Unperfect Histories: The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559-1610 (Oxford English Monographs) [1 ed.] 9780198806172, 0198806175

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OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS General Editors PAULINA KEWES

LAURA MARCUS

HEATHER O’DONOGHUE

PETER MCCULLOUGH

SEAMUS PERRY

FIONA STAFFORD

LLOYD PRATT

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Unperfect Histories The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1610 H AR R IET A R C H E R

1

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Harriet Archer 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939200 ISBN 978–0–19–880617–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements This book started life as a doctoral thesis, and over the course of its development I have incurred many debts of gratitude which it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge here. I am especially grateful to my thesis supervisor Paulina Kewes for her ongoing support and guidance, to my internal examiner Jane Griffiths for her rigour, kindness, and advice on the thesis’s transition to book manuscript, and to Mike Pincombe, external examiner, sensei, and comrade. Fundamental to the book’s development were the contributors to the edited volume A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (2016), the most brilliant and generous group of scholars; I am hugely grateful to all of them, especially my redoubtable co-editor Andrew Hadfield. Among them Scott Lucas and Bart van Es provided feedback on early drafts, and I owe them a great deal for their suggestions but also their support of my project in its early stages. A number of scholars have been generous enough to share unpublished work with me, including Scott and Mike; in addition, I would like to thank Jennifer Richards, Philip Schwyzer, Richard McCabe, Joanne Diaz, William Kerwin, Andrew King, Rob Carson, Kavita Mudan Finn, and Freyja Cox Jensen. My colleagues at Newcastle, including Mike and Jenny, Kate Chedgzoy, Kate de Rycker, Aditi Nafde, Ruth Connolly, and Shehzana Mamujee, and at nearby Northumbria University, Paul Frazer, Adam Hansen, Fred Schurink, Monika Smialkowska, and David Walker, provided a supportive early modern community, while my ‘Myth and Magic’ cohorts at Newcastle handled weekly asides about the Mirror with good grace. A more general debt of gratitude is owed to David Norbrook, Rhodri Lewis, David Scott Kastan, Liz Oakley-Brown, and Matthew Woodcock, who have all given me invaluable advice and encouragement. For financial support, I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Christ Church, Oxford, the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Folger Shakespeare Institute, the Leverhulme Trust, and Newcastle University, where a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship made the final revisions to the text possible. The staff of the Bodleian Library, the Christ Church library, the Yale Manuscripts and Archives Room, the Oxford English Faculty and Library, the British Library, Newcastle University’s Robinson Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder, all deserve thanks for their assistance. At OUP, I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton,

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Acknowledgements

Rachel Platt, Ellie Collins, and Catherine Owen, and Fiona Stafford and other members of the Oxford English Monographs Series committee, as well as my two anonymous readers. I remain hugely indebted to my undergraduate and masters’ tutors Christopher Butler, Peter Conrad, Mishtooni Bose, Peter McDonald, Alexandra Harris, and Sophie Ratcliffe, and Sharon Achinstein, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Emma Smith, whose teaching continues to inspire me. It would be impossible to thank all of the spectacular friends who have helped in different ways, but special mention should go to Paul Gledhill, Toby Martin, Beatrice Turner, Ewa Dabrowska, and Clare and Mark Hanson, who all had time for this book even when they were writing their own, and Jemma Jones, Faye Keegan, Hannah Burnham, Ben Britton, and Holly and Martin Brain, for keeping a corkscrew to hand. My husband Jack has been the book’s staunchest champion, and my partner in this and all of our great adventures—I can’t begin to thank him adequately. My greatest debt is, as always, to my parents, for their endless faith in me and my work, and for everything else. This book is dedicated to them.

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Contents List of Abbreviations Texts of the Mirror

ix xi

Introduction

1

1. Baldwin’s Mirror, 1554–1610 Origins and Authority Revision and Expansion From Precepts to Precedents

14 16 23 30

2. John Higgins’s First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1574–5) Humanist Historiography in Crisis Writing British History Mediating Authorities

39 41 50 61

3. Thomas Blenerhasset’s Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1578) Creative Isolation History and Memory Contingency and Individualism

73 75 84 96

4. The Mirour for Magistrates (1587) Textual Stability Topical Politics Killing Seneca

110 115 123 129

5. Richard Niccols’s Mirour for Magistrates (1610) The Trials of Transmission A Winter Nights Vision ‘Polemic to Panegyric’?

139 141 150 161

Select Bibliography Index

173 197

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List of Abbreviations BHR CLS CR EEBO EHR ELH ELR EMLS ES HLQ IHR JBS JCHA JMEMS JNR LC MLN MLR MMC MP N&Q ODNB OED PMLA PQ RES RQ RS SCJ SEL SP SQ SS TRHS USTC YES

Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance Comparative Literature Studies The Chaucer Review Early English Books Online English Historical Review English Literary History English Literary Renaissance Early Modern Literary Studies English Studies Huntington Library Quarterly Intellectual History Review Journal of British Studies Journal of the Canadian Historical Association Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Journal of the Northern Renaissance Literature Compass Modern Language Notes The Modern Language Review Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (eds), A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Modern Philology Notes and Queries Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Philological Quarterly The Review of English Studies Renaissance Quarterly Renaissance Studies The Sixteenth Century Journal Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 Studies in Philology Shakespeare Quarterly Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Universal Short Title Catalogue Yearbook of English Studies

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Texts of the Mirror I have modernized i/j and u/v, and restored abbreviated m/n, but otherwise original spelling has been retained throughout. Quotations from the Mirror are followed by references in parentheses in the main body of the text, which use the following abbreviations: 1559

1563

1571

1574F

1574L

1575F

1575L

Baldwin, William, et al., A Myrroure for Magistrates Wherein May be Seen by Example of Other, with Howe Grevous Plages Vices are Punished: and Howe Frayle and Unstable Worldly Prosperitie is Founde, Even of Those, Whom Fortune Seemeth Most Highly to Favour (London: Thomas Marshe, 1559). Baldwin, William, et al., A Myrrour for Magistrates Wherein May be Seen by Example of Other, with Howe Grevous Plages Vices are Punished: and Howe Frayle and Unstable Worldly Prosperity is Founde, Even of Those Whom Fortune Seemeth Most Highly to Favour (London: Thomas Marshe, 1563). Baldwin, William, et al., A Myrrour for Magistrates Wherein May be Seene by Examples Passed in this Realme, with Howe Grevous Plagues, Vyces are Punished in Great Princes and Magistrates, and How Frayle and Unstable Worldly Prosperity is Founde, where Fortune Seemeth Moste Highly to Favour (London: Thomas Marshe, 1571). Higgins, John, The First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates Containing the Falles of the First Infortunate Princes of this Lande: from the Comming of Brute to the Incarnation of Our Saviour and Redemer Jesu Christe (London: Thomas Marshe, 1574). Baldwin, William, et al., The Last Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates Wherein May be Seene by Examples Passed in this Realme, with Howe Grevous Plagues, Vices are Punished in Great Princes and Magistrates, and Howe Frayle and Unstable Worldly Prosperitie is Founde, where Fortune Seemeth moste Highly to Favour (London: Thomas Marshe, 1574). Higgins, John, The First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates Contayning the Falles of the First Infortunate Princes of this Lande: from the Comming of Brute to the Incarnation of Our Saviour and Redemer Jesu Christe (London: Thomas Marshe, 1575). Baldwin, William, et al., The Last Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates Wherein May be Seene by Examples Passed in this Realme, with Howe Grevous Plagues, Vices are Punished in Great Princes and Magistrates, and Howe Frayle and Unstable Worldly Prosperitie is Founde, where Fortune Seemeth Moste Highly to Favour (London: Thomas Marshe, 1575).

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Texts of the Mirror

Blenerhasset, Thomas, The Seconde Part of the Mirrour for Magistrates Conteining the Falles of the Infortunate Princes of this Lande, from the Conquest of Caesar, unto the Commyng of Duke William the Conquerour ([London]: Richard Webster, 1578). 1578L Baldwin, William, et al., The Last Part of the Mirour for Magistrates Wherein May be Seene by Examples Passed in this Realme, with Howe Greevous Plagues, Vyces are Punished in Great Princes & Magistrats, and How Frayle and Unstable Worldly Prosperity is Founde, Where Fortune Seemeth Most Highly to Favour (London: Thomas Marshe, 1578). 1587 Higgins, John, et al., The Mirour for Magistrates Wherein May bee Seene, by Examples Passed in this Realme, with How Greevous Plagues Vices are Punished in Great Princes and Magistrates, and How Fraile and Unstable Worldly Prosperity is Found, where Fortune Seemeth Most Highly to Favour: Newly Imprinted, and with the Addition of Divers Tragedies Enlarged (London: Henry Marshe, 1587). 1610 Niccols, Richard, et al., A Mirour for Magistrates Being a True Chronicle Historie of the Untimely Falles of such Unfortunate Princes and Men of Note, as have Happened since the First Entrance of Brute into this Iland, untill this our Latter Age (London: Felix Kyngston, 1610).

1578S

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Introduction It is the condition of historical narrative to be ‘unperfect’. Denoting a specific shade of imperfection, things which are unperfect are ‘not fully developed or brought to completion’, just as history, as far as we know, is never finished.1 The term connotes the immature, and underdone. It functions as a modesty topos for John Lyly, who asked the dedicatee of Euphues and His England (1580), Edward de Vere, to pardon his work ‘although the Historie seeme unperfect’, or, as Lyly frames it in an elaborate simile of visual art, legless.2 Lyly’s ‘unperfect’ encloses a challenge to participate: on his title page he playfully invites readers to ‘Commend it or amend it’. But his meaning also blurs into the unnatural or monstrous. Unperfect texts are frequently ‘maimed’ or ‘mutilated’. Like John Higgins’s Claudius Tiberius Drusus, ‘Unperfect all, begun by nature, but begot | Not absolute, not well, nor fully framde’ (1587, f. 89r), the physically unperfect coalesces, in the early modern mind, with intimations of sinfulness and evil. Both senses are brought to bear in Francis Bacon’s delineation of types of unperfect modern histories in his Two Bookes, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605). There is the respectable kind, ‘which industrious persons . . . doe save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time’. And then there is the other sort, ‘the Corruptions and Mothes of Historie . . . that have fretted and corroded the sound bodies’ of the nation’s past.3 So when Thomas Blenerhasset describes his reading, and casting aside, of the ‘unperfect Mirour for Magistrates’ in his isolated army garrison, there is more to it than simple incompleteness (1578S, sig. *iiiir). The successive authors and editors of the Mirror for Magistrates all postulate ambitious projects which they never finish; one after another, William Baldwin, 1 ‘unperfect, adj.’, OED Online, March 2016, Oxford University Press, http://www. oed.com/view/Entry/216151?rskey=jIIK47&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 28 May 2016). 2 John Lyly, Euphues and His England (London: T. East for Gabriel Cawood, 1580), sig. Aiiijr. 3 Francis Bacon, Two Bookes, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (London: Thomas Purfoot and Thomas Creede for Henry Tomes, 1605), f. 11r.

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2

Unperfect Histories

Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols are called away to other affairs, leaving each collection of historical verse complaints open to later appropriation. In each of their Mirrors, an ideal English history is figured in the plans they say they have made; by leaving each iteration incomplete, they declare that ideal’s impossibility. But this recurrent statement is not just about time; it is also about text. The subject of these histories is not just the past, but also the act of composition. Baldwin, his co-authors, and his successors, are interested in more active, more devious forms of the imperfect than mere incompletion, and Unperfect Histories argues that all of the Mirrors’ authors not only identify but also embrace and exploit the instability of a textual past. The stability of historical narratives mattered in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, because they underwrote the construction of monarchy, religion, ownership, and Englishness.4 As these ideas were reformed and redefined under the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, history was mined and reframed in justification. Writers constantly cited Cicero, for whom history was ‘testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis’—the witness of time, light of truth, life of memory, teacher of life and messenger of antiquity—to justify the mode’s superlatively authoritative basis for both moral education and practical guidance.5 The Mirror, too, was a work designed to be ‘studied for action’ from its inception at the Inns of Court, as well as unfolding out of a tradition of commonplacing; both angles underpinned by the humanist education of the Mirror authors

4 See Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Arthur B. Ferguson, Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993); Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5 See, for example, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 11:129 (1990), 30–78; Freyja Cox Jensen, ‘Reading Florus in Early Modern England’, RS, 23:5 (2009), 659–77; Julie Crawford, ‘Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her De Mornay’, HLQ, 73:2 (2010), 193–223; Cathy Shrank, ‘ “This Fatall Medea,” “This Clytemnestra”: Reading and the Detection of Mary Queen of Scots’, HLQ, 73:3 (2010), 523–41; Paulina Kewes, ‘Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England’, HLQ, 74:1 (2011), 515–51.

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Introduction

3

and their readers.6 Its prose and verse narratives of composition frame a collection of complaints which are melting pots of sententiae and exempla, while each complaint is presented as an exemplum writ large. The Mirror corpus grew between 1554 and 1610, as the success of William Baldwin’s belatedly published Myrroure for Magistrates (1559), a series of complaints in the voices of late medieval rulers and rebels, prompted extended editions (1563, 1578), revised editions (1571, 1574), ancient British and Saxon prequels by Higgins and Blenerhasset (1574 and 1578), and enlarged compilations by Higgins and Niccols (1587, 1610). This enlargement took place against a backdrop of intense and complex historiographical change. William Camden and John Selden’s antiquarianism and chorography began to supplant traditional chronicle history, the uses and kinds of histories available proliferated, and the peeling away of historiography from imaginative literature was crystallized.7 The continuity inherent in the Mirror’s rolling appropriation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s de casibus form, via John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes which translated and amplified Boccaccio’s collection of tragedies, masks the diversity of authors, genres, and contexts, as well as strategies of reading and rewriting, which shape its development.8 However, the Mirror’s premise, providing moral guidance through historical examples, remained largely valid, and its form endured as a medium through which successive generations were moved to participate in the historiographical process. Unperfect Histories hopes to demonstrate, though, that rather than being a monolithic compendium of moral exempla, or a standard iteration of this genre, there is a fundamental division between what the texts of the Mirror do, and what they say they are for. The Mirror’s de casibus framework exposes the coercion of history into an exemplary mode it will not fit, a realization with the power to prise ‘history’ and ‘the past’ apart. Its authors consider history through a series of generic filters, including epic, tragedy, and romance.9 To borrow Peter Conrad’s assessment of Chaucer’s Nun’s 6 See Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). 7 See Patrick Collinson, This England: Essays on the English Nation and Commonwealth in the Sixteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), especially Introduction and Ch. 9; Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino: Huntington Library Publications, 2006). 8 On Lydgate’s adaptation of Boccaccio see Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge, 1970). 9 Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), Introduction.

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4

Unperfect Histories

Priest’s Tale, ‘[i]f read morally, it is trite; if read aesthetically, it is superbly bold’.10 Its subjects are reading, writing, textual transmission, and interpretation; of signs, events, language, and form. This book reads Baldwin, his collaborators, and his disciples as a group of early modern thinkers who were aware of and highly exercised by the division between fiction and history.11 They wrestled with the incompatibility of the roles of poet and historian, and explored the balance of authority in the related responsibilities of compiler, editor, translator, printer, and reader. One of the more heated areas of debate in current scholarship on the Mirror is whether or not Baldwin’s prose frame offers a truthful account of discussions between contributors to the collection which actually took place, or a fictive, metaleptic narrative designed to draw attention to the work’s artificiality. Scott C. Lucas has undertaken painstaking archival detective work based on its clues, to reconstruct the circumstances of the Mirror’s composition; by contrast, Donald Jellerson and others see Baldwin’s story as overtly ‘mythical’.12 While I hope in some ways to achieve a balance between these approaches, aware of Mike Pincombe’s warning not to take too cynical an approach to Baldwin’s claims, it seems to me that the uses of fiction to explore the expression and limits of textual authority is Baldwin’s primary subject, both in the Mirror and throughout his oeuvre.13 Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols, too, foreground the materiality of their encounters with their hypotexts (1574F, f. 1r; 1578S, sig. *iiiir; 1610, p. 557). The authors all make transmission the bedrock of their interrogation of and participation in the theory and practice of historiography, questioning both the oral, through mistrust of rumour and report, and the written, by foregrounding historiographical discrepancies. Rather than being simply of bibliographical interest, then, transmission is central to the Mirror’s content.14 The Mirror’s authors might agree with 10 Peter Conrad, Cassell’s History of English Literature (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), p. 48. 11 Cf. Levine, Humanism and History, pp. 20–53; Blair Worden, ‘Historians and Poets’, HLQ, 68:1–2 (2005), 71–93. 12 See Scott C. Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), and more recently ‘Henry Lord Stafford, “The Two Rogers”, and the Creation of A Mirror for Magistrates, 1554–1563’, RES, 66:277 (2015), 843–58. 13 See Mike Pincombe, ‘William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates’, RS, 27:2 (2013), 183–98; Jane Griffiths, Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Ch. 5; R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 14 Cf. Jennifer Richards, ‘Transforming A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Margaret Healy and Tom Healy (eds), Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing, 1500–1650

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Introduction

5

D. F. McKenzie that ‘new readers of course make new texts, and that their new meanings are a function of their new forms’.15 I espouse McKenzie and Jerome McGann’s broad conception of responsibility for a text’s production, and awareness of the historicity and variability of multiple iterations, while my interpretation is governed by a historical formalist awareness of language, genre, and form’s historically contingent significances.16 More often, though, I take my lead from the Mirror texts themselves, which frequently anticipate McKenzie and McGann, and Hayden White’s postmodern metahistory, to interrogate the social construction and misconstruction of meaning: the span of the Mirror’s development literalizes the claim that ‘[e]very society rewrites its past, every reader rewrites its texts’.17 Rather than believing that historiographical problems could be solved by more information, or better sources, the Mirror is interested in the bias of historians. Especially significant is McKenzie’s suggestion that the form of a text is ‘less an embodiment of past meaning than a pretext for present meaning’.18 The relationship between past and present meaning becomes crucial, particularly to the compendious Mirror editions of 1587 and 1610, which construct their new functions by eliding past significance with present understanding. It is central to my reading of the Mirror corpus that the separate editions are written and read as products of changing circumstances, but that their form is constantly self-reflexive. I suggest that we reframe the Mirror not as a canonical hypotext followed by a series of inferior derivatives, but as an expanding body of work which is repeatedly reimagined and recast, as each addition responds in new ways to the questions posed by Baldwin’s central collection. By examining the Mirror’s persistent engagement with history as textual, and its sustained interrogation of what that might mean both personally and nationally, Unperfect Histories seeks to provide a comprehensive reassessment of the Mirror texts, resituating each publication within the evolving landscape of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century conversations about poetry and historiography. As such, this book is interested in

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 48–63, at p. 48. Richards states that the Mirror ‘is not only about transformation but . . . was itself in transformation’. Cf. Sherri Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 150–84. 15 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 29. 16 See Stephen Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Abingdon and New York: Ashgate, 2007), Introduction. 17 18 McKenzie, Sociology, p. 25. McKenzie, Sociology, p. 33.

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6

Unperfect Histories

the development of several themes and their place in early modern intellectual culture. How significant or relevant is the truth of historical accounts? What part does social memory play in shaping contemporary political culture and conceptions of virtue? To what extent does ethical worth inhere in aesthetic value? How far can we trust oral and written narratives, and what happens when those narratives are manipulated for political or personal ends? In addressing these questions, and how the answers to them shift across its fifty-year expansion, the centrality of the Mirror to early modern understanding and representations of the past becomes very clearly apparent. Twentieth-century criticism of the Mirror was critical indeed, epitomized by the damning pronouncements of C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard in the 1950s and 1960s, but instigated by Lily B. Campbell’s somewhat grudging assessment of the work even in the introduction to her own edition.19 Recently, Baldwin’s Mirror has enjoyed a scholarly rehabilitation, led by Paul Budra’s A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition (2000), and Lucas’s A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (2009). Although very different kinds of study, these monographs share a close focus on the political context and purpose of the early editions. Budra reads the 1559–63 editions with a post-structuralist ear to the texts’ subversive polyvocality, while Lucas provides a revisionist account of their production history and Marian suppression. Scholarly consideration has rarely extended, though, to the collection’s reception and appropriation by later writers.20 While I have not set out to cheerlead unduly for Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s Mirror texts, this new assessment necessarily counters the critical consensus that they are simply not worth reading, which is often where their treatment ends; rare considerations of the whole span of the Mirror’s development wrongly posit inexorable decline.21 The assumption of the Mirror’s deterioration over time, and the binary division of its transmission history into phases either side of Baldwin’s 19 See Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield, ‘Introduction: A Mirror for Magistrates and Early Modern English Culture’, in Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (eds), A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 1–14, at p. 1 [hereafter MMC]. 20 On Higgins and Blenerhasset see Richards, ‘Transforming’; Paulina Kewes, ‘Romans in the Mirror’, and Harriet Archer, ‘ “Those Chronicles Which Other Men Had”: Paralipsis and Thomas Blenerhasset’s Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1578)’, both in MMC, pp. 126–46 and pp. 147–63. 21 Paul Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 22, and passim. Cf. Dermot Cavanagh, ‘Review of Paul Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition’, EMLS, 7:2 (September 2001), 1–7, where it is suggested that ‘[p]erhaps the sense of a progressive dissolution of the work’s merit is also a little over-drawn’.

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Introduction

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death, are mutually supporting fallacies which have become entrenched, and fostered the denigration of later versions. Lily B. Campbell’s editions have helped to bolster these interpretations by separating Baldwin’s Mirror (1938) from the later Parts Added (1946) by Higgins and Blenerhasset, and leaving out altogether Niccols’s editorial transformation of the Mirror and his own collection of complaints, A Winter Nights Vision (1610).22 The present study builds on the recent recognition of the centrality of textual transmission to Baldwin’s Mirror, and extends it to encompass Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s additions to the corpus.23 I argue that when read as topical allegory or exemplary fables, as Budra and Lucas try to do, the value of Higgins and Blenerhasset’s writing is eclipsed, but if we read the additions through their exploration of textual authority, their workings are unlocked. Higgins and Niccols’s compilations also have topical applications, but attention to the theme of textual instability makes sense of their editorial strategies. Thanks in large part to Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, the ‘Drab Age’ moniker which has dogged the Mirror is on the wane, and Tudor writing may be taken seriously.24 I hope to show as well, though, that it pays not to take the Mirror for Magistrates too seriously. Once the dusty worthiness of Higgins and Blenerhasset’s reputations has been cast off, their genetic associations with Baldwin come into focus, and their sceptical histories come to life. Critics frequently cite the Mirror’s contemporary popularity. But what did it really mean to hijack a project so popular that it could be identified simply by the (inaccurate!) abbreviation, ‘M. of M.’, as in Robert Allott’s Englands Parnassus (1600)?25 Allott attributed around three thousand words of verse to the Mirror in his anthology, alongside extracts by poets 22 Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 20. Joseph Haslewood did edit Niccols’s Mirror, but flattened and distorted the work’s transmission by using the 1587 edition as its base text: Joseph Haslewood (ed.), Mirror for Magistrates (London, 1815), vol. 1, p. xxix. Cf. Sherri Geller, ‘Editing under the Influence of the Standard Textual Hierarchy: Misrepresenting A Mirror for Magistrates in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Editions’, Textual Cultures, 2:1 (2007), 43–77, at 45. 23 Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches’; Donald Jellerson, ‘The Spectral Historiopoetics of the Mirror for Magistrates’, JNR, 2:1 (2010), 54–71; Cathy Shrank, ‘ “Hoisted high upon the rolling wheele”: Elinor Cobham’s Lament’, and Angus Vine, ‘Bibliophily in Baldwin’s Mirror’, both in MMC, pp. 109–25 and pp. 89–106; Pincombe, ‘Baldwin and A Mirror’, 12; Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, ‘Doing Away with the Drab Age: Research Opportunities in Mid-Tudor Literature (1530–1580)’, LC, 7:3 (2010), 160–76. See also Constance C. Relihan, Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 23. 24 Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature: 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Pincombe and Shrank, ‘Doing Away with the Drab Age’. 25 Robert Allott (ed.), Englands Parnassus (London: N. Ling C. Burby and T. Hayes, 1600), Dedication, sig. A4r.

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such as Gascoigne, Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd. In order to appreciate how the Mirror functioned in amongst these luminaries, its full transmission history has to be reconsidered. The 1559–63 Mirror is well known as a source and influence for Shakespeare’s tetralogies. When, around 1595, Shakespeare’s Richard II shattered a mirror, its shards stood for the ‘brittle glory’ of his forfeited kingship, more accurately reflected in fragments following his deposition. Well might an Elizabethan Richard expect a mirror to illustrate his downfall: by the time of the play’s composition, the Mirror for Magistrates had been England’s principal purveyor of ‘sad stories of the death of kings’ for nearly forty years.26 It catalogued more candidly than the ‘flatt’ring glass’ Richard smashes the mutability of fortune, and the mortality of monarchs. To posit its earliest iterations as the inspiration for late Elizabethan drama, though, is to conflate the fluctuating topical resonances of late medieval history at distinct moments into a single cultural response. Richard II had become a common figure for Elizabeth I by the time of her notorious claim in 1601, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’27 The comparison by this point in her reign referred to the uncertain succession, and Elizabeth’s increasing vulnerability as a monarch, and Shakespeare’s play is regularly read as a response to this context.28 However, in 1578, Sir Francis Knollys had defended his unpalatable advice to the queen by claiming that he refused to ‘play the partes of King Richard the Second’s men’.29 Here, at a peak of the Mirror’s late sixteenth-century expansion, Knollys used the allusion to denounce court flattery.30 If the suppressed Memorial had been calculated to ‘protest specific instances of Marian officers’ abuse of English law on the queen’s behalf ’, the Richard II sequence’s re-presentation under Elizabeth in 1559 represented the first in a series of renegotiations of the narrative’s topical applicability.31 The influence of the Mirror’s brand of history on Shakespeare’s plays provides one expression of the ways in which the texts, and their characters, had come to be read by the end of the century. The

26 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (The Arden Shakespeare, London: Methuen Drama, 2002), 3.II.152. 27 See Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation” ’, RES, Advance Access (14 July 2012). 28 From Evelyn May Albright, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy’, PMLA, 42:3 (1927), 686–720 passim. 29 Forker (ed.), King Richard II, see Introduction, p. 5 n. 1. 30 For the ongoing modulation of the play’s topical resonance beyond the Elizabethan period see Margaret Shewring, King Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 31 Lucas, Politics, p. 16.

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evolution of the Mirror forms part of the cultural fabric out of which they acquired their late Elizabethan and early Jacobean significance.32 Further, it is not just the particulars, or the form of history and the shape of his own tragic fate which Shakespeare’s Richard reads in the Mirror. Shakespeare’s Richard II constructs himself textually, and his fascination with the presentation of his own narrative is informed and shadowed by the Mirror’s bestselling de casibus formulation.33 Stories, retold and remade, provide a locus in the play for desperate anxiety held in tension with desperate faith. In the Mirror as in Richard II, the vulnerability of textual history to reconstruction and misappropriation is exposed, while its political and memorial roles are exploited and celebrated. The Mirror also exerted more mercurial influences, perpetuating models of providentialism and teleology that were otherwise being superseded, and, crucially, a selfreflexive awareness of these models and how to read them. By the late 1590s and 1600s, appropriations of the Mirror had proliferated to such an extent as to become tedious—comically tedious, and the object of satire. It is difficult to survey this landscape for evidence of the Mirror’s impact, since it was so pervasive and embedded; the texts deployed commonplaces, and were in turn excerpted by readers. As in the incestuous, appropriative language of chronicle history, it is impossible to trace individual borrowings with certainty. The Mirror’s familiarity, though, is reflected back by Henry V ’s Fluellen. His comically repetitive depiction of Fortune alludes to a discourse that must have grown tiresome in its ubiquity: Fortune is painted blind . . . to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you . . . that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls, and rolls.34

This description slyly evokes the Mirror’s more laborious rehearsals of Fortune’s fickleness, and its extended publication history, while Fluellen’s ‘Fluellenism’, the tendency to draw tenuous parallels between historical figures, may be read as a parody of the Mirror’s function.35 Also a commonplace of early modern historical interpretation, this was no doubt 32 See Bart van Es, ‘ “They do it with mirrors”: Spenser, Shakespeare, Baldwin’s Mirror, and Elizabethan Literature’s Political Vanishing Act’, in MMC, pp. 216–30. 33 Cf. Budra, De casibus, pp. 85–6, 92. 34 William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (The Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 3.6.26–37. Craik identifies Locrine (1595), Gascoigne’s Jocasta (1566, printed 1573), and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy as objects of parody here. 35 As identified in Richard Levin, ‘On Fluellen’s Figures, Christ Figures, and James Figures’, PMLA, 89:2 (1974), 302–11.

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wearing thin after the repeatedly implied topicality of the eighty-five Mirror complaints available to Shakespeare’s contemporaries.36 Ben Jonson sends it up explicitly in the opening scene of Bartholomew Fair (1614), when his Scrivener demands that the audience give up anyone who will pretend to affirme (on his owne inspired ignorance) what Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the Justice, what great Lady by the Pigge-woman, what conceal’d States-man, by the Seller of Mouse-trappes, and so of the rest.37

While John Marston’s ‘Reactio’ seems to defend ‘Magistrates mirrour’ from ‘thy enuious hungry fangs’, Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1598) comically denounces the adherent of the form, who Urgeth his melting Muse with solemne teares Rime of some dreerie fates, of lucklesse peeres. Then brings he up some branded whining ghost, To tell how olde misfortunes had him tost.38

Hall claims, Too popular is Tragick Poesie, Strayning his tip-toes for a farthing fee, ... Some braver braine in high Heroick rimes Compileth worme eate stories of old times.39

The satire’s contempt depends on readers’ familiarity with the form. For all their scorn, these satires attend closely to the workings of textual transmission in the Mirrors, encapsulating the tension between composition, performance, and the compilation of oral and written narratives. In short, we need to recalibrate our understanding of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century’s literary landscape. We need to recognize that the Mirror’s title had passed into idiomatic use, and to take into account contemporary fluency not just with the subject matter or style of the 36 See Willy Maley, ‘ “Let a Welsh Correction Teach You a Good English Condition”: Shakespeare, Wales and the Critics’, in Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer (eds), Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 177–89, at p. 186. In 1610, Niccols’s addition of the Winter Nights Vision would make this ninety-five. 37 Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fayre (London: I. B. for Robert Allot, 1631), Induction, sig. A6r. Cf. Lucas, Politics, pp. 1–3. See also George Chapman, May-Day (London: William Stansby for John Browne, 1611), p. 39; cf. Geoffrey R. Hope, ‘Tales of Literacy and Authority in the Violier (1521): The French Gesta Romanorum’, BHR, 59:2 (1997), 353–63, at 357. 38 John Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (London: [James Roberts] for Edmond Matts, 1598), p. 62; Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum (London: Richard Bradocke for Robert Dexter, 1598), Book I, Satire V, p. 12. 39 Hall, Virgidemiarum, Book I, Satire IV, p. 10.

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Mirror, but with the interpretative strategies it demanded.40 The poetic transmission and topical interpretation of history are central to the Mirror’s early modern reception as well as its practice.41 The chapters below offer snapshots of moments in the collection’s expansion, to trace the evolution of its engagement with textual transmission, what it meant to appropriate the Mirror form as the century progressed, and how successive editors responded to and reformulated the discourse of imperfection which persisted across the text’s development. Each chapter charts the expansion of the Mirror against contemporary changes to poetic and historiographical trends, and the shifting allegiances, literary and political, of the social and print communities of which the Mirror’s development was a part. At the heart of this approach is McGann’s ‘double helix of a work’s reception history and its production history’.42 This model works to illuminate both the ‘sociology’ of the Mirror corpus and, within that, the relationship of the Mirror’s transmission to its own representation of textual influence, exchange, and production. Beginning with the 1559 edition of late medieval figures’ complaints overseen by William Baldwin, this study follows the extension of the corpus through the addition of ancient British and Saxon ‘prequels’ by John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset in the 1570s, to the monumental compilation of the First and Last parts of the Mirror in 1587, and Richard Niccols’s heavily revised and enlarged edition, printed in 1610. The book takes a predominantly chronological approach to the Mirror’s development and expansion through the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; ‘predominantly’, because a lateral comparison of the different contributors’ writing is also essential to an interpretation of the body of work as a whole. In Chapter 1, I revisit the genesis and expansion of Baldwin’s Mirror, and put forward a fresh account of its adaptation between 1563 and 1610. Banned under Mary I, Baldwin and his co-authors’ extension of Lydgate’s fifteenth-century Fall of Princes was printed as A Myrroure for Magistrates in 1559, when its allegorical responses to specific instances of Marian corruption were safe to publish, and extended in 1563 to call for legislative clarification of the limits of poetic freedom under the new regime.43 40 See, for example, William Est, The Triall of True Teares (London: Tho. Creede for Arthur Johnson, 1613), p. 23; Thomas Gibson, The Blessing of a Good King (London: Tho. Creede and N. Okes for Arthur Iohnson, 1614), p. 106. 41 See Lucas, Politics, pp. 234–5; Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’; Jessica Winston, ‘Rethinking Absolutism: English de casibus Tragedy in the 1560s’, van Es, ‘They do it with mirrors’, and Philip Schwyzer, ‘ “Most out of order”: Preposterous Time in A Mirror for Magistrates and Shakespeare’s Histories’, all in MMC. 42 Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 17. 43 Lucas, Politics, pp. 202–3.

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Where the Mirror has predominantly been read with regard to its political contexts and aims, this chapter explores the ways in which, by drawing attention to conflicting historiographical accounts and the susceptibility of speech to misinterpretation, Baldwin transformed his continuation of Lydgate, and covert topical allegory, into a broader reflection on textual transmission and its discontents. This reading frames my interpretation of the work’s early modern expansion, in this and subsequent chapters. Its historiopoetic purpose changed over the course of Elizabeth’s reign, as editors reshaped the focus of the text, and Thomas Marshe, the printer, repackaged it to accommodate Higgins’s ancient British collection. The Mirror’s intended readership changed too, as the target audience moved from Baldwin’s Inns of Court lawyer, to Higgins’s upwardly mobile history buff, who prized a solid understanding of unknowable British origins. The chapter concludes by considering the 1587 changes to Baldwin’s Mirror, including the addition of tragedies of Nicholas Burdet and Cardinal Wolsey, in tandem with its renovation in Richard Niccols’s 1610 edition, as early modern uses of history were shifting. Niccols’s revisions, widely condemned as a mutilation of the Elizabethan Mirror, take on new significance when situated within the work’s continued transtextual engagement with historiographical instability. Chapter 2 suggests, then, that rather than co-opting the Mirror format as a vehicle for a straightforward nationalist retelling of British history, as critics have claimed, Higgins’s First Part grapples with a different but related shade of historiographical imperfection, confronting not only the unreliability but also the all-out absence of historical records. Both Baldwin and Higgins were concerned with historiography, but while Baldwin’s exploration of historiographical process highlighted conflict between sources, and the potential for the opportunistic manipulation of accounts, Higgins’s tackled the absence of historical records for British history, and the resulting loss of cultural identity.44 The third chapter is devoted to Blenerhasset’s Second Part of the Mirror (1578), the least well known but in many ways the richest of the Mirror’s imitations. Here, I argue that Blenerhasset’s text and paratext make a radical intervention into the project of completion which Higgins appears to pursue. The work focuses for the first time in the Mirror’s development on the role of memory in history writing, with devastating effect. I show how Blenerhasset’s emphatic depiction of his physical and intellectual isolation, 44 See Herbert Grabes, ‘The Creation of “English Literature” by Early Modern Literary Histories’, in Mihaela Irimia and Dragoş Ivana (eds), Imitatio-Inventio: The Rise of ‘Literature’ from Early to Classic Modernity (New Europe College, Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român, 2009), pp. 119–37, at p. 124; Shrank, Writing the Nation, Ch. 2.

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and the deconstruction of written records implemented by his prose frame, work to reveal the verse complaints themselves as flawed and contingent, based, as all history writing must be, on idiosyncratic perspectives, local concerns, and creative reconstruction. Chapter 4 returns to Higgins, to explore his additions to the 1587 Mirror compilation. Firmed up and nailed down since 1574, Higgins’s Mirror material casts a new light on his interests and priorities, and reflects a different contemporary climate. The chapter explores the facets of this new atmosphere into which the most influential text of the Mirror was released. It suggests that, while tensions around the Elizabethan succession crisis mounted, and concerned contemporaries grasped for a more viable poetics of counsel, the 1587 Mirror more than ever hinted at the inadequacy of exemplary history. The final chapter sees another compilation marketed to yet another altered set of topical interests. In Niccols’s 1610 edition the work’s political zeal is recharged, as he attempts to recast the corpus as a whole, with the addition of a collection of new complaints and some heavy revision of the existing text, to speak to the concerns of a postElizabethan literary elite. This chapter contests Paul Budra’s contention that the Mirror deteriorated under Niccols ‘from polemic to panegyric’, and reads the work as a deployment of an Elizabethan textual monument in opposition to James I’s disappointing administration. The Mirror is capacious, allusive, and contradictory; there will always be more to uncover. But to approach this diverse group of poets through their shared obsession with volatile textualities, to watch them all framing their writing as reading and their reading as conversation, offers one way into the maze.

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1 Baldwin’s Mirror, 1554–1610 The Mirror for Magistrates is a collection of historical verse complaints. It was commissioned by the printer John Wayland to extend John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, to tell the tragic stories of English rulers from the death of Edward III to the reign of Mary I. William Baldwin, Wayland’s assistant, compiled the collection from a series of manuscripts, read aloud by members of the group of poets he gathered to assist him in completing the commission. The collection opens with Thomas Sackville’s Induction, and is divided into three books, the first containing complaints from the period 1377–1483, the second 1483–5, and the third 1485–1554. The principal aim of this collection is to promote virtuous behaviour, and the exercise of justice by the English ruling class. Or at least, that is the book described to us by the prose frame interspersed between verse tragedies, which narrates their recitation and immediate reception by Baldwin and the fictional poets’ collective. It is not, however, the book printed by Thomas Marshe under the title A Myrroure for Magistrates in 1559, in which this account appears, and it is certainly not The Mirour for Magistrates printed in 1587 by his son, Henry. It is not even the text called A Memorial of suche Princes as Since the Tyme of King Richard the Seconde, have been Unfortunate in the Realme of England, commissioned and printed by the Catholic printer John Wayland in 1553–4 and then suppressed, from which the Mirror was to emerge—so far as we can tell from the fragment that survives. From the very first, the Mirror as we have it draws attention to the volatile nature of textual authority, destabilizing our faith in written records through its multilayered fictions of transmission. As the collection of complaint poems expands across the second half of the sixteenth century, its engagement with the transmission of texts shifts, along with its authors’ approaches to historiography, its public function, and its personnel. Critics are inclined to focus on ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’, the collection of late medieval characters’ complaints printed in the editions of 1559 and 1563, and scholarship has largely overlooked the substantial revisions made to these editions in the 1570s, not to mention the later appropriations of the corpus by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard

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Niccols.1 But each of these contributors rereads the Mirror for new contexts, and shapes the text to conform to their own understanding of its significance. Our appreciation of the Mirror, its extraordinary popularity and profound impact on early modern literary culture, is unacceptably distorted if we do not take these later publications into account. Critics are quick to observe that the Mirror for Magistrates’ history ‘is one of the most confused, controversial, and error-filled subjects in all of Tudor literary studies’.2 The common separation of this slippery, unconventional work’s history into two distinct phases, ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’ (1559–63) and the ‘post-Baldwin’ editions (1571–1610), belies its evolution’s complexity, and sets up an artificially antagonistic relationship between texts.3 Certainly, the paratextual material and prose frame describe how William Baldwin oversaw and coordinated the composition and collection of the Mirror complaints in 1559 and 1563, before his death in 1563 prevented his further involvement.4 But the complaints in the voices of late medieval figures, and the accompanying prose frame, are reproduced (give or take editorial alterations and interpolations) in six editions between 1571 and 1610, as part of or alongside ‘post-Baldwin’ versions. This chapter aims to unpick the intricacies of the six texts referred to collectively as ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’. The Mirror as printed in 1559 and 1563 tells the story of a threevolume complaint collection, composed and compiled by a group of writers, overseen by George Ferrers, with William Baldwin on secretarial duties; we know about Thomas Chaloner’s involvement, while other named participants include Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Phaer, ‘Cavyl’ (possibly Humphrey Cavell), and John Dolman. Scott C. Lucas has recently made a convincing case for Henry, Lord Stafford’s participation; Lord Vaux, we are told, agreed to write the tragedy of the princes in the Tower, ‘but what hee hath done therein I am not certayne, & therfore I let it passe, til I knowe further’ (1578L, f. 129r).5 While it does not share the louche after-hours set-up or fantastical happenings which characterize Ferrers and Baldwin’s first fictive outing together in the framing narrative of Beware the Cat (composed 1550s, first extant printed edition 1570), readers au fait with that text’s irreverent blurring of fact and fiction cannot but be aware that all may not be as it seems. The premise of the historic ‘falls’ narrated by the Mirror shares an ironic basis on a par with Baldwin’s 1

2 In particular Lucas, Politics. Lucas, Politics, p. 237. Geller, ‘Editing under the Influence’, at 43 n. 1. 4 See John N. King, ‘Baldwin, William (d. in or before 1563)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1171, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. 5 Lucas, ‘Henry Lord Stafford’. 3

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Treatise of Morall Philosophy (1547), whose compilation of learned commonplaces turns out to be a hoax; his Menippean play with the genre of esoteric natural philosophy tracts in Beware the Cat, too, should alert readers to the potential subversion of yet another reputable sixteenthcentury form, in this case the de casibus complaint, and the speculum principis more generally.6 The three-volume complaint collection Baldwin postulates never materializes—the Mirror as we have it is a metanarrative of its compilation, rather than the text itself. Based on the previously prepared Memorial, it had been conceived as an extension of Lydgate’s Fall (1494), itself a translation and expansion of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, via the French version of Laurent de Premierfait (1365–1418), Des cas des nobles homes et femmes (1409). In some respects, Baldwin does take his lead from Lydgate himself, whose Fall of Princes exhibits its fair share of metapoetic commentary. In translating Laurent’s French version of Boccaccio’s Latin, Lydgate made plain the licence afforded to the ‘artificer’, who may chaunge and turne bi good discrecioun Shappis, formys, and newli hem devyse, Make and unmake in many sondry wyse[.]7

Nevertheless, Baldwin-the-author’s detached meditation on textual reliability has been overwhelmingly neglected in favour of Baldwin-thenarrator’s politics, and his (albeit playful) interrogation of early modern rule, more directly inherited from Boccaccio’s original vilification of tyranny in the De casibus.8 Like the erstwhile critical focus on the antiCatholicism of Beware the Cat, the politics of the Mirror, the specifics of which probably led to its suppression under Mary I, are only part of Baldwin’s wider interest in textual reliability.9

ORIGINS AND AUTHORITY Sherri Geller, Donald Jellerson, Cathy Shrank, and Angus Vine have led the examination of the 1559–63 Mirror’s interest in historiographical 6 See R. W. Maslen, ‘William Baldwin and the Politics of Pseudo-Philosophy in Tudor Prose Fiction’, SP, 97:1 (2000), 29–60, at 32. 7 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen (Early English Text Society, London: Oxford University Press, 1924), Book I, Prologue, p. 1. 8 See Lucas, Politics; Budra, De casibus; Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 249. 9 See William A. Ringler, ‘Beware the Cat and the Beginnings of English Fiction’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 12:2 (1979), 113–26, at 117; Rachel Stenner, ‘The Act of Penning in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat’, RS, 30:3 (2016), 334–49.

