direct royal command to cease and desist. He first
cited examples, drawn from sacred history, of prophets, counsellors and people
refusing to obey (or checking) corrupt or unjust royal commands. He then
proceeded to claim that ‘we do willingly pass over many examples tending to
this purpose. We will not take any out of the histories of this land, for if we
should either cite’ ‘Vortigern, before the conquest, or Edward II, or Richard II
sithence, it might seem to commend that which hath some foul spot marks of
condemnation. For, though faults were found in government worthy of amend-
ment and evil counsellors did lead princes in ways meet for their private
purposes, . . . yet did corrupt affection not only force men then too far, but
ambition, under pretense of reformation, practiced unusual revenge and
destruction. To wade too deeply in this matter is odious, but, if it prove needful,
it is good to know what may justly be done and also to do it. Kings have to learn
their state. The higher it is, the more at liberty, the greater need is of good
 C o n t e x t s a n d s t ru c t u r e s 9

aid, counsel and advertisement.’25 This is a remarkable passage, in which, by

claiming that he was not going to mention the unmentionable, Sampson
managed to mention it in ways that surely lodged the point that he claimed that
he was not making firmly in the mind of the reader, and he did so by again
citing reigns that were to provide the subjects of plays by Marlowe and
Shakespeare; plays which, at least in Shakespeare’s case, adverted to the explo-
sive matter contained within them with much the same sort of direct indirec-
tion displayed by Sampson
If we fast-forward to 1584 when John Leslie, the bishop of Ross’s defence of
the Stuart claim, first produced in 1569, was once more reprinted as part of a
Catholic propaganda offensive that also included both Leicester’s common-
wealth and Cardinal Allen’s reply to Burghley’s Execution of justice in England,
we find a manuscript reply to Leslie indulging in very similar uses of historical
precedent and interpretation. One of the major arguments against the Stuart
claim was the assertion that a maxim of the common law barred from inher-
iting the throne those born abroad to parents out of allegiance to the English
crown. In response, Leslie cited the examples of ‘King Stephen, Henry II,
Arthur, duke of Brittany, Edgar Aetheling and Lewis, son to the king of France,
all the which, notwithstanding that they were strangers, yet were two of them
kings of this realm, two were established heirs apparent to the crown and the
fifth called in by the barons to inherit the crown in the right of Blanche his
wife, being a descendant from the crown yet a stranger born’.26
This elicited from Ross’ nameless critic a detailed discussion of the relevant
chronicle materials, a discussion that concentrated with particular intensity on
the events of John’s reign. Distinctions were drawn between different writers;
Polydore Vergil was all but dismissed because he was ‘a stranger, a late writer
and therefore of least credit’.27 Other sources, more nearly contemporary, were
rated higher, with one being hailed as, ‘by all presumption’, ‘an eye witness in
this matter’ and then quoted as proving definitively that Arthur had never been
intended or established by Richard as his heir but rather ‘both prince and
people resolved fully upon king John as undoubted heir apparent to the realm’.28
It would, our author concluded, be ‘tedious to rehearse what all authors write
of this matter. It sufficeth to have proved that those that make for Ross are of
the least credit because of a later age’ and because they disagreed amongst
themselves as to the manner and ‘time of Arthur’s supposed establishment’.29
Various assertions and interpretations were weighed against one another,
and an historical explanation provided for what out author claimed was the
entirely illusory claim that Richard had chosen Arthur as his heir. (It had
proceeded from the machinations of the evil bishop of Ely who had invented a
letter from the king to that effect in order to keep his enemy John away from
the throne and, since Arthur was then a child, in the event of Richard’s death
on crusade, to prolong his own power as regent.)30
10 H ow S h a k e s p e a r e P u t P o l i t i c s o n t h e S ta g e

Similar attention was lavished on the alleged claim to the throne enjoyed by
Lewis, the son of the French king, through his wife Blanche, with our author
concluding that none of the sources ‘maketh mention that the barons called
Lewis into the realm in respect of any right that he had to the crown by his wife
but to fortify themselves against the pope, who had excommunicated the said
Lewis and all of them, supporting king John against them, because he had
made his realm tributary to the church. Neither did Lewis claim the crown, at
his coming into England, by colour of his wife’s right’, but rather thanked the
barons for ‘their voluntary calling him to the government’.31 Our author’s
authority for all this was Polydore who, since he was now on the right side, was
instantly transformed into a reliable source.
Ross’ providential gloss on the crucial events also came in for a good
hiding. Where Leslie claimed that Harold, Stephen and John had all suffered
from the providential judgement of God for usurping the throne from the
rightful (and foreign born) claimants – Edgar Aetheling, Maud and Arthur
respectively – our author replied that ‘the stories report these men to have
committed other grievous offences for the which they deserved God’s punish-
ment, though we should deny that they offended in securing the crown into
their hands’. In John’s case the relevant lapse was ‘an horrible murder in the
persons of the said Arthur and Eleanor his sister, for the which God
plagued him as well with the loss of his countries abroad as with civil wars
at home’.32
The crucial point, of course, is that controversial claims and counter-claims
about the succession were being canvassed here through detailed historical
argument. Disputes about what had actually happened, and about what that
meant – conducted here with every appearance of scholarly rigour – thus
took on a heightened political significance. Indeed, the point was reached
when any discussion or version of the crucial historical events could – I am
tempted to say would, or even must – have been taken to contain some sort of
covert or coded reference to the controversial matter, the crucial and forbidden
issues, assumed to turn upon these highly charged precedents and examples.
There could, in short, be no such thing as an entirely innocent depiction or
re-enactment of such controverted and controversial historical events. And, of
course, as we shall see below, in the face of one version of the key events of
John’s reign, staged in The troublesome reign of King John and performed
all round the country by the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare produced his own
tellingly different account of the selfsame events.
Such uses of history in disputes about politics, the succession and the nature
of the English monarchical polity remained a more or less consistent feature
throughout the period. Just as there is a quite remarkable degree of overlap
between the fears and phobias that Thomas Sampson set before the parliament
men of 1566 and those being evoked and exploited by Robert Parsons in
 C o n t e x t s a n d s t ru c t u r e s 11