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instability, while Mike Pincombe was among the first to pay attention to Baldwin’s dark sense of humour in the text’s treatment of its historical corpses.10 These include Robert Tresilian; ‘the two Rogers, surnamed Mortimers’; Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester; Lord Mowbray; Richard II; Owain Glyn Dŵr; Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland; Richard, duke of Cambridge;11 Thomas Montacute, earl of Salisbury; James I of Scotland; William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk; Jack Cade; Richard Plantagenet, duke of York; Lord Clifford; John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester; Richard Neville, earl of Warwick; Henry VI; George Plantagenet, duke of Clarence; and Edward IV. Based on the extant Memorial table of contents, only Duke Humphrey’s complaint is missing from the original scheme, which roughly encompasses the period 1377–1485. Opening with the complaint of chief justice Tresilian, a poem which winks at the legal milieu of the work’s authors and readers and ‘takes interpretation as its theme’, ‘the historiopoetic Mirror knowingly performs its work in the shared terrain of discourses in the slow process of becoming separate disciplines’.12 Where Jellerson suggests that Baldwin’s prose frame gives ‘the impression that the writers compose on the spot as the spectres possess them’, Vine, much closer to the mark in my view, interrogates the Mirror authors’ ‘bibliophily’.13 Their accounts agree, though, that Baldwin’s Mirror shows how ‘history . . . happens after the fact, and events will be given the valence of “innocence” or “crime” by those in the present who seek to control interpretation of the past according to changeable current values and power structures’.14 Vine observes that the Mirror’s opening Epistle draws attention to books, not only to their use as sources but also to ‘their physical form and their presence’, and their authorship as ‘a material and mechanical practice’.15 This close engagement with the practicalities of history writing also reveals, Vine argues, ‘a penetrating (and perhaps surprising) recognition of the openness of history to interpretation, an awareness of the contestation of the historical record, and an understanding of the uncertainty of historical evidence and testimony’.16 The uncertainty of the evidence and testimony they discuss is compounded by the fact that, in Jellerson’s words, ‘the poetic 10 Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches’; Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’; Shrank, ‘Elianor Cobham’, and Vine, ‘Bibliophily’; Pincombe, ‘Baldwin and A Mirror’, 12; Pincombe and Shrank, ‘Doing Away with the Drab Age’. See also Relihan, Fashioning Authority, p. 23. 11 Erroneously listed in the contents as earl of Cambridge from 1559 to 1563. 12 Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, 4. Cf. Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches’, 157. See Winston, Lawyers at Play. 13 Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, 7; see Vine, ‘Bibliophily’. 14 Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, 9. 15 16 Cf. Stenner, ‘Penning’. Vine, ‘Bibliophily’, 91.

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voice (and writing) that gives it form and presence bears a forged signature, “Baldwin”, that draws attention to its own forgery’.17 Shrank reads Eleanor Cobham’s lament in this light, and explores the ways in which its author, George Ferrers, and Cobham herself, reflect on the transmission of her story.18 These shades of scepticism set up my reading of the Mirror’s evolution. A Memorial, the text composed in the early 1550s and suppressed under Mary I by her Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner, often reflected positively, not negatively, on figures depicted, providing a critique of the Marian treatment of, for example, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and Edward VI’s Protector, not, as the speculum principis model presupposes, of Somerset himself. Baldwin’s chosen characters are punished for falling foul of an oppressive regime, rather than inherent wickedness, while his pleas for civil obedience and condemnation of rebels emphasize the monarchy’s dependence on the consent of the commons.19 In other words, this was not a book of advice to magistrates, except in a series of very specific, ironic senses. The unwieldy expansion and transmission of the Mirror rests on this complex and delicate platform. As its characters’ topical relevance faded after Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558, and the ostensible purpose of the text (cautionary tales for the political elite) was brought to the fore, the new title’s mirror trope distanced the 1559 edition from its earlier seditious potential by directing the reader’s gaze back at their own image instead of towards likely targets. The term ‘mirror’ was a fairly arbitrary title for all kinds of instructive sixteenth-century texts, but one which brought with it a wealth of associations.20 Baldwin’s Mirror draws on a rich semantic heritage without ever restricting itself to a single category, allowing the contingency of transmission to define the text’s reception and meaning. The modification broadened the scope of the metaphor’s reach, and it proved a runaway commercial success. Vine locates the origins of Baldwin’s bibliophily in Lydgate, but otherwise little attention has been paid to the genetic make-up of his metatextual play and interpretative scepticism.21 One of Baldwin’s antecedents may be found in amongst his fictive coterie. The tragedy of Edward IV is attributed by a member of the group to the disembodied John Skelton Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, 10. See Shrank, ‘Elianor Cobham’, and below, pp. 26–28. 19 For a detailed discussion of the text’s suppression see Lucas, Politics, from p. 20, and Ch. 2, pp. 67–105. See also Budra, De casibus, p. 23. 20 Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 38–63. 21 Vine, ‘Bibliophily’, 96–7. 17 18

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(d. 1529), one of the few named poets to provide a complaint in 1559. Although not a voluntary collaborator, and perhaps not the author of the complaint at all, Skelton is as present to us as any other contributor to the collection, as in his own Goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (1523) he had telescoped literary history into a diachronic gathering, at which all noted poets were simultaneously present.22 We know that Baldwin read Skelton: Vine notes ‘a revealing parallel’ in the 1559 Mirror with Skelton’s ‘Collyn Clout’ (1521–2), which draws, like Tresilian’s complaint, an analogy ‘between specious glossing and a Welshman’s stockings’, sharing Skelton’s point about ‘the exercise of authority and the interpretation of texts’.23 Baldwin also seems to co-opt Skelton’s multivocal protest in Speke Parott for Protestant purposes, apparently drawing on the shrill caveat ‘ware the cat, Parot, ware the fals cat!’ in the title of his own satire of clerical authority and corruption.24 But, although Skelton wrote a Latin Speculum Principis, completed in 1501 and revised for presentation to Henry VIII between 1509 and 1512, in which he appropriated the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition with a mixture of pomp and irreverence, it is not Skelton’s mirror which is most significant to the Mirror for Magistrates’ genesis and transmission.25 Rather, Baldwin and his colleagues’ interaction with Skelton’s work fits a broader pattern of post-Reformation reception; among those whom Jane Griffiths identifies at the culmination of posthumous praise for Skelton are the major Mirror author Thomas Churchyard, who contributed a prefatory encomium to Stow’s 1568 edition of Skelton’s works, and Robinson, whose Rewarde of Wickednesse borrowed heavily from the Mirror’s style, structure, and subject matter.26 Skelton’s influence is more pervasive in the Mirror corpus than his own dalliance with the speculum genre or the attributed complaint suggest. Even if he did not write Edward IV’s tragedy—and a false attribution is a joke he probably would have enjoyed—it is fitting that his name should appear in the narrative of the text’s composition. Baldwin’s early Mirror does, I think, quite clearly take its lead from Skeltonic protest; Collyn Clout’s ‘scrupulous care to dissociate himself ’ from potentially seditious utterances, for example, exactly anticipates Baldwin’s techniques.27 22 John Skelton, A Ryght Delectable Treatyse upon a Goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (London: Richard Faukes, 1523), sig. A.viiir. 23 Vine, ‘Bibliophily’, 94. 24 John Skelton, ‘Speke Parott’, in The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 230–46, at p. 233. 25 John Skelton, The Latin Writings of John Skelton, ed. David R. Carlson, SP, 88:4 (1991), pp. 1–125, at p. 107. 26 Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 158. 27 Griffiths, Poetic Authority, p. 163.

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This Mirror already exhibits the readiness to excerpt and appropriate, while the possibility of the text’s corruption, in the course of oral and material transmission between Skelton and Baldwin, is foregrounded. The complaints themselves demonstrate the confusion of textual forms from which the work is constructed, where theatre is parallel to the written word (‘As one on a stage attendyng a playe’/‘as an olde booke sayth’, 1559, f. 9r–v), and pageants, proverbs, and prophecies rub up against one another. The editor of the 1578 text saw and attempted to rectify this instability. In 1559, Skelton’s complaint is recited aloud, from memory ‘so farre as I remember’ (1559, f. 83r), but in 1578 the speaker explains that the complaint, ‘the true copy wherof as hee wrote, the same I have here readye to be red’ (1578L, f. 100r).28 The revision reveals how important textual transmission was to those involved in producing and extending the Mirror corpus throughout its history, whether they revelled in its risks or tried to curb them. Edward IV’s bilingual complaint is an appropriate foil for this volatility, as it gestures towards the chaotic echo chamber of Skelton’s oeuvre. John N. King, with reference to Beware the Cat, hears another echo chamber at work as an influence on Baldwin’s writing: that of Chaucer’s House of Fame. Baldwin ‘imitates Chaucer’s pose of timid innocence in creating his persona as a “reporter” who merely retells’ stories, and Streamer himself, Baldwin’s narrator, cites Chaucer’s poem.29 The narrator of the Mirror’s prose frame is closely related to Beware the Cat’s, extending Baldwin’s interrogation of the process of transmission from oral report to the printed page—King’s account does not fully draw out the vulnerability of the reporter’s ‘retelling’ to destabilizing inflections. Baldwin’s approach to textual authority in the Mirror, too, responds to Chaucer’s ‘treatment of fame [which] problematizes the status of writing itself ’.30 The work as a whole bears comparison with the Canterbury Tales, in its explicit engagement with the literary and historiographical implications of the genres and media of its stories’ sources, inset within a discursive framing narrative. While this structure is inherited from Lydgate—also, of course, in Chaucer

28 Ironically, the 1578 editor also makes changes to the text of Skelton’s complaint; even this interpolated concern for textual authority is a fiction. 29 John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 389. 30 Griffiths, Poetic Authority, p. 117. See also William A. Quinn, ‘Chaucer’s Recital Presence in the House of Fame and the Embodiment of Authority’, CR, 43:2 (2008), 171–96; Katherine H. Terrell, ‘Reallocation of Hermeneutic Authority in Chaucer’s House of Fame’, CR, 31:3 (1997), 279–90.

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and Boccaccio’s debt—Baldwin’s irreverent and darkly comic reworking of tragic and exemplary models returns to Chaucer’s habits.31 To the 1559 edition’s complaints, those of Anthony Woodville, Lord Hastings; Henry, duke of Buckingham; the poet Collingbourne; Richard Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester; Jane Shore; Edmund, duke of Somerset; and Michael Joseph the blacksmith were added in 1563.32 The first six made up a group which retold the machinations of Richard III’s rise to power and subsequent fall in 1485, while the duke of Somerset’s leads up to his death at the first Battle of St Albans (1455), and the tragedy of Michael Joseph recounted the Cornish Rebellion of 1497. While the 1563 ‘Second Part’ of the Mirror is traditionally regarded as exhibiting ‘an increased interest in the specific literary art of the individual tragedies’, with ‘the question of the proper role for, and even the possibility of, controversial political poetry in the new Elizabethan age’ foremost amongst its concerns, the whole project may usefully be reframed as a product of an appropriative Reformation poetics extending back to Chaucer via Skelton, whose primary focus is the instability of textual authority.33 The 1563 edition re-emphasizes the text’s place within this network. The Canterbury Tales is invoked explicitly for the first time, for example, in the newly incorporated complaint of Lord Hastings by ‘Maister Dolman’, who also describes himself as a Pandarus to Edward IV’s Troilus (f. 100v). John Dolman was another learned member of the Inns circle, and translator of Those fyve Questions, which Mark Tullye Cicero disputed in his Manor Tusculum (1561). His complaint includes a discussion of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale which is, according to Campbell, ‘more extensive and detailed than any other of its date’, and appropriates its language— murder is ‘waltsome’, for example (f. 104r).34 Hastings questions the authority not just of texts, including historical accounts and the speech of false friends, but also symbols: gold cannot be defended from counterfeit, religion is a cloak of vice, and dreams, of course, may be misconstrued. His integration of the ‘mery tale’ of Chauntecleer into a tragic framework inherited from the Monk’s Tale—which, we are told in its prologue, the tale of Chauntecleer was commissioned to counterbalance—enacts his own 31 See David Lavinsky, ‘Turned to Fables: Efficacy, Form, and Literary Making in the Pardoner’s Tale’, CR, 50:3–4 (2015), 442–64; Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Conrad, History of English, ‘Chaucer, Langland and the Treachery of Text’. 32 See C. S. L. Davies, ‘Stafford, Henry, tenth Baron Stafford (1501–1563)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press; online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26205, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]; the 1559 dedication also cites Stafford’s assistance in the Mirror’s publication (p. 66); Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 66 n.; Lucas, ‘Henry Lord Stafford’. 33 34 Lucas, Politics, pp. 202–3. Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 46.

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observation that stories stand ‘at the takers mercy, or rygour’ (f. 111v), and foregrounds the Mirror’s debt to Chaucer’s disingenuous framing narrative of reception and interpretation. The prose link following Hastings’s complaint famously objects that it is ‘very darke, and hard to be understood’, but remarks, ‘[c]onsidering also that it is written for the learned (for such all Magistrates are or should be) it can not be to hard, so long as it is sound and learnedly wrytten’ (f. 114v).35 Interpretation is an essential skill for the magistrate-subjects of the tragedies, as well as their readers, whose erudition is also increasingly tested throughout Baldwin’s Mirror. But the exegesis of exempla is subordinated to literary criticism, as Baldwin’s boisterous linguistic play, with its legal puns, Latin gags, and parodies of poetic decorum and equivalence, strips serious hermeneutics down to a textual game. The 1563 edition also saw the addition of Thomas Sackville’s Induction, which prefaced his complaint of Henry, duke of Buckingham, in which the speaker is led by the personification of Sorrow through a classical underworld to encounter the nation’s dead.36 Like Skelton, Sackville’s affinity with the Mirror’s concerns and themes is demonstrated substantially through his work outside the Mirror tradition. Written with Thomas Norton, Gorboduc (1561/2, first printed 1565) had explored the relationship between counsel, succession, and civil discord, and has far more in common with Baldwin’s Mirror than the Induction itself. The antiquary and Inns member William Fleetwood notes how he and Sackville customarily conversed ‘sometymes of parleamente matters, sometymes of chronicles and historyes, but chiefelye of the antiquityes of this realme of England’, and Sackville went on to become an advisor to Elizabeth I.37 But Sackville’s Induction redefined the Mirror, and shaped its reception, inspiring the dream frames of Higgins and Niccols, as well as providing often its sole representative in modern anthologies.38 It was well known independently of its context, disproportionately influential in Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, and favoured by Baldwin’s fictive collaborators (f. 138r).39 The piece sets Baldwin’s own dream

35 Cf. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 36 See Lucas, Politics, pp. 207–9. 37 See J. D. Alsop, ‘William Fleetwood and Elizabethan Historical Scholarship’, SCJ, 25:1 (1994), 155–76. 38 See, for example, Gordon Braden (ed.), Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Derek Pearsall (ed.), Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English, 1375–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott (eds), Male and Female Voices in Early Modern England: An Anthology of Renaissance Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 39 See Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England

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(1559, f. 48r–v) within a serious intellectual context, reframing his lapse of concentration as a legitimate literary trope. Finally, the involvement of Sackville, the poet’s poet, sets up the tragedy of Collingbourne which follows, where the unfortunate Ricardian rhymester explores the limits of poetic freedom, while satirizing contemporary poetic and antipoetic discourses.40 The Mirror’s discussion of textual transmission is extended in this edition to encompass not just historical source material but also imaginative literature, while the susceptibility of manuscript circulation to abuse is dramatized by the placement of Sackville’s Induction, not at the beginning as intended, but according to the order of the fictive narrative of compilation. The sub-Virgilian vision, which on its own might seem rather too straight-faced for the impish role in which Baldwin has recently been cast, therefore plays a central part in the mangling of the purported plan for the fictive Mirror text’s structure. The Blacksmith’s complaint, too, composed for a ‘third part’ of the Mirror which would narrate falls between Henry VII’s reign and the present day, is captured at a precarious intermediary moment. In Beware the Cat’s Epistle Dedicatory, the narrator had constructed just such a fictive temporality, asking for permission to publish the story in the future, and joking darkly about a Cure of the Great Plague which he will produce ‘as soon as I may conveniently’.41 So, at the end of the 1563 ‘Second Part’, Baldwin sets off with his papers, and vanishes into the gap between manuscript and print.

REVISION AND EXPANSION The fictive composition narrative, with its tantalizing plethora of additional complaints which Baldwin says he has received but has not included, confused critics and contributors alike. But it proved hugely successful with readers, whose interest sustained its expansion over nearly five subsequent decades. The 1570s, a pivotal moment in English literary history and the self-definition of Elizabethan national culture, saw the Mirror’s real zenith. Higgins and Blenerhasset’s supplementary First (1574) and Second (1578) parts appeared, alongside four reprints of Baldwin’s Mirror, renamed the Last Part from 1574, with two new (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 267–89, at p. 274; Budra notes his debts to Virgil and Chaucer, De casibus, p. 53. 40 Lucas, Politics, p. 210, and pp. 210–30. 41 William Baldwin, Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. William A. Ringler and Michael Flachmann (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1988), p. 3. See Stenner, ‘Penning’.

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tragedies added in 1578. This period marks a ‘secondary moment of textual production or reproduction’, as defined by Jerome McGann, where ‘the influence of the work’s own production history on the work itself grows more important with the passage of time’, following Baldwin’s death the previous decade.42 It was here that the collection’s emphasis began to be seriously modified, as editors and contributors enacted the bowdlerization that earlier editions had theorized, and its own textual instability took centre stage. The turn taken complicates the historiographical interests of the collective, and forges a path away from what scholars have come to recognize as Baldwin’s own priorities. At this point, ‘the influence of the work’s own production history’ begins to weigh on the Mirror’s development, as its success, its collaborative composition, and its genesis as a printer-led extension of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes begin to reapply pressure to its form. The 1571 and 1574 editions (and the reissue of 1575) reproduce the complaints printed in 1563, but 1571 also brought substantial modifications. This edition saw widespread correction and augmentation of historical detail, while the new device introduced for the title page is also used for all subsequent versions, defining the Mirror ‘brand’ henceforward. The fiction of Baldwin’s presence as secretary is maintained, but sweeping changes are made, which frequently persist right through to the edition of 1587. The link connecting the tragedies of Jane Shore and Edmund, duke of Somerset is excised in 1571; gone is Baldwin’s proposal that, whyle we be nowe together, I wyl reade unto you Edmund the Duke of Somerset, which must be placed in the fyrst parte: and then the blacke Smyth, which must serve for [the] thyrde volume. (1563, f. 156r–v)

As noted above, this extraordinary fiction had constructed a meta-Mirror, imagining the compilation not of the book we are reading but of an external text, and anticipated George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), a fictional book whose thwarted production is described within the miscellany of which it is, as it were, the eponymous subject.43 In excising this detail, the 1571 editor begins the shift towards a more straight-faced Mirror, fully realized, finally, in Niccols’s edition where all prose and verse links are removed. 42 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), ‘The Monks and the Giants: Textual and Bibliographical Studies and the Interpretation of Literary Works’, p. 193. 43 George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (London: Henry Bynneman and Henry Middleton for Richard Smith, 1573), ‘The Adventures of Master F. I.’, p. 201. Relihan notes that the Mirror ‘seems somewhat analogous to the novelistic structure of Gascoigne’s work’, in Fashioning Authority, p. 22.

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Similarly, the textual alterations would set a precedent for later editors, and change the tragedies’ sense, not merely their spelling or scansion, suggesting that the text was deliberately revised rather than inaccurately copied. The majority of textual variants retained throughout the subsequent four editions are introduced here; it is a vital stage in the Mirror’s transmission history, in terms of the shape in which its most eminent readers would encounter it in later decades. The collection’s political terminology is sharpened, in particular with respect to unjust rulers, perhaps owing to increased confidence in the Mirror’s contemporary acceptability. In Collingbourne’s complaint, for example, ‘The kyng him selfe’ is replaced with ‘The tyrant prince’, and ‘That with the lewde save this no order was’ becomes ‘That among tyrants this is and ever was’ (1571, f. 141v). The final coy warning ‘So shall their freedome save them from extreames’, is converted to the more overt hope that their ‘fredome vnto no harme redound’ (1571, f. 145r); these alterations were all retained throughout all subsequent editions. In line with this greater confidence and specificity, initials are included after some 1571 complaints. It is unclear in 1559 who is supposed to have written what—Geller argues that Baldwin constructed the fictive narrative of composition specifically to avoid attribution under Mary I.44 In the 1563 ‘Second Part’ we are told that tragedies have been written by Dolman, Sackville, and Churchyard, but many remain anonymous, as the fictive Baldwin reads aloud from others’ manuscripts. The 1571 inclusion of initials attributes complaints to specific authors; the exclusion of full names could hint at residual anxiety, or authorial modesty, but also fits with the burgeoning fashion for poetic miscellanies which adopted that practice. Dates were added to the complaints’ titles, adumbrating greater factual precision and pretensions to historiographical reliability, a significant departure from the earlier editions. The clear logic behind the 1574–5 editions of Baldwin’s Mirror, to be released as the Last Part in parallel with Higgins’s continuation, makes the version printed in 1578 all the more mystifying.45 The extensive revision in 1571 was as nothing to the dramatic textual alterations put into print seven years later, and then subsequently ignored by Higgins and Henry Marshe when they came to compile the final sixteenth-century edition in 1587. Another editor was to put their stamp on Mirror, and complicate its transmission history still further. Pincombe suggests that Ferrers might be behind the anonymous alterations, which returned to the 1559 or 1563

44 45

Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches’, at 154–7. See Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 18.

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text, deliberately bypassing a number of the 1571 changes to Ferrers’s complaint of Tresilian.46 It makes sense that either he revised his own complaint in 1571, or corrected the 1571 revisions in 1578 to return to an original version, but seems unlikely that he did both, so Ferrers probably did not have a hand in both the 1571 and 1578 texts—perhaps Higgins, Churchyard, or another associate was behind the 1571 edit. The 1578 Last Part featured two new additions: the tragedies of Eleanor Cobham, and Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, supplied in a cancel. The addition of Eleanor and Humphrey’s complaints ostensibly completes Baldwin’s Mirror: for the first time the edition’s list of titles matches its content, and apparently fits the original plan. But this new material also engages directly with the subject of transmission, rendering this edition one of the most self-reflexive and difficult of the Mirror canon. The 1578 revisions are not spread consistently through the work, but instead form some identifiable trends, and cluster in a number of revisionheavy complaints. Changes push for greater specificity, inserting or clarifying details. Instead of ‘a battayle’, for example, the 1578 text specifies ‘a battaile at Towton in Yorkeshire’ (1578L, f. 81v). Substantial new passages provide additional historical information in the links preceding Tresilian and Richard Plantagenet’s tragedies, while smaller pedantic interpolations precede the Mortimers’ complaint (1578L, f. 4r). One counter-example occurs in the prose before Edward IV’s complaint, where the writers decide when to convene again. In 1559, Baldwin suggests, ‘this daye seuen nights hence, if your business will so suffer, let vs all mete here together agayne’ (1559, f. 82v), a fiction which persists until 1578, when it is replaced with the vaguer proposal that ‘some other day when your leasure will beste serue let vs mete here altogether agayne’ (1578L, f. 100r), gentrifying the authors in the process by the shift from business to leisure. Particularly thoroughly revised in 1578 are the complaints of the Mortimers, which Lucas has suggested was the inferior composition of Henry, Lord Stafford, and Richard Plantagenet, duke of York.47 Again, precise details are added, and the discourse is given an aristocratic gloss. Fortune gains a ‘triumphall Arch’ (1578L, f. 4v); ‘fortunate estate’ becomes ‘pompe and highe estate’ (1578L, f. 7r); ‘matchles men’ are

46 Mike Pincombe, ‘A Structural Analysis of Two Poems by George Ferrers and William Baldwin from the 1559 Mirror for Magistrates’ (Unpublished, 2010), p. 9. See Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 31. 47 See Lucas, ‘Henry Lord Stafford’. By contrast, there are hardly any new revisions to be found in the complaints of Richard, earl of Warwick, Henry VI, and Collingbourne.

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replaced by ‘knights peerelesse’ (1578L, f. 77v). The 1578 editor also amplifies the blame apportioned, and the sins’ specifics, particularly in the duke of York’s complaint where the behaviour of men that had been mere ‘folly’ in earlier editions renders them ‘Beastes most brute’ (1578L, f. 77v), and actions once ‘voyde of cause’ are now ‘traytourlike’ (1578L, f. 78r). Increased emphasis on his son, the earl of Rutland, heightens the verse’s affective power. The title clarifies Rutland’s role as ‘an Infant cruelly murdered’, and this theme persists as the editor replaces ‘my sonne’ with ‘this poore Boy, whom by the hand I led’ (f. 77v), ‘my childe’ with ‘my poore infant’ (f. 79r), and ‘the infant wept’ with ‘the pore child with tears did mercy crave’ (f. 79r). What revisions to the two complaints have most in common, though, is a greater emphasis on the theme of succession and inheritance, as in the revisions to the prose links. Throughe theyr deserte so called of euery wight, Tyll death them tooke, and left me in theyr right. (1559, f. 5v)

is altered such that its implications are spelt out: After whose Death I onely stood in plight, To be next heyre vnto the crowne by right.

(1578L, f. 5v)

Later, Richard II’s death is not significant because it is caused by his ‘dissolute lyfe’ (1559, f. 6r), but because he has ‘none heire after him to reigne’ (1578L, f. 6r). These changes could have been prompted by a surge in awareness of a growing succession crisis in England, whereby questions of legitimate succession would be of general interest. The augmented emphasis on the Mortimers’ right to the crown, however, may have had to do with the claim of Mary Stuart, a descendant of the Mortimer family. A minor change to Baldwin’s Dedication pertains to anxieties about authorial control, and the agency of the text itself. The former versions asked that ‘God graunt [the Mirror] may attayne’ its ‘chiefest ende’ (1559, sig. ¶3v), that is, to move magistrates to amend their actions. But in 1578 ‘Baldwin’ hopes that ‘God graunt it may talke according to the maner of the makers’ (1578L, sig. 3r). Like Richard Robinson’s Rewarde of Wickednesse (1574), which claims in the ‘The Booke to the Author’ that ‘As the aucthour hath commanded mee, I shall declare at large’, the Mirror is invested with the power to speak, and not necessarily as its authors would like. In Lord Hastings’s complaint, we are warned, ‘Forth irreturnable flyeth the spoken word’ (1578L, f. 126r). The 1578 revision demonstrates awareness that the written word can be equally unstable. Cathy Shrank reads the way in which the Mirror ‘highlights the subjectivity of history and its own incompleteness’ as central to a reading

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of Eleanor Cobham’s complaint, too.48 She writes, ‘[t]he dual perspective provided through the two Gloucester tragedies is thus compatible with the way in which the Mirror destabilises the authority of the historical record’.49 Eleanor, in particular, she suggests, in the Mirror as well as in chronicle and ballads’ accounts, functions as a site of contested history. Instrumental in the Mirror’s own story—from the involvement of the real Duke Humphrey, a ‘highly literate humanist’, in Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus, to his original Memorial complaint, the likely prompt for Gardiner’s suppression of the 1550s text—the Gloucesters act as a locus for compositorial anxiety in the 1570s Mirror.50 The inscribed Ferrers is thrown into a quandary, admitting that whether of them is fyrst to be placed in the order of our boke, I somewhat stande in doute. For albeit the sayde Dukes death happened before the deceasse of the Duches, yet was her fall first, which fynally was cause of ouerthrow to both. (1578L, 39v)

Despite concluding that since ‘the cause doth alwaies go before theeffect and sequel of any thing’, the main reason for placing Cobham’s complaint first seems in the end to be that ‘al thys whyle we haue not hard the complaint of any Lady or other woman’ (1578L, f. 39v), which side-steps Ferrers’s dilemma, but directs further attention to Cobham’s problematic status and authority. The order of these two complaints is problematic, as Ferrers acknowledges, and crucial, which is less clearly put across, because it has the capacity to play havoc with our interpretation of events—a difficulty with which the reader of the Mirror would, by now, have been very familiar.51 Corralling this divergent collection of material, Thomas Marshe is central to the Mirror’s rerouted trajectory. Responding to popular demand, he printed a total of six editions across his career. His involvement binds the reprinting of Baldwin’s Mirror to Higgins’s First Part, the ‘prequel’ which begins its sequence of de casibus complaints with the foundation of Britain by Brutus, since he printed both and repackaged Baldwin’s text as Higgins’s sequel, shifting its function from topical admonishment to encyclopaedic history. Assessing Marshe’s output, and imagining the range of texts he printed for sale side by side, the Mirror’s place within a cohesive and complementary network of cultural production comes into 49 Shrank, ‘Elianor Cobham’, p. 113. Shrank, ‘Elianor Cobham’, p. 114. Samuel M. Pratt, ‘Shakespeare and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester: A Study in Myth’, SQ, 16:2 (1965), 201–16, at 201–3; Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Bergen, Prologue, Book I, p. 1; see Lucas, Politics, p. 21. 51 For a detailed discussion of sequence in relation to this passage, see Schwyzer, ‘Most out of order’, pp. 234–5. 48 50

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focus. As Budra notes, ‘Marshe had had an eclectic early career’, printing ‘everything, from psalters to cookbooks . . . he is probably best known to students of Renaissance literature as the printer of Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (1581)’.52 Even this is reductive of an output comprising some of the mainstays of humanist culture, from Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1557), The Firste Volume of Syr John Froissart (1563), and Stow’s Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565), to Thomas Drant’s translations of Horace (1566) and Golding’s Ovid (1567), collected works of Skelton (1568) and John Heywood (1577), and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus (1571). Marshe also printed Baldwin’s Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt (1560), and the expanded version of Higgins’s revision of Nicholas Udall’s Flowers or Eloquent Phrases of the Latine Speech (1575). The First Part (1574–5) has Higgins read Baldwin’s Mirror, before falling asleep and dreaming of a hall where ancient British figures, ‘[d]estainde with woade . . . And wylde’, tell him ‘[t]heir names, and lyves: their haps, and haples days’ (1574F, f. 3r). Higgins’s history, expansive but unpretentious, aimed to remedy the Mirror’s imperfection and a wider shortfall in British historiography using ‘mine owne simple inuention’ (1574F, sig. *vir). Higgins, already associated with Marshe, Churchyard, and Thomas Newton, ‘is not the outsider that scholars would have us believe’.53 However, he did not share the background of Edward VI’s court that Baldwin and Ferrers had in common, and came to the Mirror with different ambitions and expectations to his predecessors. While Higgins would come to secure it in 1587, the Mirror’s place, as a ‘complex literary endeavour . . . indicative of mid-sixteenth-century print culture’, among the period’s great historiographical monuments like Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Holinshed’s Chronicles, is largely down to Marshe. The printer’s many prequels and sequels amongst his other publications posit the proliferation of textual expansions as a commercial strategy: tempting prospective buyers with the suggestion of continuations must have been a profitable venture.54 Marshe’s output is also packed with summaries, abbreviations, and epitomes of historiographical and theological works. It is Marshe, more than Higgins, at work behind the Mirror’s evolution from ‘a collection of cautionary tales into a dictionary of national (and fervently nationalist) biography’.55 52

Budra, De casibus, p. 11. Philip Schwyzer, ‘Higgins, John (B. C.1544, d. in or before 1620)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13233, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]; Richards, ‘Transforming’, p. 25. 55 54 Budra, De casibus, pp. xii–xiii. Schwyzer, ‘Higgins, John’. 53

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In 1587, ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’ expanded again with the insertion of four new tragedies. The complaint of Sir Nicholas Burdet, a tragedy of King James IV of Scotland, an account of the Battle of Brampton, and the complaint of Cardinal Wolsey were added, following on from that of the Blacksmith.56 Burdet’s complaint, written by Higgins, was apparently commissioned by Raphael Holinshed, while the Scottish verses adapt poems found in the British Museum Harleian MS 2252.57 The edition collated all Mirror material previously printed by Thomas Marshe, including Higgins’s First Part of the Mirror (1575). The volume also contained Higgins’s new tragedies voiced by additional ancient characters, from legendary British king Jago to the Roman emperor Caracalla (198–217). The whole compilation, printed by Marshe’s son and assign Henry, and titled The Mirour for Magistrates, mimicked the appearance of the older Marshe’s editions to the extent that Henry still used Thomas’s ‘TM’ device on the title page, but the prose frame’s font size was reduced to match the text of the complaints, eroding the prose frame’s primacy.58 Baldwin’s Mirror was rearranged, so that Churchyard’s Jane Shore follows the new Scottish tragedies, and precedes his complaint of Wolsey. This rearrangement and filling out of existing sections heightens the sense that the collection aimed for a comprehensive chronicle effect, but it was still highly selective and far from complete. Richard Niccols’s edition represents yet another controversial reinterpretation of the Mirror’s form and function. Baldwin’s Mirror was collated with Higgins and Blenerhasset’s prequels, and the tragedies rearranged roughly in chronological order. Niccols added his own new collection separately, entitled A Winter Nights Vision, as well as the retrospective panegyric, Englands Eliza. Certain original poems were removed, notably the 1563 complaint of Richard III, replaced in the Vision by Niccols’s new composition, while the complaint of Cromwell, by Michael Drayton, was added following Churchyard’s Wolsey. In her survey of the Mirror’s transmission, Campbell concludes with the text of 1587 which, she argues, ‘was the last of the editions of the Mirror to follow the original plan. The editions of 1609–10 . . . cannot be integrated 56

See Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 372. See Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 19 and Appendix D, pp. 548–54. Although the prose was not rendered subordinate to the verse until Campbell’s edition reduced the font’s size further in 1938. Cf. Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches’, p. 154. 57 58

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in the tradition. Niccols played Colley Cibber to the Mirror.’59 Likewise, Haslewood discounts Niccols’s text when he declares that the 1587 Mirror, ‘being the last printed by either of the original editors, may be characterised . . . as the STANDARD EDITION’.60 But as Glyn Pursglove notes, ‘To declare . . . that at one particular point in time [the Mirror’s] process of organic growth was over . . . is merely arbitrary’.61 Felix Kyngston’s role in the text’s final iterations also hints at a more cohesive heredity than Niccols’s critics often countenance: in 1591, a substantial proportion of Thomas Marshe’s copyrights and devices were transferred to the printer Thomas Orwin, then in turn passed on to Kyngston, Orwin’s successor and stepson.62 Niccols’s alterations have been widely condemned.63 His removal of the prose and verse links from the early Mirrors, which Elizabeth Human suggests ‘makes the text far more like a chronicle history than it previously was’, is a major source of antipathy towards his editorial intervention.64 But Niccols’s rearrangement creates an elegant triple dream vision structure, which tells its own story about his aesthetic priorities, and moulds a remarkably coherent whole from the disparate collection. Niccols divides the tragedies into three sequences, approaching the putative Mirror of Baldwin’s prose frame. First, Higgins and Blenerhasset’s ancient and medieval material is prefaced by Higgins’s Induction; then Sackville’s Induction introduces Baldwin and his fellow contributors’ late medieval and Tudor complaints; and finally Niccols’s own Induction, after Sackville and Higgins’s model, opens the Winter Nights Vision. This reorganization, and the centrality of Sackville to the structure of both Higgins’s First Part and Niccols’s reordered collection, clearly evinces Niccols’s admiration for Sackville’s ‘golden Preface’ (1610, sig. A4v), and demonstrates the extent to which the later custodians of the corpus took its previous manifestations to heart. Sackville and Higgins are structurally definitive figures for Niccols, and their significance should be read 59 Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 20. See also Lawrence D. Green, ‘Modes of Perception in the Mirror for Magistrates’, HLQ, 44:2 (1981), 117–33, at 122. 60 Haslewood (ed.), Mirror, vol. 1, p. xxix. 61 Glyn Pursglove, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Niccols: Selected Poems, ed. Glyn Pursglove (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p. 16. 62 R. B. McKerrow, Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, 1485–1640 (London: Chiswick Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1913), pp. 177–8; see also Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates: Richard Niccols’ Sir Thomas Overburies Vision (1616)’, in MMC, pp. 181–96, p. 195 n. 4. 63 See G. D. Willcock, ‘Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates [Review]’, MLR, 43:1 (1948), 104–5, at 104; Haslewood (ed.), Mirror, vol. 1, pp. xxix–xxx. Cf. Niccols, Selected Poems, p. 17. 64 Elizabeth M. A. Human, ‘House of Mirrors: Textual Variation and The Mirror for Magistrates’, LC, 5:4 (2008), 772–90, at 781.

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in part through the potential ‘uses of the visionary to convey controversial content’, an oppositional tradition to which the Mirror refers from its outset.65 Notwithstanding Haslewood’s claim that Niccols remodels the Mirror ‘to please his own ear’, Niccols himself insists that it was done ‘not taking a poeticall licence to fashion all things after mine owne fancie, but limiting my selfe within the bounds of an historicall writer’ (1610, ‘To the Reader’).66 However, Niccols is no historian; despite the assertion that ‘the storie in some places false and corrupted’ has been ‘made historically true’, his alterations generally engage critically with the work’s poetics. Niccols must have consulted the 1587 edition, since he includes material added there for the first time, but he did not follow it exactly. His version usually follows the text of the 1578 Last Part, except where revisions in 1587 have improved the scansion; perhaps Niccols compared the two texts before preparing his own, specifically to effect metrical enhancements. The smoothing out enacted by both editors, though, is counterpoised by diversification of both editions’ authorship, and their persistent polyvocality. The year 1587, the ‘annus mirabilis of English Renaissance tragedy’ following over a decade’s expansion of London commercial theatre, saw revisions and additions foreground theatrical performance.67 Editorial alterations to Baldwin’s material heighten this resonance; ‘thinke thervppon’ becomes ‘looke therevpon’ in Richard II’s prose link (1587, f. 122r), while Thomas Newton’s new commendatory verse states, ‘Certes this worlde a Stage may well bee calde, | Whereon is playde the parte of ev’ry wight’. Burdet asserts that he deserves ‘full well on stage [to] supply the place a while’ (1587, f. 244v), and Churchyard’s Wolsey asks, ‘Shall I looke on, when states step on the stage, | And play theyr parts, before the peoples face?’ (1587, f. 265v). Theatrical metaphors are common to many kinds of imaginative history; Thomas Newton had also described the romance Hystorie of Gerileon of England (1578) as ‘A Stage of state and stoute attemptes, a Theatre of Fame’ in another prefatory poem.68 Here 65 Scott C. Lucas, ‘The Visionary Genre and the Rise of the “Literary”: Books under Suspicion and Early Modern England’, JBS, 46:4 (2007), 762–5, at 762. 66 Haslewood (ed.), Mirror, vol. 1, p. xxx. 67 Mike Pincombe, ‘English Renaissance Tragedy: Theories and Antecedents’, in Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–16, at p. 3. The Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577), and imminently opened Rose (1587) among others. See Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 17. 68 Collinson, This England, pp. 233–4; Estienne de Maisonneufe, Hystorie of Gerileon of England, trans. A. M. (London: Miles Jennings, 1578).

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they draw out a latent theme of the earlier Mirrors, building on, for example, Churchyard’s first ‘cunningly “staged” poetic complaint’ of Jane Shore, and pave the way for its stories’ assimilation into the dramatic canon of the 1590s.69 When inflected by the idea of performance, though, the moral earnestness of the de casibus cycle begins to ring hollow. Lawrence D. Green mocks Burdet’s complaint, ‘a celebration of the stances of loyalty and valour’, in which he encounters ‘endless opportunities . . . to be loyal and valiant’.70 But the feebleness of these stances, and their ultimate futility, could as well be deliberate functions of the poem. Burdet advances a specification for history writing, but in the context of his complaint this series of instructions conveys more than anything the inadequacy of historiography: the injunction ‘Not [to] mangle stories’ is broken by Burdet’s own ‘mangled tale’ (1587, f. 252v). The poem depicts not so much Burdet’s fall as the fall of the state, of which his own death is an incidental part. By including yet more complainants whose ‘falls’ do not, in fact, act as warnings for the wicked, but rather simply reinforce the inevitability of death, the compilation’s overriding emphasis becomes dangerously nihilistic. The final stanza of Churchyard’s complaint of Wolsey sets out this shift most starkly, asking, But what of that? the best is wee are gone, And worst of all, when wee our tales have tolde, Our open plagues, will warning bee to none, ... Well, let them say, and thinke what thing they please. This weltring world, both flowes and ebs like seas. (1587, f. 272v)

Churchyard ironically echoes the Mirror’s subtitle which aims to show, we remember, ‘by examples passed in this realme, with how greevous plagues vices are punished’: Green asks, ‘What more complete repudiation of the preceptive basis of the Mirror for Magistrates?’71 To end not only the complaint but the book with such bitterness and indifference seems characteristically provocative. But both Higgins and Niccols’s editions signpost disillusionment with the Ciceronian premise of preceptive history, wearily echoing rather than staving off new waves of treason and dissatisfaction by both courtiers and the commons, coterminous with

69 Richard Danson Brown, ‘ “A Talkative Wench (Whose Words a World hath Delighted in)”: Mistress Shore and Elizabethan Complaint’, RES, 49:196 (1998), 395–415, at 401. 70 71 Green, ‘Modes of Perception’, 122. Green, ‘Modes of Perception’, 133.

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Baldwin’s sceptical approach to the form back in the 1550s.72 For Niccols, in particular, the monarch is also implicated in this treason against the nation, while for Higgins this is more opaque. Both call on the memory of a glorious military past—in Niccols’s case as an antidote to contemporary affairs, for Higgins more as a distancing, escapist strategy. Both evoke a freshness and energy to open war, in opposition to the underhand manoeuvres that Niccols explicitly, and Higgins more latently, rejects. These topics are also explored more actively in the sections added by both authors in these years, discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, below; in terms of additions to Baldwin’s Mirror itself, as author and editor, they effectively throw up their hands. Churchyard’s complaint of Wolsey extends the Mirror’s historiographical scope into the sixteenth century, and enacts its own iconoclastic vision on Baldwin’s text. ‘[T]he most daring adaptation of the prose frame yet’ leapfrogs the editorial figures of Baldwin and Higgins, describing the direct path of the tragedy from poet to printer in Wolsey’s own voice.73 Campbell suggests this snub was ‘designed to fight Churchyard’s battle against Baldwin’, without identifying a possible cause for the grudge between them—even harder to fathom if Baldwin was the ‘Western Wyll’ who had leapt to the defence of Davy Dycars Dreame in Western Wyll upon the Debate Betweene Churchyard and Camell (1552?).74 Perhaps Churchyard resented the suppression from 1571 of the 1563 prose link after Shore’s tragedy, which had claimed that the piece ‘was so well liked, that all together exhorted me instantly, to procure Maister Churchyarde to vndertake and to penne as manye moe of the remainder as might by any meanes be attaynted at his handes’ (1563, f. 156r). Or perhaps such effusive admiration and the promise of future involvement put into the mouths of a fictive writers’ collective could be taken as a joke at the poet’s expense, especially a poet as ostentatiously hard up and desperate for preferment as Churchyard was.75 Churchyard was already railing at Baldwin in 1575, in the voice of Sir Simon Burley, whose de casibus tragedy was printed in The First Part of Churchyards Chippes (1575 and 1578). Burley begins by asking, 72 Cf. Larry S. Champion, ‘Dramatic Strategy and Political Ideology in The Life and Death of Thomas, Lord Cromwell ’, SEL, 29:2 (1989), 219–36, particularly at 232–3. 73 Richards, ‘Transforming’, p. 20. 74 Campbell (ed.), Mirror, p. 19 and pp. 42–3; alternatively ‘Western Wyll’ could have been William Waterman, translator of The Fardle of Facions (1555); see R. W. Maslen, ‘William Baldwin and the Tudor Imagination’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 293. 75 See Matthew Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword and Ego (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Am I of blood, or yet of birth so base, O Baldwin now, that thou forgetst my name: ... O shew some cause, wherefore I sit in shade, And why is thus, my Tragedie unmade.76

Being left out of the Mirror was something of a trope by now: Ulpian Fulwell’s short de casibus history of James IV of Scotland, explicitly ‘in forme of the Mirror for Magestrates’, opens in similar fashion, asking ‘why have not I a place among them left, | whose fall eche tong with dayly talke revyves’.77 Later, in William Wyrley’s The True Use of Armorie Shewed by Historie (1592), Lord Chandos would claim, When first that woorthy golden booke began For Magistrates bright mirror cleare indeed, ... Streight I beleevd as truly as my Creed ... that some one of those rare learned men My blis and bale would have vouchsaft to pen.78

However, Burley’s attack on Baldwin is particularly personal. The tirade continues for a further four stanzas, and accuses Baldwin of snobbery, embarrassment, cowardice, ineptitude, forgetfulness, and sloth. In the 1587 Mirror, though, Churchyard seems no better disposed towards Higgins, whom he ignores entirely. Wolsey recounts his life story not to Baldwin or Higgins but to ‘Churchyard (the noter thereof)’ (1587, f. 265v), while Shore effaces the conceit of companionable reading and writing in her new prose link, announcing in the first person ‘so step I on the stage’ (1587, f. 259r). The 1587 inclusion of Wolsey’s ‘rags-to-riches’ ‘adventure story’ in Baldwin’s Mirror parallels the interpolation of Drayton’s complaint of Cromwell in 1610.79 These in turn reflect the reproduction of ‘Skelton’s Edward IV at the end of the very first Mirror edition. All three instances strengthen the Mirror’s status as a compendious, multi-authored compilation; ironically, given Drayton’s role in the later sixteenth-century appetite for single complaints, which inverted the Mirror’s appropriative tendency to and extrapolate characters and material from the Mirror corpus. Like 76

Thomas Churchyard, Churchyards Challenge (London: John Wolfe, 1593), p. 25. Ulpian Fulwell, The Flower of Fame (London: William Hoskins, 1575), f. 22r–v. William Wyrley, The True Use of Armorie (London: I. Iackson for Gabriell Cawood, 1592), p. 31. 79 Green, ‘Modes of Perception’, 125. 77 78

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Churchyard’s complaint, too, Drayton’s Cromwell tells his story from youth, rather than extracting the relevant biographical section as many of the other Mirror tragedies do. While not composed together or even for the Mirror collection, their complaints overlap and integrate seamlessly as a pair. Drayton’s complaint had originally been printed by Niccols’s printer Kyngston, as The Legend of Great Cromwell (1607) and subsequently The Historie of the Life and Death of the Lord Cromwell (1609). Drayton had demonstrated his affinity with the Mirror tradition through complaints like Piers Gaveston, Earle of Cornwall (1593) and Matilda (1594), and the pair of letters by Eleanor Cobham and Duke Humphrey in Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597). He and Niccols both wrote a complaint of Robert, duke of Normandy, and used bird allegory to satirize court corruption in Drayton’s Owle (1604) and Niccols’s Cuckow (1607). In short, Drayton was an obvious candidate to contribute to a new Mirror, and very much entangled with the collection’s transmission: the dream vision opening of the Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy, for example, seems to have been plundered by Niccols for his Induction to A Winter Nights Vision, and itself draws on the model of previous Mirror frame narratives. Drayton’s complaint promptly participates in the Mirror’s anxieties about transmission and reputation, when it opens to reveal Cromwell trembling betwixt rage and dread With the loud slander (by the impious time) That of my actions every where is spread[.] (1610, p. 520)

Ultimately, Cromwell concludes that attempting to rise ‘By flattring princes with a servill tong’ (1610, p. 546) is the cause of his downfall, so in some ways it is fitting that his arrest is staged in the ‘counsell chamber’, and when he is tried by parliament, speech finally fails him. Both Wolsey and Cromwell are depicted as rising from humble origins as a result of their intellect. Churchyard’s Wolsey in particular has an almost supernatural rhetorical charm, to enrapture audiences ‘With stories strange’ (1587, f. 266v). His academic learning is set against the corrupt education in genteel dissembling he receives at Henry VIII’s court, where ‘I quickely learnde, to kneele and kysse the hand, | To waite at heele, and turne like top about’ (f. 266v): this damning picture of dishonest expediency is compounded by Churchyard’s conclusion that Wolsey comported himself ‘like a priest’, outwardly ‘grave’, but dazzled by the luxury attendant on a king’s favourite, metaphorically reeling ‘about the streetes’, with ‘giddy braynes’, and dining on banquets ‘of fine conceites’ (f. 267r). Wolsey curses Catholicism, hinting not only that its hypocrisy and avarice is in part responsible for his downfall, but also that, following the Reformation, he is unable to call in his debts from Purgatory: ‘when yee should,

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now serve my turne indeede, | Yee have no house, I know not where yee dwell’ (f. 270v). Wolsey’s fall follows the inexorable logic of Fortune’s wheel, after his unchecked ambition and rapid rise to power. But false report and, by implication, the dissolution of religious houses (which displaced his Catholic debtors) and the Chantries Acts (which abolished prayers for his soul) are responsible for his current plight. Drayton’s Cromwell likewise continues to endure the slander of ‘fables vaine’ decades after his death, and asks that his complaint should be heard to redress the balance of testimony (1610, p. 520). He accuses his detractors of Catholic sympathies, arguing that it is his role in ‘Romes sad ruine’ which turned the ‘false worlde’ against him (p. 521), and writes the Mirror’s Reformation origins and suppression into its legacy by narrating his run-in with ‘arch-villain’ of the text’s transmission history, Stephen Gardiner.80 The oppositional Drayton also exploits Cromwell’s lowly birth to push his social agenda, following the late Elizabethan play Thomas Lord Cromwell in its emphasis on ‘class division and oppression’, whose portrayal of Cromwell Larry S. Champion describes as ‘little less than revolutionary’.81 Often an unexpected champion of ordinary people, here Drayton stresses ‘[t]hat height and Godlike puritie of minde | Resteth not still, where titles most adorne . . . Richest and poorest both alike are borne’ (p. 523). The radicalism of this message sits uncomfortably with Drayton’s obligation to condemn Cromwell’s ambition within the de casibus framework, but this does not mute the belief that inherited wealth is no guarantee of virtue or ability, calling even hereditary monarchy into question. Cromwell also questions the acceptance of fame via posterity, which, he says, memorializes those with money rather than those who are deserving. Monuments, both textual and architectural, are misleading (p. 524). Churchyard, too, undermines the premise of his lament, implying that memorialization will destabilize, rather than solidify, Wolsey’s posthumous reputation by twisting the significance of his words (whose primary purpose, he says, is to elicit pity). Wolsey complains that while the wordless performance of grief evokes sympathy, spoken testimony leaves one’s account open to written misappropriation, preferring ‘[a] tale by signes, with sighes and sobs set out’ to narrative speech (1587, f. 269v): another endorsement of historical drama’s ‘multiplicity of perspective’ and interpretation as the natural successor of the Mirror’s critical historiopoetics.82 See Champion, ‘Thomas, Lord Cromwell ’, 229. W. S., The True Chronicle History of the Whole Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell (London: William Jones, 1602); Champion, ‘Thomas, Lord Cromwell ’, 228, 225. 82 Champion, ‘Thomas, Lord Cromwell ’, 232. See also Kathleen Tillotson, ‘Michael Drayton as a “Historian” in the “Legend of Cromwell” ’, MLR, 34:2 (1939), 186–200. 80 81

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The slippage of de casibus terminology across Cromwell’s life story frames the Reformation itself as an alternative moral centre for his complaint, as the ‘mighty fall’ of Rome ‘from that proud height to which it long did clime’ parallels his own narrative trajectory (1610, p. 540). Drayton co-opts Cromwell as a proto-Protestant, whose invocation of Piers Plowman enacts the deployment of both pre-Reformation figures in the retroactive rejection of Catholicism. However, he is particularly critical of the management of the 1530s dissolution of religious houses, describing the destruction of a female-personified institution in startlingly violent terms.83 While Cromwell’s instigation of the Dissolution demonstrates at least the capacity of ‘magistrates’, those in high office, to effect change, this optimism is largely overridden by a nihilistic conclusion that replacements are often worse, that power corrupts, and corruption persists regardless of confessional identity. Cromwell’s complaint is a remarkable political intervention in a collection which has been thought to abandon its oppositional intent at the moment of Niccols’s involvement. While Niccols’s apparent social conservatism feels a great distance from Drayton’s more meritocratic, occasionally even egalitarian vision, the interpolation of Cromwell’s tragedy firms up the Jacobean Mirror’s militant Protestant, oppositional stance. The transmission history of Baldwin’s Mirror takes in a turbulent period for English historiography and poetics, but its analysis reveals a remarkably coherent body of work, whose interests and focus fluctuate, but whose later iterations extend and unpick tendencies present from the outset. It is the task of the following chapters to slot the prequels and sequels by Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols into this framework.

83

See King, English Reformation Literature, pp. 50–1.

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2 John Higgins’s First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1574–5) In the early 1570s, John Higgins set about completing the Mirror for Magistrates, which he suggested had languished, unfinished, since its second instalment was printed in 1563. Aspiring to a comprehensive record of national history, Higgins’s Mirror began again with its misty origins, retelling the mythical foundation of Britain, through complaints of legendary figures up to the Roman invasion. Baldwin and his collaborators’ concerns regarding unreliable transmission paled against newly emerging anxieties over the physical loss of textual sources, and with them of Britain’s collective memory. Characterized in twentieth-century scholarship as staid and stolid, and criticized for a heavy-handed, literalist appropriation of Baldwin’s project, Higgins’s work has been dismissed as an inferior sequel in the history of the Mirror’s expansion—not least in his own paratext (1574F, sig. *vi v). But the imperfections of Higgins’s British history may more productively be read as a reconfiguration of hints laid down by successive editions of Baldwin’s Mirror, which reimagined the text’s scope and focus, and adapted the form the better to reflect a new Elizabethan interrogation of English identity. The Mirror had been printed in evolving editions three times before Higgins became part of its complicated history. Higgins composed his own set of sixteen complaints, printed by Thomas Marshe in 1574, and in 1575 with one additional complaint, as The First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates. The 1574 edition contains the tragedies of Albanact, who retells Brutus’s foundation of Britain after the fall of Troy, Humber, Locrinus, Elstride, Sabrine, Madan, Manlius, Mempricius, Bladud, Cordila, Morgan, Ferrex, Porrex, Kimarus, Morindus, and Nennius, who is supposed to have died of a head wound sustained in single combat with Julius Caesar in 54 BC. Higgins draws on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1136), having lost, he says, a manuscript of that text, and another ‘old Chronicle in a kind of Englishe Verse, beginning at Brute’ (sig. *5v).1 Each 1 This manuscript could be Hardyng’s chronicle; see Lily B. Campbell (ed.), Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), p. 26.

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complaint is preceded by a short verse Induction, except for that of Albanact, where the general Induction stands in and introduces the dream vision by which the Britons’ tragedies are communicated. The tragedy of Irenglas (added in 1575) was followed by three concluding stanzas in which Higgins promises he will ‘Againe retourne, to Printers presse’ with a ‘Seconde parte’ (f. 81r), as Baldwin had done. Thomas Blenerhasset, of course, pre-empted Higgins’s efforts—Blenerhasset’s Seconde Part of the Mirour for Magistrates was printed in 1578—and no ‘second part’ by Higgins was ever released. ‘Sober, scholarly, and ambitious’, Higgins was around thirty years old when he made his first contribution to the Mirror.2 He is believed to have studied at Oxford, and claims to have taught grammar for two years before revising Richard Howlet’s Abecedarium (1552) as Huloets Dictionarie (1572).3 Prefatory verses by Higgins enumerate the contents and uses of The Foure Bookes of Flavius Vegetius Renatus (1572); this appears to be the first outing for Higgins’s poetry in print.4 He was vicar of Winsham, Somerset, where he lived at least between 1574 and 1602, and produced an expanded edition of Nicholas Udall’s Flowers, or, Eloquent Phrases of the Latine Speech in 1575 and 1581, before translating The Nomenclator, or, Remembrancer of Adrianus Junius (1585) out of ‘Latine, Greeke, French and other forrein tongues’.5 His final known work, An Answere to Master William Perkins, Concerning Christs Descension into Hell (1602), took the bold form of a dialogue between Higgins and the famous theologian about the scriptural basis for that story’s validity.6 Higgins’s whole oeuvre demonstrates a desire to fix knowledge— language, history, scriptural interpretation—as secure textual records, and to augment or complete the work of others: Howlet; Udall; Baldwin. While too young to have fraternized with Baldwin and Ferrers at Edward VI’s court, Higgins was demonstrably a part of the intellectual milieu within which the Mirror was written and read; his works were variously 2

Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 4. See Schwyzer, ‘Higgins, John (b. c.1544, d. in or before 1620)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13233, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. 4 Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 23. 5 Schwyzer’s ODNB entry suggests that we know only that Higgins ‘was still dwelling [in Winsham] in 1585’. Additionally, though, his dedication to the nobility of the 1587 Mirror is dated ‘At Winceham the vii. Day of December. 1586’, while the preface to An Answere places Higgins ‘At Winsam the 22. Of Iune. 1602’, sig. A2v. The Nomenclator’s Latin original, by Hadrianus Junius (or Adriaen de Jonghe), the Dutch physician and scholar, was first printed in Antwerp in 1567, and reprinted some dozen times up to 1620. 6 Cf. Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 25. The dedication clearly connects the text with Higgins, placing its composition ‘At Winsam’ as noted above. 3

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commended by Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Newton.7 But in addition to some degree of official endorsement, Higgins brought with him ambitions to educate and codify which extended beyond Baldwin and Ferrers’s wry moralizing. And he meant to exploit the ostensible fixity of print to achieve these goals: as Churchyard wrote in his commendation of Huloet’s Dictionarie, Higgins proffered ‘a schole of rules’ by mobilizing a modern partnership, the ‘Scholers penne and Printers shoppe’.8 While there are clear motivations which underpin and unite Higgins’s oeuvre at large, though, generalizations about his contribution to the Mirror have been reductive, as they smooth out the important differences between the 1574–5 First Part, and his 1587 edition of the whole Marshe corpus. Where his ancient British complaints are characterized by fretful attempts at completion, the Roman collection added in 1587, for example, reveals more about Higgins as an editor, a classical scholar, and a politically engaged citizen. Higgins is central to the Mirror’s history, as a reader, editor, and proponent of the form in his own right. His intervention as a new author of an imperfect text demonstrates the facility with which readers may participate, and become writers, and for their new compositions to reconfigure their source material. The shifting status of the author-reader had been central to the 1559–63 Mirror, too. As in much of his oeuvre, Baldwin’s prose frame blurred the distinctions between speakers, readers, and writers from the start, as the collaborators wrote, read, and copied their own and others’ poems. As we have seen, the early Mirror was fundamentally concerned with modes of textual interaction and transmission. When Higgins extends this tendency, he is building on rather than rejecting the example of Baldwin’s metatextual practice.

HUMANIST HISTORIOGRAPHY IN CRISIS Higgins echoes Baldwin’s structural elision of text and paratext, and includes the reader in a scenario of aural exchange, when he pauses the verse frame to ask that we ‘pardon whats amisse, a while give eare, | So you shall heare the rest that I recite’ (f. 40r). His interpolation of what amounts to a verse ‘To the Reader’, with its modesty topos and riposte to critics, halfway through the poems’ fictive framing narrative suggests that he has internalized the early Mirrors’ mutable dynamic between inscribed fiction 7 Churchyard wrote a commendatory poem prefixed to Huloets Dictionarie; Newton did the same for the 1587 Mirror, and praised Higgins’s Flowers of Terence in his and John Leland’s Encomia (London: Thomas Orwin, 1589), p. 128. 8 Cited in Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 22.

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and extra-textual persona. Taking a break to write up the accounts he has heard, reported between the tragedies of Mempricius and Bladud, Higgins defends his learning against anticipated criticism in somewhat antipoetic terms, by countering that ‘I have not spent in poetrye my dayes, | Some other workes in proase I printed have’ (f. 39v). He asserts his authority by providing a literary curriculum vitae for the past five years to silence potential detractors: the first two yeares I Grammer taught: The other twaine, I Huloets worke enlargde: The last translated Aldus phrases fraught With eloquence, and toke of Terence charge At Printers hand, to adde the flowers at large Which wanted there, in Udalles worke before: And wrote this booke with others divers more. (f. 40r)

Humanism is a not a monolithic concept by any means, but Higgins presents himself as recognizably humanist in that he is embedded in a culture of classical learning and teaching, aligned with prominent Tudor educators like Nicholas Udall, the playwright, translator, and schoolmaster whose Erasmian paraphrases had been printed by Baldwin’s former employer Edward Whitchurch, and the lesser known lexicographer Richard Howlet, compiler of the first sixteenth-century English– Latin dictionary, in a Protestant tradition which nods to the legacy of Ascham, Bale, Elyot, and Smith.9 In this respect, Higgins seems well placed to participate in the surface project of the Mirror, to provide a moral education through negative examples drawn from the nation’s history. Higgins also approaches Baldwin’s Mirror in the humanist spirit of reader participation, writing, as it were, in the margins of Baldwin’s text. Indeed, from the outside, the Mirror itself is analogous to the humanist commonplace book, the product of readerly engagement with a wider body of learning, excerpting key figures from history to be deployed for their moral or rhetorical usefulness. Such a process should efface questions of textual authority and even truth, as the persuasive organization of apt quotations is privileged.10 Baldwin, then, despite his credentials as an exemplary Renaissance man, had deviated from this central tenet of humanist practice, by questioning the veracity of his source texts, Hall and Fabyan, while elsewhere he sent up learned practices in the Treatise of 9

See Mike Pincombe, Renaissance Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Late Sixteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 10 See Levine, Humanism and History, p. 21, and passim.

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Morall Philosophie and Beware the Cat.11 Higgins seems instead to have taken the Mirror’s educative premise at face value, and to participate in its commonplacing bent. If ‘the impulse to excise and excerpt books’ is ‘a humanist response to the equally humanist imperative to expand the horizons of learning through infinitely expanding the library of predecessor texts’, Higgins’s desire to condense British history into bite-size tragedies amid the sixteenth-century diversification of material evidence available is precisely of this sort.12 Here, though, the contradictory aims at the heart of humanism itself and the Mirror project come into focus, holding tendencies towards expansiveness and epitome in tension. Equally, the Mirror’s purposes, real and projected, can be seen to conflict with humanist metanarratives, as the idea of human perfectibility runs counter to the Mirror’s de casibus framework, relying on faith in providentialist progress at the end of interminable cycles of historical rise and fall which the Mirror itself never delivers.13 Higgins may be seen to exploit the text’s own imperfection, and the flawed histories it describes, in their offer of an opportunity for scholarly progress, such that its English history may be improved even if the evil remain incorrigible, and suffering and death inevitable for good and bad alike. In this way, the original Mirror’s humanist basis is appropriated and reshaped: to complete and perfect, and to proselytize these processes, surfaces as an end in itself. The Mirror of the 1570s, under Higgins’s administration, becomes a flashpoint for contradictory humanisms, as its form and project evolve. The First Part opens with a bold statement of intent. The Dedication’s first sentence follows that of the 1559 Mirror exactly, but substitutes Plotinus and temperance for Baldwin’s Plato and justice.14 Such a forthright appropriation undermines Higgins’s humility before Baldwin’s example in the subsequent paratext, ‘Higgins to the Reader’, replacing rather than augmenting Baldwin’s text, and asserts a new, modified agenda. By the time Higgins was compiling his Mirror, ‘the language of reformation 11 See Scott C. Lucas, ‘A Renaissance Man and his “Medieval” Text: William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates, 1547–1563’, in MMC, pp. 17–34. 12 Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 21. See also Chloe Wheatley, Epic, Epitome, and the Early Modern Historical Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 13 See Scott C. Lucas, ‘Hall’s Chronicle and the Mirror for Magistrates: History and the Tragic Pattern’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 356–71. 14 Cf. Jennifer Richards, ‘Shakespeare and the Politics of Co-Authorship: Henry VIII ’, in David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 176–94, at p. 192.

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government was more conciliatory’, and he may have updated its ethical stance to reflect new norms of political discourse.15 But the matrix of authorities cited to support this shift also grounds it in mid-sixteenth-century intellectual culture, and the conduct manual tradition; another hint that Higgins’s work should be read as a parallel thickening of select aspects of earlier Mirrors, rather than part of a straightforward linear expansion. Early modern thinking about the four cardinal virtues—justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude—derived from the writings of, in particular, Plato, Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas, and Aristotle.16 However, Higgins claimed his definition of temperance, ‘not to exceade the bandes of measure, and to keepe desire under the yooke of Reason’ (sig. *3r), from Plotinus, ‘that wonderfull and excellent Phylosopher’ of the third century. Higgins probably did not read Plotinus himself. Editions of the Six Enneads were available from continental presses, but although Higgins was adept at Latin and perhaps Greek translation, his quotation from Plotinus follows almost verbatim his contemporary John Bossewell’s Workes of Armorie (1572).17 Both possibly drew on Thomas Elyot’s Boke Named the Governour (1537), which offers a near-identical summary of Plotinus’s dictum.18 Elyot and Bossewell refer to the ‘boundes of Mediocritie’, instead of Higgins’s ‘bandes of measure’; Higgins echoes the ‘boundes of measure’ found exceeded by tyrants in Lydgate’s Fall, and Alexander Barcley’s Myrrour of Good Maners (1518) also uses the phrase in relation to drunkenness.19 So Higgins’s focus on temperance is a product of the early Tudor advice literature of which the 1559–63 Mirror was also a scion. Higgins’s Dedication arguably plugs the Mirror tradition back into this genre, reconnecting with a morality discourse which the earlier Mirror paratexts had generalized: Baldwin’s Epistle focused more broadly on ‘the goodnes or badnes of the rulers’ (1559, C2v). The virtue of temperance looms large in other early Tudor mirrors, including the Myrrour of Good Maners, John Goodale’s Myrrour or Lokynge 15 Richards, ‘Transforming’, p. 60; although Aristotle had suggested there could be no true justice without temperance. See Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 2004), Book V, pp. 118–19. 16 See Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), Introduction. 17 They were printed at Solingen in 1540, and Basel in 1559 and 1562. See John Bossewell, Workes of Armorie (London: Richard Tottell, 1572), f. 7v. 18 Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1537), f. 207v; Elyot has ‘Mediocritie’ for ‘measure’, like Bossewell, but he describes Plotinus as ‘wonderfull’, as Higgins does. 19 John Lydgate, The Falle of Princis (London: Richard Pynson, 1494), sig. O4v; Dominicus Mancinus, The Myrrour of Good Maners, trans. Alexander Barcley (London: Richard Pynson, 1518), sig. G1v. The other two major sixteenth-century proponents of the phrase were Thomas Churchyard and William Perkins (EEBO search, 26 September 2012).

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Glasse of Lyfe (1532), and Thomas Palfreyman’s Myrrour or Cleare Glasse for All Estates (1560). Tracts on the duties of magistrates and nobility also feature temperance prominently. The Marian Memorial ’s change of title seems to advertise its membership of this group, and Higgins’s Dedication fleshes out the generic affiliation with Cicero’s De officiis (trans. Grimald, 1556), Johannes Ferrarius’s Good Orderynge of a Common Weale (1559), and Laurence Humphrey’s The Nobles or Of Nobilitye (1563), in addition to Elyot’s Gouernor.20 It was in these advice books, and contemporary treatises on virtue, where analogous treatments of temperance could be found, not in British chronicles, although Roman histories such as Anthony Cope’s popular Historie of Hannibal and Scipio and Rainolde’s Chronicle (1571) cite the quality more frequently.21 In particular, Ludovic Lloyd’s Pilgrimage of Princes (1573) combines historical accounts by classical authors with ethical teaching, arranged by moral theme. Lloyd includes a chapter ‘On sober and temperate Princes’, which describes Julius Caesar as ‘for his abstinence the onely mirrour of Italy’.22 Higgins’s Dedication echoes Lloyd’s highly referential style, listing Alexander the Great, Caesar, Pompey, Cyrus, and Hannibal, while for the first time in the Mirror’s development his paratext is studded with citations and marginal references to Curtius, Justinian, Plutarch, Livy, Polybius, Aristotle, and Cicero, shorthand for the intellectual traditions they represented. The Pilgrimage was reprinted in 1586 and 1607, and in 1659 as A Looking-Glass for Kings and Princes. This publishing history, including the telling change of title, as well as Churchyard’s commendatory poem in the 1573 edition, suggest the existence of a greater affinity between the Mirror and texts of this kind than criticism recognizes, borne out by Higgins’s new ethical focus. The 1574 complaints did not employ anything like the schematic approach to virtue and vice taken in Lloyd’s prose histories, or later poetic endeavours such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), with its alternating interrogation of Christian and classical virtues, or Munday’s Mirrour of Mutabilitie (1579), whose de casibus complaints

20 This text and Elyot’s Castle of Health (1539) are known to have influenced later sixteenth-century treatments of temperance; see D. T. Starnes, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot and the “Sayings of the Philosophers” ’, Studies in English, 13 (1933), 5–35, John C. Bean, ‘Cosmic Order in the Faerie Queene: From Temperance to Chastity’, SEL, 17:1 (1977), 67–79, and John Wesley, ‘The Well-Schooled Wrestler: Temperance and Rhetoric in the Faerie Queene, Book II’, RES, 60:243 (2008), 34–60. 21 See also Plutarch’s The Educacion or Bringinge Up of Children, trans. Thomas Elyot (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1530), and A President for Parentes, trans. Ed. Grant (London: Henry Bynneman, 1571). 22 Ludovic Lloyd, The Pilgrimage of Princes (London: John Charlewood and John Kingston for William Jones, 1573), f. 49v.

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each address a different sin.23 However, Higgins’s First Part is significant to the heredity of those works, bridging a gap between their exemplary verse histories and a longer tradition of advice literature. The educative agenda of the first paratext buckles and threatens to collapse, however, as the First Part’s prefatory material articulates its divergent strands. Its second prefatory paratext, ‘Higgins to the Reader’, bemoans the inadequacy of modern historiography, and the absence of a satisfactory narrative of Britain’s foundation; another, parallel agenda, which builds on Baldwin’s Mirror’s professed moral aims, while also perpetuating its dissatisfaction with textual histories. It is this foundation which Higgins sets out to provide, somehow avoiding the paradox which ought to prevent him researching it—his own ancient manuscript is also missing: I have seene no auncient antiquities in written hand but two, one was Galfridus of Munmouth which I lost by misfortune, the other an old Chronicle in a kind of Englishe Verse, beginning at Brute and endinge at the death of Humfrey Duke of Glocester[.] (sig. *5v)

Read in tandem with the first paratext, though, this statement presents a still more damaging paradox: when it comes to ancient Britain, the historical treasury of historical precepts on which humanist moral teaching rests is not just unreliable, as Baldwin’s Mirror made clear, but wholly absent. Higgins composed his complaints at a time when English antiquaries were facing up to the simple absence of documentary evidence about their nation’s past beyond a certain point, and negotiating the implications of this absence for contemporary historiography.24 Although ‘doubts about ancient records had always existed’, the import of these doubts was sharpened during the sixteenth century by the incipient need to recreate England’s narrative and identity in the light of a reconfigured relationship to continental Europe and the wider world, while the destruction and dispersal of monastic collections under Henry VIII was still raw.25 The blank space of prehistory became a battleground for religious authenticity during the Reformation. Protestants like Bale and Leland, and later, 23 On Spenser and temperance see Helen Cooney, ‘Guyon and His Palmer: Spenser’s Emblem of Temperance’, RES, 51:202 (2000), 169–92, Kasey Evans, ‘How Temperance Becomes “Blood Guiltie” in the Faerie Queene’, SEL, 49:1 (2009), 35–66, and Gerald Morgan, The Shaping of English Poetry: Essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), Ch. 11. 24 See Escobedo, Nationalism, especially p. 55. 25 Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9; see Jennifer Summit, ‘Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem of the English Library’, ELH, 70:1 (2003), 1–34.

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Matthew Parker and his circle of collaborators in the preservation and analysis of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, capitalized on the scarcity and in many cases linguistic inaccessibility of textual records, in their efforts to locate a true, ancient form of Christianity which predated Catholic corruption.26 Both Higgins and Blenerhasset’s prefaces to their Mirrors are wistful with references to absent texts: Higgins’s historical manuscript is lost; Blenerhasset is separated from his books by an ocean. ‘The convergence of spectral complaint with British antiquarianism’, Philip Schwyzer suggests, ‘should come as no surprise. Both modes of writing were means of achieving, or at least imagining, communion with the vanished past.’27 The ‘profound sense that the English past was missing and unrecoverable’ and ‘alien to the present’ informs Higgins’s identification of ‘temporal isolation’ as ‘a distinctively English fate’: Higgins writes, ‘amongst diverse and sundry Chronicles of many Nations, I think there are none (gentle reader) so uncertain and brief in the beginning as ours’.28 This paucity of evidence is doubly problematic, since during the period ‘the question “What is English?” [became] deeply tied to the question “When did England begin?”’29 North’s near-contemporary translation of Amyot’s analysis explains that written records of the ancient past were unavailable ‘bicause that men in those daies delivered in their lifetimes the remembrance of things past to their successors, in songes, which they caused their children to learne by hart, from hand to hand’.30 Higgins’s complaints themselves enact this model of historical transmission, hoping to fill in the records of the British past using stories passed on aurally.31 Meanwhile, in ‘Higgins to the Reader’ he admits to having invented some histories because ‘in some suche places as I moste needed their ayde [the chronicles] wrate one thing: and that so brieflye that a whole Princes raigne, life and death, was comprised in three lines’ (sig. *6r). But this is misleading when it comes to Higgins’s actual historical research. The paratext also reveals that his reading has been extensive; multiple sources do exist to support his new history. Furthermore, these are contemporary or near-contemporary publications; a far cry from the lost, ancient, and damaged texts (‘mine olde booke’, for example, taking 26 Shrank, Writing the Nation; Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 27 Schwyzer, Literature, p. 112. 28 Escobedo, Nationalism, p. 3. Cf. Hampton, Writing from History, p. 14. 29 Escobedo, Nationalism, p. 13. 30 ‘Amiot to the Readers’, in Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wight, 1579), sig. *3v. 31 On the relationship between oral and written histories see Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition’, TRHS, 9 (1999), 233–56.

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the place of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s own liber vetustissimus) whose failure he sets out to remedy.32 Hugo Zimmermann and Campbell identify his sources as Grafton’s Chronicle at Large, (1568–9); Thomas Lanquet’s Epitome of Chronicles (1569); Stow’s Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565); Matthew of Westminster’s Flores historiarum (1567), also published as Matthaeus Westmonasteriensis de rebus britannicis (1570); and the Chronicle of St Albans.33 Nearly all of these texts were printed no more than nine years before the First Part. His paratextual citations create a serious dissonance between Higgins’s various implied historiographical methods, while the paratext in itself is disingenuous. Higgins dismisses Grafton on the grounds that ‘he is most barraine and wantes matter’ (sig. *5v), when in fact ‘Higgins to the Reader’ closely echoes the motivations set out by Grafton’s dedication for composing a new English chronicle, namely that no history of ancient Britain exists without treating the histories of other nations in tandem.34 Jostling for position amongst contemporaries, Higgins’s nod to Archbishop Parker, who ‘hath brought such ayde as well by printing as preservinge the written Chronicles of this Realme that by his Graces studye and paines, the labour in time to come wil be farre more easye’ (sig. *6r), suggests that he wishes to associate and ingratiate himself with Parker, a figure at the forefront of contemporary antiquarian activity, a far cry from the invented dream account the First Part subsequently proffers. So Higgins’s contradictory representations of the work’s composition make up a layering of authorial fictions, whose rhetoric holds the multiple aims of the First Part together. From the outset, the First Part’s history is situated as an answer to the narratives of other nations’ origins. On the one hand, Higgins, really, is setting out to emulate Virgil’s Aeneid, in providing a poetic account of his nation’s dynastic heritage. Accordingly, the work draws on the myth of Troy and Virgil’s treatment of it, particularly in the epic story of Albanact.35 On the other hand, though, the work is an exercise in differentiation, setting the British story apart from and quitting those of other civilizations. It embodies, in short, the period’s equivocal relationship with the achievements and profanities of its classical inheritance. Bladud’s complaint celebrates the academic culture of the ancient world, 32

See Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, p. 117. Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, pp. 26–7, enlarging on Hugo Zimmermann, Quellenuntersuchungen zum ersten Teil von J. Higgins Mirror for Magistrates (Munich, 1902); Campbell notes that Higgins is also doubtless indebted to additional chronicles which he does not name, as well as to ‘literary treatments of history’. 34 See Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at Large (London: Henry Denham for Richard Tottel and Humphrey Toye, 1569), ‘The Epistle’, sig. 2v. 35 Additionally, it does not recount Albanact’s own fall. 33

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and showcases Higgins’s stake in this culture in its bilingual final stanza (f. 47r), while Irenglas vilifies the invading Romans, but seems also to hold up the Aeneid as an exemplary moral guide (1575F, f. 79r).36 Hadfield, commenting on the ‘related but opposed desires’ facing English writers in the period, notes the conflict between ‘celebratory nationalism’, which ‘sought to elevate the status of English literature so that it could rival the achievements of the classical world’, and ‘a specifically critical nationalism’, ‘arguing the need for a critical public sphere where national problems could be debated’.37 Set against this dichotomy are the ‘two incompatible types of reading’ he observes in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ‘a static notion of an unchanging universe which teaches mankind the same lessons regardless of historical development’ and ‘an awareness of historical change which negates this certainty and is acutely conscious of a national development. In other words, an abstract didacticism versus an English nationalism.’38 Hadfield argues that, even before Higgins’s involvement, ‘[t]he public message of de casibus tragedy had started to pull in two directions’.39 However, he suggests that while ‘the text becomes more cornucopian with its juxtaposition of such diverse narrative strategies’ on Higgins’s arrival, the First Part presents ‘an unproblematic, more crudely ideological’ narrative.40 I would argue that Higgins’s texts and paratexts together produce a deeply problematic reflection of 1570s nationalism, as its tensions foreground precisely this diversity of approaches. Ideology is shown to be profoundly compromised, as the work’s compound generic heritage rips a simplistic rehearsal of the past apart. The collection faces up to a contradiction also embodied in Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, where ‘Lydgate attempts to write an exemplar . . . even as he gives in to the desire to amplify and correct the historical authorities that provide him with the story’.41 While sixteenth-century history is regularly mined for moral precepts, the First Part noticeably grapples with a dissonance between inherited form and intended content; ‘the classical notion of . . . histories as sources of moral exempla’, Nicholas Popper suggests, ‘ultimately brought historians’ credibility under scrutiny’.42 Higgins’s desire to attend to incomplete historiographical texts is further incompatible with 36 See John Clark, ‘Bladud of Bath: The Archaeology of a Legend’, Folklore, 105 (1994), 39–50, at 44. 37 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 105. 38 39 Hadfield, Literature, p. 89. Hadfield, Literature, p. 90. 40 41 Hadfield, Literature, p. 102. Nolan, Lydgate, p. 51. 42 Nicholas Popper, ‘An Ocean of Lies: The Problem of Historical Evidence in the Sixteenth Century’, HLQ, 74:3 (2011), 375–400, at 377. See also van Es, Forms of History, p. 25; Eggert, Disknowledge, pp. 17–22.

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humanist moral education through exempla, in that while one patches up, the other mutilates. As Lavinsky notes, the very term ‘example’, from the Latin eximere, ‘betrays the textual fragmentation and dismemberment specific to exemplary discourse, an abstractive mode that incites moral behaviour precisely by ex-citing, calling forth, or cutting out narratives from other bodies of writing’.43 A poetics of fragmentation permeates Higgins’s complaints: Morgan’s ancient armour, for example, is ‘clampt together, joynts but joyned ill’ (f. 54v), and prefigures Spenser’s Satyrane’s armour of ‘rugged steel’, ‘compilde’ in the forge.44 Histories, too, are ‘clampt together’, compiled—or even forged—from what is to hand. The final framing passage added in 1575 suggests that Higgins’s complaints are ‘fragmentes’ which might gain legitimacy only once they have passed through the ‘Printer’s presse’, and found favour with readers (f. 81r), echoing Ludovic Lloyd’s Pilgrimage, compiled by ‘gathering . . . fragments & broken sentences’.45 Bart van Es reads in the slippage between textual and architectural monuments in The Faerie Queene a movement from historiographical to moral lesson: ‘the regrettable fact that no record of Brutus remains is made to stand as a monument, in the sense of a warning or lesson, of the dangers of discord’.46 That Higgins’s First Part is not able to offer so tidy a transposition is, however, fitting.

WRITING BRITISH HISTORY Although the British legend would become central to later Renaissance imaginative literature, like the 1559–63 Mirrors Higgins’s First Part was unusual amongst contemporary poetry in its choice of subject matter. In his verse Chronycle (1547), Arthur Kelton had shared Higgins’s desire to consider ‘fortunes mutabilitee’, and have British genealogy from the foundation by Brutus ‘Registred in a boke’, but his narrative was vague, and named only its most famous protagonists.47 Despite these stories’ evident significance, they were yet to be tapped for their moral lessons or dramatic potential by the 1570s.48 John Hardyng’s Chronicle, printed in Lavinsky, ‘Turned to Fables’, 450. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (London: Richard Field for William Ponsonby, 1596), III.vii.30. 45 Lloyd, Pilgrimage of Princes, sig. **2r. Cf. van Es, Forms of History, pp. 52–3. 46 van Es, Forms of History, p. 42. 47 Arthur Kelton, A Chronycle with a Genealogie Declaryng That the Brittons and Welshemen Are Linealiye Dyscended from Brute (London: Richard Grafton, 1578), sig. c4v; sig. b1v. 48 John E. Curran, Jr, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth in Renaissance Drama: Imagining NonHistory’, MP, 97:1 (1999), 1–20, at 3. 43 44

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1543 but written in the mid-fifteenth century, was a lone analogue, narrating British history in verse ‘from the first begynnyng of Englande’. Closer to hand was The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex (1570), printed as The Tragedie of Gorboduc in 1565, and first performed at Whitehall in 1561/2. Composed by Baldwin’s Mirror co-author Sackville, and their Inns associate Thomas Norton, the play stages the bloody result of Gorboduc’s division of his British kingdom between his sons, Ferrex and Porrex (‘about’, according to Higgins, 491 BC). Much work has been done on Gorboduc and its engagement with discourses of tyranny, rebellion, and counsel, in common with Baldwin’s Mirror.49 However, although Higgins’s Mirror frames Forrex’s story as a fable about instability and misfortune incurred by Pride and Ambition, and Porrex’s densely annotated complaint enumerates anachronistic legendary and historical fratricides, the relationship between the texts is markedly distant, and his retellings, in quatrains rather than the Mirror’s more usual rhyme royal, come across as ballads with a humanist-moral veneer. Recently reprinted in response to the Northern Rising, the new edition of the play must have been a noteworthy literary-political event, yet Higgins seems not to draw on it. Even his spelling of ‘Gorboduge’, after Cooper, Fabyan, Grafton, and Stow—in other words, prose chronicle histories—either deliberately effaces the play or suggests he had limited contact with it.50 A variety of historiographical options were open to Higgins in the field of ancient British narrative before it was shoehorned into the Mirror framework: prose chronicle, from which he seems to have derived most of his material; Hardyng’s verse chronicle, which anticipates the style but not the content of his Gorboduc poems; summary or epitome, in whose spirit the Mirror is arguably compiled; historical drama, a novelty in which Higgins did not seem to be interested; religiously motivated antiquarian collecting and editing, represented in Higgins’s paratext by Matthew Parker; and chorography, initiated in the sixteenth century by Leland, but not to take off in print until the 1580s.51 Higgins’s synthesis of aspects

49 See, for example, Mark Breitenberg, ‘Reading Elizabethan Iconicity: Gorboduc and the Semiotics of Reform’, ELH, 18:2 (1988), 194–217; Dermot Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Ch. 2; Kevin Dunn, ‘Representing Counsel: Gorboduc and the Elizabethan Privy Council’, ELR, 33:3 (2002), 279–308; Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, EHR, 110:435 (1995), 109–21; Jessica Winston, ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, RQ, 59:1 (2006), 29–59; Winston, Lawyers at Play, Ch. 7. 50 His ‘Forrex’ rather than ‘Ferrex’ also suggests he read this story in Stow (although the 1565 edition of the play also uses this spelling once, most likely in error). 51 Willard Farnham has difficulty trying to reconcile Higgins’s tragic schema with Seneca in ‘John Higgins’ Mirror and Locrine’, MP, 23:3 (1923), 307–13, at 310.