1594, so precisely the same historical events, the same interpretative claims and
counter-claims, at issue between Leslie and his anonymous critic of 1584, are to
be found at the centre of Parsons’ account, in the Conference, of the English
monarchy as elective. The only real difference was that, in the 1560s, it was the
protestants who were appalled by the prospect of the accession of the Stuarts
and, by the 1590s, it was a certain sort of Catholic.33
Here, then, were contemporaries of very different, indeed of mutually exclu-
sive, ideological perspectives and political interests – Catholics and puritans, no
less – using history not only to decide specific disputes about the nature and
course of the succession, but also, more generally, to provide templates, exem-
plary narratives, models of behaviour and patterns of moral probity and polit-
ical probability that could be brought to bear on present events and future
prospects as a ready guide to what was happening now and, more importantly,
to what might be about to happen next. History, then, was crucial, not merely
to questions of ‘right’, but also to questions of prudence, to both the ‘is’ and the
‘ought’ of contemporary politics.
The tracts known collectively as Cecil’s commonwealth and indeed Parsons’
Conference were all being produced at the very moment when Mary Stuart’s
death, the war with Spain and Elizabeth’s advancing age were returning to the
very centre of contemporary attention and concern, the question of
what would happen once the queen died (as it now seemed certain that she
would) with the succession unsettled. At the same moment, the public stage
resounded with plays about these very same events: about the reigns of Edmund
Ironside, of King John and Henry VI, the rise of Richard III, the depositions of
Richard II and Edward II and the tumults of Henry IV’s reign.
Not only that, but many of the scenarios conjured by Sampson and
Parsons – contested successions, tumultuously conducted elections, the mutual
suspicions and emergent jealousies between new rulers and their erstwhile
supporters, the destabilising effects of dynastic conflict and change, the down-
ward spiral of civil strife and civil war leading to foreign invasion and the
imposition of new rulers from abroad – formed the subject matter of plays like
Richard II and Richard III, of the Henry IV and Henry VI plays, and of King
John, not to mention of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. In the
process, various dramatists proceeded, on the public stage, to ‘wade’ very
deeply indeed into what Sampson had called the ‘odious matter’ at the heart of
the reigns of Edward II and Richard II.
We have here, then, a transition from the illicit and libellous Catholic
pamphlets, and the incendiary and unpublished manuscript tracts of the
1560s, 1570s and early 1580s to the public stage, where, by the early 1590s,
topics and notions previously discussed only in the most illicit or constrained
of media and circumstances were being publicly canvassed in front of both
ideologically and socially heterogenous audiences. That transition and what
12 H ow S h a k e s p e a r e P u t P o l i t i c s o n t h e S ta g e

it has to tell us about the political culture and condition of late Elizabethan
England is one of the primary subjects of this book.

Putting the (high) politics back into ‘power’

The origins of this book, then, lie in the juxtaposition of two insights or rather
commonplaces: the first that contemporaries regularly used recent history to
think (and talk) about the here and now, and in particular about the dreadful
prospect that might be awaiting Elizabethan England once the old queen died
and a struggle for the succession began; and the second, that the plays that
dealt with those historical events regularly contained elements that seemed to
speak directly to current circumstances and concerns, and did so in ways that
invited contemporary audiences to use the events being acted out on stage
to think through some of the most controversial, and in the case of the
succession, most taboo, questions of the age.
My aim became to examine the relation between history plays and, not
so much the history they staged, as the events, if you will, the history, within
which they were written and to which, I am arguing, they were very directly –
albeit in Shakespeare’s case, with typically Shakespearean indirection –
addressed. The aim here is historical and the interpretative mode circular; not,
I hope, a circle of the futile, self-consuming sort, described by the fabled
oozlum bird, but rather one of a far more virtuously hermeneutic type.34 I want
to use the immediate political context to interpret the plays; and the plays, thus
contextualised and interpreted, to cast light back upon the politics, the political
culture, indeed the political imagination, of the period. My main objective is
thus not to talk about Shakespeare per se, but rather to use plays – most, but not
all, of them by Shakespeare – to say something about the period, and then
perhaps to use the resulting picture of the period to say something about the
theatre and indeed the plays under discussion in this book.
But if the result is a history book about Elizabethan politics and political
culture, it is one whose primary unit of analysis and argument is a series
of heavily contextual readings of particular plays. Of course, and perhaps
inevitably, it has also, to some extent, become a book about plays and in partic-
ular about the history plays of Shakespeare. For as I worked myself into the
project, it seemed to me that many, indeed most, of the plays that spoke most
directly to the issues in which I was interested turned out to be by Shakespeare.
That being the case, a series of juxtapositions seemed to be in order; not only
between the plays and the immediate political contexts in which they were
written and to which they were addressed, and between the plays and other
(more overtly) political texts, but also within and between the plays them-
selves. On that basis, it seemed, something might be said, or suggested, about
the ideological and political trajectory described by Shakespeare’s history plays
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