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of these options, which went beyond the existing facets of Baldwin’s model, frames his narrative as a Protestant take on Hardyng’s verse history, at a moment when ‘the British material became part of the wholesale rewriting of history that accompanied the Reformation’, inflected by the Mirror’s moral imperatives.52 While Higgins does not draw directly on the text of Gorboduc, though, the First Part’s concerns correspond closely to the play’s interests in dynasty, community, territory, and succession.53 The division of land among siblings is a recurrent theme (Brutus, Gorboduge, Leir), evoking the Welsh custom ‘whereof this mischiefe grew, that is, the division of the fathers inheritance amongst all the sonnes’ by which ‘everie one of the sonnes did hold some portion of his fathers lands’: Caradog o Lancarfan’s twelfthcentury Brut y Tywysogion explains the catastrophic impact of this custom, ‘for by that meanes, the inheritance being continuallie divided and subdivided amongst the children, and the childrens children, &c. was at length brought to nothing’ and the resultant ‘unnaturall strife . . . amongst brethren’. Translated in Powel’s Historie of Cambria (1584), Caradog’s account may also explain why Brutus’s original apportioning of England, Scotland, and Wales to his sons Locrinus, Albanact, and Camber did not end disastrously, as, he says, this custom works well ‘to plant and settle anie nation in a large countrie not inhabited, but in a populous countrie’ it causes ruinous ‘strife and debate’.54 Higgins emphasizes the Britons’ concerted unity as a group at the outset, speaking and acting as one, for example in mourning, ‘the Britaynes all, with one assent: | Did for their king full doulfully lament’ (f. 13r). But this unity dissipates as their stories progress. The ‘Welshness’ of the Britons is largely played down—had Higgins wanted to, he could have drawn on the efflorescence of Welsh-language scholarship printed in recent decades.55 However, it is clearly significant. The location for Higgins’s vision itself is occluded as part of a disorientating dream experience, not situated at Sackville’s hell mouth, but instead in ‘a goodly hall, | At th’ende wherof there seemde a duskish Ile’ (f. 2v) out of which the Britons are summoned. The description nods to 1563’s classical underworld and the ultimate source of the Mirror corpus, 52 Alan MacColl, ‘The Construction of England as a Protestant “British” Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, RS, 18:4 (2004), 582–608, at 583. 53 See Jacqueline Vanhoutte, ‘Community, Authority, and the Motherland in Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc’, SEL, 40:2 (2000), 227–39. 54 Caradog o Lancarfan, The Historie of Cambria, trans. Humphrey Lluyd, ed. David Powel (London, 1584), p. 21. 55 See for example William Salesbury, A Playne and a Familiar Introductio[n] to the Brytishe Tongue, a revised edition of which was printed in 1567 by Henry Denham; Denham also printed many Welsh-language texts.

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Boccaccio, by recalling the ‘duskish drowsie dreames’ of Lethe from which Love raises ‘drowned wittes’ in Galesus, Cymon and Iphigenia (1565).56 Perhaps the reader is also encouraged to fill in the details from the ‘wonderslye wrought’ ‘goodly hall’ in The Historie of Graunde Amoure and La Bell Pucel (1554), whose lengthy description evokes the elaborate, jewelled landscapes of medieval dream visions.57 The ‘duskish Ile’, though, is more revealing about the origins of Higgins’s Britons in every sense. The ‘Dark Isle’ or ‘Island’ is the common translation of Ynys Dywyll, the Old Welsh name for Anglesey, the island at Wales’s north-west point, and ‘ancient seat of the Druides . . . brought in subjection under the Romane Empire’.58 It was, furthermore, a chorographical battleground in the dispute between Polydore Vergil and the Galfridian apologists, after Vergil mistakenly assumed that the Isle of Man and Anglesey, or Môn, were one and the same; in 1568, Humphrey Llwyd retorted that the continental upstart Vergil was ‘too yong a godfather to name so old a child’.59 Stow describes how, ‘driven into the Westerne partes of the Ile’ after Cadwaladr’s flight to Rome in 682, ‘the Brytaines were called Walshmen’ and ‘dispossessed . . . of theyr auntient habitation, & rule of this land’.60 To draw the Britons back into the light, out of the farthest corner of Wales, and specifically out of a landscape imbued with mystical resonance, the ominous promise of Roman subjugation, and a live historiographical quarrel, shows Higgins’s First Part engaging stratigraphically with the island’s textual past and present. Stow’s account rehearses the line that the name ‘Welshman’ ‘was given them by the Englishmen, or Saxons, who used to call all men Walshmen, that be straungers’.61 Perhaps unexpectedly, given his era’s ready appropriation of pre-Catholic cultures to underpin Protestant reform, Higgins plays on the Britons’ strangeness, in tandem with their suggestively apposite experiences. They appear as foreigners to his dreaming narrator, ‘[m]en 56 Giovanni Boccaccio, A Most Pleasant and Delightful History of Galesus, Cymon and Iphigenia, (Decamerone, fifth day, tale 1), trans. T. C. (London: Nicolas Wyer, 1565), sig. Biir–v. 57 Stephen Hawes, The Historie of Graunde Amoure and La Bell Pucel (London: John Wayland, 1554), sig. Biiir. 58 Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (London: John Norton, 1608), sig. ix2v; see also Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London: Humphrey Lownes, 1612), p. 154. 59 Caradog o Lancarfan, Historie of Cambria, pp. 7–8. See Iolo and Menai Roberts, ‘De Mona Druidum Insula’, in Marcel van der Broeke, Peter van der Krogt, and Peter Meurer (eds), Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of his Death, 1598–1998 (HES, 1998), pp. 347–61. 60 John Stow, Chronicles of England (London: Henry Bynneman for Ralph Newberie, 1580), p. 89. 61 Stow, Chronicles, p. 89. Other accounts claim it was named after Dyfnwal Moelmud, or Dunwallo, the son of Cloten according to Geoffrey’s Historia.

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mighty bigge, in playne and straunge atyre’, ‘[d]estainde with woade, and turkish berds they had, | On th’over lippes moutchatoes long of heyre’ (f. 3r), foregrounding their otherness in strikingly contemporary terms.62 While recalling Caesar’s characterization of the Britons in the Commentarii de bello Gallico, who ‘dye themselves wyth woade’, ‘weare their heare long, and shave al partes of theyr bodyes saving ye head and the upper lip’, their facial hair also anticipates the 1585 translation of Nicholas de Nicolay’s Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, made into Turkie; early uses of ‘moustache’, whose orthography in the First Part conveys its unfamiliarity, often have Turkish associations, while the Turks were mooted, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to share Trojan ancestry.63 The Britons are therefore religiously and racially distinct, but in a way which reinforces their opposition to Caesar’s Rome. The slight resonance with the contemporary conflict between the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires, in which, during the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabethan England sided uneasily with Murad III, also gestures towards the Britons’ own awkward allegorical alliances, suggestive of ‘the slipperiness and instability of the ideological oppositions on which the political structure of Renaissance Europe depended’.64 They are also foreigners in ‘their own’ land, reflecting the complex cultural politics of Elizabethan attempts to rationalize contemporary English expansionism.65 When the territory is divided between Brutus’s sons, Higgins carefully maintains the perspective of the new arrivals by omitting modern toponyms, so Locrinus takes ‘[t]his midle parte of the realme’, Camber is given ‘that lande that lies welnighe oregrowne: | With woodes Norwest & mountaynes mighty hie’, and Albanact ‘[a]s muche . . . As Northe beyonde the arme of sea there lyes’ (f. 12r–v). Higgins’s complaints circumvent any sense of hybrid identity 62 Holinshed’s near-contemporary emphasis on the otherness of the Welsh points up the complications of England’s British ancestry; see Harriet Archer, ‘Holinshed and the Middle Ages’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 171–86, at pp. 173, 185–6. 63 Julius Caesar, The Eyght Bookes of Caius Julius Caesar, trans. Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1565), f. 117r; the OED cites this text as the first usage of ‘moustache’: ‘moustache | mustache, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2016. Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 57–8. 64 Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 59; Hopkins, Cultural Uses of the Caesars, p. 57. See also Lisa Jardine, ‘Gloriana Rules the Waves: Or, the Advantage of Being Excommunicated (And a Woman)’, TRHS, 14 (2004), 209–22; Benedict S. Robinson, ‘Harry and Amurath’, SQ, 60:4 (2009), 399–424. 65 For analysis of the ongoing ramifications of this problem, see John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 3.

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present in the early history of the island, and instead advance Britain rather as a site of negative identity, a blank slate for the Trojan refugees, whose nationhood is reset on their arrival at the ‘deserte shore’ (f. 6v) of Albion.66 The physical map on which Brutus shows his sons their allocated territories could well recall for Higgins’s contemporaries Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), or Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of the Countries of England and Wales (1580) which appeared in parts from 1574. Richard Helgerson suggests that these publications formulated a new ‘cartographically and chorographically shaped consciousness of national power’, strengthening ‘local and national identity at the expense of an identity based on dynastic loyalty’, and opening ‘a conceptual gap between the land and its ruler’.67 The First Part, too, provides a history of the land onto which a series of dynastic identities is imposed. Higgins’s ancient landscape is inscribed by the Britons, filling in their carte blanche as they go along, bringing the land and its inhabitants into closer association through their remembrance in topographic features.68 Humber, for example, gives his name to the river in which he meets his death, and which ‘the Britaynes to my fame: | Yet call . . . by Humbers name’ (f. 17r). Morgan ‘[w]as at Glamorgan . . . stricken downe’; ‘[t]he place is cald Glamorgan to this daye’ (f. 66v). Turnus’s burial gives Tours its name; King Leir dies and is buried at Leicester; Lud lends his name to Luds-town, or London. Inherited from source material, and rehearsed across the Elizabethan retellings of the Galfridian narrative, these references emphasize the role of geography in more fully piecing together national origins, but also question the implications of such commemoration for lasting rule—Humber, for example, is a Nordic king, not a Briton.69 Like Spenser’s Lady Verlame, the genius of a city razed after successive British, Saxon, and Roman occupations, the landscape witnesses and testifies to a tragic sequence of mutable temporal 66 Cf. David J. Baker, ‘Britain Redux’, SS, 29 (2014), 21–36, at 25. The ‘desert places’ of Britain carry their own literary baggage, however; see B. G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in the House of Fame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 126–8; Howard R. Patch, ‘Chaucer’s Desert’, MLN, 34:6 (1919), 321–8; John M. Steadman, ‘Chaucer’s “Desert of Libye”, Venus, and Jove (The Hous of Fame, 486–87)’, MLN, 76:3 (1961), 196–201. 67 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 108; p. 114. On the 1570s cartographic phenomenon and its relation to imaginative literature see also Nandini Das, ‘Romance Recharted: The “Ground-Plots” of Sidney’s Arcadia’, YES, 41:1 (2011), 51–67. 68 Cf. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, p. 315. 69 See van Es, Forms of History, p. 41; Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Brian S. Robinson, ‘Elizabethan Society and its Named Places’, Geographical Review, 63:3 (1973), 322–33. Cf. Lesley B. Cormack, ‘ “Good Fences Make Good Neighbours”: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England’, Isis, 82:4 (1991), 639–61.

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authorities, a topographical rendering of the translatio imperii in the de casibus mould. Spenser’s chorographical approach to the nation’s past is obviously indebted to William Camden’s Britannia (1586), without which, Verlame laments, her memory would be utterly erased.70 The First Part anticipates later Elizabethan adaptations of the Britannia’s ‘hybridity’ to create ‘works with historical content but of mixed or uncertain literary form’, combining prose and verse sources, and textual, archaeological, and chorographical details.71 Where earlier Mirrors had become increasingly preoccupied with historical geography as time went on, the First Part raises the stakes. Read in a more playful light, though, the practice also recalls Baldwin and his co-authors’ irreverent interrogation of linguistic equivalence, and echoes the way in which the pompous Menippean fallguy Streamer delineates the naming of London streets in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat. Bishops built Bishopsgate, Streamer explains, ‘Moorgate took the name of the field without it, which had been a very moor’, and ‘Ludgate taketh the name of Lud’.72 Printed in 1570, the satire may well have crossed the path of the young poet so keen to capitalize on the popularity of its author. While Higgins’s complaints try to rebuild British history spatially through their oral testimony, the spectre of Baldwin’s Cat reinforces the cynicism of the dream vision’s verse links, reminding us that spoken evidence is also suspect. Where the British legend was rehearsed, it was, of course, fiercely contested. The nexus for this controversy was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, and the monstrous proliferation of romance stories it had spawned. For Geoffrey and the author of the vernacular Brut, Layamon, history had been a ‘broadly conceived genre’, in which ‘historical truth’ was intertextually contingent; ‘a history need not be true at all in any objective sense provided it be edifying and sufficiently verisimilar to be convincing’.73 But in the sixteenth century, antiquarians demanded that their readers take sides over Geoffrey’s veracity, and the matter of Britain at large was enormously volatile, both as a narrative and as an idea. Exactly how sixteenth-century English readers, and their Welsh monarchs, should relate to the ancient Britons was desperately fraught, to say

70 Edmund Spenser, The Ruines of Time, in Complaints (London: William Ponsonbie, 1591), sig. B3v. See also van Es, Forms of History, p. 49. 71 Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), p. 208. 72 Baldwin, Beware the Cat, p. 9. 73 Kenneth J. Tiller, Layamon’s Brut and the Anglo-Norman Vision of History (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 1; Ferguson, Utter Antiquity, pp. 115–16.

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nothing of this relationship’s territorial implications.74 Helen Cooper suggests that Geoffrey’s ‘Historia has a pro-British and anti-English agenda’, a configuration reversed, argues Simon Meecham-Jones, by medieval English expansionist appropriations of Geoffrey’s history, a process exposed by Chaucer’s reference to ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ in the House of Fame, and his punning allusion to the ‘Cymerian’ darkness enveloping the ancient British past.75 As the First Part was composed, the Galfridian narrative, of which Leland had been a vehement defender in his Assertio inclytissimi Arturij Regis Britanniae (1544) against the doubts cast by Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (1534), was being seriously discredited by sceptical commentators like George Buchanan, whose antipathetic Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582) was in progress as Higgins composed his own history. For some readers, a substantial portion of the British past could essentially be cancelled, although Higgins’s associate Churchyard would later take issue with Vergil and Buchanan’s ‘bad’ judgement in his Worthines of Wales (1587).76 The myth of Troy, meanwhile, was put to work on both sides of contemporary confessional pamphlet wars, implicating Geoffrey’s History in polemical responses to Elizabeth I’s 1570 excommunication, civil discord, and the succession question.77 The Arthurian legend, of which Geoffrey was effectively the originator, was particularly outré in some quarters, having become synonymous for many with the Catholic propagation of ‘false fables’, and therefore problematic for reforming humanists.78 Hardyng’s pre-Reformation Chronicle (c.1457–63) betrayed a disproportionate interest, devoting thirteen chapters to Arthur and his knights, as against, for example, the one he gives to Locrine. Higgins’s history, by contrast, contains no hint of Arthuriana. Three years later, Blenerhasset would hedge around Arthur’s story, writing a complaint of Uther Pendragon for his Second Part while omitting Arthur himself (see 1578S, f. 40r). It was only in 1610 that Arthur finally entered the Mirror canon. By this time, questions about the veracity of Geoffrey’s 74 See, for example, MacColl, ‘The Construction of England’, and ‘The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England’, JBS, 45:2 (2006), 248–69; Andrew Escobedo, ‘From Britannia to England: Cymbeline and the Beginning of Nations’, SQ, 59:1 (2008), 60–87; Hadfield, Matter of Britain, especially Ch. 4. 75 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 437 n. 52; Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘ “Englyssh Gaufride” and British Chaucer? Chaucerian Allusions to the Condition of Wales in the House of Fame’, CR, 44:1 (2009), 1–24, at 20. 76 Thomas Churchyard, The Worthines of Wales (London: G. Robinson for Thomas Cadman, 1587), sig. C2r. 77 See Kewes, ‘Romans in the Mirror’. 78 See, for example, the diatribe against Arthurian romance in Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: John Day, 1570), f. 27r-v.

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narrative were beside the point, and Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr (1601) had reclaimed Arthur for the Protestant cause; Niccols appropriated the figure to make a very different statement about the textual past and its present pertinence. Brutus and his descendants, though, were problematic enough. Brutus drew together by his name alone wave after wave of negative historiographical overtones: the Welsh ‘Brut’, or story; Layamon’s vernacular version of Wace’s Anglo-Roman Roman de Brut, records of a ‘brutish’, pre-textual past, ‘bruited’ rather than written down; its paradoxical associative ties to both the ancient myth of Troy, and the less ancient Roman Republic. Budra claims that ‘in reciting tragedies from legendary prehistory [Higgins] was retreating from the concerns of current historiography’.79 In fact, his Mirror struck at the heart of contemporary history and politics, not just rehearsing these stories but highlighting their fragility. Higgins’s Britons themselves are often metatextually aware of their contested historical status. Evidently the categories of historian and poet were entwined and fluid from their perspective as for many in the period, but Blundeville’s contemporaneous distinction between ‘poets historical’ and historiographers, like Sidney’s six years later, must have some bearing on their evident discomfort.80 That Higgins’s Mirror, like Baldwin’s, articulates such concern for the transmission of textual accounts suggests that the openness of history to interpretation and rereading for diverse moral and social ends was a live issue. Hardyng, no stranger to textual forgeries himself, had been suspicious of his historical sources, ‘[n]or well assured, who were corrupte or pure’, ‘[w]hether fabulous, or menne . . . of good authoritee’.81 Higgins’s Nennius similarly takes on inaccurate and absent accounts, arguing that ‘wryters . . . Of stories olde’ who omitted his tale must be ‘rude or negligente: | Or else . . . unlearned’ (1574F, f. 68v), an omission John E. Curran suggests shows Higgins inadvertently ‘signalling the manifold holes perforating the Galfridian tradition’.82 Rather than a ‘lapse’, though, as Curran terms it, this is central to the First Part’s 79

Budra, De casibus, p. 26. Cf. Blair Worden, ‘Historians and Poets’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), pp. 69–90. 81 John Hardyng, The Chronicle of Jhon Hardyng from the Firste Begynnyg of Englande, unto the Reigne of Kyng Edward the Fourth (London: Richard Grafton, 1543), ‘To the Reader’, sig. *7r, f. 7r. See Henry Summerson, ‘Hardyng, John (b. 1377/8, d. in or after 1464)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/12296, accessed 17 May 2016], on Hardyng’s forged documents supporting the English claim to the Scottish crown. 82 John E. Curran, Jr, Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (London: University of Delaware Press, 2002), p. 167. 80

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exposure of the problems with the nation’s textual past. Regarding his father’s reign, Higgins’s Nennius claims that ‘writers misse. | Or if I may be bolde to saye: they lye’ (1574F, f. 69v). Nennius is ‘ridiculously, uncertain as to whether his father Heli reigned for one or forty years’ because of conflicting historical records: Higgins’s marginalia indicate that Lanquet, Stow, and Grafton claim one year, ‘Flores Hist.’ forty.83 The ‘ridiculous’ situation in which Nennius finds himself, though, foregrounds his existence as a purely textual product; he is unable to resolve the conflict, because he has no reality to draw on outside the chronicles. So, ‘the boundaries of plausibility and credulity remained porous and uncertain’ in the historiographical culture of the 1570s, with the Historia at the forefront of this uncertainty.84 It could be that Higgins’s rehearsal of Geoffrey’s British history strays into the realm of magical romance not in the spirit of residual credulity, but rather to foreground the problematically fictive quality of this history. Mempricius, who twice remarks on his ‘straunge’ appearance (f. 36v), had featured in Pierre Boaistuau’s compilation of Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature (1569), having been eaten by wolves, and Boaistuau’s subtitle, ‘a description of sundry strange things, seming monstrous in our eyes and iudgement, bicause we are not priuie to the reasons of them’, speaks tellingly to the interconnectedness of historiography and the marvellous.85 Monstrosity is predicated on the absence of a logic of cause and effect, an essential marker of history writing in, for example, Thomas Blundeville’s True Order and Methode (1574), and Higgins’s later complaint of Burdet, who states that the historian must ‘bee able well his reasons so to knit | As should continue well the matter’ (1587, f. 250r).86 Not only is a ‘wonder’ opposed to logic in its unnaturalness, it methodologically invokes then dismisses historical truth. Higgins is repeatedly drawn to the monstrous. Most striking is Albanact’s conception of fame as a flying creature, ‘[a] monster swifter none is under son’ (f. 13r–v). She is both the product of a mythical origin story whose British analogue Albanact also rehearses, and generative of untrustworthy narrative herself: They say the earth, that first the giaunts bred, ... Brought forth this sister, of those monsters dead: 83

Curran, Roman Invasions, p. 167. Laura Ashe, ‘Holinshed and Mythical History’, in Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 153–69, at p. 153. 85 Pierre Boaistuau, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature, trans. E. Fenton (London: Henry Bynneman, 1569), f. 7r. 86 See Thomas Blundeville, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (London: William Seres, 1574), sig. F.j r. 84

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Unperfect Histories Full light of foote swift winges the winds to catch: Such monster erst did Nature never hatche: As manye plumes she hath from top to toe, So many eyes them under watche or moe. ... By night twene heaven, she flyes and earthly shade: And shreaking takes no quiet sleepe by darke. On houses rowfes, or towres as keeper made She sittes by day, and Cities threats t’invade. And as she telles, what thinges she sees by vewe: She rather shewes thats fained false, then true. (f. 13v)

She anticipates van Es’s reading of Spenserian error in the inscribed retelling of ‘stories of how the island came to be inhabited’, in which ‘[i]t is as much the inaccuracies of history as the creatures themselves that are “monstrous”’.87 Perched on rooftops like the birds of the Ovidian locus horridus, Fame emerges from a classical tradition incompatible with the antiquarian demands of the First Part’s paratexts, embodying the treacherous instability of reported accounts, and the mythographical underbelly of humanist education. An alternative slippage between kinds of monstrosity is showcased by the legendary tyrant Morindus, devoured by a sea monster which had been terrorizing the local coast. He attempts, like a British Perseus, to defeat the monster, but is swallowed whole; Higgins amplifies existing chronicle accounts with a lively description of the monster’s innards, full of ‘rammishe stenche, bloud, poyson, slymy gere’ (f. 67v).88 Although Stow and Cooper had emphasized Morindus’s cruelty as a ruler in their prose accounts of the story, they did not draw a moral from the manner of his death. Higgins, by contrast, reactivates the moral equivalence found in Baldwin’s prose frames, to suggest ‘[a]t once the realme was rid, of monsters twayne’ (f. 67v). Apparently equally fantastical, the British Icarus, Bladud, ‘practisinge by curious arts to flye, fell and brake his necke’ (f. 40v). However, Higgins’s narrative works to reclaim Bladud for ‘true’ history. Like all Higgins’s British tragedies, the title includes a date (844 BC), an inheritance from the 1571 Mirror conveying the putative veracity of Higgins’s stories. Bladud works hard to legitimize his magical skill through a painstaking 87 van Es, Forms of History, p. 40. See also Maik Goth, Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in The Faerie Queene: Most Ugly Shapes, and Horrible Aspects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), Ch. 9, especially pp. 104–6. 88 This recalls Jonah’s experience inside the whale, which ‘stank as Þe deuel’, full of ‘glaym ande glette’, in Patience, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), p. 197.

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run-down of his learning: stanzas are devoted to the progressively less reputable arts of Grammer, Rhetoricke, Logicke, Musicke, Geometrie, Astronomie, Phisiognomie and Metoposcopie, Chiromancie and Geomancie, Augurium and Magicke. Bladud, with commendable prescience, insists that ‘wooden birdes’ can be made to fly ‘[t]hrough Magicke Mathematicall’ (f. 45v), a practice which ‘swarves from Natures will’, but results from scientific application, in contrast to the occult tenor of Golding’s Daedalus, who ‘to uncouth Arts . . . bent the force of all his wits | To alter natures course by craft’.89 Bladud’s ‘witched wiles’ and ‘[d]arke dreames’ are mocked as much as condemned, and his ridiculous final appearance, ‘deckt . . . with plumes and winges’, recasts Albanact’s feathered Fame in a bathetic light, revealing faith in alchemical practices to be folly based on Fame’s own flawed information: ‘[w]home Fame had praisde I gate the beste . . . Their wisedome is but wily wit, | Their sagenes is but subtilty’.90 In fact, Bladud claims his fate is governed by cause and effect—‘[w]ell then deserts requirde my fall’ (emphasis added)—which writes him out of the arena of Boaistuau’s ‘wonders’, and back into historiographical logic. Bladud opposes necromancy, ‘[a] divelishe arte, the feen[d]es by this, | Seme calde, and conjurde to arise’ (f. 42v), too, while Higgins performs the textual ‘form of legitimized necromancy—a “magical harnessing of the dead”’, which Schwyzer suggests contemporary nationalism required.91 The play of genres within the First Part allows Higgins’s histories to encompass classical epic and vernacular romance, a genre central, according to Helen Cooper, to national self-representation.92 The collection’s genre is determinedly set apart from chronicle history, even as it attempts a systematic reanimation of the past, circling the inadequacy of chronicle to accomplish the nationalist feats demanded of it.

MEDIATING AUTHORITIES The First Part negotiates its historiographical difficulties by formally foregrounding them. A series of poetic devices which stand for temporal distance bring interpretation and authority into question, or highlight the 89

Ovid, Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London: William Seres, 1567), f. 98v. See Miriam Jacobson’s discussion of the pertinent connotations of ‘subtlety’ in Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Ch. 2. 91 Schwyzer, Literature, pp. 97–8. See also Genevieve Guenther, Magical Imaginations: Instrumental Aesthetics in the English Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 28–9. 92 Cooper, Romance, p. 6. 90

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gulf to be bridged between the inscribed Higgins and the British characters whose stories he tries to hear. His Mirror walks a tightrope of material and immaterial textual communication, probing the ways in which readers and hearers relate to the spoken and printed word. Firstly, although the commission to extend the Mirror in this way may have stemmed from Marshe’s wider commercial strategies, the decision to insert this treatment of dubious ancient British history into an already complex and contested framework destabilizes the project from the outset. Even the text’s relationship to Baldwin’s Mirror is unclear. Is it an extension or a recension? Based on the Mirror or a part of it? Higgins’s, and Blenerhasset’s, fictive narrative frameworks and problematic, abrupt or non-existent endings further cloud this relationship. Jessica Winston calls Higgins’s 1574 volume a ‘prequel’, and Blenerhasset’s Second Part a ‘continuation’ of Higgins’s prequel.93 W. F. Trench does not acknowledge Higgins’s work as connected at all, instead including it among those ‘other collections [which] appeared claiming the same title’.94 Hadfield says Higgins makes ‘additions’ to the Mirror, while for Human and Schwyzer his texts are ‘editions’.95 Gerard Genette specifies a ‘genetic’ difference between kinds of hypertext: ‘One may write a continuation of someone else’s work and the sequel to one’s own.’96 This should make Higgins’s Mirror text a ‘continuation’; however, Genette goes on to identify continuation as specifically the act of ‘finishing the work in the author’s stead’, which as a result ‘can only be the work of another’. By contrast the sequel ‘exploit[s] the success of a work that in its own time was often considered complete . . . setting it into motion again with new episodes’, which resonates suggestively with Higgins’s practice.97 Accordingly, Higgins’s contribution lies somewhere between ‘sequel’ and ‘continuation’ depending on how the Mirror’s paratextual rhetoric of imperfection was popularly received; a ‘continuation’ in its desire to perfect the unfinished text, and a ‘sequel’ in that it attempts to exploit the original’s popularity. Baldwin was dead by the time Higgins’s First Part was printed, but in any case, Gary Taylor argues, ‘in any

93 Jessica Winston, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and Public Political Discourse in Elizabethan England’, SP, 4 (2004), 281–400, at 399. 94 W. F. Trench, A Mirror for Magistrates: Its Origin and Influence (Privately printed, 1898), pp. 73–4. 95 In Hadfield, Literature; Human, ‘House of Mirrors’; Schwyzer, Literature. 96 Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 161. 97 Genette, Palimpsests, p. 162.

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editorial situation, the author has always already passed away’.98 Higgins’s work effects a ‘redistribution of intertextual space, by the introduction of new reference points’, and as such constitutes an editorial act, subsuming Baldwin’s Mirror at the same time as reframing it as a comprehensive verse chronicle, although in reality this monolithic vision is as removed from Higgins and Blenerhasset’s 1570s additions as it is from Baldwin’s original intention.99 For Genette, the continuation is a ‘restricted’ form, ‘an imitation with a partially prescribed subject’.100 But Higgins flouts this restriction, and recasts the Mirror’s historiopoetic mode.101 In his search for a lost British past, Higgins does not weigh specific sources against each other as Baldwin’s complaints and prose frame had done.102 Instead he foregrounds the insubstantial nature of his visions, and uncertainty surrounding their validity. When Albanact begins to speak, ‘With Ecco so did halfe his wordes rebounde, | That scarce at first the sence might well appeare’ (f. 3v). Not for the last time, Higgins is initially unsure whether he will be able to catch and record the ancient speaker’s testimony. After Locrinus’s complaint, ‘this king was vanisht quite and gone, | And as a mist dissolved into ayre’ (f. 21r); Elstride likewise ‘flitted in the ayre abrode, | As twere a miste or smooke dissolved quite’ (f. 28r). Following Madan’s complaint, the dream frame’s speaker considers, (If it were he) but sure I half suspecte It was some other else, so serv’de had bene, For that all stories do not so detecte His death, or else I did perhaps neglecte His tale, bicause that divers stories brought, Such fancies of his death into my thought. (f. 34r)

Where Baldwin and Ferrers analysed their sources’ disagreements, Higgins stresses that his visionary history assimilates the stories of others. Hesitancy lies at the heart of Higgins’s representation, portrayed by agonizing pauses before his legendary figures speak. Manlius’s complaint, for example, is delayed, ‘as to mynde he musde his factes to call’. When ‘At length . . . he spake’, Higgins cannot be sure if it was with ‘these wordes, or like’ (1574F,

98 Gary Taylor, ‘The Renaissance and the End of Editing’, in George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (eds), Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 121–49, at p. 125. 99 Taylor, ‘The End of Editing’, p. 131. 100 Genette, Palimpsests, pp. 162–3. 101 See Geller, ‘Editing under the Influence’, 58–61. 102 In ‘Higgins to the Reader’ he notes that ‘Lanquet, Stowe, and Grafton were alwayes nighe of one opinion’ (1574F, sig. *6r).

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f. 34r). Irenglas pauses for a full stanza before his 1575 complaint, as Higgins’s framing narrative embodies the distancing and silencing effects of time (including a year’s delay in publication) on historical accounts: At length he tryde, which way to tell his mynde: Yet how to speake his tonge had quite forgotte: Each instrument forgotten had his kinde, That erste could run at randon and by roate, But then me thought, with fist his brest hee smote, The other hande his musing browes did holde: And as awakte (at laste) this tale he tolde. (1575F, f. 75v)

(The tale is further compromised though, if Irenglas has remembered merely to speak ‘at randon’ or ‘by roate’.) In making the reader persevere to reach these stories through grinding delays, Higgins emphasizes how hard won his ancient narratives are. By foregrounding the scarcity and fragility of their accounts, he also increases the affective impact of the characters’ moral messages as the reader strains to hear them. Even when the narrator does ‘write’, he displaces his own agency by personifying his pen, which ‘did trudge to wryte these verses’ (1575F, f. 81r), unlike the active role of the fictive Baldwin and his colleagues in the original prose frame. The Britons’ accounts are set at a further remove by the cultivation of an exaggerated medievalism. The impression is widespread that Higgins’s verse is, in a pejorative sense, ‘medieval’; Budra’s claim that ‘Higgins took the Mirror back to Lydgate and the hoary tradition of the dream frame’ perpetuates a strong critical tradition.103 Recent studies have exposed the deficiency of this approach; Pincombe, for example, insists that Baldwin’s Mirror itself belongs more properly to poetic continuity with the medieval period.104 Indeed, Budra, and before him Farnham, both examined the medieval origins of the Mirror and its legacy in drama.105 While they present consideration of its medieval roots as a fundamental contribution to the study of the 1559–63 text, Budra refers repeatedly to the retrospective technique of Higgins’s work as a ‘retreat’: Higgins retreats ‘from the current concerns of historiography’ and ‘the immediate past’, taking the Mirror ‘out of the process of patriotic self-definition that directed so much of the intellectual energy of the late Tudor period’, and making it ‘a book

103 Budra, De casibus, p. 33. See also Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, pp. 13, 17; Douglas Bush, ‘Classical Lives in the Mirror for Magistrates’, SP, 22:2 (1925), 256–66, at 256. Cf. Farnham, ‘John Higgins’ Mirror’, 309–10. 104 See, for example, Pincombe, ‘Baldwin and A Mirror’, 16. 105 Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956); Budra, De casibus, especially the final chapter on Richard II.

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of sweeping antiquarian lore rather than English political history’.106 The suggestion that Higgins’s First Part of the Mirror is medieval is often deployed to distance his contribution from Baldwin’s, which by contrast has been historically located as a precursor to late sixteenth-century tragedy: while Baldwin’s text anticipates, Higgins’s regresses. It becomes problematic to denounce Higgins for his work’s medieval features, though, when we interpret them as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Unlike Spenser’s archaic diction and form in his Shepheardes Calender, printed five years later, Higgins’s medievalism arguably stemmed from the reinstatement of Lydgate, and his mediation of the authority of ‘Bochas’, in the background of the Mirror project which the earlier editions had played down.107 But Higgins, like Spenser, also looks to the incipient canon of vernacular English poets, with Chaucer at their head, in his quest to identify and stabilize a historically grounded national aesthetic, as well as foregrounding the ‘notional instability both of texts and the category author’.108 Higgins draws, for example, on Robert Henryson, whom he could have known as Chaucer from the Testament of Cresseid’s publication in William Thynne’s 1532 Workes. Richard Hillman notes the similarities between Sackville’s Induction and Henryson’s Testament: both begin with a typical description of the weather that the current season and corresponding astrological sign have brought with them, and equate these with the emotions of the speaker.109 The opening of Henryson’s Testament also, however, shares these and other lexical echoes with Higgins’s dream vision, suggesting that, while Higgins’s vision owes much to Sackville’s Induction, to the extent that Lady Anne Clifford mistook one for the other, in this case Higgins leap-frogged Sackville and went directly to his medieval source.110 In Higgins’s Induction, ‘The wery nightes, approatched on apace’, closely following Sackville’s ‘wrathfull winter prochinge on a pace’, while the poems share the personification of astrological features, the fading of greenery, and a military tenor to the overthrow of one season 106

Budra, De casibus, pp. 26–7. See Human, ‘House of Mirrors’, 775, on Higgins’s incorporation of Lydgate’s title ‘in order to lend prior authority to his later text’. 108 Ralph G. Williams, ‘I Shall Be Spoken: Textual Boundaries, Authors, and Intent’, in George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (eds), Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 45–66, at p. 51. 109 Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and the Stage (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 81; cf. Mike Pincombe, ‘A Place in the Shade: George Cavendish and De casibus Tragedy’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 372–88. 110 Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity’, p. 270. 107

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by another (1574F, f. 1r; 1563, f. 116r). Sackville, though, far more explicitly reads the inevitability of death into the transition from summer to winter. Higgins emulates Sackville’s diction but not his interpretation. Instead, he shares with Henryson the belief that ‘Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte | Suld correspond and be equiualent’.111 In contrast to Higgins and Sackville’s autumnal setting, for Henryson March–April are most fitted to tragedy, but it is his example and not Sackville’s that Higgins follows when he is convinced by bad weather to read and write sad stories. Sackville extends his description of the season and the zodiac, and encounters the weeping figure of Sorrowe without the help of explicitly textual mediation: it is his own imagination, rather than a book, which presents ‘Such fall of pieres as in this realme had be’ (1563, f. 117r). Henryson and Higgins, however, both proceed quickly from the conventional seasonal description to an encounter with their source material. Henryson settles in with a drink in front of the fire, then ‘tuik ane quair— and left all uther sport— | Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious | Of fair Cresseid and worthie Troylus’.112 Higgins’s narrative becomes explicitly early modern at this point; he ‘went the Printers straight unto’ (f. 1r). However, his source text is similarly ‘a booke so sad, | As time of yeare or wynter could require’, found ‘At length, by hap’ (f. 1r). Higgins recalls Henryson’s presentation of his fictive self as reader, dreamer, and writer, re-engaging with an earlier approach to historical rewriting, which looks to his Chaucerian interrogation of authority through books, dreams, and half-heard, half-remembered accounts.113 In the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the ‘real’ Chaucer claims that ‘if olde bokes were aweye, | Yloren were of remembraunce the keye’.114 While dreaming, Chaucer is told that he may find the women ‘in [his] bookes’, and on waking ‘my bokes gan I take, | And ryght thus on my Legende gan I make’.115 Higgins’s dream takes him beyond his book, filling in a narrative it did not provide, and requiring the manifestation of the extra-textual sources Somnus and Morpheus to help him where his history is lacking—criticism has become inured, I think, to the irony of Higgins’s choice of assistants here, with its roots in Chaucer’s own allusive

111 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid (Edinburgh: Henrie Charteris, 1593), sig. Ai v. 112 Henryson, Testament, sig. Aii r. 113 ‘The reading of a book as the occasion and provocation for a dream’ is supposed to be Chaucer’s innovation; John M. Fyler, Introduction to The House of Fame, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), pp. 347–8, at p. 347. 114 115 Riverside Chaucer, p. 589. Riverside Chaucer, p. 603.

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playfulness.116 The inscribed Higgins has decided to ‘refreshe my wittes oppreste’ by choosing a book (f. 1r); he happens upon Baldwin’s Mirror, and reads it several times before trying to sleep. Instead, Somnus ‘Revived all my fancies fonde’, recalling the process which Baldwin describes more prosaically, when he ‘began . . . to slumber: but my imagination styll prosecutyng this tragicall matter, brought me suche a fantasy’ (1559, f. 48v). Higgins next humbly did request: [Morpheus] shewe th’unhappy princes were of yore, ... Sythe unto divers Somnus erste had tolde, What things were done in elder times of olde. (f. 2v)

This is an exercise in historiographical wish-fulfilment, as the inscribed Higgins asks to have not the future, but the past revealed to him, invoking then modifying the literary tradition into which he writes himself (and suppressing the moral, educative functions of both dream vision and sixteenth-century historiography, here). The innovation of the dream vision is an indispensable tool as Higgins embarks on a new history of absent origins, as its mechanics foreground historical distance, difference, and loss, while offering a framing narrative of composition to contain his de casibus tragedies. The dream vision speaks to historiographical dislocation on multiple levels, evoking a medieval tradition relegated in Baldwin’s Mirror to the surreal interlude of Baldwin’s inset dream (1559, f. 48r–v) and Sackville’s displaced Induction, and emphasizing the immateriality of Higgins’s ancient histories in contrast to the physical books to which the inscribed Higgins and Henryson have access. Moreover, it allows him to write the Mirror corpus back into a substantial textual heritage, while also ‘tacitly declaring his literary ambition’ like George Gascoigne, whose ‘deliberate medievalising’ in his 1575–6 revision of The Complaynt of Phylomene re-presents the narrative as a Chaucerian dream vision, and places Gascoigne ‘more firmly in the native poetic tradition’.117 At once fictionalizing the process of composition, and alluding to an ‘apparently stable’ textual monument, Higgins is able to depict himself trying to pin down a coherent narrative inflected by Chaucer’s own sceptical poetics.118 The conflicted status of dreams, increasingly deemed unreliable by the later See Meecham-Jones, ‘ “Englyssh Gaufride” and British Chaucer?’, 7. Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 155–6. 118 Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Lydgate, Chaucer and their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 105. 116 117

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sixteenth century, must have contributed to the collection’s unstable relation to historiography: there is an acknowledgement of uncertainty in this new choice of form, as well as stability lent by the canon.119 Although Higgins’s dream vision replaces the celebrated ‘pseudononfiction’ of Baldwin’s ‘poets-at-work’ frame, both framing devices stand for the process of creative production; as Terrell notes, ‘[a]s an inherently self-conscious genre, one in which the narrator is doubly implicated as both reader and narrator . . . the dream-vision provides an ideal vehicle for an examination of poetic activity’.120 Where Baldwin’s writers conspicuously debate the reliability of their source material, the First Part’s dream vision acknowledges the difficulty of accessing accounts of the ancient past by rendering their transmission more explicitly fictive. In the same year, Richard Robinson introduced his own Mirror-style complaint collection with a similar dream vision trope, claiming in ‘The Author to the Reader’ that ‘I collected this together, faining that in my sleepe MORPHEUS took me to PLUTOS Kingdome in a Dreame: The which device, I mistrust not, but thou shalt thincke well of.’121 The coexistence of fictive and factual narratives of composition suits Robinson’s chosen ensemble; his collection includes complaints by overtly mythological figures like Tantalus, Medea, and Helen of Troy, mixed in amongst various popes and biblical characters. By excluding any paratextual comment of this kind on the dream’s unreality, though, Higgins’s Mirror suspends disbelief in a visionary dimension of historiography. Designed to fit alongside the model that Sackville had apparently proposed, ‘to continue and perfect all the story him selfe’, ‘backeward even to the time of William the conquerour’ (1563, f. 114v), Higgins also appropriates Sackville’s ‘naive authorial persona’ and ‘quasi-Medieval framing narrative’, while his ‘guides’ Morpheus and Somnus refresh the medieval savour initiated by Sackville’s Neoplatonic personification of Sorrowe.122 Additionally, Sackville’s premise of Boethian consolation permeates Higgins’s complaint collection, as Richards has observed.123 In his 1563 Induction, the inscribed Sackville and his guide, Sorrowe, walk ‘hand in hand imbraced’, and experience physiological emotions together: ‘With trembling limmes we softly parted thence, | Tyll in our 119 See, for example, Derek B. Alwes, ‘Elizabethan Dreaming: Fictional Dreams from Gascoigne to Lodge’, in Constance C. Relihan (ed.), Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent, OH and London: Kent State University Press, 1996), pp. 153–67. 120 Terrell, ‘Hermeneutic Authority’, 279. 121 Richard Robinson, The Rewarde of Wickedness (London: William Williamson, 1574), p. 20. 122 123 Hillman, Self-Speaking, pp. 80–1. Richards, ‘Transforming’.

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iyes another sight we met’ (1563, f. 119r, emphasis added). Sackville foregrounds the emotional impact of his vision, whose characters’ suffering ‘it was a hel to heare’, while his empathy is represented in strikingly physical terms: confronted with the duke of Buckingham, ‘My hart so molte to see his grief so great, | As felingly me thought it dropt awaye’ (1563, f. 124v). Sackville’s emotional successor, Higgins’s Mirror tries out empathy as another means by which the historiographical gap can be bridged, allowing invented British history to share in humanism’s educative premise, while undercutting its extractive violence. In a sequence which reverses the commonplacing process by dismembering its readers, rather than the texts being read, Ludovic Lloyd imagines the intimate material relationship of classical ruler’s body parts with their books throughout a history of textual counsel: August[us] . . . would never be without Virgil in hande, nor Alexander the great without Homer under his Pillow. Happy was Pompeius when hee had Cicero in his bosome, and glad was Scipio when he had Enneus in his sight.124

However, while Higgins’s Mirror presents itself as morally educative, as Baldwin’s had done, neither text is centrally concerned with offering moral guidance. Instead, they interrogate the practice of using historical exempla to provide it. Baldwin had problematized exemplary history by representing admirable contemporary heroes as moribund historical villains to expose the capricious sympathies of later readers; Higgins’s morals are derailed by affect, and the relentless exposition of indiscriminate misfortune further complicates Higgins’s moral-historiographical purpose. His tragedies remain faithful to the de casibus trajectory, but they often emphasize sadness rather than desert, calling divine retributive justice into question.125 His characters are frequently sympathetic, guiltless, and merely unfortunate.126 Blundeville asserts that ‘[a]ll those persons whose lyues have beene such as are to bee followed for their excellencie in vertue, or else to be fledde for their excellencie in vice, are meete to be chronicled’, exhibiting a certain ghoulish enthusiasm for the latter.127 While Higgins’s complaint of Nennius upholds this recommendation, the practice of including positive exempla with tragic ends steps away from ingenuous confidence in ineluctable moral arbitration.128 In addition to those who

124 125 126 127 128

Lloyd, Pilgrimage of Princes, ‘Epistle’, sig. **1r–v. Cf. Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 15. See Richards, ‘Transforming’, p. 59. Blundeville, True Order and Methode, sig. C2r. See Curran, Roman Invasions, pp. 166–7.

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wish to be examples to others, to garner fame, or to correct historiographical mistakes, some accounts take on a new therapeutic dimension. Cordila, for example, finds comfort in relating her story, while its educative properties are an afterthought. Testimony is the salve and medcine of our paine, Which cureth corsyes all and sores of our disease: It doth our pinching panges, and paines a pease: It pleades the part of an assured frende, And telles the trade, like vices to amende. (f. 47v)

Mempricius is reluctant to share his history, but is also compelled to for emotional relief, ‘because it moveth in my brest | Compunction still’ (f. 37v), while Irenglas suggests that the complaints also ‘bring the Readers hartes such ease’ (1575F, f. 76r). The evocation of a personal encounter with the historical figures he depicts is key to Higgins’s new model, as ‘pity and compassion are foregrounded as proper responses to the complaints’.129 We also feel for Higgins himself: King Morindus’s gruesome appearance ‘rayde with matter vyle, or slimy mud’ repels him, and he must put aside his ‘squemishnes’ to record the ‘worthy wight’’s tale (f. 65v). Higgins’s voice is a timid and faltering one among the plethora of historical figures whose narratives he records, a mere amanuensis for the dead. The dream conceit removes his creative agency, and positions Higgins alongside the reader, as audience to rather than originator of the text. The First Part reinstitutes the tragic bodies which Pincombe suggests Baldwin’s dark humour had written out, such that when Higgins first encounters the Britons, he is terrified: ‘wylde they seemde as men dispeyring mad’, some injured so badly they are ‘disguisde’ by their wounds, recalling Aeneas’s dream of Hector, ‘squalentem barbam et concretos sanguine crinis | vulneraque . . . gerens’.130 Whereas the Mirror Higgins reads impresses him—it is ‘So finely pende, as harte could well desire’, and Higgins ‘marked playne eache party tell his fall’ (f. 1r–v)—and even his discussion with Somnus is quite measured, his response to the vision shows that it is altogether more visceral and appalling. Higgins’s presence within the fiction as a shocked, then sympathetic dreamer is central to his ability to summon and convey compassion, while in the 1574 frame he is so caught up in the patriotic enthusiasm of Nennius’s account that he 129 Richards, ‘Transforming’, pp. 58–9. Cf. Paul Budra, ‘A Miserable Time full of Piteous Tragedyes’, in MMC, pp. 35–52. 130 Mike Pincombe, ‘Tragic and Untragic Bodies in A Mirror for Magistrates’, in MMC, pp. 53–70; ‘With ragged beard, with hair matted with blood, and bearing . . . wounds’: Aeneid, Book II in Virgil, Virgil I, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), ll. 277–8.

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dreams himself into Romano-British history, ‘so madde and mazed at the last | I lookt about for sword or weapon I, | To runne with Britaynes, cryde they flie they flie’ (f. 74r). The de casibus tragedy’s trajectory, narrative content, and its moral function are thus prized apart, while witness and empathy are briefly elevated as the salient results. Caught up in a moment of cultural and intellectual transformation, in which the definitions of its central terms, ‘history’ and ‘humanism’, were in flux, Higgins lights here on the human value of storytelling.131 Higgins’s First Part doubtless reconfigures the methods and priorities of Baldwin’s Mirror. What emerges from an analysis of this departure is a complex interaction of modes, drawing on epic poetry, the example of the earlier Mirror texts, and diverse ways of thinking and writing about the past. Although the critique of political ambition familiar from Baldwin’s Mirror is still rife, Higgins’s narrative deepens the commingling of history and myth, as familiar legends collide with modern chorography and archaeology. Higgins’s apparent contradictions—a vernacular poet of national origins dedicated to modish translation; an innovator in verse history deeply rooted in early Tudor humanism—situate him squarely within the narrative of late Elizabethan literary development.132 Despite their ostensible conflict, it is possible to resolve Higgins’s multiple agendas: the shift from justice to temperance as the Mirror’s primary ethical focus; the introduction of a medieval-style dream vision to conjure up lost ancient history; and the contradictory real history Higgins seems simultaneously to undertake. All promote the stabilization of the commonwealth, cementing its past in the recapitulation of national origins, and its future by regulating those in power. His new focus on sympathy, and the measured interpretation of moral lessons, mitigates the barbarity of the ancient past, forging a compassionate corporate identity. Higgins’s Britons are not, ultimately, uncivilized Welshmen, but a locus for nationalist pride; he envisages a complete history not of England, but ‘oure Ilande’.133 Explaining his account’s derivation from the ‘Bards or Irish Chroniclers’, Edmund Spenser’s Irenaeus would subsequently claim, ‘I doe gather a likelihood of truth, not certainly affirming any thing, but by conferring of times, language, monuments, and such like, I doe hunt out a probability of things, which I leave to your judgement to believe or refuse.’134 131

See Pincombe, Humanism. Cf. Shrank, Writing the Nation, pp. 220–1. 133 This still may mean ‘England’ in effect; see MacColl, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” ’. ‘Britain’ and its cognates are used seventy-two times in the First Part, ‘England’, 5. England was still an anachronism in the historical period Higgins’s First Part describes. 134 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in Edmund Campion, Two Histories of Ireland (Dublin, 1633), pp. 28–9. 132

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Echoing Higgins’s own prefatory claim that he began by ‘takinge in hand ye Chranicles, and minding to conferre the times’ (sig. *6r), the ‘likelihood of truth’ offers one escape from the historiographical impasse Higgins had identified and tried to invent his way past. Spenser’s combination of sensitivity and pragmatism evokes qualities which pervaded Higgins’s complaint collection, and could have been teased out to come to such a delicate resolution. This is not the vein in which Higgins’s Mirror was to develop, however. During Spenser’s continued absence in Ireland, the commingling of national history, dream vision, commemoration, and the poetics of mutability which Spenser went on to fulfil in the Ruines of Time (1591) is left behind, and, some twelve years after the First Part was printed, Higgins took the work in a new direction. Here, though, Higgins’s stated ambitions for completeness belie his editorial practice. In the compendious 1587 edition, he passed over Blenerhasset’s continuation which could have advanced these aims, including only the First and Last parts of the Mirror printed by Marshe. Chapter 3 will suggest that far from assisting Higgins in his mission to complete the Mirror’s coverage and patch up the historical record, Blenerhasset’s text exposes the flawed logic behind a reconstruction of history that uses only imperfect memory and invention. Higgins comments, too, on the contingency of history writing: the writer’s limited narrative skill and ability to marshal large quantities of material may derail the story. He will recite Mempricius’s tale, ‘though nothing nere so well’ as Mempricius himself related it (f. 36v), and the sceptical reader is advised to consider that a simple Clarke, Hath not such skill theffect of things t’unfolde, But may with ease of wiser be controlde. (f. 39r)

In this respect, Higgins stands somewhere between Baldwin’s fear that histories may be manipulated by those in power, and Blenerhasset’s Second Part, in which historiographical caprice rampages out of control.

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3 Thomas Blenerhasset’s Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1578) The personification Memory opens Thomas Blenerhasset’s collection of historical verse complaints by asking Inquisition, her companion, to help ‘renew the decayed Memory of those men’ who were ‘excluded out of the English Mirrour of Magistrates’ (1578S, sig. A1v). In fact, Blenerhasset himself has for the most part been excluded from the Mirror’s critical treatment, as well as from Higgins’s 1587 edition.1 Where previous analyses have positioned Blenerhasset alongside Higgins as another inferior versifier misguidedly plundering Baldwin’s successful model, this chapter will suggest that Blenerhasset engages more subtly with the early Mirrors to extract his own poetics of textual loss, as well as the means by which to convey the contingency of historiographical reconstructions of the past. In the 1559 Mirror’s prose frame, the inscribed poets confront a patchy and unsatisfactory historical record: I finde mencion here . . . of a duke of Excester found dead in the sea betwene Dover and Calays, but what he was, or by what adventure he died, master Fabian hath not shewed, and master Hall hath overskipped him: so that excepte we bee friendlier unto him, he is like to be double drowned, both in the sea, and in the gulfe of forgetfulness. (1559, f. 75r)

This passage, with its capricious historians, watery oblivion, dark punning humour, and use of suggestive liminal space, would form the basis of Blenerhasset’s esoteric appropriation of the Mirror tradition.

1 See Human, ‘House of Mirrors’, 778–9. The one monograph on Blenerhasset’s Second Part remains Rudolf Lämmerhirt, Thomas Blenerhassets ‘Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates’. Eine Quellenstudie (Weimar: Druck von G. Uschmann, 1909). On the Revelation, see John N. King, ‘Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen’, RQ, 43:1 (1990), 30–74, at 58; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 80–1; Ivan L. Schulze, ‘Blenerhasset’s A Revelation, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, and the Kenilworth Pageants’, ELH, 11:2 (1944), 85–91; and Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 90–108.

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Blenerhasset is another reader whose work foregrounds the imperfection of the existing Mirror texts to justify his own intervention in the tradition, and whose appropriation radically destabilizes its premise and derails its trajectory. His first literary work, a translation of Ovid’s Remedia amoris (‘De remedio amoris’ in 1578S, sig. *3r), is not extant, while the visionary panegyric, A Revelation of the True Minerva (1582), and his prose tract, A Direction for the Plantation of Ulster (1610), do not cohere with the Second Part to form so identifiable an approach or agenda as Higgins’s oeuvre presents.2 But all three texts hypothesize a perceived shoring up of English history, territory, and reputation in the face of erosive forces: mutability, savagery, and unreliable textual transmission. When Blenerhasset composed the Second Part, which he claims was completed by 15 May 1577 (sig. *4v), the Mirror had been printed in four repeatedly revised editions. Higgins’s continuation, The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates, had been printed in 1574; Blenerhasset’s Second Part was clearly designed to slot into the corpus after the first. It contains the complaints of Guidericus, Carassus, Queen Hellina, Vortiger, Uter Pendragon, Cadwallader, Sigebert, Lady Ebbe, Alvrede, Egelrede, Edricus, and Harold, spanning a period of British history ‘from the Conquest of Caesar, unto the commyng of Duke William the Conqueror’. However, Blenerhasset’s text is anomalous among the other appropriations of the Mirror formula. Blenerhasset does not seem to have been associated with Baldwin, or Thomas or Henry Marshe.3 Ostensibly, he did not even participate in or oversee the publication of his own work, let alone sections of others’ texts, and does not appear as a character in the collection. He added only twelve complaints. His addition to the Mirror is, and seems always to have been, problematic. Higgins, deliberately or not, had nothing to do with Blenerhasset, and omits any reference to the Second Part in his 1587 edition. However, despite misgivings, the three subsequent editors of the Mirror all reprinted Blenerhasset’s complaints—Richard Niccols in 1610, Joseph Haslewood in 1815, and finally Campbell in 1946—where the work of others who appropriated the title for their own ‘unofficial’ Mirror texts, like Anthony 2

See Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 80. Very little is known about the printer. The text is signed ‘Richard Webster’, whom Budra notes was ‘singularly unsuccessful’; he is not known to have printed anything else (Budra, De casibus, p. 32). McKerrow identifies him as ‘Richard Webber’ (see H. G. Aldis and R. B. McKerrow (eds), A Dictionary of Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books 1557–1640 (London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society by Blades, East and Blades, 1910), p. 286) but Campbell suggests that the work could actually have been printed by Thomas Dawson, who printed Blenerhasset’s A Revelation (Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 502). 3

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Munday’s The Mirrour of Mutabilitie (1579) and George Whetstone’s A Mirror for Magistrates of Cities (1584), was rejected. The Second Part’s paratextual material echoes Richard Robinson’s preface to the Rewarde of Wickednesse (1574), a de casibus collection that hovers like George Cavendish’s Metrical Visions (MS, 1550s) on the edge of the Mirror tradition. Both Robinson and Blenerhasset present themselves as extrinsic to literary communities by virtue of their physical isolation in fortified castles, Robinson at Sheffield and Blenerhasset on Guernsey, where he was a captain at Guernsey Castle from 1577.4 But despite the text’s atypical nature, the Second Part would become an integral if inconsistent part of the corpus.

CREATIVE ISOLATION The paratexts of Blenerhasset’s Second Part describe the work’s relationship to Baldwin’s Mirror in terms which anticipate Gerard Genette’s definition of a ‘supplement’. This term offers a useful critical framework for Blenerhasset’s text, at once a sequel and a prequel to the Mirror as it existed in 1577. Genette’s ‘supplement’ refers to an optional addition, or at the very least an eccentric or marginal one that brings a surplus to the work of another—a surplus in the nature of a commentary or a free, even illegitimate interpretation . . . [T]he hypotext here is no longer anything but a pretext, the point of departure for an extrapolation disguised as an interpolation.5

The idea of literal ‘eccentricity’ is key. Blenerhasset was physically and intellectually cut off from the environment in which previous Mirror editions had been produced, and his text revels in this independence. Its potential ‘illegitimacy’ is borne out by Higgins’s rejection of it from his 1587 edition, as well the paratextual narrative of its circumstances of publication, although it seems to have been accepted by the Mirror’s wider contemporary readership. Baldwin and Higgins’s evolving hypotext exists as an inherited pretext for this autonomous commercial and artistic venture, which appropriates the early Mirrors’ unease about textual reliability and re-presents it for a new cultural context. 4 See ‘The Author to the Reader’, Robinson, The Rewarde of Wickednesse, pp. 20–1; Sidney Lee, ‘Blenerhasset, Thomas (c.1550–1624)’, rev. Andrew Hadfield, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2636, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. 5 Genette, Palimpsests, pp. 202–3.

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Using the term ‘supplement’ to describe Blenerhasset’s addition to the Mirror also helps to articulate the long-overdue distinction between it and Higgins’s work: twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics frequently refer to ‘Higgins and Blenerhasset’, a rather disreputable double act, and refuse to attend to their differences.6 Higgins’s Mirror project has traditionally been presented as the product of his misreading the early collection as primarily historiographical, rather than topical and politically engaged. Meanwhile, his verse has been denigrated for its dubious aesthetic value.7 The idea that ‘Blenerhasset—like Higgins—simply tells patriotic stories of England’s past’ goes some way to explain the reluctance with which scholars approach his supplement, so this association has been perpetuated.8 But Blenerhasset’s text and paratext do not have to be read as a bland, mechanical extension of Higgins’s lapsed project.9 The Second Part does seem sympathetic to the improvement of ‘unperfect’ English histories, as Blenerhasset patches up the gap between Higgins and Baldwins’ chronicle coverage.10 In his second preface, Higgins had reasoned that ‘it were worthily done if one Chronicle were drawne from the beginning in such perfect sort’ (1574F, sig. *5v), and although Blenerhasset’s argument differs (he is protesting his unworthiness to the task), the outcome is the same when he notes in his Epistle that the Mirror ‘is left even unto this day, like the unperformed image of Venus, paynted by Apelles[.] No man is able to finish the work’ (sig. *3r).11 Blenerhasset’s printer, too, claims that he was moved by ‘divers men’ to print the text and ‘make perfite the former booke’ (sig. *2r).12 Both poets 6

See, for example, Schwyzer, Literature, pp. 115–16. See, for example, C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) and E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates Revisited’, in Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (eds), Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 1–16. 8 Lee, ‘Blenerhasset, Thomas (c.1550–1624)’, rev. Hadfield, ODNB [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/2636, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. See also J. Swart, ‘[Review] Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, by John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset’, ES, 27:1 (1946), 157–9, and R. B. McKerrow, ‘Review [Untitled]’, RES, 16:61 (1940), 78–81, at 79. 9 See Willcock, ‘Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates [Review]’, 104–5. Cf. D. M. Cappuyns, ‘Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates [Review]’, Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, 14 (1947), 238–9. 10 Cf. Human, ‘House of Mirrors’, 778. 11 According to Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, Apelles died before finishing his painting of Aphrodite of Kos, and there was no artist skilled enough to complete the picture. Since Higgins and Ferrers were both alive in 1577, could this allusion imply that Blenerhasset regards their contributions as inferior to those produced before Baldwin died in 1563? 12 Stephen Orgel notes that ‘the final, correct, uniform text was not what the book was conceived to embody—it was left to the reader to produce the correct text’: Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity’, p. 289. 7

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are engaging with the suggestive ambiguity around the language of completion and perfection. Higgins describes how, having written complaints spanning the time between Brutus’s arrival in England and the birth of Christ, a friend ‘desired mee t’accomplish the residue til I came to the Conquest’ (1574F, sig. *6v). But before Higgins had produced a new collection, Blenerhasset’s printer hijacked Higgins’s intended continuation by bringing out the Second Part.13 In order for it to be successful, both commercially and artistically, the Second Part should, one might argue, broadly model itself on the work it purported to extend, and structurally, Blenerhasset’s complaints resemble Higgins’s closely. They share the idea that they are delivered by the figures in whose voices they are written, in contrast to the late medieval Mirror. Following Baldwin, though, both Higgins and Blenerhasset’s texts address the concept of literary composition. As well as a discourse of writing and reciting which permeates the complaints and the framing narratives, the characters in both First and Second Parts are intermittently aware that they are part of a new historical record. But the two collections reveal different attitudes towards the textual transmission of history. Blenerhasset reshapes the formal and conceptual attributes of his hypotext through the application of a new mediating framework, and the layering filters of paratext and prose frame which complicate attempts to read the complaints. Higgins attends to a fragmented historical record, while Blenerhasset interrogates this attention. Although Blenerhasset extends Higgins’s narrative, it is Baldwin’s sceptical reflection on the transmission of history which informs his approach. The presentation of the Second Part’s publication circumstances in both Blenerhasset’s Epistle and the printer’s note to the reader emphasizes its ‘unofficial’ nature. And yet its title claims a confident hold over Baldwin and Higgins’s readership.14 This paradox provides an illuminating point of entry for a new reading of Blenerhasset’s anomalous position within the Mirror canon. The Second Part emerges as an irreverent subversion of the historical monument Higgins had attempted to construct. Geller reformed the way in which the late medieval portion of the Mirror is read by describing the prose links which surround the verse complaints as a ‘pseudo-nonfictional’ narrative.15 There is no doubt that Blenerhasset’s paratexts should be read with similar caution.16 13 While this publication’s content did not overlap chronologically with the work Higgins intended to complete, the title of Blenerhasset’s text effectively closed off the market for Higgins’s additional material. 14 Human, ‘House of Mirrors’, 778. 15 Geller, ‘Editing under the Influence’. 16 Cf. Lucas, ‘History and the Tragic Pattern’, p. 369 n. 10.

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As pieces ‘very clearly written for consumption by a wider audience than purported by their author’, they should be situated between the categories of ‘primary’ epistle—a genuinely private letter intended for a specific, probably specified recipient—and ‘secondary’—a selfconsciously and deliberately ‘imaginative’ piece intended for publication.17 Once Blenerhasset’s Epistle has been appropriately positioned between autobiography and fiction, it becomes possible to align his adoption of a semi-autobiographical persona with Baldwin’s technique. We know that the boundaries between categories of literature and autobiography, fiction and historical account were far from formalized in early modern England; Baldwin is increasingly held up as a master of negotiation between these modes.18 But the implications of reading Blenerhasset’s work in this light have barely been taken into account.19 The Second Part begins with a note from Blenerhasset’s ‘Printer to the friendly Reader’. This in itself is unique among the texts of the Mirror and its additions, which are otherwise prefaced by statements of intent by their author-editors.20 The printer sets out his motivations for publishing Blenerhasset’s work, which will both ‘encourage the Authour to set thynges of greater price in Print’, and act ‘as a Lanterne, havying lyght sufficient to guyde thy wandryng steppes, both unto the happynesse of this worlde, and of the world to come’ (sig. *2v). The printer must have noticed that Higgins’s ‘first’ and Baldwin’s ‘last’ parts of the Mirror left room for additions: the title given to Blenerhasset’s work complements this arrangement, and the misrepresentation of the existing texts in the printer’s note implies that Blenerhasset’s is a vital missing component: Webster claims, speciously, to have found a book ‘Entituled, The first and third part of the Mirrour for Magistrates’ (sig. *2r). Extant copies of the Second Part are indeed seen bound between Higgins and Baldwin’s sections.21 Although these are not contemporary bindings, Gabriel 17 Jo-Marie Claassen, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999), p. 90. 18 See, for example, Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, and ‘William Baldwin and the Tudor Imagination’. 19 The contradictions in Blenerhasset’s paratext are noted but not explored at length in Edwin Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study of Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 144–5. 20 With the exception of the Dyce edition of the Memorial, which contains a ‘Printer to the Reader’ address. Meaghan Brown read the 1559 prose frame as an extended ‘Printer to the Reader’ device in ‘ “By Examples Passed in this Realm”: Narratives of Print-Production in The Mirror for Magistrates’, The Book Through Time conference (Merton College, Oxford, June 2012). 21 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Y.6.3 (1–3), and BOD Malone 270 and BOD Douce B subt.269; the libraries of Edmund Malone, 1741–1812, and Francis Douce, 1757–1834, were acquired by the Bodleian in the nineteenth century; the Cambridge

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Harvey describes the Mirror as ‘thre books’ in late sixteenth-century correspondence; even if the works were bound separately, it seems that Blenerhasset’s text was generally accepted as part of the Mirror canon by contemporaries.22 The printer also claims that Blenerhasset’s Mirror was printed without its author’s knowledge, an idea belied firstly by the Mirror form itself— purportedly a public medium—and secondly, by the high rhetorical style of Blenerhasset’s supposedly private Epistle. The affectation of coyness on the part of authors whose work is allegedly appropriated by printers was a common feature of contemporary publications, while paratextual narration of the hazardous journey from manuscript to print was also a regular occurrence.23 Blenerhasset’s Epistle and the printer’s note cumulatively deploy these tropes, which speak to the unpredictability of print transmission while remaining open to play.24 But where Baldwin and his collaborators are inscribed in their prose frame, and the First Part’s dream vision allows Higgins to mediate and comment on the complaints he transcribes, Blenerhasset is absent from both his poems and their framing narrative, displaced from the process of composition, and the Mirror tradition as a whole. In contrast to the 1559–75 prefaces, whereby the reader ‘becomes his or her own authority for reading, for making meaning’, his Epistle to an unnamed but specific correspondent also shuts down the text’s openness to interpretation, and maintains an illusion of privacy.25 The fiction of a text written to be shared only between educated friends harks back to the coterie Baldwin created and then made public in 1559–63. But the ‘authorial’ agency of the reader-editor (which Higgins saw in Baldwin’s call for further contributions), and the

volume was bound in the seventeenth century, see http://search.lib.cam.ac.uk/?itemid=| collandb|618750 (accessed 30 September 2012). 22 Edward John Long Scott (ed.), The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey (London: The Camden Society, 1884), p. 167. The editor’s note to this letter suggests that Harvey is referring to the 1578 edition of Baldwin’s Mirror, which presumably also includes Higgins’s 1574–5 additions. While Baldwin’s text was in turn subdivided into the ‘first’ and ‘last’ parts, however, this would not have involved a physical division into two distinct books (+ Higgins’s = 3), as Harvey’s phrase seems to suggest. 23 See Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England, pp. 140–8; see, for example, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, The Tragidie of Ferrex and Porrex (London: John Day, 1570), sig. A2r. Cf. Breitenberg, ‘Semiotics of Reform’, 204; Long Scott (ed.), Letter-Book, pp. 59, 64; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 96. 24 Cf. Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 30. 25 Liebler’s Introduction in Naomi Conn Liebler (ed.), Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 9.

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moral accountability that the Mirror form ostensibly seeks to elicit, is written out of Blenerhasset’s paratextual set-up. The Epistle, ‘a form of communication predicated on distance’, stresses Blenerhasset’s physical isolation from the English mainland, and equates geographical distance with intellectual dislocation.26 His complaints were composed while sittyng on a Rocke in the Sea . . . in Garnzie Castle, where although there be learned men, yet none whiche spende their tyme so vainely as in Poetrie.27 (sig. *4r)

Indeed, historical accounts of 1570s Guernsey emphasize the island’s cultural detachment.28 An ‘Elizabethan troublespot’, the island’s proximity to France meant that the inhabitants’ ‘laws, customs, ecclesiastical allegiance and, at least in the countryside, their language were all Norman-French’.29 With the unfolding of religious conflict in France, the Channel Islands became a key ‘transition point’ for Huguenot refugees, particularly after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres in 1572.30 While close to the reasonably significant print centres of Rennes and Le Mans on the French mainland, their printing houses would have offered a predominantly hostile intellectual culture to the Protestant Blenerhasset, although Caen in particular, along with Lyons and Orléans, acted as centres of heretical thought from which the ‘Norman reformation’ of the Channel Islands profited.31 Jersey and Guernsey were given a special dispensation to allow limited Presbyterian preaching and worship in their

26 Laurie Ellinghausen, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 25. 27 Blenerhasset almost certainly means Castle Cornet, the residence of the Governor of Guernsey, ‘seated on a high rock, & environed with the Sea’, Gerhard Mercator, Historia Mundi: Or Mercator’s Atlas, trans. Wye Staltonstall (London: T. Cotes, 1635), ‘The Seventh Table of England’, p. 120. John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1612) says of Guernsey, ‘It standeth for the most part vpon a rocke, verie high in many places from the Sea’, Book I, p. 94. 28 The Book of Common Prayer was reportedly printed in French at Guernsey before 1571; see Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador (London: Thomas Newcomb for Gabriel Bedell and Thomas Collins, 1655), p. 103. 29 Michael A. R. Graves, Thomas Norton: The Parliament Man (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 141. 30 Tim Thornton, The Channel Islands, 1370–1640: Between England and Normandy (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), p. 113. 31 Rennes, and Le Mans to a lesser degree, specialized in the production of French royal edicts in the sixteenth century, as well as occasional ecclesiastical tracts and local history (see USTC). See Thornton, The Channel Islands, p. 80 and Andrew Pettegree, ‘Centre and Periphery in the European Book World’, TRHS, 18 (2008), 101–28, at 112. See also Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 68–84.

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major towns.32 However, this left them at greater risk of French retaliation—as well as ecclesiastically distinct from either mainland— and Sir Thomas Leighton, Elizabeth’s Lieutenant and Governor of Guernsey, fought to keep his garrison fortified against attack.33 Adrian Saravia bore witness to the licentious atmosphere on Guernsey in the 1560s, where the usual problems associated with managing strategic outposts of English rule were compounded by the island’s ‘remoteness’ from London.34 Saravia wrote to William Cecil: there are only three or four people in the island who attend service, and if an ecclesiastic goes into the country, he is greeted with jeers and laughter . . . Robbery and slaughter are committed with impunity, there being no laws, and the decisions of the judges various.35

Perhaps owing to his own distance from higher authority, Leighton’s widely unpopular governorship turned tyrannical and his law martial.36 (Elizabeth’s Privy Council was petitioned in 1578 to help ‘bring the people to better obedience and reform abuses’, and it was none other than Thomas Norton who was commissioned to stabilize Guernsey’s laws.)37 Blenerhasset likens Leighton to Lycurgus, famous for his militaristic legal reforms in Sparta. Personally, Blenerhasset must have regarded Leighton highly: a distinguished soldier, Leighton held puritan beliefs, and was a particular friend of the earl of Leicester.38 But instead of describing the island or Leighton’s governorship, Blenerhasset cites Seneca: 32 Ferdinand Brock Tupper, The Chronicles of Castle Cornet, Guernsey (Guernsey: Stephen Barbet, 1851), p. 28. 33 A. J. Eagleston, The Channel Islands under Tudor Government, 1485–1642: A Study in Administrative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Guernsey Society, 1949), pp. 72–3. 34 Adrian Saravia, or Hadrian à Saravia, was headmaster of Elizabeth College (founded 1563) on Guernsey, and a minister in St Peter Port in 1565 (Andrew Spicer, ‘Saravia, Adrian (1532–1613)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24664, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]); Graves, Thomas Norton, p. 143. 35 Letter dated 26 February 1565, cited in Ferdinand Brock Tupper, The History of Guernsey and Its Bailiwick (Guernsey: Le Lievre, 1876), p. 155. 36 See A. J. Eagleston, ‘Guernsey under Sir Thomas Leighton (1570–1610)’, Société Guernsiaise. Report and Transactions for 1937, 13:1 (1938), 72–108; Graves, Thomas Norton, pp. 140–6. 37 R. Lemon and M. A. E. Green (eds), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (London, 1856–72), Elizabethan Addenda, 1566–79, vol. 25, no. 128; Marie Axton, ‘Norton, Thomas (1530x32–1584)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/20359, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. 38 See Eagleston, The Channel Islands, p. 72; D. M. Ogier, ‘Leighton, Sir Thomas (c.1530–1610)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/68015, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. See also Simon Adams, ‘Dudley, Lettice, countess of Essex and countess of Leicester (1543–1634)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8159, accessed 8 Sept. 2012].

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Unperfect Histories Where Governours be good, and rule their charge aright, Without an ebbe, there flowes the flood, which vertuous minds delight. (sig. *4v)

This couplet leaves the reader with an uncertain and troubled picture of Guernsey, since the island’s prosperity is contingent on information with which we have not really been provided. The Epistle’s sense of intellectual isolation—the dearth of other poets or access to books in the Guernsey Castle garrison—extends metaphorically into Blenerhasset’s conscious distancing of his text from source material. This in turn necessitates the exercise of invention, on Blenerhasset’s part, and forgetfulness, on the part of his readers. His physical and cultural distance from the mainland left Blenerhasset free from any sense of canon or intellectual network. While Higgins bemoans the inadequacy of his source material, Blenerhasset is gleefully adrift. His narrative hints at the creative possibilities of exile in a way that shares both context and terminology with Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), where ‘exile functions as a metaphor for the exclusion . . . from the company of learned and eloquent tongues’.39 His alienation may also, like Spenser’s, be read as ‘enabling’, particularly in helping to navigate the problematic absence of source texts, from both Blenerhasset’s remote garrison and the historical record at large.40 He proclaims, ‘I had not those Chronicles whiche other men had: my Memorie and Invention were unto me instead of Grafton, Polidore, Cooper, and suche like’ (sig. *4r), where the paraliptic reference to these three chroniclers in particular gives away his actual reading history.41 Similarly, the texts embedded in Blenerhasset’s claim that since he ‘could not beare about with me a librarie’, he has with him ‘the thirde Decade of Titus Livye’, ‘Boswelles Concordes of Armorie’, and ‘Monsignor de Lange, that notable Warriour’ (sig. *4r), speak to his interests in presenting himself as an erudite soldier-poet, well versed in contemporary continental publications.42 39 See Catherine Nicholson, ‘Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation’, SS, 23 (2008), 41–72, at 44–5, 52. 40 Nicholson, ‘Pastoral in Exile’, 53. 41 See Archer, ‘Those Chronicles Which Other Men Had’. 42 Richard Grafton notes that the length of most chronicles histories means that they ‘coulde not in the whole be folowed without pestering the Reader with importable Volumes’, in Grafton, Chronicle at Large, ‘The Epistle’, sig. 2r. The so-called third decade of Livy’s Ab urbe condita, describing the second Punic War (218–201 BC), was printed in numerous volumes across continental Europe in the sixteenth century. The most recently printed in 1577 was Decas Tertia, a Latin edition produced in Lyons by Sébastien Gryphe in 1554. In 1561, Thomas Marshe printed Anthony Cope’s History of Two the Moste Noble Capytaynes of the Worlde, Anniball and Scipio (previously printed in 1544 and 1548 by

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The rhetoric of isolation, which generates the potential for deviation and originality, is central to Blenerhasset’s first-person voice. The concept of narrative agency which is produced as a result, however, poses significant problems in the context of the Mirror as a whole, insofar as the collection functions as a poetic re-presentation of existing chronicle histories. Where Baldwin’s complaint collection had interrogated the unreliability of textual transmission, Blenerhasset draws attention to the contingencies of historiographical invention. He dramatizes his construction of history ex nihilo in militaristic terms which suggest that the enterprise is ultimately futile: ‘how hard a thing it is to compell Clio . . . to couch under the compasse of a few metered lines’ (sig. *3r). The customary humilitas affecta and pleas to his reader for lenience culminate in the climactic demand that they ‘cease then to thinke on L. Buchurst, or Sackvyll, let Gascon and Churchyard be forgotten’ (sig. *3v). Blenerhasset is alone in tackling the next instalment of the Mirror, assisted only by the rather unlikely choice of Erato and Terpsichore, muses of erotic lyric poetry, and choral song and dancing.43 Again, though, we should be alert to the use of paralipsis when Blenerhasset lists texts he does not have, and authors we ought to forget. As much as Blenerhasset tries to distance himself from analogues, his work is situated within a broader contemporary dialogue about history, poetry, and invention.44 While the Second Part purports to complete or at least continue Higgins’s project, the basis of isolation and invention provided by the Epistle in fact works to subvert Higgins’s approach to the British past, and to destabilize its historiographical aims. The Epistle also writes Blenerhasset into a literary community. Crucially, this is a modified version of the print communities created by Baldwin and Higgins’s paratexts, which at once distances Blenerhasset from his models, and illustrates the ways in which those models were being read and transformed in the later 1570s.

Thomas Berthelet), ‘gathered and translated into English oute of Titus Liuius, and other authoures’. This treated the same period as the third decade. William Painter translated the first and third parts of Livy’s history as part of his Palace of Pleasure (1566). ‘Monsignor de Lange’ is possibly Instructions sur le Faict de la Guerre (Paris: Michel de Vascosan for Galliot du Pré, 1548), attributed to Guillaume du Bellay, seigneur de Langey (elder brother of Joachim). See Grafton and Jardine, ‘Studied for Action’, 40–2 for the specifically military reading of Livy in the early 1570s. 43 Melpomene (tragedy) or Clio (history) seem more appropriate—however, Erato is invoked at the opening of Book 7 of Virgil’s Aeneid. 44 Maslen explores the deep contemporary suspicions around fiction in the Introduction to Elizabethan Fictions, pp. 1–20.

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Blenerhasset’s idiosyncratic synthesis of canonical analogues and contemporary models continues in his approach to the English past. In contrast to Baldwin’s prose narrative of compilation from chronicle histories, and the dream vision of Higgins’s verse inductions, Blenerhasset’s complaints are framed by a prose dialogue between the personifications Memory and Inquisition, characters with historiographical agency unlike the guiding but ultimately passive roles of Sackville’s Sorrowe and Higgins’s Morpheus. The Second Part’s Epistle claims that where ‘Higgins used (I know not what) Morpheus, the God of dreames’ and ‘the other had Baldwine for their hearer’, Blenerhasset has ‘diligent Inquisition, who can find out al things, and Memorie, who knoweth al thinges, for the Arbiters of my matter’ (sig. *4v). The term ‘Arbiters’ suggests that Memory and Inquisition represent a mental process by which the complaints will be communicated to Blenerhasset, their ultimate amanuensis. No more is heard from the author, however, as the personifications take charge, isolated in a decontextualized, incorporeal world which is never fully formalized or explained. It is a Renaissance commonplace to invoke memory in the writing of history, originating with the first historical text printed in England, Higden’s Polychronicon.45 Andrew Hiscock suggests that while ‘key concepts associated with acts of cognition, such as memoria, would undergo intense and sustained interrogation’ across the sixteenth century, historians of all stripes shared the view ‘that the parentage of memory, writing and history is . . . invaluable for the growth in human understanding’.46 The correlation between memory and history was figured in logical symbolic terms: since memory’s antithesis is forgetfulness, commonly associated with oblivion and death, history works to stave off oblivion by commemorating the past. Edward Hall’s Chronicle had decried ‘Oblivion, the cankered enemy to Fame and renown, the sucking serpent of ancient memory’, suggesting that the ‘antidote to oblivion . . . is historical writing’.47 Blenerhasset’s prose frame foregrounds the avoidance of oblivion for its speakers as a central concern, in a way that the earlier Mirrors rarely did.48 45

Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, pp. 268–9. Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 28. 47 Cited in Escobedo, Nationalism, p. 55. 48 See Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, on the way in which the early Mirrors differ from Hall’s stance on ‘the moral effect of memorializing the dead’ (at 61). 46

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Memory initially demands that Inquisition ‘beholde in the bottomlesse pyt of blind Oblivion: there remayneth as yet a multitude’ who are ‘covered and hidden with those mistie cloudes of fylthy forgetfulnes’ (f. 1r). The verse dedication of The Castel of Memorie (1562) to Robert Dudley had explicitly connected the mirror trope to memory’s commemorative function, likening ‘the losse, | of high renoumed actes’ to oblivion, ‘an eatyng moth’, and ‘sore corrupting rust’: all may be purged and scoured away by Memory, such that ‘ech mans estate’ appears shining, ‘as in a glasse’.49 Here, as in Blenerhasset’s first prose link, this notion of memory allows forgotten examples of virtue ‘to come into the light’ (f. 1r). Although Higgins had wanted to correct the deterioration and absence of historical records in his First Part, he did not frame this concern in terms of remembering and forgetting; by contrast, Blenerhasset directly equates ‘defaced’ ‘Recordes of time’ with ‘decayed Memory’. But the relation of memory to history is more complex than the simple equation of one with the other. The ways in which memory was believed to function in the sixteenth century illuminate the vast significance of history to contemporary intellectual culture, and the place in that culture of the Mirror’s moral-educative project. The moral usefulness of historical information stems from the role memory plays in turning ‘facts about the past’ into the morally educative force that ‘history’ was thought to be.50 So memory is a fundamental part of history, not just in creating and sustaining it, but in its ideological purpose. Early modern representations of Cicero’s stance, ‘that memory should be exercised in order to preserve evidence of human greatness and to restore (moral) direction’, exemplify this connection.51 Cicero’s definition of history, ‘Historia est testu temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoria, magistra vitae, nuncia virtutatis’ (‘the witnes of time, ye light of trueth, the life of memorie, maistres of life, & messenger of antiquitee’) is ubiquitous in the period, and central to the socially conservative premise underpinning the Mirror.52 But Renaissance intellectual thought about memory encompassed not only its uses, but how it works, where it is located, how to improve it, and its inherent 49 Guglielmo Gratarolo, The Castel of Memorie, trans. William Fulwood (London, Gutter Lane: Rouland Hall, 1562), sig. A3v–A4r. 50 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 1. 51 Hiscock, Reading Memory, p. 20. 52 Thomas Cooper, Coopers Chronicle Conteininge the Whole Discourse of the Histories as well of this Realme, as All Other Countreis (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1560), sig. A2r. It is this facet of Cicero’s writing on history which is most frequently cited, and not, for example, his exploration of the processes and exercise of memory in old age found in ‘The Book of Oldage’, in Fowre seuerall treatises of M. Tullius Cicero, trans. Thomas Newton (London: Thomas Marshe, 1577).

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moral implications, deriving theories from Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia, and the handbooks of rhetoric which included memory as a crucial component of the orator’s skill, such as the classical Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, as well as Stephen Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure (1509). The earlier Mirrors do not engage with the processes of memory, described and theorized at length in the period. Memory is often depicted as a physical object or place. Sometimes this will be a textual object like a book or register, aligning memory closely with the idea of written history.53 In Amyot’s Preface to Plutarch’s Lives, the process and moral functions of memory are shown to combine, so that ‘an historie is an orderly register of notable things said, done, or happened in time past, to mainteyne the continuall remembrance of them, and to serve for the instruction of them to come’.54 Alternatively, though, memory can be a store, treasury, house, or the rooms of a palace.55 North’s translation of Amyot notes that like as memorie is as a storehouse . . . So may it also be sayd, that an historie is the very treasury of mans life . . . [I]n how horrible darkenes, and in how beastly and pestilent a quagmyre of ignorance we should be plunged: if the remembrance of all the thinges that have bene done, and have happened before we were borne, were utterly drowned and forgotten.56

North’s reference to drowning highlights the connection between forgetting and being forgotten, and death or sleep. Images of oblivion as a sea or the river Lethe act as corollaries to the spatial depiction of memory, and evoke the landscape of the classical underworld (Blenerhasset’s Edricus situates himself in ‘Limbo Lake’ or ‘Plutoes lothsome lake’, ff. 59v and 60v). Thence Memory also has a moral function as an antithesis to an idle body and ‘the general malaise of human delinquency’.57 In this respect, Blenerhasset’s Memory is problematic, in that she goes to great lengths, like Blenerhasset himself in the Epistle, to insist that the Second Part’s history is the product of idleness. Idleness was conventionally linked to forgetfulness, but it also played a part in poetic invention; early modern 53 Cf. D. R. Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture in Early Modern England’, JCHA, 2:1 (1991), 283–308, at 288. 54 Plutarch, Lives, sig. *3v. 55 See William E. Engel, Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 101–5, 109. These two ideas are combined, the ‘places’ being ‘cardes or scroll[s] or other thynges for to wrytte in’, in Ravennas Petrus, The Art of Memory, trans. Robert Copland (London: Wyllyam Myddylton, 1545), sig. A2v–A3r. 56 Plutarch, Lives, sig. *3v. 57 Hiscock, Reading Memory, p. 5. See William Rankins, A Mirrour of Monsters (London: Iohn Charlewood for Thomas Hacket, 1587), f. 8r–v.

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thought framed ‘imagination as the melancholy breeding ground of “idle thoughts and fantasies”’, or vice versa, presenting vivid and imaginative dreams as ‘the children of an idle brain’.58 Spenser would later voice the opposition between ‘th’aboundance of an ydle braine’, or ‘painted forgery’, and ‘matter of just memory’, but Blenerhasset elides these two ideas, and radically complicates his ostensibly commemorative historiographical task.59 The Aristotelian distinction between memory and recollection, ‘crucial’ to ‘classical and early modern ideas about the psychology of memory’, underpins Blenerhasset’s personification of the process of memory as two distinct figures.60 Aristotle’s De memoria locates memory in the heart, while recollection, or ‘being reminded’, is a process which acts upon the memory’s stored material (images).61 These separate aspects of remembering also ‘belong to different faculties of the tripartite soul . . . memory belongs to the sensing soul, recollection to the thinking soul’.62 Blenerhasset’s Memory and Inquisition clearly dramatize this duality; while Memory may ‘haue howrded up in my treasury’ the material needed to compile the complaints, she admits that it is inaccessible without ‘a new inquirye’ (f. 1r).63 The interpretation of the De memoria which exemplifies ‘how mnemotechnique came to be understood at the beginning of the early modern period’, figures memory as passive, like ‘“a sheet of paper, or a book”, while recollection was active, comparable to “a sound, an utterance or a voice”’, following Aristotle’s distinction between ‘the passive state of memory’ and recollection which is ‘a kind of active search, or, even more revealingly, a kind of deduction’.64 Memory and Inquisition, however, confuse the difference between memory as a conceptual question, and 58

Engel, Mapping Mortality, p. 116; William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies Published According to the True Originall Copies, ed. John Heminge and Henry Condell (London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), p. 57. 59 Spenser, Faerie Queene, II.Proem.1. 60 Rhodri Lewis, ‘A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the Ars Memoriae and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge’, IHR, 19:2 (2009), 155–75, at 155. 61 See Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 35. Recollection is ‘not necessarily the recovery of memory’; Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, p. 88. 62 David Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation, Interpretation, and Reception in Western Scholasticism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), p. 75. 63 Cf. Plato, Meno; see Elaine Landry, ‘Recollection and the Mathematician’s Method in Plato’s Meno’, Philosophia Mathematica, 20:2 (2012), 143–69, Norman Gulley, ‘Plato’s Theory of Recollection’, The Classical Quarterly, 4:3/4 (1954), 194–213. Platonic anamnesis allows one to ‘remember’ innate knowledge, and functions differently to Aristotelian recollection. It is unclear here whether Memory’s ‘treasury’ contains innate or pre-learned knowledge, but it does not seem to be readily available without Inquisition’s aid at this stage. 64 Lewis, ‘A Kind of Sagacity’, 161; Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection, p. 72. Cf. Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory, where memory is ‘an ability or tendency’, p. 88.

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recollection as a procedural or practical question, by externalizing the passive memory store as Memory’s treasury.65 They also complicate the distinction between ‘passive state and active process’, since both figures play active, vocal roles.66 The Second Part is clearly troubled by memory, unpacking its workings as both a mental function and a courtesy paid to the dead. Woolf notes that the contemporary ‘relationship among memory, reading, and writing was fluid and dynamic’; by choosing to introduce the lively personifications into the Mirror’s investigation of reading and writing history, Blenerhasset explores this potentially problematic fluidity.67 But Memory and Inquisition seem to have little basis in Renaissance mnemotechnique. While their roles evidently build on existing philosophical thought, there are no definitive literary models corresponding to Blenerhasset’s treatment.68 The dual personifications do appear later, though, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua (1607).69 It is Higgins’s Mirror that provides a model for the content of Briton Moniments, the chronicle that Arthur encounters in Spenser’s House of Alma, but the custodians of the historiographical cache of which it is a part, Eumnestes and Anamnestes, are thought to have been inspired specifically by Blenerhasset’s Memory and Inquisition.70 Spenser includes two references elsewhere in the poem to Dame Memory, echoed later by Lady Memorye in Niccols’s seventeenth-century Mirror. But Eumnestes and Anamnestes evoke the pair’s historical and historiographical function. Jerry Leath Mills suggests that while ‘they are not explicitly contrasted in terms of age’ like Spenser’s characters, Memory and Inquisition ‘maintain a relationship identical with Eumnestes and Anamnestes, and they serve, as do their Spenserian counterparts, to introduce a chronicle of legendary British kings’.71 65

Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection, p. 74. Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection, p. 75. 67 Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture’, 291. 68 ‘Dame Memory’ features in a relatively simple allegorical way in, for example, John Skelton’s translation of Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica (1487), and in Stephen Hawes’s Pastyme of Pleasure (1509). See Mary Carr, K. P. Clarke, and Marco Nievergelt (eds), On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Carruthers, Memory; Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (eds), Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Anne Whitehead, Memory (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009). 69 See Alan Stewart and Garrett A. Sullivan, ‘ “Worme-Eaten, and Full of Canker Holes”: Materializing Memory in the Faerie Queene and Lingua’, SS, 17 (2002), 215–38. 70 Carrie Anna Harper, The Sources of the British Chronicle History in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Philadelphia: Bryn Mawr, 1910); The Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Jerry Leath Mills, ‘A Source for Spenser’s Anamnestes’, PQ, 47:1 (1968), 137–9. 71 Mills, ‘Source’, 139. 66

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Spenser’s response to the duality in Aristotle’s depiction of memory appears to be mediated through Blenerhasset’s work, since their deviations from Aristotle’s theory are very similar. Eumnestes’s room, ‘hangd about with . . . old records from auncient times deriv’d, | . . . all worme-eaten, and full of canker holes’, does recall Blenerhasset’s ‘auncient Historyes, and Recordes of time . . . utterly defaced’ (f. 1r), (as well as the appearance but not the symbolism of Sidney’s historian ‘loden with old Mouse-eaten records’), while Memory’s claim to ‘have howrded up in my treasury the knowledge of all thinges’ (f. 1r) anticipates Eumnestes’s ‘infinite remembrance’ and ‘immortal scrine’.72 But their relationships cannot be called ‘identical’. Memory and Inquisition have interchangeable functions, where Eumnestes and Anamnestes have set roles. Eumnestes and Anamnestes are silent, their functions pertaining to the physical retrieval and reorganization of texts; by contrast, Memory and Inquisition are vocal and disorganized. However, Spenser’s characters speak to the impact of Blenerhasset’s text on the characterization of memory in the period.73 The Aristotelian pairing of Memory and Inquisition affords Blenerhasset the opportunity for further irreverence. He muddles the roles of his two narrators, so that their firm philosophical basis is compromised. In the Induction to the complaint of Edricus, for example, their apparent functions are reversed, as Inquisition, who ought to perform the function of anamnesis or recollection, asks Memory ‘what dyd become of Edmund Ironsyde, of whom you made mention . . . ?’ (f. 58v). Blenerhasset’s Memory is forgetful, and the ‘diligent Inquisition’ of the Epistle gives way to a thrown-together historical patchwork. The aspect of mnemotechnique that Blenerhasset’s text addresses more enthusiastically is the role of the author’s own personal memory in the writing of his history, rather than the lost cultural memory that exercises Higgins.74 Memory is personified as a fallible historian, rather than a pure embodiment of an abstract. In this way, the Second Part shifts the valency of memory away from its role as cultural shorthand for national history, or ‘social memory’, and focuses instead on the practical role of personal memory in the writing of history.75 Historical texts are therefore exposed as doubly unreliable, since Blenerhasset depicts both social memory and personal memory as flawed. This is firstly because of the susceptibility of the text to the caprices of the memory, and in particular the failure of the memory of its author. 72 Spenser, Faerie Queene, II.ix.57; Philip Sidney, ‘The Defense of Poesie’, in ‘The Defense of Poesie,’ ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ and Other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges-Wilson (London: J. M. Dent, 1999), p. 93; Spenser, Faerie Queene, II.ix.59. 73 Contra Lucas, ‘History and the Tragic Pattern’, pp. 369–70. 74 Cf. Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture’, 296. 75 Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture’, 285.

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In combination with the sense of the malleability and instability of text common to the early Mirrors, Blenerhasset’s prose frame ‘draws attention to a potential conflict between the claims for the truth of history and the human error of historians’.76 The treasury metaphor actually compounds this conflict by introducing the concept of choice, implying that memory is a storehouse out of which material may be selected and arranged to create history: Erasmus depicted Plutarch’s historiographical practice as a process of compilation ‘from the remote storerooms of all kinds of authors and disciplines, in such a way that one could not qualify it a coherent discourse but rather a patchwork’.77 Memory and Inquisition dramatize the danger of this process by making thoroughly disorganized choices. They pluck characters at random from a dimly recalled ancestry, but they are aware at the same time of, for example, the substantial body of early modern writing that deals with the Arthurian tradition, and therefore decline to participate in it (‘of Arthur there be whole volumes . . . let us therefore passe them over’, f. 40r). Given the well-documented investment of the Tudor dynasty in Arthurian legend, Blenerhasset might be expected to rework some popular, commercially viable material, which he would not need much prompting to remember. Indeed, Niccols appears to do just that in 1610, including the Mirror’s first complaint of Arthur; Blenerhasset himself would rehearse the foundational myth which connects Elizabeth I’s dynasty to the legacy of Aeneas and Brutus just four years later in A Revelation. Here, though, Memory and Inquisition illustrate the process by which the validity of historical narratives becomes destabilized, forgetting Arthur in their enthusiasm for stories in which they are less well versed: The greate desire (quoth Inquisition) whiche we have had to heare this man, hath made us to overpasse king Arthur and Cariticus, the one no lesse famous for his noble actes, then the other for his vices and wretchednes infamous. Yea (said Memory) so have we forgot two or three other, whose examples would have been goodly lanternes to lighten wandryng pylgrimes. But it is not much amisse, for . . . of the rest ther be the like ensamples both in Bochas and Baldwin: let us therefore passe them over, and speake somwhat of some of the Saxons. (f. 40r)

This passage also damages the Mirror premise and renders Memory and Inquisition quietly subversive; that they should ‘pass over’ characters 76

Cf. Griffiths, Poetic Authority, p. 44. Quoted in Paul J. Smith, ‘Montaigne, Plutarch and Historiography’, in Karl Enenkel et al. (eds), Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period (Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 167–87, at p. 171. 77

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because ‘of the rest ther be the like ensamples both in Bochas and Baldwin’ negates the need for Higgins and Blenerhasset’s additions to the Mirror at all. Finally and most alarmingly, the storehouse model of memory which allows this kind of choice quickly gives way to narratological agency, while the inability to access memory precipitates the need for invention. Writing slightly earlier that same decade, Montaigne admitted in the Essais (1580) that his lack of memory led him to rely on invention instead.78 In a literal sense, memory is seen as the capacity to ‘image’ or ‘imagine’ things: according to Aristotle, ‘all things which are imaginable are essentially objects of memory’.79 This is distinct from the multiple late antique senses of imaginatio, which included ‘fantasy’, ‘simple mental image’, and ‘a mental image produced by an intentional act of combination’, as well as from the early modern uses of ‘invention’.80 By 1605, the distinction would be solidified in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, in which Bacon divides learning into three parts, history, poesy, and philosophy, dependent respectively on man’s memory, imagination, and reason.81 For Blenerhasset, the division between history/memory and poesy/ imagination was not yet fixed, but Montaigne’s contemporary taxonomy of liar-inventors who either ‘invent, seale, stampe and all’ or ‘disguise and change a true grounde’ elucidates the ways in which the absence of memory, either social or personal, may be played out around those categories.82 We do not actually witness Memory and Inquisition inventing history in the prose frame, but the slippage between Blenerhasset’s use of the terms ‘Inquisition’ and ‘Invention’ in the Epistle allows for this possibility, setting up the parallel pairing of ‘Memory and Invention’ in

78 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, trans. John Florio (London: Val. Simms for Edward Blount, 1603), ‘The Ninth Chapter: Of Lyers’, p. 15. 79 Aristotle, ‘On Memory and Recollection’, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath: Aristotle VIII, ed. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 285–313, at p. 293. 80 Todd Breyfogle, ‘Memory and Imagination in Augustine’s Confessions’, in Todd Breyfogle (ed.), Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 139–54, at p. 146. Although ‘invent’ was predominantly meant in the sense ‘To come upon, find; to find out, discover’ in this period, the OED does cite Abraham Fleming’s use in A Panoplie of Epistles (1576) as an example of the sense ‘To compose as a work of imagination or literary art; to treat in the way of literary or artistic composition’: ‘invent, v.’, 1 and 2b, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2013. 81 Bacon, Aduancement of Learning, The Second Booke, f. 7r. 82 Montaigne, The Essayes, ‘The Ninth Chapter: Of Lyers’, p. 16. Cf. Ellen Loughran, ‘Defective Memories, Deception, and the Writing Process: Montaigne’s Attempt at Truth in Essay I: 9’, Neophilologus, 94:1 (2010), 33–41.

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place of a textual source (sig. *4r), a hint that Blenerhasset’s ‘history’ is at least partially fictive.83 This history’s compilation has more in common with ex tempore performance, bypassing the written text altogether, to explore the contradictory coexistence of invention and historiography. It has been suggested that Spenser’s contrasting portrayal of Phantastes and Eumnestes, which flouts Aristotle’s close connection of phantasia and mnēmē, ‘marks the motion from a primal modality of expression and response to a devitalized, exhausted, and “material” one’, but Blenerhasset’s division between history and imagination is not so finely or finally defined.84 The abstracted characters are still permitted to leap off the page into the space between the textual and dramatic; that is, into the world of pageant and masque (f. 17v). As in Elizabeth I’s near-contemporary Arthurian entertainment at Kenilworth, history acts as a crucial reinforcement of monarchic authority, but the problem of the mythical basis for this royal history is defused by the overt artificiality of an allegorical text which hovers between writing and performance.85 Blenerhasset’s alignment of his text with pageant shifts his work into a more courtly, mythographic mode, heightening his proximity to the Leicester circle, and the literary model of, for example, Petrarch’s Trionfi.86 It also anticipates the millenarian pageant of the Revelation. Blenerhasset’s characters are not the product of prosopopoeia, like Baldwin’s historical figures, conjured by the recitation of their complaints. Nor do they take to an imaginary stage like Higgins’s ghosts, or expect their listeners to take dictation. Spenser’s anarchic, 83 In terms of speech, this pairing is a common, recognized rhetorical technique combining memorized and extempore material; Bacon argues that contemporary universities ‘make to great a divorce betweene Invention & Memory: for their speeches are either premeditate in Verbis conceptis, where nothing is left to Invention, or meerly Extemporall, where little is left to Memory: wheras in life & action, there is least use of either of these, but rather of intermixtures of premeditation, & Invention: Notes & Memorie’, in Bacon, Advancement of Learning, The Second Booke, f. 5r. However, Blenerhasset seems to mean to use ‘Memory and Invention’ to compile the factual content of his complaints, which is more problematic. While it is well established that ‘history’ frequently takes the meaning of the modern ‘story’ in the period and therefore fictive histories are not problematic from that perspective, this is not what Blenerhasset aims to write. 84 James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 147. 85 See George Gascoigne, ‘The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle’, in The Pleasauntest Workes of George Gascoigne Esquyre (London: Abell Ieffes for R. Smith, 1587). Part of this entertainment is attributed to George Ferrers. 86 In keeping with his connection to the Leicester-Knollys family through Thomas Leighton’s marriage, and the more explicit link made by the dedication of The Revelation of the True Minerva to Lady Leighton, formerly Cecilia Knollys, sister of Lettice, countess of Essex (and participant in the Woodstock pageant); see Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, pp. 371–2, and Shenk, Learned Queen, p. 91. See Robert Coogan, ‘Petrarch’s Trionfi and the English Renaissance’, SP, 67:3 (1970), 306–27, from 320.

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deranged Phantastes and bookish, orderly Eumnestes crystallize forces which are at play in Blenerhasset’s Second Part, but whose roles in his historiographical commentary are not yet fully realized. The ostensible function of Memory and Inquisition is to summon and witness the ghostly complaints, with the implication that they will be recorded or reproduced in some way. However, their authorial agency, like that of Baldwin’s collaborators, undercuts the stories’ integrity, while their moral significance is subject to interpretation. Just as Jack Cade’s low social status and even his blameworthiness are redeemed by his learned discourse in the 1559 Mirror, Blenerhasset’s Memory also endows text with the power to expunge guilt: on the basis that Uter Pendragon’s complaint is ‘Verye well sayde’, she desires ‘habilitie to redeeme this princes soule out of Lymbo lake’ (f. 35r). According to the commemorative premise, the act of including Pendragon’s story has done just that, or at least rescued his narrative from (typically watery) Oblivion, but Memory’s comment also challenges his function as a negative exemplum. Later, Blenerhasset imbues another scribe with the capacity to edit, when the Revelation’s Brutus describes his lineage to a herald, who ‘markte and did his misse amend’.87 How much do Memory and Inquisition try to amend, and how accurate are their corrections? They demonstrate that history as a product of memory and invention is fallible, while the textuality of history means that ‘the past may be subject to revision’.88 In orchestrating the narrative, they impose their flaws and contradictions onto the Mirror form, reconstructing the past out of chance and supposition. A similarly destabilizing effect is achieved by Memory and Inquisition’s frequent digressions, as they chat and bicker about additional matters around their content, like the contemporary controversy regarding the adaptation of classical metre for English verse.89 Blenerhasset was both a theorist and a practitioner of translation, a central part of the intellectual culture in which the Mirror was composed and extended, but Memory’s claim that had ‘these ripewitted Gentlemen of England . . . left of their 87 Thomas Blenerhasset, A Revelation of the True Minerva (London: Thomas Dawson, 1582), sig. A4r. 88 Cf. Hiscock, Reading Memory, p. 4. 89 See Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 111; Robert Cummings, ‘Abraham Fleming’s Eclogues’, Translation and Literature, 19 (2010), 147–69, at 166; Kelly A. Quinn, ‘Samuel Daniel’s Defense of Medievalism’, in Clare A. Simmons (ed.), Medievalism and the Quest for the ‘Real’ Middle Ages (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 29–44, at pp. 30–2; Stephen Orgel, ‘Measuring Verse, Measuring Value in Renaissance Poetry’, in Martin McLaughlin, Ingrid D. Rowland, and Elisabetta Tarantino (eds), Authority, Innovation and Early Modern Epistemology: Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti (Cambridge: Legenda, 2015), pp. 97–103.

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Gotish kinde of ryming’ they might have equalled their classical models (f. 40r–v) could come across as somewhat beside the point. However, Warren Boutcher makes an explicit connection between the Mirror and Elizabethan translation, suggesting that in his 1568 Polybius, Christopher Watson ‘was offering—just like the authors of A Mirror—a work “crafted to evoke mid-Tudor events and figures” even as it appeared to speak only of a distant past’.90 Yet more pertinent here, Boutcher describes Watson’s adaptation of an excerpt from Edward Hall’s Union as a ‘translation’ as well, uniting the two techniques as part of a ‘broader attempt to shape the reading and rewriting of the whole pre-Reformation past in the contemporary context of the “British question” and of Protestant nation-building’.91 Higgins and Blenerhasset both draw attention to their previous experience as translators in the course of their paratextual narratives of composition. The processes of appropriation and translation can be read as functions of each other, and both Higgins and Blenerhasset demonstrate the interrelation of these skills in their common treatment of their hypotexts.92 Blenerhasset claims to have translated Ovid’s Remedia amoris. Though not extant, his choice of text complicates Blenerhasset’s modern reputation as a puritanical opponent of lust; although Ovid’s speaker offers advice on how to suppress and extinguish sexual attraction, the Remedia’s salacious suggestions and explicit scenarios do not quite accord with the stern morality Budra and Lucas posit for Blenerhasset, unless it is manifested as a kind of prurience.93 However, the translation of Ovid was subject to a complex process of legitimation in the sixteenth century, as commentators sought to stabilize and contain a course of textual transmission which in fact demonstrated the potential multiplicity of interpretation.94 Liz Oakley-Brown suggests that translations are ‘supplements which threaten “to take the place of” the original or, at the very least, to fragment the problematic binary opposition of “original” and “translation”’.95 Having 90 Warren Boutcher, ‘Polybius Speaks British: A Case Study in Mid-Tudor Humanism and Historiography’, in Fred Schurink (ed.), Tudor Translation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 101–20, at pp. 102–3, citing Lucas, Politics, p. 3. 91 Boutcher, ‘Polybius Speaks British’, pp. 110, 116. 92 See, for example, Rhonda Knight, ‘Stealing Stonehenge: Translation, Appropriation, and Cultural Identity in Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Chonicle’, JMEMS, 32:1 (2002), 41–58. 93 Lucas, ‘History and the Tragic Pattern’, p. 370. 94 See Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 193; Heather James, ‘Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England’, ELH, 70:2 (2003), 343–73, at 348; Lee T. Pearcy, The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560–1700 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), p. xiii; cf. Raphael Lyne, ‘Writing Back to Ovid in the 1560s and 1570s’, Translation and Literature, 13:2 (2004), 143–64. 95 Oakley-Brown, Cultural Politics, p. 193.

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identified Blenerhasset’s Second Part as a supplement earlier in this chapter, the significance of translation to Blenerhasset’s poetics—specifically the translation of Ovid—and the similarity between translation and the appropriation and adaptation of the Mirror form become more evident. If ‘all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’, it is the foreignness of his own language that seems to exercise Blenerhasset the most, as he scrambles to foreground his difference, and simultaneously to accumulate analogues.96 Blenerhasset and his contemporaries’ interrogation of poetic practice had theological as well as philological implications. His commentary on the poetics of translation is included in the context of a vehemently antiCatholic episode in the Second Part, presumably based on the regular association made between ‘any rhymed verse’ and medieval ‘monastic orders’.97 Memory is viciously scathing in the induction preceding Cadwallader’s complaint, itself written in unrhymed verse, about his habit—a criticism which references the 1560s vestiarian controversy fuelled by Thomas Cartwright in the early 1570s.98 She asks, ‘What, shal we alowe tippet wearers to pleade amongst Princes? Me thinke by the deformitie of his apparel, he shoulde not be of the Religion, nor of the reformed Church’ (f. 35r). Following the confessional trepidation of the earlier Mirrors, the Second Part is actually the most outspoken on specific matters of doctrine: Lucas stresses Blenerhasset’s Presbyterian leanings, and states that the Second Part offers ‘important glimpses into the nascent literary culture of separatist English Puritanism’, while Norbrook describes Blenerhasset’s imitation of the Shepheardes Calender in the Revelation as ‘sternly Calvinist’.99 For the late sixteenth-century poet and historian, earlier forms of verse history ‘present phantastical and seductive idols of the Catholic medieval past . . . that threaten to corrupt the Protestant commonwealth’, a threat which ties Blenerhasset’s scepticism regarding the invention of history to his ideal of metrical purism.100 96 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 70–82, at p. 75. Cf. Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English, pp. 19–63; Orgel, ‘Measuring Verse’, p. 98. 97 Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, p. 101. 98 See, for example, Thomas Cartwright, A Defense of the Ecclesiastical Regiment in Englande (London: Henry Bynneman for Humfrey Toy, 1574). Cartwright was appointed chaplain to Thomas Leighton and minister of Castle Cornet on Guernsey in 1596 where he remained until 1601 (Patrick Collinson, ‘Cartwright, Thomas (1534/5–1603)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4820, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]). 99 Lucas, ‘History and the Tragic Pattern’, p. 370; Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 80. 100 Thomas A. Prendergast, ‘Spenser’s Phantastic History, The Ruines of Time, and the Invention of Medievalism’, JMEMS, 38:2 (2008), 175–96, at 182.

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Memory and Inquisition—mediators with a Catholic past speaking out of a purgatorial landscape—demonstrate through their seemingly random topical digressions the way in which stories are selectively remembered and rewritten, according to the demands of contemporary mores. The abrupt way in which Blenerhasset’s narrators conclude their story just before the end of the Second Part leaves the circumstances and outcome of their work unexplained, and casts their authority in a still more doubtful light. In their final prose link, Memory and Inquisition abandon the project: now ‘our idle houres be spent, tyme and our affaires do call us from the further hearing these mens complayntes’ (f. 61v). This unceremonious exit conveys the failure of Memory and Inquisition as personifications, in that they fail to accomplish or embody permanently the qualities assigned to them. What are their ‘affaires’ except to remember? Blenerhasset’s narrator-guides provide a picture of historiographical disillusionment, and the openness of history writing to error. Far from shoring up collective memory, their vision is profoundly solipsistic.

CONTINGENCY AND INDIVIDUALISM The enigmatic intervention of Memory and Inquisition is fitting, given that Blenerhasset’s history begins with figures of murky ancient British legend. Murkier still is his own historiographical practice. Lucas emphasizes his ‘entirely unhistorical claims’, and the tendency to ‘depart from his chronicle sources’, while Curran argues that Blenerhasset’s goal ‘of reclaiming national stories thought to be lost’ is ‘unravelled’ by his ‘manufacturing’ of particular narratives.101 Far from ‘unravelling’ Blenerhasset’s intentions, though, it is by these means that the Second Part actually reveals the inadequacies of imaginative historiography to offer ‘true’ history, as well as the problematic creative agency of the historical poet. Governed by practical contingencies of composition and transmission, and the individual perspective of the author, Memory and Inquisition present a historiography which is both comically nihilistic, and the foundation for an innovative model of inwardness in the construction of historical texts. Lucas’s criticism builds on the unique study of Blenerhasset’s sources by Rudolf Lämmerhirt, who found that the Second Part’s complaints depend primarily on precisely those authors to which Blenerhasset declared he had no access in the Epistle. In addition, Lämmerhirt records Blenerhasset’s debt to Fabyan (an influence in common with the earliest Mirror texts, 101

Lucas, ‘History and the Tragic Pattern’, p. 370; Curran, Roman Invasions, p. 199.

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and one which Blenerhasset does not signpost in the paratext), and occasional similarities with Hardyng, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stow, and Matthew of Westminster.102 Despite his thorough demonstration of textual parallels, however, Lämmerhirt also vehemently decries Blenerhasset’s arbitrary use of these source materials, and his unhistorical deviation from their accounts.103 In particular, he finds the complaints of Alfred and Harold to be ‘hideous fakes’.104 Is it possible that Blenerhasset was just a typical ‘moderately well-educated Elizabethan gentleman, dabbling in history’ who might ‘rely on his memory rather than on written notes for . . . historical citations’?105 Both Lucas and Lämmerhirt suggest not, explaining Blenerhasset’s deviation from textual sources as a result of his ethical agenda. For Lucas, it is ‘Blenerhasset’s revulsion for lechery’ that ‘leads him several times to depart from his chronicle sources to compose matter that insists upon the numerous miseries awaiting those who indulge in wantonness’.106 Lämmerhirt argues that he changed the cause of Alfred’s death to a specifically venereal disease to capitalize on the hints by other authors at licentiousness in Alfred’s youth, and draw a stronger contrast and sharper moral from the militant chastity of Lady Ebbe in the previous complaint.107 Blenerhasset certainly does manipulate narratives in order to promote particular readings, even inventing stories where the ‘admission of the unavailability of ancient Britain’ and ‘an imaginative historical reconstruction’ are combined.108 But this extends beyond heightening the moral force of the tragic falls rehearsed, which in themselves take in many more sins than lust, including ‘pride and arrogancy’, ‘suspition’, gluttony, usurpation, adultery, sloth, regicide, and dissatisfaction with one’s lot in life. When read alongside the prose frame and paratext, and earlier Mirrors, Blenerhasset’s complaints expose a broader project behind this contentious deviance. The variable tragic status of the characters is matched by disagreement over the extent to which man plays a part in his own downfall, a disparity which fits with the Mirror’s reputed polyvocality, and does nothing to reassure readers seeking guidance. Whilst Queen Hellina, an exemplary— and transparently topical—monarch, lives and dies predominantly happily, Lady Ebbe, a paragon of virtue who cut off her nose and upper lip in order 102

103 Lämmerhirt, Quellenstudie, passim. Lämmerhirt, Quellenstudie, p. 97. Lämmerhirt, Quellenstudie, p. 97. 105 Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture’, 298. 106 Lucas, ‘History and the Tragic Pattern’, p. 370. 107 Lämmerhirt, Quellenstudie, p. 79. This point is also made in more general terms on p. 98. Cf. Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28 (1999), 225–356, at 246. 108 Curran, Roman Invasions, p. 199. 104

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to avoid being raped by invading Danes, dies horrifically when ‘With fiery flames they burnt our Nunnery, | And us therein’ (f. 50r). It is difficult to equate these stories to the doctrine which governs Uter Pendragon’s earthly punishment for his lust, or to find any moral in Vortiger’s conclusion, ‘he who now doth flourish freshe and greene, | Must fade and fal as Hyems frostes doo frette’ (f. 29r), which removes human agency entirely from our inevitable downfall. By contrast, Carassus offers a straightforward balance of crime and punishment (‘As due desert did force my shippe to flote, | So vices vile me drencht in waves of woe’ (f. 16r)), but there is no hope for self-improvement, since ‘The crooked Crabbe wyl alwayes walke awry’. Blenerhasset’s paratextual introduction had already established a hermeneutics of contradiction and instability. In his standard apology for the plainness of his style, such that ‘he who doth reade [the complaints] shal not neede to be Oedipus, for every playne Davus shall by reading them, easely understand the Authours drift’ (sig. *4v), Blenerhasset alludes to the Latin ‘Davus sum, non Oedipus’, from Terence’s comedy Andria, in turn an allusion to the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx.109 This rather confounds the sentiment that one does not need to be learned, or a solver of riddles, to appreciate the text, and paradoxically reinforces Baldwin and his colleagues’ reliance on ‘reader competence’ in 1563. A further justification for Blenerhasset’s low style asks his reader to remember, that they whose falles I have here penned, were . . . suche as lyved presently after the Incarnation of Christe: and I have not thought it decent, that the men of the olde worlde shoulde speake with so garnished a Style, as they of the latter tyme. (sig. *3v)

The emphasis on lexical decorum perpetuates the eagerness of earlier Mirrors to ensure appropriateness in their complaints’ discourse, although ‘garnished’ does strike the modern reader as quite an apt term for Blenerhasset’s voice. His paratextual prose, and the verse of the complaints, are characterized by learned flourishes, in scattered references either to classical mythology, history, and philosophy, or to rhetorical figures; Lämmerhirt lists instances of anaphora, epiphora, epanodos, epizeuxis, annominatio, polysyndeton, asyndeton, pleonasm, and tautology in his 109 Terence, Andria, ed. G. P. Shipp (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2002), I.ii.194, p. 72. Peculiarly, this phrase is not excerpted from the Andria in John Higgins and Nicholas Udall (eds), Flowers or Eloquent Phrases of the Latine Speach (London: Thomas Marshe, 1575), although Davos’s previous line from the play is quoted in Udall’s selection: ‘non hercle intelligo’, ‘In good soothe I knowe not what you meane’, A3r. Shipp notes that ‘the phrase Davos sum non Oedipus became proverbial’, Terence, Andria, p. 137, but it does not seem to have been prevalent in England until the seventeenth century.

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breakdown of Blenerhasset’s rhetorical technique.110 Like the earlier Mirror collections, too, the form of the Second Part’s complaints is very varied. Notwithstanding his comments on the inadequacy of English rhyming poetry in the prose frame, Blenerhasset demonstrates its variety, shifting between rhyme royal, octains, nonains, and abbaaccdd stanzas, unrhymed hexameter and hexameter couplets. The complaints are generally stylistically similar to Baldwin’s and Higgins’s, but at times Blenerhasset’s highly alliterative, often tautological phraseology suggests that he was conversant with the fashionable poetry anthologized in contemporary collections such as the Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) and A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578); a trend of which Hyder E. Rollins suggests ‘the extremely popular Mirror for Magistrates’ could be considered an anomalous constituent.111 So his style and ostentatious rhetoric again sit at odds with his paratextual claims. The complaints’ contents proffer neither a uniform linguistic or poetic style, nor a consistent frame of reference. The complaint of King Sigebert, delivered by the herdsman who approaches Memory and Inquisition with his headless corpse and claims to have murdered him, cites classical figureheads Antigonus, Ptolemy, Caesar, Mithridate, Darius, Antiochus, Cambises, and Pyrrhus. His narrative draws, anachronistically, on the language of courtliness, and he formulates a semi-allegorical chess metaphor, which blurs the distinction between signifying and signified Bishop, Queen, and Knight. By contrast, Alfred builds up a proto-Spenserian allegorical ‘wildernesse of woe’, complete with ‘Daungers denne’, ‘Hatreds house’, and the ‘cave of Care’ (f. 51v), whose similarities to a dream recounted in Nicholas Breton’s recent prosimetric miscellany, The Woorkes of a Young Wyt (1577), again reveal Blenerhasset engaging incongruously and mendaciously with the fashionable, ephemeral literature of London’s contemporary young masculine poetic culture.112 Blenerhasset snatches remembered snippets from biblical, classical, and vernacular sources, with Carassus’s beast fable clashing against Uter Pendragon’s alliterative anti-lust catalogue. Meanwhile, Carassus refers to ‘Hob and Jhon, Rafe Royster, and his mate’ (f. 15r), invoking Nicholas Udall’s 1550s comedy Ralph Roister Doister (printed 1567), to stand for unsuitable companions; Alfred cites ‘Scoggin’, ‘Skeltons mate’ (f. 53r). The result is a rich and varied, but also

110

Lämmerhirt, Quellenstudie, pp. 114–19. Hyder E. Rollins (ed.), A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), p. xiii. 112 Nicholas Breton, The Woorkes of a Young Wyt (London: Thomas Dawson and Thomas Gardiner, 1577), f. 20r. 111

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disorienting and arbitrary sequence of moral snapshots, whose randomness echoes the meandering miscellaneity of Breton’s ‘vision strange’. It is appropriate, in this referential morass, that the complaints’ speakers engage sceptically with oral and written modes of textual transmission. Popular misrepresentation is associated predominantly with female characters in the earlier collections: Eleanor Cobham and Jane Shore both have to perform public penance, a punishment which exposes their living and posthumous reputations to oral reconstruction and manipulation by crowds who witness their disgrace. For the two female characters in the Second Part, Queen Hellina and Lady Ebbe, the safeguarding of textual reputation remains paramount, but these women hope to enter the historical record to secure their histories, the like of which ‘The eare of man . . . hath never hearde, | No penne, nor tounge the like hath ever tolde’ (f. 50r). In fact, though, where the disfigured abbess Ebbe (actually a product of misremembered chronicle history) is confident of securing praise from posterity (‘when your wits have wayed well the case, | You wyll commende me much’, f. 48r), it is Queen Hellina’s complaint which foregrounds the precarious position of women in the male-dominated textual past. While the collaborative authors note the scarcity of women’s complaints in the 1578 Last Part in their discussion of Cobham’s tragedy, Hellina draws attention to this discrepancy herself. She claims, Mens due desertes ech Reader may recite, For men of men doo make a goodly show, But womens workes can never come to light, ... No writer wyll a litle time bestowe, The worthy workes of women to repeate. (f. 18r)

The process of restoring this lost honour and renown is presented in artisanal terms; Hellina is now able ‘My spotlesse life to paynt in perfect white’, and provide a ‘true report’ which will ‘burnishe’ and ‘rubbe the rust’ off of her actions. Later in the poem she demonstrates her specifically female vulnerability to the workings of rumour, when her dedication to chastity is compromised: flittinge Fame the truth to testifie, Against my wyl, at Rome made such reporte, That Constantinus thence dyd hether hye, And being come unto my Brittayne Court, With lovers lookes hee strivde to scale the Fort Of my goodwyll. (f. 19v)

The sexually charged metaphors of conquest and occupation—made explicit ten years later between Robert Greene’s Fawnia and Pandosto,

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who attempts to ‘scale the fort of her chastitie’—locate Hellina as a victim, taken advantage of by masculine historiographical narrative.113 While Hellina is concerned about women specifically being excluded from the historical record, she does not appeal to female writers or readers of history to rectify this situation. There were very few available. Anne Dowriche’s ‘revisionary’ Protestant verse adaptation, the French Historie, of Thomas Tymme’s Three Partes of the Commentaries . . . of the Civill Warres of Fraunce (1574), which shares Blenerhasset’s highly selective historiographical approach and ‘propensity to convey moral rather than evidentiary truths’, would not be printed until 1589.114 However, two European mirror texts were translated by women in the sixteenth century: Elizabeth Cary translated Abraham Ortelius’s Le mirroir du monde (1598), while Margaret Tyler’s translation of Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de Principe y Cavalleros (1562) was printed as The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood in 1578. Tyler’s ‘provocative’ preface draws attention to history as a realm dominated by men in the same year that the Second Part was printed.115 Deborah Uman and Belén Bistué argue that Tyler’s translation functions as a collaboration between Tyler and Ortúñez; Tyler plays on Ortúñez’s own manipulation of layers of authorial fictions by writing herself into the text as a co-author, while by adapting details of the Spanish romance she ‘invites her readers to consider the historical similarities between The Mirrour and the politics of sixteenthcentury England’.116 Once again Blenerhasset’s approach to historiography seemingly resonates with the expression of contemporary dissatisfactions, although he does not engage with the implications of Memory’s gender in the narration or construction of the past, and includes only two female complaints in his collection of twelve (which, of course, cannot ultimately escape male authorial mediation). In contrast to her claims, Hellina’s story is actually quite frequently retold in the sixteenth century, in ecclesiastical

113 Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Cadman, 1588), sig. G1r. 114 Randall Martin, ‘Anne Dowriche’s the French History, Christopher Marlowe, and Machiavellian Agency’, SEL, 39:1 (1999), 69–87, at 71; see Megan Matchinske, ‘Moral, Method, and History in Anne Dowriche’s the French Historie’, ELR, 34:2 (2004), 176–200, at 176–7. 115 Chris Laoutaris, ‘Translation/Historical Writing’, in Caroline Bicks and Jennifer Summit (eds), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500–1610 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 296–327, at p. 317; see Catherine Gallagher, ‘A History of the Precedent: Rhetorics of Legitimation in Women’s Writing’, Critical Inquiry, 26:2 (2000), 309–27, at 312–18. 116 Deborah Uman and Belén Bistué, ‘Translation as Collaborative Authorship: Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood’, CLS, 44:3 (2007), 298–323, at 299, 317.

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and Roman as well as British histories, put to work variously advocating charitable donations and defending Mary Stuart’s right to the English throne, but her role is primarily defined by her relationship to her husband Constantius and her son Constantine.117 The topicality of Blenerhasset’s complaints also serves to expose historiography as local or arbitrary, though, when contemporary concerns divert focus, and even narrative, in a more relevant direction. Queen Hellina’s account of religious reforms and her resolute chastity for the sake of national security (‘I who did regard my Comons good, | Refusde to linke my selfe with forrayne blood’ (f. 19r); ‘private pleasures luste | May never make me throwe my Realme to duste’ (f. 20r)) constitutes one of Blenerhasset’s most overt fabrications, and clearly makes reference to Elizabeth I’s policies.118 Inquisition affords Hellina specifically Elizabethan renown: with ‘incomprehensible complexion’ (evidence of the ‘epideictic recourse to the topos of poetic indescribability’ which Anna Riehl identifies as central to early modern praise of Elizabeth I’s beauty), and ‘knowledge of Tongs, & . . . divers gifts of the mind’ (f. 16v), there is little ambiguity over the allegorical valency of this ‘Goddesse’, ‘chiefest among men’.119 Following such an overt evocation of Elizabeth’s chastity, however, Hellina is married to the Roman Constantinus; ‘There to the Duke the Britayne Crowne I gave, | With sacred spousall ryghtes’ (f. 21r). Blenerhasset alludes to the conflicted hierarchy the marriage of a female monarch was thought to generate, with the suggestive claim that ‘His myghtie Mace did rule the Monarchie, | My wyt did rule (some wryters say) his Mace’ (f. 21r), hedging the judgement by evoking historiographical disagreement in his sources. The complaint seems to advocate a union with a European duke, and was composed as Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations with Francis, duke of Anjou and Alençon, were about to reach a second peak. But it resonates with contemporary fears about a foreign marriage by describing their opposites: Hellina reassures her subjects, for example, that ‘This Roman heyre . . . will restore your ancient lybertie’ (f. 20v), when a major contemporary concern was that ancient English liberties would be curtailed.

117 Henry Bedel, A Sermon Exhorting to Pitie the Poore (London: John Awdely, 1571), sig. D4r, and John Leslie, A Defence of the Honour of the Right Highe, Mightye and Noble Princesse Marie Quene of Scotlande and Dowager of France (London [i.e. Rheims]: Eusebius Dicaeophile [i.e. J. Foigny], 1569), f. 133r. 118 The fourth stanza of the complaint is especially explicit. 119 Anna Riehl, The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 92.

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Theologically, too, Hellina mirrors Elizabeth when she states that by my meanes al people did imbrace The fayth of Christ, the orders I did set They were obayd. (f. 19r)

This fairly unambiguous allusion to the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (1559), which codified the Church of England’s doctrine and independence from Rome after Elizabeth’s accession, sits uncomfortably alongside Hellina’s marriage to ‘The Roman Duke’. Although Hellina offers a positive example of a married queen, Blenerhasset’s position regarding the marriage to Anjou remains unclear. Anjou’s sympathy towards the Huguenot opponents of his brother Henri III must have recommended his suit to Blenerhasset to some degree; as a resident on Guernsey, Blenerhasset would have had some direct contact with Huguenot refugees. However, the ambiguity of Hellina’s complaint may have been calculated to avoid the censorship and punishment that greeted, for example, John Stubbes’s pamphlet the following year.120 Blenerhasset treads a fine line in this regard: his decision to recount ‘The Complaint of Sigebert’ in the voice of Sigebert’s killer modifies the Mirror formula but perpetuates its message, to ‘teach both Prince and subject his duetie at large’ (f. 41v), signalling the reciprocal duty of the ruler and ruled in a topical way which his sources do not. Blenerhasset eschews the obvious topical capital to be made out of Cadwallader as an ancestor of the incumbent dynasty (later, Shakespeare’s Pistol uses Cadwaladr to mock Fluellen’s Welshness in Henry V ).121 Instead, he focuses on the pertinence of the story to contemporary religious questions. Cadwallader’s complaint is made up of two phases, depicting two versions of the spiritual contrasted with the temporal lifestyle. First, Cadwallader explains his rejection of kingship, in favour of the simpler, more modest life of the friar. He claims that poverty ‘beareth much more blesse, then hygh and courtly state’, since ‘the more of wealth I had, the more I dyd desire’ as king (f. 38v). Subsequently, though, the portrayal of a pure, spiritual existence shades into satire. While all other estates from the king to the labourer have to work hard, ‘Churchmen . . . be blest’ because they ‘labour not at al, [and] knowe no kinde of payne’; we realize that the contrast drawn between the ‘courtly pompe of wearing royal crowne’ and the option to become ‘A Deacon, or a Deane, Prebende, or 120 See Cyndia Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 123. 121 Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. Craik, 5.1.28: ‘Not for Cadwallader and all his goats’. See Schwyzer, Literature, on the sixteenth-century significance of Cadwaladr.

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Minister’ is ironic, given the ceremonial listing of roles in the ‘Romishe route’ who ‘did nought but play and pray’, and yet ‘sit in highest place’ (f. 39r). As a satire of contemporary religious practices, Cadwallader’s complaint draws attention to its ahistoricity. The suggestion that faults, ostensibly specifically Catholic, are shared by Protestant clergy situates the complaint in a post-Reformation theological landscape. Individual topical resonance aside, the broader narrative trajectory of Blenerhasset’s Second Part is defined by conquests. It is a long-standing convention that, in medieval and early modern historical narratives, ‘[e]ach age is initiated by conquest’, and Blenerhasset’s Anglo-British history is framed by those of the Romans and Normans.122 The structure echoes that of Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large (1569), of which we can be reasonably confident Blenerhasset was aware. Grafton’s Chronicle divides world history into the Seven Ages, the seventh of which exactly correlates to Blenerhasset’s chosen date range, spanning the period between Christ’s birth, and, at the beginning of the ‘Seconde Volume’, William of Normandy’s accession. Additionally, William I’s reign marked a shift in English textual culture for early modern readers, as the new bureaucracy which characterized his government was remembered in ‘the legend that [he] had brought the English from the uncertainty of reliance on memory to the use of written law’.123 The defining nature of conquest in the unfolding of national history arguably has topical resonance for readers in the late 1570s, too. While not so urgent as at the peak of anxiety in the 1580s, the threat of invasion by Catholic Spain was constantly present. For Blenerhasset in particular, so close to the coast of France, conquest must have felt like a very real possibility. However, although the complaint of Guidericus deals with his resistance to the emperor Claudius, and Carassus is a Roman who briefly ‘conquers’ Britain, the conquests with which the Second Part is most concerned are those of the Saxons and Danes; eight out of the twelve complaints address this period, perhaps in response to the ‘Renaissance rediscovery of the Anglo-Saxon past’.124 This rediscovery came about as religious reformers looked to the nation’s archives for theological precedents. In particular, ‘a burgeoning national interest in the language of Anglo-Saxon England’ stemmed from the antiquarian study of Old English manuscripts by Archbishop Matthew Parker and his circle in the 1560s and 1570s, on the heels of the more polemical interests of Bale and 122

Nolan, Lydgate, p. 47. Woolf, ‘Memory and Historical Culture’, 290. 124 Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), p. 7. 123

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Foxe.125 Allen J. Frantzen has noted the logical opposition between Germany and Rome in conceiving of both the Anglo-Saxon past and the ecclesiastical conflict of the present.126 This reinforced the ‘Protestant motivations underpinning these early Anglo-Saxon studies, prompting the exploitation of certain resonances between reformist beliefs and preConquest theology’, accomplished through a ‘peculiarly linguistic’ approach to the rediscovered textual records.127 A Testimonie of Antiquitie shewing the Auncient Fayth in the Church of England by Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham, was printed in 1566, and presented ‘a testimonye of verye auncient tyme, wherin is plainly shewed what was the judgement of the learned men in [the matter of the sacrament], in the dayes of the Saxons before the conquest’.128 Parker argues in his preface to this edition that while ‘many be charged and condemned of heresye, and reproved as bringers up of new doctryne, not knowen of olde in the church’ in the days of William the Conqueror, Aelfric’s testimony offers confirmation of his doctrine’s legitimacy.129 John Asser’s tenth-century Ælfredi regis res gestae was also printed by John Day in 1574, and although Blenerhasset’s complaint of Alfred does not follow Asser, his decision to include Alfred’s story responds to contemporary interest. E. G. Stanley comments that ‘the Saxonists of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s time and those who followed him looked back to their ancestors before the Norman Conquest for the civil liberty extinguished, as they thought, under the Normans and only slowly restored’.130 But this does not seem to be what motivates Blenerhasset’s portrayal of the period. Although he notes its significant achievements, especially in Alfred’s complaint which describes his foundation of abbeys, Winchester Minster and a grammar school in Oxford ‘[b]y meanes whereof my common weale was filde | With learned men’ (f. 53r), the account does not include any comparison with post-Conquest history. In fact, the complaint of Harold foregrounds William’s legitimacy, when ‘[m]y kingdome then was provde his lawful price, | With conquest he recovered his right’ (f. 65v). As seen 125 Hannah Crawforth, ‘Strangers to the Mother Tongue: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Early Anglo-Saxon Studies’, JMEMS, 41:2 (2011), 294–316, at 294; Frantzen, Desire for Origins, pp. 35–47. See also Timothy Graham, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (eds), A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 415–33, at pp. 415–23. 126 Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 31. 127 Crawforth, ‘Strangers to the Mother Tongue’, 294. 128 Aelfric, A Testimonie of Antiquitie (London: John Day, 1566), ‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, f. 2v. 129 Aelfric, Testimonie, ‘Preface to the Christian Reader’, f. 2r. 130 Eric Gerald Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past: The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism, and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), p. vii.

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above, the Second Part also portrays the Anglo-Saxon period using a ‘dark ages’ discourse which denigrates the ‘Gothic’ in opposition to the linguistic and intellectual superiority of the classical past. In this respect, too, Blenerhasset’s depiction of the period does not match that of Parker’s circle, and his manipulation of the multiply significant ‘Rome’ produces an ambiguous, layered moral history when read through the lens of contemporary religious debate. Blenerhasset’s approach does, however, accord with the ‘assumption of . . . meddling’ in textual history, which ‘had a direct bearing on the reception of Anglo-Saxon historical texts in the mid-sixteenth century’.131 While ‘[t]he charge that earlier scholars had rewritten texts for political ends is richly ironic, for those activities describe precisely the scholarly endeavours of Bale and Parker and his assistants’, the Second Part draws attention to this process, complicating and confounding a political reading of the Anglo-Saxon past.132 William E. Bolton suggests that, later, in ‘Spenser’s version of British history, Anglo-Saxons are the antagonists of the historical and allegorical virtues he is espousing. They are the people who depose the Welsh ancestors of his own monarch, and they are the antithesis of temperance.’133 However, this oversimplifies the cultural valency of AngloSaxons in the sixteenth century, and flattens the differences between distinct phases of Saxon rule. Blenerhasset’s Saxon complaints do not prescribe the loyalty of his readers in the way that Bolton suggests Spenser’s poem does, and the polyvocality of this section of the Second Part provides a nuanced, or at times confused, portrait. Edricus falls foul of the manoeuvring between Saxons and Danes when he kills King Edmund Ironside, ‘hoping’, according to his complaint’s title, ‘to have greate preferment for his labour of Canutus’. He drastically misjudges the situation. Cnut jokes cruelly, in a dark comic vein reminiscent of the early Mirrors, that ‘sith that love did moue thee doo that deede, | Thou for thy paynes shalt be preferde with speede’ (f. 60r), and orders the hangman to ‘let this mans head the hyghest place obtayne | On London walles’. The Saxon Egelrede is hated by his subjects, and a clear negative example (‘I did delight in everye villannye’ (f. 56v)), but the ‘dreadful divelish Danes’ are no better. Egelrede concludes that ‘Al murthering Massacers be vile and vayne’ (f. 57v), and suggests that the nation suffered under both his own and Cnut’s rule, because ‘alwayes that which wanteth government, | That fyrst dooth feele the force of dangers dent’ (f. 58r).

131

132 Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 46. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, p. 46. William E. Bolton, ‘Anglo-Saxons in Faerie Land?: A Note on Some Unlikely Characters in Spenser’s Briton Moniments’, SS, 23 (2008), 293–301, at 299. 133

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Lady Ebbe’s complaint compares the Saxons and Danes, when she presents the Saxons as especially ineffectual in the face of the Danish invasion: Amazde, they gazde, not knowing what was best, So strayghtly were the Saxons then distrest. (f. 48v)

By contrast, the Danes are active, savage, and wicked, and their invasion is characterized by the destruction of buildings, particularly religious houses, in accordance with Parker’s treatment in the Preface to Aelfric’s Testament of Antiquitie, based on Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, of the Danes as a divine scourge to the Saxons’ Catholicism.134 Blenerhasset’s decision to represent the destruction of the abbey as the means whereby the nuns ‘gaynde . . . a heavenly happinesse’ (f. 50r) therefore becomes doubleedged in the context of contemporary providentialist readings of British history: is their spiritual happiness augmented by the dissolution of religious houses? Considering the close parallels between Blenerhasset’s linguistic and religious interests and Spenser’s, demonstrated in his antipathy towards the Gothic corruption of language, and the degenerate vice of Cadwallader and his fellow clergy, it is perhaps surprising that he did not anticipate (or even echo in the Revelation) Spenser’s exploration in the Shepheardes Calender of whether ‘a return to origins might be possible, in language and—by analogy—in the English Church’.135 Judging by the references to ecclesiastical apparel in the prose link preceding Cadwallader’s complaint, it seems that Blenerhasset may have been on the opposing side of the vestiarian controversy to Archbishop Parker, although this would be a petty reason to reject the Parker circle’s efforts in Anglo-Saxon studies. However, Blenerhasset’s negative portrayal of conquest in the complaint of Lady Ebbe speaks to contemporary fears of invasion, and demonstrates the contingency of personal perspective and historiographical interpretation in its alternative take on the significance of the Saxon defeat. Blenerhasset’s complaints, then, offer a diverse and sometimes surprising portrayal of Anglo-Saxon history. His cavalier treatment of source material, and adaptation of the Mirror form, contributes to this unusual picture, while his evident engagement with contemporary literature and topical religious and political questions shows the construction of historical accounts mediated through the personal interests of the historian. King Harold is particularly aware of the limits of written text, and his complaint, the last of the collection, draws a formal distinction between oral and written utterances. His narrative takes place in a heuristic historic 134 135

See Aelfric, Testimonie, f. 6v. Crawforth, ‘Strangers to the Mother Tongue’, 295.

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present, and he urges his troops as in an exhortatory speech on the battlefield to ‘Come forth, and purchase Fame. Geve me my swoorde’ (f. 62r). Harold admits, however, that the Norman Conquest essentially comes about as a result of his failed correspondence with William, in which his ‘letters were of little might’, his ‘yfs and ands were vaine’ (f. 64r–v). Is this story of the defeat of the written text the ‘fit conclusion’ Memory foresees for her and Inquisition’s work in Harold’s complaint? Blenerhasset’s Mirror is shot through with arbitrariness. Both his characters’ falls and his narrators’ retelling of them are subject to unknowable contingencies, open to human error as well as deliberate distortion. In his hands, the moral premise of the Mirror tradition is unworkable, but Baldwin’s subversion of it to call out the unstable basis on which all kinds of authorities rest is alive and well. Blenerhasset’s exposure of fabulous history is light-hearted as well as cautionary, and follows Baldwin’s lead, too, in the construction of paratextual personae to critique the form in which he also participates. A self-identified exile from the literary-political scene, it is not just in his attitude towards the invention of fictions that Blenerhasset’s persona resonates with Montaigne’s, whose near-contemporary Essais shared a wider affinity with Blenerhasset’s sense of individualism and contingency. Montaigne’s retreat from his role as a magistrate in Bordeaux and solitary composition of his expanding collection of essays worked, through a ‘casual, unmethodical’ process of exploration and revelation, to foreground the tensions between individual motivations and the imposition of extrinsic structures.136 While it is a vastly different work, the Second Part contemporaneously reflects similar tensions between individual and commons, private virtue and public ambition (or vice versa), brought to the fore by the French wars of religion which raged a stone’s throw from both authors’ isolated studies. Blenerhasset’s later works, the Revelation of the True Minerva and the Direction for the Plantation of Ulster, are also concerned with what he presents as morally debased and corrupt communities which may be civilized. Both touch, as well, on the transmission of text and the physical circumstances of reading. In the Revelation, ‘[t]he truth’ appears on Neptune’s crown; it reads, ‘[t]he tearing tract of time hath wasted and worne out the worthie’.137 Blenerhasset’s Elizabeth I, ‘a divinely wise queen whom God has elected to usher in the millenial age’, promises to 136 Donald M. Frame, Montaigne’s Essais: A Study (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 34. See Nannerl O. Keohane, ‘Montaigne’s Individualism’, Political Theory, 5:3 (1977), 363–90; William M. Hamlin, ‘Florio’s Montaigne and the Tyranny of “Custome”: Appropriation, Ideology, and Early English Readership of the Essayes’, RQ, 63:2 (2010), 491–544. 137 Blenerhasset, Revelation, sig. A4r.

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restore England’s ‘worthie’, and comes to embody textual stability in the poem as ‘a Queen of God’s Word’.138 But the fact remains that ‘truth’ resides in this powerful image of textual desecration. Blenerhasset’s evocations of mutability here and in the Second Part anticipate Churchyard’s complaint of Wolsey which concludes the 1587 Mirror, as well as Spenser’s final cantos of the Faerie Queene, foreshadowing the shifts enacted by both texts from inexorable cycles of dynastic history to a more chaotic sense that the only certainty is change. While Higgins did not include Blenerhasset’s work in his 1587 compendium, he carried forward something of its absurdist spirit, in the mechanical reiteration of the de casibus formula whose moral centre was itself beginning to feel ‘wasted and worne out’.

138

Shenk, Learned Queen, pp. 92, 97.

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4 The Mirour for Magistrates (1587) In 1590, John Lydgate’s prose ‘history or mappe of Romes overthrowe’, The Serpent of Division (1422), was reprinted alongside Norton and Sackville’s British dynastic tragedy Gorboduc (1565).1 Lydgate’s Serpent, which described Julius Caesar’s life and death and its aftermath, had been composed in response to the potential power vacuum on the accession of the infant Henry VI. Gorboduc had tried to warn Elizabeth I, back in the 1560s, against neglecting the succession, by depicting the annihilation of the Trojan Brutus’s dynasty and a brutal civil war following the division of the British kingdom between Gorboduc’s sons, Ferrex and Porrex. A stanza of verse on the 1590 title page concluded with the Latin tag, ‘felix quem faciunt aliena periculum cautam’, a popular saying which had also prefixed editions of Baldwin’s Mirror between 1559 and 1578. The Serpent’s preface to the reader noted ‘thou wilt finde if thou compare our state with Romes, to be no lesse in danger and dread’, and the threads brought together in this publication spoke eloquently if obliquely to the pitch of public anxiety regarding Elizabeth I’s ongoing refusal to nominate an heir, and the feverish postulations about the ruin into which the country would inevitably fall if she were to die without having done so.2 Public discussion of the succession was strictly taboo, so the late 1580s and early 1590s saw poets and dramatists turning to allegorical means to insist on the importance of an agreed successor and national unity, while polemicists like Peter Wentworth ran the gauntlet of the queen’s anger by appealing to her openly.3 Wentworth’s vitriolic tract, A Pithie Exhortation to her Maiestie for Establishing her Successor to the Crowne (1598),

1

John Lydgate, The Serpent of Division (London: Edward Allde for John Perrin, 1590). Lydgate, Serpent, sig. Aijv. 3 J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), p. 251; Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 89. See Paulina Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean Succession’, in Paulina Kewes and Susan Doran (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 47–70. 2

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composed in 1587 and circulated in manuscript, but printed posthumously in Edinburgh after Wentworth’s death in prison, drew heavily on the discourse of violent societal disintegration which had characterized Gorboduc’s closing speech, and which also resonated through subsequent imaginative treatments of broken royal lineages and civil collapse like George Peele’s Tragedie of Absalon (1599) and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594). The 1590 Serpent/Gorboduc edition, its own contexts and those of the texts it combined, is key to my reading of Higgins’s 1587 Mirror, in terms of both its politics and the fissures it reveals in the practice of reading history politically. As Wentworth was composing his Pithie Exhortation, Higgins too accessed the Serpent of Division’s potent juxtaposition of historical referents, combining his collection of tragic British exempla with new Roman content. Higgins collated his First Part of the Mirror and Baldwin’s Last Part, and added twenty-three new and three revised complaints, eight of which were interspersed with the complaints printed in 1575, followed by fifteen Roman tragedies; as discussed in Chapter 1, the late medieval collection was also enlarged. It should be impossible to ignore this Mirror’s evident engagement with topical concerns, and its anticipation of the significance Roman histories would soon take on in the language of political counsel, although criticism to date largely has.4 This chapter will suggest that by setting Higgins’s new edition of the Mirror in context, the aims of his additions and alterations come into sharper focus, while shedding light on how the literary and political priorities of historical representation and transmission were changing during the troubled 1580s. It will also argue, though, that this edition sees the Mirror’s exemplary model run into further difficulties. This vast expansion of the Mirror’s dramatis personae chimes with the need identified by Richard Helgerson to write the history of England in the ‘large, comprehensive and foundational works’ which characterized the late sixteenth century.5 However, the Roman sequence veered sharply away from the ‘comprehensive and foundational’ ambitions of Higgins’s First Part. A far cry from his former proto-Spenserian poetics of loss, these complaints appropriate Roman history from contemporary classical accounts.6 They were not linked by a framing narrative, and diverted the story away from Britain, a move explicitly rejected in 1574 since extant 4 Paulina Kewes’s chapter, ‘Romans in the Mirror’, in MMC, pp. 126–46, is the exception. 5 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 4. 6 van Es, Forms of History, Ch. 1; also Andrew Escobedo, ‘The Tudor Search for Arthur and the Poetics of Historical Loss’, Exemplaria, 14:1 (2002), 127–65.

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chronicles supposedly neglected British history and ‘are faine in steede of other stuffe to talke of the Romaines, Greekes, Persians, &c.’ (1574F, sig. *5v).7 In 1587 this objection was excised, although Higgins’s Caesar still anticipates the reader’s surprise, ‘Why I a Romayne Prince, no Britayne, here | Amongst these Britayne Princes now appeere’ (1587, f. 77v). Also removed is Higgins’s lament for the scarcity of historical records, which would have struck a disingenuous note following the publication of Stow’s Chronicles of England from Brute (1580) and Camden’s Britannia (1586). Holinshed’s First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande had appeared in 1577, and the second, thoroughly updated version of that text was about to go to press.8 Higgins included the complaints of Caius Julius Caesar; Claudius Tiberius Nero; Caius Caesar Caligula; Guiderius; Laelius Hamo; Claudius Tiberius Drusus; Domitius Nero; Sergius Galba; Silvius Otho; Aulus Vitellius; Londricus; Severus; Fulgentius; Geta; and Aurelius Antonius Bassianus Caracalla, covering approximately 100 BC to AD 217. Sackville had pre-empted Higgins’s incorporation of Roman history into the Mirror’s de casibus schema in the manuscript of his complaint of Buckingham, perhaps remembering Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s Roman tragedies. He followed Buckingham’s claim that ‘whan fortune frownd the feller made my fall’ with the note, so felle Iulius so fell Nero And so furth.9

While Higgins’s additions clearly resonate with the politics of his own time, Sackville’s offhand attitude towards the homogeneity of successive Roman falls in this cursory comment is also pertinent, as we will see. Around the new ancient British complaints, Higgins’s expanded verse frame re-engages with the transmission of history. His original tragedies and frame narrative were subject to edits which drastically refocused the work, redacting his initial uncertainty. Higgins’s approach to legendary history had evidently changed, while his literary standing and interests are

7 The collection of Roman complaints was connected to the previous material by a verse link, but individual tragedies were not linked to each other. 8 See Felicity Heal and Henry Summerson, ‘The Genesis of the Two Editions’, and W. H. Herendeen, ‘Later Historians and Holinshed’, both in Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 Thomas Sackville, The Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, Including the Induction: Or, Thomas Sackville’s Contribution to the Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Marguerite Hearsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), p. 88.

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much more stridently asserted, in keeping with the developments in English intellectual culture since these texts’ last outings in print eleven years earlier. Prose romance was enjoying a boom after the runaway success of John Lyly’s Euphues (1578), and literary theory was being codified by the likes of Peacham, Puttenham, and Webbe in print, and Sidney in manuscript.10 It would have been impossible to ignore the rise of commercial theatre and the corresponding wave of antitheatrical polemic.11 Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) had recalibrated English poetry’s relationship with the classics and its own past, North’s Plutarch (1579) and Camden’s Britannia (1586) made readers conceive of Roman and Romano-British history in new ways, and the historiographical landscape at large had radically changed.12 Puttenham and Sidney’s theoretical tracts were about to begin peeling historical poetry away from historiography, on the grounds of its being better able to maximize the past’s exemplary utility through fictive amplification.13 While Higgins’s verse history of ancient Britain had been unusual in the 1570s, the market was now awash with similar ventures. William Warner’s Albion’s England was first printed in 1586, and contained, in Books 3 and 4, a verse history of Britain from Brutus to the Norman Conquest, the period which Higgins and Blenerhasset’s texts had covered, in addition to classical, mythological stories, and a brief history of Aeneas. Meanwhile, exemplary histories like George Whetstone’s English Mirrour (1586) had returned to the more recent past: Whetstone offered prose summaries of the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, before enumerating the successes of Elizabeth’s rule. Like Anthony Munday’s Mirrour of Mutabilitie, or Principall Part of the Mirrour for Magistrates (1579), Blenerhasset’s Second Part of the Mirror had appropriated the text’s form and name, as well as Higgins’s plan for a ‘Second Part’ of his own. Higgins did not include Blenerhasset’s supplementary text in his 1587 edition, but may 10 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: H. Jackson, 1577); George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589); William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie (London: John Charlewood for Richard Walley, 1586); Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595). 11 See Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: John Kingston for Richard Jones, 1583); Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1579) and Playes Confuted (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582); Rankins, Mirrour of Monsters. 12 See D. R. Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), pp. 31–68, at pp. 64–5. 13 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, and Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 89–91 and pp. 19–20.

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have read it. A reference to the ‘Lethian lake’, for example, creeps into the 1587 Induction; although a common enough phrase, this does ape the diction of Blenerhasset’s prose frame. Silvius Otho’s complaint also echoes Blenerhasset’s Carassus in his use of the proverb ‘Like will to like’, while the ‘hatefull hellish hagge’ (1587, f. 42r) in the new complaint of Forrex recalls Edricus’s ‘hellish hagges of Limbo Lake’ (1578S, f. 59v), an intriguing footnote to the Mirror corpus’s complex and self-referential transmission history. Campbell suggests that because ‘[b]y 1587 a good many hopeful poets were apparently writing poems in the manner of the Mirror tragedies’, the 1587 edition was ‘primarily important as an attempt to issue a definitive edition and establish a canon’.14 She adds that the intention ‘was doubtless also to fix Higgins’s place as a canonical writer’, and to ensure that the Mirror was ‘regarded henceforth as one and indivisible’.15 In addition to solidifying the Mirror canon and eliminating competitors, though, the 1587 edition expresses new priorities. Interrupted by Blenerhasset’s attempted interpolation, Higgins’s Mirror project seems to have changed tack. The 1587 Mirror reflects a confluence of these developments, in addition to the atmosphere of mounting political anxiety: over challenges to Elizabeth’s rule and life by the Babington plot of 1586, the fear of an attempted Spanish invasion which would reach an apogee in the 1588 Armada, and what these internal and external bids for power would mean in the event of Elizabeth’s failure to name an heir. For Marshe, a new edition of the First and Last parts of the Mirror, which played up its role as a wide-ranging compilation of morally educative histories, was perhaps a shrewd commercial move, as Baldwin and Ferrers’s interests in civil conflict, counsel, and rebellion were growing ever more resonant. The Mirror by now made up a vast body of political counsel appropriate to these contemporary problems, and, as Kewes has shown, concern about the succession in particular does seem to have shaped Higgins’s editorial choices and new compositions.16 The edition conveys as well, though, a building discontent with this form of intervention. The validity of analogy, the bread and butter of exemplary history, comes once again under threat, via the terms of contemporary antitheatrical discourse. Behind the 1587 Mirror’s newfound textual confidence, its sceptical interrogation of allegory and exemplarity continues to undercut the premise of the speculum principis.

14 16

Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 9. Kewes, ‘Romans in the Mirror’.

15

Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, p. 9.

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TEXTUAL STABILITY ‘Hadst thou late ouerslept thy selfe?’ the legendary king Jago asks, as he opens the non-story of his ‘sleepy sinfull life’. Now, ‘awaked sith wee are both twayne’ (1587, f. 40v), Higgins may get down to the business of completing his history. Instead of the hesitant, somewhat traumatized visionary of 1574–5, 1587’s brisk, bookish narrator is back in his study, and on the qui vive. The revised paratexts feature incisive updates which reconfigure his new edition. Where the First Part’s dedication suggests that the text to follow ‘reproved foly in those which are heedelesse: injurie in extortioners, rashnes in venterers, and excesse, in such as suppresse not unruly affections’ (1574F, sig. *5r), the 1587 version adds ‘trecherie in traytours’, and ‘riote in rebelles’ (sig. Br). Combining a flashier rhetoric with explicit condemnation of civil disobedience, his Mirror’s warning is newly pertinent in the wake of the Throckmorton and Babington plots (1583 and 1586) against Elizabeth. Meanwhile, where ‘Maister Baldwin hath so learnedly touched in his Epistle of the other volume of this book’ on the dangers of ambition in 1574, in 1587 ‘learnedly’ is struck out, and the earlier volume is not an ‘other’, but the ‘last’ (sig. Bv). Higgins’s flattery of Baldwin and his readers, and his self-deprecation, are removed. The closing of the dedication claims that Higgins wrote the piece ‘the vii. day of December. 1586’ (sig. Bv), confidently remaking the text’s fiction of composition. The new ancient British complaints were interspersed among the existing collection, such that the historical scope of the First Part was not extended, but instead filled out. In 1575, the narrative concluded with the deaths of Nennius and Irenglas in 51 and 50 BC, whereas Jago (d. 612 BC), Pinnar, Stater, and Rudacke (d. 441 BC), Brennus (d. 375 BC), Emerianus (d. 225 BC), Chirinnus (d. 137 BC), and Varianus (d. 136 BC), take Higgins back into more ancient territory.17 These complaints are mostly very short, and split into three distinct groups: those of Pinnar, Stater, and Rudacke, who are killed together by Dyfnwal; Dyfnwal’s son, Brennus’s complaint, which is by far the longest, and narrates his conflict with his brother Belinus before his famous downfall at Delphi; and those of Jago, Emerianus, Chirinnus, and Varianus, whose falls are precipitated by their specific vices: lethargy, tyranny, drunkenness, and lust.18 These 17

These dates are all Higgins’s own, from the 1587 edition. Higgins follows Stow (1580) in this regard, who devotes considerably more space to Brennus than his other ancient figures. 18

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three groups show Higgins taking on three facets of the Mirror tradition, as it stood in 1586: the polyvocal depiction through several complaints of a single event; the retelling of an ancient mythological narrative as true history; and the denunciation of a particular vice through a single, negative exemplum.19 The Lenvoys which replace the 1574–5 Inductions also whip the ancient British collection into a new, more authoritative shape. Where the complaints had been linked by Higgins’s awestruck dreamer, uncertain of what he had heard and seen, the 1587 narrator is a decisive, orderly author, who sometimes slips wholly into the down-to-earth world of Baldwin’s narrative, instructing us ‘now you must suppose did next appeare’ a vision of Stater (1587, f. 47r), rather than reporting his experience of a supernatural apparition. The 1574 Induction had presented an exploratory reader, who ‘deemde some booke, of mourning theame was beste | To reade’ (1574F, f. 1r), and set out to find something appropriate. The 1587 reader, by contrast, has a clear agenda and the expertise to devise a suitable scholarly programme.20 He depicts not just his own, but his readers’ encounter with the Mirror as a material book, hoping that they will read it often and ‘marke the causes why those Princes fell’ (sig. C2v). ‘Marke’, here, connotes the physical as well as mental marking of exempla on the page, which Higgins himself takes up in the 1587 edition, highlighting sententiae with marginal stars. He demands throughout the rewritten frame that his readers ‘one thing chiefely have to note’, or ‘now beholde and marke this story well’, apologizing after a digression on Nennius, ‘I will no longer thee from reading stay, | But wish thee marke howe he exhorteth all’ (f. 66r). His textual frame of reference has also expanded, and again he foregrounds not just the content but the act of reading. After Albanact’s lament, I cal’d to my minde In historyes what I of Troia read, And what of Brutus I in bookes did finde.

(f. 9v)

His repeated invocation of ‘mine Author’ foregrounds his poetic composition from a mental or physical library, and more attention is paid to what

19 Although Higgins’s Brennus invokes ‘Bochas’, his narrative excises Lydgate’s references to Diana, Minerva, and Apollo. Cf. Curran, Roman Invasions, p. 140. 20 Interestingly, in 1587 he also introduces the idea that he is reading ‘For conference of frende to stande in steade, | when I my faithfull frende was parted fro’; this seems to be a tantalizing glimpse into Higgins’s personal life, and the use to which the Mirror could be put, but he does not mention his absent friend again.

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‘auncient authors tell’ (f. 60v), than what they do not. The new frame regularly invokes classical myth: Higgins notes, for example, that the beauty which provoked Elstride’s downfall also ‘caused Hercules to slay th’OEchalian King, | And Deianire her worthy fere to bane’; the passage incorporates the fall of Troy, and a vivid description of sirens, monsters, and ‘toyling tempests’ (f. 20v). The murder of Sabrine is likened to the myths of Procne, Medea, and Agave (f. 24); Bladud is compared to Icarus and Simon Magus, and the Lenvoy following Morindus’s complaint has Higgins reading about Hercules, and Samson in ‘the holy histories’ (f. 32v). John E. Curran notes a similar process at work in Locrine (1595), where ‘the matter of Troy can combine with any hackneyed story from the classics . . . Troy seems indistinguishable from any other mythology’.21 The practice suggests a new aesthetic agenda, and a downgrading of historiographical priorities. The Lenvoy following Madan’s complaint notes that ‘although that authors heere dissent . . . To reade his warnings thou maist bee content’ (f. 26r). The Galfridian legend’s contested status no longer seems to be cause for anxiety, and its messages may be taken at face value. For Sergius Galba, in fact, reputation is permanent. He asks, ‘who may wordes or actions donne reuoke? | The stayne abides’ (f. 93), reworking Lord Hastings’s observation that ‘[f]orth irreturnable flyeth the spoken word’ (1563, f. 111v), and reinterpreting earlier Mirrors’ anxieties about the inaccurate transmission of speech and reputation to suggest rather that accuracy is the greater problem. Writers, too, ‘neede no longer feare theyr foule decay’ (f. 86v), according to Higgins’s Caligula, triangulating historic censorship between himself, Collingbourne’s Richard III as depicted in the 1563 text, and, by implication, Mary I, under whom the Mirror itself had been suppressed. Instead of anxiously negotiating his ancient records’ instability, Higgins just raises an eyebrow in response to their more implausible episodes: after Kimarus, Mempricius, and Madan have all been devoured by wolves as punishment for their misbehaviour, he deadpans ‘By this appeares that time in Britayne were | Aboundant store of wolues, and vices rife’ (f. 60v). Historical oblivion has become a punitive option, rather than a misfortune to be overcome by the aspiring chronicler. The Romans are largely confident of their textual immortality, although Geta throws the reliability of their accounts into doubt by acknowledging that his own story might not be trustworthy, since he speaks for himself (1587, f. 100v). Severus

21

Curran, ‘Imagining Non-History’, 10.

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announces that ‘Poets pennes perpetuate my prowes, facts and fame’ (f. 97r), and Julius Caesar commissions Higgins’s written record despite his boast that No noble authour writes that can forget the same: My prayse I know in print through all the worlde is blowne, Ther’s no man scarce that writes, but he recytes my fame. (1587, f. 86r)

But the new narrative which frames the British tragedies stresses that commemoration is within the inscribed Higgins’s gift, in response to desert. Gone are his visceral responses to the Britons’ wounds, as well as no small degree of compassion, signalled by the alteration in the main Induction of ‘cruel death’ (1574F, f. 3r) to ‘sondry deaths’ (1587, sig. C4r). Destruction and loss are no longer cruel if they are justified. Emerianus’s complaint is followed by only one narratorial stanza, because ‘I must but briefly these unworthy tutch’ (1587, f. 63v), and he dismisses Varianus, saying, ‘What should I longer on such Princes stay, | Whose factes unworthie were to be enrolde’ (1587, f. 66r). This pose of unwillingness to offer a Lenvoy for negative exempla, and perpetuate their fame textually, is perhaps inherited from Lydgate’s Fall, where, in Book VII, Lydgate decries the intemperance of a series of Roman emperors, and ‘In stede of a Lenvoye’ for Nero, suggests, If that I myght I wolde race his name Out of this boke that no man should it rede, His vicious lyfe chefe myrrour of diffame, Set hym asyde let no wyght take hede For to remember so many a cruell dede, Save onely thys to thinke in substaunce Howe every tiraunt endeth in mischaunce.22

In keeping with his more forthright moral stance, Higgins’s Lenvoys also reinforce specifically Christian virtue, which had not previously been so overtly brought out. ‘God’ and ‘gods’ had been fairly interchangeable, implying no real distinction between polytheistic and monotheistic religious feeling. By contrast, the Lenvoy following the complaint of Locrinus draws a distinction between the marriage of ‘Pagan Princes’ and ‘christen men’, suggesting that ‘Jehovah’ must object strongly to the breaking of ‘the sacred band of holy wedlocke’ now if, as the complaints show, he had in pre-Christian times (1587, f. 15r). The relative punishment of pagan

22

Lydgate, Falle of Princis, f. 157v.

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and Christian transgressions is taken up again in the new Lenvoy following Stater’s complaint: For if these Pagans proud so plagued were, Which tooke on them ambitiously the sway, Wil not th’almighties Justice soone appeare, When Christian men their Christian Kinges betray? (1587, f. 48r)

Although the First Part had emphasized the otherness of the ancient Britons through their frightening, wild appearance, and uncertain status as dreams, ghosts, or visions, their alterity was eventually subsumed in Higgins’s empathetic participation in Nennius’s battle. The new framing narrative makes a more concerted cultural and confessional division between Higgins and his subject matter. The audience of Higgins’s Mirror, as defined by the text itself, was also subtly shifting. The 1574–5 Induction states that the characters whose complaints Higgins read in Baldwin’s Mirror were of diverse social status: For some of these were kings of highe estate: And some were Dukes, and came of Regall race: Some Princes, Lordes and Judges great that sate In councell still, decreing every case: Some other Knightes, that vices did imbrace: Some Gentlemen: some poore that looked hie, Yet every one had played his tragoedye. (1574F, f. 1v)

These lines are retained in the 1587 edition, but now the terms ‘Prince’ and ‘Princely’ are inserted in five places over the 145-line Induction. The revision of phrases to contain ‘Prince’ recurs throughout the 1587 edition, predominantly in the Lenvoys. Some show a higher frequency of this than others; for example, the Lenvoy between the complaints of Madan and Manlius introduces four cognates of the term into a passage that is actually reduced from four stanzas to three. These interpolations both distance Higgins’s Mirror from its actual readership—his intended audience is not royal—and incorporate them into his nation-building narrative through the inclusiveness of the body politic. Hadfield explains that this new focus on ‘princes, and by implication any of their subjects’, means that ‘[t]he question of . . . how the individual governs, has been replaced by the “imaged community” of the nation’.23 Although Higgins appears to raise the social status of the audience with which his 1587 work is concerned by the addition of specific references to ‘Princes’, the readership for whom the text is intended is actually broadened by this change. 23

Hadfield, Literature, p. 102.

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Higgins writes into his source a general applicability which Baldwin did not have in mind. Higgins says of the 1559–63 Mirror that Examples there for all estates you finde, ... The ryche, and poore: and every one may see, Which way to love and lyve in his degree. (1574F, f. 1v)

As seen in Chapter 1, however, Baldwin’s immediate circle of readers was actually an elite, highly educated group. Both Schwyzer and Hadfield recognize the expansion of Higgins’s audience; Hadfield is explicitly critical of it.24 This broader appeal and accessibility, though, do chime with Higgins’s chosen form, and bolster its famed cultural and commercial reach. In line with Higgins’s shoring up of textual authority, his own and that of the histories he recites, the 1587 additions exhibit a heightened engagement with the theory and practice of his poetics. The ambitious new complaint of Brennus showcases a broadening geographical as well as generic scope, and recounts a wide-ranging adventure tale including an extraordinary second-person evocation of his crossing the Alps. The inscribed Higgins begins to comment on the composition of the new tragedies in terms which reflect the coexistence of the First and Last parts of the Mirror side by side in the 1587 volume. He returns to Baldwin and Ferrers’s consideration of decorum in the prose frame, by now a fashionable poetic preoccupation, which he had remarked on but not emulated in the First Part (1574F f. 1v). After the metrically anarchic complaint of Pinnar he notes the paradox that, Thus though unorderly his tale hee tell, As was his raygne: yet orderly it standes. Even such decorum deckes the person well, Who in his life decorum due abandes. (1587, f. 47r)

A disorderly reign leads to a disorderly tale, as in Baldwin’s Mirror Michael Joseph’s verse had been uncouth, and Richard III’s unpleasant. The following complaint, too, is ‘unstatelike stammer[ed] out’ by Stater, in ‘staylesse staggering footed verse’ (1587, f. 47r). Equivalence takes on renewed significance in this edition (although Humber the Hun had been ‘hungry’ in 1574), and might explain one of Higgins’s more consistent revisions: four out of the five uses of ‘brute’ and ‘brutish’ are expunged in the new text. His Britons are no longer ‘brutish’, as though his reinvigorated awareness of lexical equivalences prompted him to try and deflect the association between these terms in this more firmly patriotic iteration of his history. 24

Schwyzer, Literature, p. 112; Hadfield, Literature, p. 102.

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His newly composed Lenvoys update the medieval timbre of the collection. Evoking the Mirror’s favoured antecedents, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Skelton, more recently the envoy or Lenvoy had surfaced in modern verse tragedy and de casibus histories: Robert Sempill’s Tragical End and Death of the Lord Iames Regent of Scotland (1570) had concluded with ‘The Tragedies Lenvoy’, while George Turbervile’s contemporary Tragicall Tales (1587) even announced as part of the title that that author had appended a ‘lenuoye to eche tale’; Spenser and Harvey’s exchange of letters printed in 1580 had also closed with an envoy, following Harvey’s parodic verse on the germane themes of mutability and fortune, and the immortality of virtue.25 In her discussion of Spenser’s use of envoys in The Shepheardes Calender, a gamechanging addition to the early modern canon which had been printed in the intervening decade, Alexandra Gillespie states that an envoy at the beginning of a text, as Chaucer positioned his, provides ‘a reminder that the on-going processes of transmission, reproduction, interpretation, and preservation that comprise its trajectory are themselves constitutive of meaning’.26 Higgins’s Lenvoys act as both introductory and valedictory comments for each ghostly speaker and indeed their task is to foreground the process of transmission— within the fiction, from speaker to amanuensis, and in actuality from author to reader. As Gillespie observes, transmission itself is ‘constitutive of meaning’, and the attention Higgins paid to his framing devices, evinced by their systematic revision, shows him alive to the significance of their mediation. Unlike the heavily annotated dedication, Higgins does not advertise his humanist credentials by annotating his Roman complaints, beyond the marginal acknowledgement of ‘Flores’, Florus’s first-century Epitome of Roman History, in the complaint of Claudius Tiberius Nero.27 Suppressed within their accounts, however, is a body of classical learning; Douglas Bush reconstructs a web of scholarship beneath Higgins’s ‘classical lives’, which reveals a depth of research unprecedented in Higgins’s British complaints, whose stories had been derived from more easily accessible vernacular sources.28 Higgins’s recourse to Latin texts had been prefigured in the Historia Britannica, first printed in 1583, in which the Galfridian ‘account 25 Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser, Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters: Lately Passed Betweene Two Universitie Men: Touching the Earthquake in Aprill Last, and Our English Refourmed Versifying (London: H. Bynneman, 1580), p. 69. 26 Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Chaucer and Lydgate in Print: The Medieval Author and the History of the Book, 1476–1579’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2001, p. 316. 27 Not printed in London until 1589. See Freyja Cox Jensen, ‘Reading Florus in Early Modern England’, RS, 23:5 (2009), 659–77. Cf. Matthew of Westminster’s/Flores historiarum/(1567). 28 Bush, ‘Classical Lives’. It is interesting to note that the only complaint in Higgins’s collection augmented by printed marginalia is the 1574–5 version of ‘Porrex’: this complaint is replaced in 1587, and its marginalia excised. Reasons for this are worth further

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of Caesar’s invasions’ was supplanted ‘with that of Caesar himself ’, although this move had not yet made its mark in vernacular historiography.29 The majority of Higgins’s material derives from Herodian, Plutarch, and, most of all, Suetonius, whose Historie of Twelve Caesars was not translated until Philemon Holland’s version of 1606.30 Indeed, in 1607, John Harington likened the Mirror to exemplary works by Suetonius and Plutarch.31 However, The History of Herodian (1556), translated by Nicholas Smyth, the 1578 edition of Appian’s Auncient Historie and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres, and Thomas North’s Liues of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (1579), translated from Amyot’s French Plutarch, form the intellectual and commercial backdrop to Higgins’s choice of characters, and their pertinence as advice to princes.32 This particular period of Roman civil conflict—the fall of the republic and the establishment of imperial rule— had undeniable topical resonance in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign.33 Interest in Roman history was to flourish in the 1590s and 1600s, as Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus’s Historiae and Agricola (1591) prompted a marked increase in English translations.34 Higgins arrived early, composing his complaints at a time when translations of Latin historiography ‘were few and far between’, although attentiveness to its lessons was already building.35 Higgins’s Roman turn takes place just as William Bluett was advising in a commendatory poem, CEASE, cease hence forth you worthy Englishe wightes, at straungers deedes, to take such admiration: Since far they come behinde the noble Knights, Which fostred have bin, in our Englishe nation.36

investigation. It may be that ‘Porrex’ was composed with a view to separate publication, although there is no other evidence of this. 29 John E. Curran, ‘Spenser and the Historical Revolution: Briton Moniments and the Problem of Roman Britain’, Clio, 25:3 (1996), 273–92, at 275 and 278. 30 Bush, ‘Classical Lives’, 266. 31 Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, trans. John Harington (London: Richard Field, for John Norton and Simon Waterson, 1607), ‘The Life of Ariosto Briefly and Compendiously Gathered out of Sundrie Italian Writers’, p. 414 (wrongly paginated 114). 32 See also Antonio de Guevara, A Chronicle, Conteyning the Liues of Tenne Emperours of Rome, trans. Edward Hellowes (London: Henry Middleton for Ralph Newberie, 1577), pp. 1–11. 33 See Freyja Cox Jensen, Reading the Roman Republic in Early Modern England (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 2–3. 34 See Kewes, ‘Politics of Roman History’, especially 518–19. 35 Kewes, ‘Politics of Roman History’, 518. 36 William Bluett, commendatory verse in Christopher Ocland, The Valiant Actes and Victorious Battailes of the English Nation, trans. John Sharrock (Anglorum Praelia) (London: Robert Waldegrave, 1585).

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Bluett asks writers to leave off Caesar, Pompey, Alexander, Scipio, and Hannibal, and to stop reading Plutarch, Tacitus, Appian, Curtius, Homer, Virgil, Thucidides, and Herodotus; a patriotic statement which ostentatiously catalogues current interests, and paraliptically draws recent English history into dialogue with the classics. Romans were also about to become popular subjects in imaginative literature, as Elizabethan court culture ‘was being transformed through the influence of classical models emphasising political treachery and a moral corruption associated with luxury and cultural sophistication’.37 Richard Niccols’s revision and expansion of the 1587 collection in 1610, which included the Roman complaints in full, could be read as politically motivated in the midst of oppositional Jacobean Neostoicism, and the context of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1605) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611). The additions Higgins made to the corpus on the cusp of this shattering collision between Roman history and conciliar discourse speak tellingly to the ways in which the Mirror’s exemplarity was reframed, by this edition and its subsequent reception.

TOPICAL POLITICS Thomas Newton’s dedicatory poem articulates the 1587 edition’s new topical mode. ‘Thinges forepast’, Newton claims, ‘are presidents to us, | Whereby wee may thinges present now discusse’. This is a startling admission. The focus of this Mirror, it implies, is not warning magistrates against bad government using historical examples, but the utility of historical examples to shadow current events. An allegorical reading will facilitate public dialogue about political topics which were otherwise offlimits. In other words, Newton reinstates the aims of Baldwin’s Memorial, and the Mirror as understood by Budra and Winston.38 This is hardly surprising; Newton’s edition of Seneca His Tenne Tragedies had been printed in 1581, collating the translations by Inns poets Jasper Heywood, Alexander Neville, John Studely, and others which had employed Senecan drama to test the mechanisms of public political discourse in the 1560s, informed by Baldwin’s Mirror itself.39 The shift, though, emphasizing 37 Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 21–44, at p. 30. 38 Budra, De casibus; Winston, Lawyers at Play, Ch. 5. 39 See Winston, ‘Rethinking Absolutism’. As well as his extensive work as a translator, Newton had adapted A View of Valyaunce, Describing the Famous Feates, and Martiall Exploites of the Two Most Mightie Nations, the Romains and the Carthaginians (1580), an

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afresh the usefulness of the collection to the commons rather than to those in power, hints that its function, if not oppositional, is at least covert. The unspeakable topic of the day was the succession question. The year 1586 was fraught for Elizabeth’s subjects, as invasion anxieties heightened, and the Babington conspiracy made a final play for usurpation by Mary Stuart. Higgins’s edition engaged with these concerns both narratologically, as individual episodes resonated with contemporary events, and tonally, as their accumulation offered an ever more intense depiction of the competition between Britain and Rome.40 But as Kewes has shown, Higgins, too, was preoccupied with the forbidden subject of Elizabeth’s heir.41 The 1587 additions address topical negotiations of empire, and nationhood defined against external hostility. But they also return to the feared outcome of an unclear or split line of inheritance, piling a new sequence of tragedies about the aftermath of the Gorboduc plot onto rewritten complaints of Forrex and Porrex, which follow Cordila and Morgan’s own disordered succession narrative. Nor was Higgins alone in his late Elizabethan revival of the British legend to this purpose: ‘the Admiral’s Men had at least two plays called The Conquest of Brute, while William Haughton wrote them a new Ferrex and Porrex. The Queen’s Men had King Leir.’42 The year 1587 also saw Higgins’s verse imbued with retroactive allegorical weight, as the tradition’s popularity, and the entrenchment of its accompanying interpretative practices, meant that reflections of contemporary figures were read back into the work. In his extravagant tract in praise of Francis Drake, Henry Haslop suggested that the privateer, recently returned from sacking towns in the West Indies before ‘cingeing . . . the King of Spaines beard’ in the raid on Cadiz in 1587, was ‘no lesse fortunate then abridgement of Appian’s Iberikê. In this text, he posed as a captain under Scipio, and claimed that the View, a ‘Monument of great antiquitie’, had been ‘happilye founde’ in Italy and translated by an unnamed friend. His use of this authorial fiction, in which he takes on the persona of a Roman in order to legitimate a fictive textual record, hints at Newton’s occupation of a suggestive common ground between Baldwin’s exploration of textual instability and Higgins’s new interests. Thomas Newton, A View of Valyaunce (London: Thomas East, 1580), ‘To the Reader’, sig. A4r; see Gordon Braden, ‘Newton, Thomas (1544/5–1607)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn, Jan. 2008 [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/20069, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. 40 Cf. Curran, Roman Invasions, p. 140. 41 See Kewes, ‘Romans in the Mirror’; Paulina Kewes and Susan Doran, ‘Introduction: A Historiographical Perspective’, in Kewes and Doran (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 3–19, at p. 4. 42 Richard Dutton, ‘Hamlet and Succession’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 173–91, at p. 174.

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the prowdest Romaine whose honour Plutarch reports to the full’.43 He then posits a skewed analogy between the pirate, Drake, who had acquired a recent haul by ransoming then burning Spanish Cartagena de Indias, on the northern coast of present-day Colombia, and Higgins’s Nennius, who had defended Britain against Caesar’s invading forces. He notes, The Author of that mirror of Tragedies touching Brittish princes, amongst others bringeth in Ninius, complaining that his honours were forgotten, and left unwritten . . . Then let not this servant of our Cassibilane rest without his reward, but register his deedes, write his honours in golde, and praye for his successe . . . [H]e hath not freed his countrie, yet he defendeth it, by wounding the enimie.44

In serving Elizabeth I, ‘our Cassibilane’, Drake plays the part of Nennius in defending the nation against the ‘Romish’ threat.45 The 1587 Mirror, with its complaints of Britons and Romans side by side, gives voice to contradictions which Haslop breezes past in his extraction of contemporary local analogies. Less flattering comparisons were open to be made, though, with the internal threat to English security. In his new multifaceted depiction of the turmoil following Ferrex and Porrex’s decimation of Brutus’s primary dynastic line, Higgins anatomizes the workings of rebellion and civil discord. The group of complaints dramatizes the uprising of Pinnar of England, Stater of Scotland, and Rudacke of Wales against the rightful heir, Duke Cloten of Cornwall, father of Dyfnwal, or Dunwallo. They theorize in turn three different aspects of rebellion. Stater argues that, while he was a ‘stout’ king of his own nation, ‘Intruders’ are ‘untrusty the Realme for to guide’ (1587, f. 47r), so the country is unsafe under an illegitimate ruler. Pinnar notes that the reign of rebels cannot last, and will inevitably be overthrown (1587, f. 46v). Finally, Rudacke establishes the circumstances in which rebellions occur. Following the deaths of Ferrex and Porrex, he says, ‘Britayne was restlesse, wanting a Kyng’. Without a clear-cut successor, The land many peeres ambitious did wring, Endevouring each the kingdome to gayne. ... The subjects were armed, we nobles did strive, At length we amongst us devision contrive. (1587, f. 48v)

43

Francis Bacon, Considerations Touching a Warre with Spaine (London, 1629), p. 26. Henry Haslop, Newes out of the Coast of Spaine (London: W. How for Henry Haslop, 1587), sig. A3v. 45 Cassibilane is Cassivellanus, the Briton who led the defence against Caesar’s second invasion (54 BC). 44

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In particular, the 1587 Mirror conceives of civil conflict in terms of the intersection between metaphors of maternity and nationality, following Gorboduc’s imperceptive reference to ‘our countrey, mother of us all’ which he is about to carve up.46 The common inversion whereby ‘Dame Nature . . . receiveth all againe, into the wombe of our mother[:] the bowelles of the earth’ was presented as a levelling force against pride by Phillip Stubbes, while John Pickering’s Newe Enterlude of Vice (1567) had deployed it to frame ‘matricide as “tyraney”’.47 Shakespeare would grotesquely reconfigure the trope when Tamora, ‘your unhallowed dam, | Like to the earth swallow[s] her own increase’ in his succession drama Titus.48 Higgins’s Forrex echoes Stubbes, warning readers to remember that temporal ambition is futile since ‘the earth agayn consumeth all’ (1587, f. 43r). But both Brennus’s mother, Corwenna, and Caracalla’s mother, Julia, are given speeches in which they entreat their pairs of sons not to compete by linking their common bonds of kinship and nationality via the maternal body. Extending Videna’s rebuke to her son Porrex for killing ‘he who in the selfe same wombe was wrapped’ in Norton and Sackville’s play, Corwenna asks, ‘Did not this wombe once both inclose you . . . And cannot now all Britayne hold you brethren twaine?’ (1587, f. 52v).49 Julia threatens, ‘if devide the Empire all you will . . . My woefull corps I pray you here to kill, | And it devide betweene you both in twaine’ (f. 104r). The complaints work to unpick the intricate interrelation of the monarch and subject’s reciprocal duties as parent and child, with respect to the problematically childless Elizabeth ‘[our] natural nursing mother’, as well as related children of a mother nation, and the dire unnaturalness of the rupture of these relationships through tyranny, insurrection, or civil conflict.50 When it came to the intersection of monarchic and familial relationships, competition and conflict, Higgins’s contemporaries had a complex

46 Norton and Sackville, Ferrex and Porrex, sig. Bi v. See Vanhoutte, ‘Community, Authority, and the Motherland’. 47 Stubbes, Anatomie, sig. Bviir; see Shrank, ‘This Fatall Medea’, 539; Helen Hackett, ‘The Rhetoric of (In)fertility: Shifting Responses to Elizabeth I’s Childlessness’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 149–71. 48 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (The Arden Shakespeare, London: Routledge, 1995), 5.2.190–1. See Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 43; cf. Conrad, History of English, p. 148. 49 Norton and Sackville, Ferrex and Porrex, sig. Eiiiir. 50 Peter Wentworth, A Pithie Exhortation to her Maiestie for Establishing her Successor to the Crowne (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1598), p. 76.

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test case at hand.51 The long-running debate over what to do about the threatened insurgency of Elizabeth I’s kinswoman, Mary Queen of Scots, had ‘centered on the extent to which sovereigns could be held legally accountable for their alleged misdeeds’; a question central to Baldwin’s Mirror, too.52 George Whetstone had performed the standard providential contortions to justify the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus in his English Mirror (1586), calling parricide an ‘outrage upon nature’, and hiding behind Machiavelli to argue that ‘It was needefull . . . for that other wise the Romaine Empire might have ended in the beginning’ although this ‘cannot wash away the stayne of Romulus bloudie offence’.53 In his Enemie to Unthryftiness, printed the same year, Whetstone approached the same episode in yet more cogent terms, calling the act ‘very impious’ but noting that ‘the seditious disposition of Remus well pondred, necessytie approoved the severytie of ROMULUS, to be perfect Justice’; he pointedly concluded that ‘the love we owe unto our Countrey, commaundeth us to breake all these bandes of affection’.54 Elizabeth herself effected a characteristic rhetorical coup when she announced ‘in verie trueth we were greatly and deepely grieved in our minde, to thinke or imagine that any such unnatural & monstrous Acts should be either devised . . . by her being a Princesse borne, and of our sexe and blood’, appropriating the discourse of monstrosity and laying it firmly at Mary’s door rather than her own.55 At odds with the enforced silence around the succession question, Elizabeth framed Mary’s sentence as a victory for public counsel over private emotion, claiming in her proclamation that she was ‘overcome with the earnest requestes, declarations, and important reasons of all our sayde Subjects’.56 Higgins’s 1587 Mirror participates in this dialogic culture, albeit after the fact.57 Parricide featured prominently in the longer history of imaginative engagements with tyrannicide and regicide, and while the earlier Mirrors did not foreground its part in the late medieval struggle for the English throne, the third book of Lydgate’s Fall had concluded with an envoy on ‘fraternal strife’, in relation to the Persian 51 See John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 3. 52 Shrank, ‘This Fatall Medea’, 524. 53 George Whetstone, The English Myrror (London: J. Windet for G. Seton, 1586), pp. 6–7. 54 George Whetstone, An Enemie to Unthryftiness (London: Richard Jones, 1586), f. 8v. 55 Elizabeth I, By the Queene. A true copie of the proclamation lately published by the Queenes Majestie, under the great seale of England, for the declaring of the sentence, lately given against the Queene of Scottes (London: Christopher Barker, 1586). 56 Elizabeth I, Proclamation. 57 See Kewes, ‘Romans in the Mirror’, pp. 134–5.

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kings Artaxerxes, Cyrus, and Darius. Lydgate claims ‘devision of all mischefe maistresse, | Gan enter in through fraternall hatrede’, demonstrating how conflict between brothers can stand metaphorically for broader civil discord as well as providing a literal cause.58 In its treatment of Ferrex and Porrex, Cordila and others, the First Part had its fair share of parricides, but in 1587 the emphasis was unambiguously redoubled. Higgins replaced the complaints of Forrex and Porrex with updated versions, and added the new tragedy of Geta, also killed by his brother. Mempricius’s complaint, already an example of providential justice meted out to tyrants, when the wolves devouring him are unmoved by ‘My Princely presence, nor my highe degree’ (1574F, f. 38v), is introduced with a new stanza, whose first line specifies that Mempricius ‘his brother slew’ (1587, f. 28r). The new Lenvoy before Bladud’s tragedy begins, ‘Marke but the end of brother quellers all, | And you shall see what woefull ends they had’ (1587, f. 29v). Porrex’s new complaint warns that ‘who so slayes a King | Incurrs reproch . . . killers of their brothers, frends, and kinne, | In like degree well nigh of treason stoode’, and advises, ‘Example take you Princes of the land . . . Let not your sword with soveraignes bloud be dide’ (1587, f. 45r). Manlius and his brother decide in 1574 that one must be defeated by the other to eliminate competition, in order for the reign to ‘be sure and good’; the complaint’s account of events turns this measured, dutiful decision on its head, when Manlius is murdered by his brother ‘Not like a king, but like a cutthrote fell: | Not like a brother, like a butcher brute’ (1574F, ff. 35v–36r), whereby the act of fratricide explicitly precludes kingship and kinship alike. The calmer 1587 stanza into which this account is conflated instead has Manlius slain ‘by pollecy and sleight’, connoting court intrigue and concealment in contrast to the overt violence of the original (1587, f. 27r), which points to a revision with recent circumstances in mind. A Protestant and nationalist, Higgins would surely have shared Whetstone’s view that Elizabeth is right to put aside familial feelings when it comes to protecting her commonwealth, and that the execution of Mary Stuart was essential to national stability. Yet there is an awkward slippage between the potential allegorical significance of the siblings in these exempla, the unnaturalness of whose murders depends precisely on their status as reversible simulacra (Forrex and Porrex, phonologically, the dernier cri). Moreover, some of Higgins’s 1587 revisions are uneasily suggestive of culpability on Elizabeth’s part. In 1574, Morgan, Gonerell’s son, describes himself as a ‘traytour’, and ‘caytife vile’, because he has 58

Lydgate, Falle of Princis, f. 92r.

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‘constrainde a Queene’ (1574F, f. 56r)—his aunt, Cordila. In 1587, the Lenvoy which follows Cordila’s complaint places renewed emphasis on a queen’s imprisonment by blood relatives, replacing 1574’s ‘Hir nephewes dealings were me thought too bad’ (1574F, f. 54v), with a revised, and substantially extended passage: Her sisters dealings were (mee thought) too bad. Her cosens cruell both, for Kingdomes mad. Her owne estate most pityfull to see, A Queene by kindred captive kepte to bee. So wise a Queene, so fayre a Princesse wrongde, So dutifull in parents plight of yore. (1587, f. 38v)

The replacement of ‘nephewes’ with ‘sisters’ and ‘cosens’ draws a much closer link between Cordila’s story and the conflict between Elizabeth and Mary. The new reference to her dutiful behaviour ‘in parents plight of yore’ could conceivably allude to Mary’s early accession, following her father’s death in 1542 when she was six days old. The extract could alternatively reflect Elizabeth’s own imprisonment during her sister Mary’s reign in 1554–5 (‘wrongde’ as a ‘Princesse’, now a queen), although 1586 was an odd moment to interpolate the allusion, other than to inflect the current debate; the scenario could also be projected forwards to an imagined deposition and imprisonment of Elizabeth by James VI. The uncomfortable lability of the passage allows it to speak to both queens’ plight, and sets the analogical potential of the work at large on a difficult footing.59

KILLING SENECA The two-way traffic of exemplarity and analogy was fundamental to the sixteenth-century reading of history. A cyclical model of time upheld the logic of the mirror trope’s double function, whereby the past offered reflections of the present as it was, and of the future as it could be, flattering, admonishing, and advising simultaneously. Higgins’s Mirror was part of an ‘analogically charged culture’, in which ‘an almost obsessive awareness of parallels haunted the writers and readers of history alike’.60 While some writers shrilly heralded an English ‘golden age’ in the 1580s 59 On the ‘adaptability [of textual exempla] for different readings and applications’ in the case of Mary Stuart, see Shrank, ‘This Fatall Medea’, 527, and Staines, Tragic Histories, p. 2 and passim. 60 van Es, Forms of History, pp. 142–3.

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and 1590s, their faith in the perfect completion of historical progress was belied by the accelerating proliferation of exemplary counsel; Higgins’s Varianus assures his listener that ‘no neede there be in these your golden dayes | Of states to tell, or vertues good discrive’ (1587, f. 65r), but does it anyway, just in case.61 Abraham Fleming’s revisions to the 1586–8 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles had amplified the exemplary possibilities of their history, interpolating further references to the mirror trope, and drawing fresh analogies which are ‘intentional and pointed’.62 As we have seen, the 1587 Mirror shared in this tendency. While Higgins’s topical political agenda, as identified by Kewes, was communicated more through resonance and repetition, his fears for dynastic dissolution in 1574 were considerably sharpened, and newly consonant with contemporary polemic. However, I want to suggest, too, that in 1587 the work’s selfreflexive take on this dynamic soured. The problems faced in the implicit clash between a humanist reading of history, the de casibus tragic imperative, and the history Higgins sought to write in 1574, surface plainly in 1587. Like the imminently reprinted Serpent of Division, the collection reveals ‘the limitations . . . of the very interpretative practices that it appears most earnestly to solicit’; it ‘simultaneously makes a truth claim—the story of Caesar is relevant precisely because it is real—and repeatedly betrays the extent to which “reality” is created out of conflicting and contradictory source texts’.63 In both Lydgate’s Serpent and Higgins’s Mirror, which had set out to reflect the difficulties of providing a complete British history while creating a moralpolitical advice book, the ‘tension between exemplarity and contingency is in part produced by the contradictory ambitions of the text itself ’.64 Higgins’s historical figures themselves begin to comment on the limited usefulness of exempla. The shallow employment of chronicles ‘only as phrasebooks for this other language of history’ is dramatized within their monologues.65 As the tragic pageant of some seventy complaints performs the cycling of dynastic power, the pattern of political rise and fall is set against the constants of Higgins and his island. Like Lydgate’s Fall, or 61 Richard Crompton, A Short Declaration of the Ende of Traytors (London: John Charlewood for Thomas Gubbins and Thomas Newman, 1587); Gabriel Harvey, The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Alexander B. Grossart, 3 vols (London: Hazell, Watson, & Viney, 1884–5), i, p. 146, cited in van Es, Forms of History, p. 151. 62 See Archer, ‘Holinshed and the Middle Ages’, p. 182; van Es, Forms of History, p. 154. 63 Maura B. Nolan, ‘The Art of History Writing: Lydgate’s Serpent of Division’, Speculum, 78:1 (2003), 99–127, at 101–2. 64 Nolan, ‘History Writing’, at 116. 65 van Es, Forms of History, p. 139. Cf. Charles Martindale, ‘Shakespeare and Virgil’, in Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (eds), Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 89–108, at p. 95.

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Fluellen’s parodic wheel of Fortune, ‘which rolls, and rolls, and rolls, and rolls’, the augmented text reads as something of an exemplary battering, rather than a nuanced take on a distinct set of historigraphical difficulties like the First, Second, and Last parts.66 This barrage of falls itself, though, asks historiographical questions. Baldwin and Blenerhasset’s Mirrors, as well as the First Part, had already exposed through their problematic balance of positive and negative examples the difficult fact that not all generically or structurally conceived ‘falls’ have useful moral lessons, while showing the texts of history to be so flawed as to render their examples suspect. Higgins’s 1587 Mirror foregrounds these difficulties, but also a troubling fungibility, of sin, status, and allegorical significance, throwing the validity of analogy into doubt. From the formulaic introductions to each next complaint, to the perfunctory treatment of Jago, Emerianus, Chirinnus, and Varianus, whose cartoonish vices overshadow any historical content, Higgins’s new Britons are parodies of themselves and bored of their own advice, of which ‘examples are in stories rife’ (1587, f. 65v). The causes of their falls, though, are often highly varied to the point of being random. The overriding message of this Mirror is one of mutability, not just of fortune, but also of ‘state’: the complaints return repeatedly to the term, and the question of inherent quality, central to the medical, monetary, and alchemical discourses of the period, and the thesis of contemporary antitheatrical invective. The 1587 additions to Baldwin’s Mirror, discussed in Chapter 1, introduce a destabilizing nihilism into the discourse—the complaint of Wolsey concludes that mutability is the only lesson to be drawn. Higgins’s British and particularly his Roman additions in 1587, however, communicate an anti-exemplarity which goes beyond even Churchyard’s nihilistic conclusion, although it is telling enough that Wolsey’s complaint ends the text without a rehabilitating mediatory frame. Higgins’s Romans actually reject and transgress exemplary teaching, aloud and in no uncertain terms. Higgins’s edition exists on the cusp of a popular disillusionment in the Mirror mode’s utility, articulated in the drama and satire of the 1590s and 1600s.67 Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that Tamburlaine (1590), first performed in the same year that Higgins’s compilation was printed, reacts against ‘its tireless repetition of the same paradigm of retributive justice’.68 Marlowe regarded this system, Greenblatt contends, ‘with a blend of obsessive fascination and contemptuous loathing. Tamburlaine repeatedly 66

Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. Craik, 3.6.29–37; see Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 232. See Introduction, pp. 9–11. 68 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 292 n. 18. 67

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teases its audience with the form of the cautionary tale, only to violate the convention . . . he rises to the top of the wheel of fortune and then steadfastly refuses to budge.’69 But the 1587 edition is already turning against its own form, pre-empting and informing Tamburlaine’s rebellion. The repetitive ‘paradigm of retributive justice’ is applied irrespective of circumstances, such that a balance of similarity and difference lies at the heart of its critique. Bart van Es argues that ‘historical collections such as the Tudor Mirror for Magistrates were “mirrors” precisely because the message they bore changed in relation to the reader’, while ‘historical allegory would have presented a patchwork of contemporary politics whose interchangeability itself drove home a political message’.70 Higgins’s new Mirror also engages metatextually with these interactions. The de casibus anti-hero prefigures the Marlovian overreacher, as well, perhaps, as the ‘repetition compulsion of Marlowe’s heroes’ in their cyclical presentation in Boccaccio, Lydgate, and the sixteenth-century Mirror.71 Higgins’s Romans, though, offer by far the closest matches to a Tamburlaine figure. Shakespeare’s Richard III, too, takes content and conscience from Baldwin’s 1563 sequence, but character from Higgins’s Claudius Tiberius Drusus, whose mother called him ‘a monster . . . Unperfect all, begun by nature, but begot | Not absolute’ (1587, f. 89r). The blasphemous psychopathy of Higgins’s ‘monster vile, that beast Caligula’, who describes how ‘To make my selfe a God I did devise, | That Jupiter to name my selfe did dare’ (f. 87r), anticipates Tamburlaine’s ambitions to apotheosis, although the turning of Fortune’s wheel makes his downfall inevitable in a way that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine resists. Nevertheless, Marlowe’s conception of identity as ‘a theatrical invention that must be reiterated if it is to endure’ recalls the spirit in which the Mirror’s characters demand that their tragedies are retold, or reperformed, and who articulate a sense that the retelling of the nation’s history itself constitutes ‘the renewal of existence through the repetition of the selfconstituting act’.72 The printed paratexts of Tamburlaine draw a clear distinction between the ‘graced deformities’ of dramatic performance, and ‘honorable & stately’ history, addressing the 1590 edition to gentlemen ‘to read after your serious affaires and studies’ by contrast to its more ‘fond and frivolous’ 69 Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, p. 202. See also Johannes H. Birringer, ‘Marlowe’s Violent Stage: “Mirrors” of Honor in Tamburlaine’, ELH, 51:2 (1984), 219–39, at 236; cf. Ruth Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 74–7. 70 van Es, Forms of History, pp. 145, 162. 71 72 Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, p. 200. Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, p. 201.

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appearance on stage.73 Yet the play itself repeatedly invokes the mirror tradition from the outset, in terms of language, content, and form: the Prologue asks that the audience ‘View but his picture in this tragicke glasse, | And then applaud his fortunes as you please’, demanding that the action is considered in the tradition’s terms, while it also reflects back on Marlowe’s ‘own countrymen’.74 Jonathan V. Crewe suggests that in Tamburlaine, ‘[u]surpation and parricide . . . get enunciated as the universal rule instead of remaining, perhaps, a secret truth that fictions of legitimacy belie’.75 Rather than kicking against the mirror tradition, though, this enunciation sheds light on the constitutive role of this counter narrative within the collection itself. When Tamburlaine imagines that Millions of soules sit on the bankes of Styx, ... Hell and Elisian swarme with ghosts of men, That I have sent from sundry foughten fields. ... And such are objects fit for Tamburlaine. Wherein as in a mirrour may be seene, His honor, that consists in sheading blood,

the Mirror’s ranks of dead warriors, killed according to a providential plan to the glory of the current dynasty, are also called to mind.76 The ethical ambivalence with which audiences greet Tamburlaine may be read back into the Mirror in the light of this association, as the moral framework within which its histories are ‘curtailed and subjected to ethicopolitical judgments’ is opened up to interrogation.77 Instead of a radical departure ‘from the prevailing modes of tragedy, with their fixed moral boundaries’, Tamburlaine exhibits an extension of tensions already perceptible in the Mirror corpus.78 As Crewe notes, ‘Marlowe began his career in a cultural and political milieu preconditioned by antitheatricalism’, and Higgins’s 1587 Mirror may profitably be read as another participant in this milieu.79 To contextualize the edition within the ‘historical matrix of Marlowe’s achievement’, that is, ‘the acquisitive energies of English merchants, entrepreneurs, and 73 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great (London: Richard Jones, 1590), sig. A2r–v. 74 Marlowe, Tamburlaine, sig. A3r; Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, p. 194. See also Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition, p. 77. 75 Jonathan V. Crewe, ‘The Theatre of Idols: Marlowe, Rankins, and Theatrical Images’, Theatre Journal, 36:3 (1984), 321–33, at 327. 76 Marlowe, Tamburlaine, sig. F1r. 77 78 Birringer, ‘Violent Stage’, 225. Birringer, ‘Violent Stage’, 237. 79 Crewe, ‘Theatre of Idols’, 321.

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adventurers, promoters alike of trading companies and theatrical companies’, is to reassess the text on its own terms, rather than maintaining its unproductive circumscription by the Edwardian and Marian genesis of Baldwin’s Memorial.80 A diagnostic reference to the Antarctic in Tamburlaine, for example, after new interest in that continent was piqued in 1578 by Sir Francis Drake’s accidental voyage around Cape Horn, echoes Higgins’s revised 1587 induction, whose fashionable ‘Antarctique’ flips the ‘Arctick’ of his source text.81 From the outside, the Mirror appears both regressive and aggressively contemporary in its reactionary adherence to the precepts of antitheatrical discourse, as embodied by William Rankins’s Mirrour of Monsters (1587). The alignment of ‘forgetting and theatricality’ was frequently held up as a threat to ‘history and truth’ in contemporary anthitheatrical polemic, while ambition and social mobility, two of its primary bêtes noires, explicitly underpin many of the Mirror’s falls throughout its history, according to the spatial metaphor of climbing too high.82 Higgins’s Londricus argues that ‘though a countrey Clowne doe keepe a stately porte . . . and proudly paint his wife, | Yet he is but a Clowne . . . Full hard it is to make such one a gentill borne’ (1587, f. 95v). Costume and bearing do not alter birth; it is impossible to buy or act your way out of your original estate. Londricus’s example echoes Blenerhasset’s complaint of Carassus, the ‘Husbandsmans sonne’ whom Blenerhasset claims ‘slew Lodricke the King of the Pictes’.83 He had similarly suggested that, From Cart to Court, a Countrye man to call, With brave attyre to decke a dunghyll Dycke, Is lyke a painted Image in a wall, Which dooth deceive, and seemeth to bee quicke, Through woorkmanship most trimly dooth it tricke, Yet of a stone, a stone wyll still remayne: A Clowne cannot from Clownish deedes refrayne. (1578S, f. 14v)

These complaints reinforce the notion that the social hierarchy is inherent in heredity, although both also engage with the possibility of being misled by visual artifice. Yet complaints like Jack Cade’s, Eleanor Cobham’s, Uther Pendragon’s, and in 1587 that of Cardinal Wolsey, had questioned this truism, and engaged with the transformative power of speech, for both speaker and 80

Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, p. 194. See Henryson, ‘Testament of Cresseid’, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ll. 1–7. See Isabel Karreman, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 2–4; Crewe, ‘Theatre of Idols’, 324. 83 Higgins’s Londricus, in accordance with Fabyan, is killed by Marius. 81 82

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hearer. Hillman observes that ‘[t]he Mirror’s use of dramatic monologue is explicitly and insistently linked with the commonplace figuration of the world as a stage’, and, as noted in Chapter 1, this link is far more pronounced in Higgins’s additions, as numerous Lenvoys and the characters themselves refer to ‘taking the stage’ when it is their turn to speak: Forrex’s revised story, for example, begins, ‘Complayne I may with tragiques on the stage’ (1587, f. 42r).84 The edition also reintegrates earlier texts’ knowing acknowledgement of suspended disbelief—‘the unavoidable distance between the particular actor and his role, the insistent awareness in audience and players alike of illusion’—as we hear the complaints performed.85 The 1587 collection is framed by the trope, too, when Thomas Newton’s prefatory poem states, ‘Certes this worlde a Stage may well bee calde, | Whereon is playde the parte of ev’ry wight’, and repeatedly invokes the metaphor, extending its meaning from a mere proverb or commonplace to encompass ideas of authorship, authority, tragedy, and identity. The Mirror’s theatricality, then, had always been a deep fault in its model and ostensible moral function, as Baldwin’s shabby coterie ventriloquizes kings.86 Crewe draws attention to Rankins’s ‘anxiety about the players’ tendency to forget themselves and become what they act’, a transformative property of speaking aloud which Baldwin had gleefully posited in the fictive preface to Beware the Cat.87 His editorial persona assures his dedicatee, John Young, that, although I be unable to pen or speak it so pleasantly as he could, yet have I so nearly used both the order and words of him that spake them (which is not the least virtue of a reporter) that I doubt not but that he and Master Willot shall in the reading think they hear Master Streamer speak, and he himself in the like action shall doubt whether he speaketh or readeth.88

Newton claims that the Mirror’s tragic characters are ‘Like counters . . . which now stand in sight | For thousand or ten thousand, and anone | Remooved, stande perhaps for lesse then one’. His suggestion that identity and authority, like dramatic roles and numerical values, can be exchanged and reassigned, echoes precisely the protest of the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson, that a ‘Player is like to a Marchant’s finger, that standes sometime for a thousand, sometime for a cypher’.89 It was in these terms that the

84

85 Hillman, Self-Speaking, p. 83. Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, p. 217. See Jennifer Richards, ‘Reading and Listening to William Baldwin’, in MMC, pp. 71–88. 87 Crewe, ‘Theatre of Idols’, 329. 88 Baldwin, Beware the Cat, ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’, p. 3. 89 Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig. A8v. 86

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discourse ‘condemn[ed] the plasticity of theatrical identities’.90 By describing the falls in terms of exchange value, Newton’s preface also draws the Mirror and theatre closer together through the prism of antitheatrical discourse. The counter metaphor does not apply just to upstarts changing places, but to the change of state to which all of the characters are subject. In other words, their value is not inherent. As the readerauthors switch roles, the historical characters themselves change states, and their topical significance slides from one political development to another, the value of exemplarity comes under repeated strain. Whether distanced by historiographical paperwork, or absorbed into history’s reanimation through performance, the 1587 Mirror’s readership is constantly reminded of the book’s material textuality, and the mechanics of its genre’s excerptive practices. Humanist historiography is turned inside out, inviting deconstructive scepticism. In the face of this insubstantiality, two of Higgins’s Roman complaints in particular turn on the exemplary mode, invoking the idea of admonitory analogy only to violate it. In an inset speech, Aurelius Antonius Bassianus Caracalla deploys a series of historical exempla deliberately to mislead, embodying the adaptability of analogic discourse to virtuous and unethical purposes, while the Emperor Domitius Nero describes leaving the moral instruction of Seneca behind, and how his resulting reign of terror culminates in Seneca’s own death. Dutton notes that by the time of the 1590 edition of Gorboduc and its turn-of-the-century performances, it was clear that ‘[t]he aging Queen had ignored all the play’s advice’.91 The republication of the early Elizabethan Mirror material in 1587 brings this point home, and it is spelled out by Higgins’s additions: Varianus rebukes ‘yonger heads, that will not heare their faultes them tolde’ (f. 65v). Ironically, of course, Gorboduc was a play about a monarch who will not heed counsel, and even writes the discourse of the Mirror into its discussion of this fact. Eubulus’s lament in Act Five, ‘though so many bookes, so many rolles | Of auncient time recorde, what grevous plagues | Light on these rebelles aye . . . yet can they not beware, | Yet can not stay their lewde rebellious handes’, recalls the Mirror’s early subtitle, ‘Wherein may be seen by example of other, with howe grevous plages vices are punished’.92 Higgins’s Nero is another such ruler. Nero has experienced the ultimate humanist education, and one in which, for 90 Ian W. Archer, ‘Economy’, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 165–81, at p. 171; see also Conrad, History of English, p. 139. 91 Dutton, ‘Hamlet and Succession’, p. 174. 92 Norton and Sackville, Ferrex and Porrex, sig. Biiiv–iiiir. On the appropriation of ‘mirror language’ by Senecan drama more widely, see Winston, ‘Rethinking Absolutism’.

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late Elizabethan readers, the Mirror corpus was deeply implicated. Instructed by ‘Senecke grave’, he ‘gave my selfe to governe well’, for ‘A while’ (f. 90v). But Seneca’s instruction fails to prevent Nero’s fall into ‘shamelesse dealings’, living ‘At randome’ according to his physical desires. He tells of how he sang the ‘Iliades sweete’ while watching Rome burn, a further repudiation of the ethical value of classical learning, before actually commanding Seneca’s death precisely ‘for that [he] mee counsayle gave’ (f. 91r). Both Gorboduc and Nero’s tragedy dramatize the dangers inherent in the rejection of counsel, and may be read as examples of what not to do. But Higgins’s 1587 complaints, and the 1590 Gorboduc, also shadow Elizabeth’s dismissal of Gorboduc’s lesson, holding a critical mirror up to her shortcomings and the limitations of the exemplary genre. Bassianus Caracalla does not just reject exemplarity; he actively perverts it. Ignoring the advice of his father Severus, who ‘Declarde by stories olde what came by strife’ (f. 103r), he and his brother Geta seek to destroy each other until Caracalla succeeds, framing the murder as an external act of treason, and blasphemously giving thanks to the gods for saving his own life, before having Geta’s household and numerous miscellaneous bystanders murdered. Caracalla ‘quotes’ in full his subsequent dissembling speech, delivered to the Senate to protest the necessity of the fratricide he had committed (f. 105r–v), a rabid pastiche of works across the political spectrum, including the anonymous Defence of the Honorable Sentence and Execution of the Queene of Scots, exempled with analogies, and diverse presidents of emperors, kings, and popes (1587). He hints, in his defence, that history is written by the victor, ‘For, to the slayne beside his woe, there comes a dastardes name’ (f. 105r), and cites parricides by Romulus, Germanicus, Titus, and Marcus, arguing that their actions were justified since ‘[t]o take revenge on such, is due: as custome telles of yore’ (f. 105v). This invokes traditional justifications for regicide using classical exempla, and nods metatextually to the Mirror’s own form. But Caracalla’s transparent motives undermine the ethical humanist associations of this practice, and muddy residual faith in its efficacy. Like Shakespeare’s villain Chiron, who, evidently schooled in Latin literature like many of Titus Andronicus’s characters, ‘correctly identifies an ode of Horace’, the abhorrent Caracalla, who explicitly models himself on Alexander, prompts Higgins’s Mirror to ‘be read as interrogating humanist belief in the straight-forwardly exemplary value of ancient literature’.93 Caracalla concludes, to end his complaint and the ancient portion of Higgins’s history, that his downfall was precipitated not by his lust for power or the murder 93

Martindale, ‘Shakespeare and Virgil’, p. 95.

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of a king, but by killing ‘those faithfull servants . . . Which would not sley their noble Lordes for golde’ (f. 108r), as he is stabbed by a member of his own guard. Had he spared his loyal soldiers, he implies, he might have got away with all of his other crimes. The only lesson to be had is the treacherous transferability of a classical education. As Baldwin and Blenerhasset had found in earlier decades, there was no tidy way to wrap up a historical narrative whose ultimate telos was the present day, so the myth of prospective returns to the unfinished Mirror was perpetuated.94 The inscribed Higgins, too, is ‘called away by other studies of more importance’ (Preface, sig. B2v); no mean feat, considering he had just signed off the book which would preoccupy English historical poetry and drama for the next twenty years, making cameo appearances in material form under its own name and others in works by Drayton, Jonson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser, while its historical contents, narrative rhythms, and interpretative modes informed countless more. Set down ‘even for the profit of my native countrey’ (Preface, sig. B2v), in this respect at least Higgins’s hesitant, tortuous, sceptical appropriation of Baldwin’s Mirror had succeeded.

94 On the incompleteness of the Faerie Queene in relation to exemplarity see van Es, Forms of History, pp. 149–63.

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5 Richard Niccols’s Mirour for Magistrates (1610) In the late 1600s, the printer Felix Kyngston found himself in possession of some old Elizabethan stock, inherited via his stepmother, Joan Orwin, from Thomas Marshe, with a writer on his books with the potential to make it into something marketable. It remains unclear why he chose the angry young Oxford graduate Richard Niccols, instead of the acclaimed historical poet Michael Drayton, to edit and extend what would be the final edition of the Mirror for Magistrates (another good bet, Orwin and Kyngston’s seasoned verse chronicler William Warner, died in 1609).1 For Niccols, the ‘unperfectness’ of history was as nothing to the political, moral, and intellectual imperfection of the present. He responded decisively to previous Mirrors’ historiographical scepticism, excising links between complaints, and writing uncertainty out of their dealings with textual records. But Niccols is as alert as his predecessors to the potent agency of a volatile textual past. By remaking the Mirror in this way, deliberately suppressing qualms about transmission and foregrounding the solid materiality of books, Niccols exploited its malleability to reconfigure the corpus in support of an oppositional project. The edition comprises Baldwin’s late medieval complaints, and most of Higgins and Blenerhasset’s British, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon material. As well as explanatory paratexts, Niccols added A Winter Nights Vision, ten new complaints within a separate dream narrative. The work concludes with a retrospective panegyric, Englands Eliza, recounting the highpoints of Elizabethan military history.2 Niccols was probably born in London 1 See O’Callaghan, ‘Sir Thomas Overburies Vision’, p. 195 n. 4. While Niccols’s work was reissued twice in 1619 and twice in 1620, with new frontispieces, as The Falles of Unfortunate Princes, this was the last edition called the Mirror. Niccols’s Mirror is reproduced in Joseph Haslewood’s 1815 edition, but has not been reprinted or edited in full since. 2 This verse history is mistaken for Thomas Heywood’s prose account Englands Elizabeth (1631) in Stephen Orgel, ‘Margins of Truth’, in Andrew Murphy (ed.), The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 91–107, at p. 96, and Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity’, p. 267.

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in 1583/4, and sailed with the earl of Nottingham as part of Robert Devereux’s 1596 Cadiz expedition, a formative experience which directed the ethics and aesthetics of much of his later work.3 The suggestion that Niccols’s Mirror ‘retreated into myth, Stuart propaganda, and Tudor nostalgia’ has been refuted by scholars of Jacobean satire, as Niccols’s wider poetic oeuvre creates a suggestive matrix within which his edition of the Mirror takes on a striking oppositional cast.4 His laments for recently deceased figures—Expicedium: a Funeral Oration (1603) for Elizabeth I, The Three Sisters Teares (1613) for Prince Henry, and Monodia, or, Walthams Complaint (1615) for Lady Honor Hay, the wife of James Hay, earl of Carlisle—all utilize memorial forms to political purpose; similarly, the anonymous translation attributed to Niccols, Three Precious Teares of Blood (1611), from Jean Loiseau de Tourval’s French, highlights the relevance of laments for the dead Henri IV to a contemporary English readership. More overtly mutinous are The Cuckow (1607), a pastoral satire, and the beast allegory The Beggers Ape (1627), thought to have been composed in the early 1600s, but too incendiary to be printed in Niccols’s lifetime. London’s Artillery (1616) perpetuated his advocacy of armed peace, calling for a city militia, and extended his equation in A Winter Nights Vision of the ‘current decline of the nation into a peaceful inertia . . . with the fall of Republican Rome’.5 Sir Thomas Overburies Vision (1616) makes the connection between ghost complaint and court satire explicit, taking on the Mirror’s form to denounce favouritism and corruption among James I’s advisers, and once again drawing on imagery which evoked the fall of the Roman Republic. The Ovidian Philomel reappears throughout Niccols’s oeuvre, standing for that which is abused, unwanted, or cast out, but potentially salvaged by a redemptive Elizabethan poetics. This chapter aims to unpack Niccols’s treatment of the Mirror text, and his response to its flawed historiography. Reading A Winter Nights Vision as part of the Mirror and in the context of its expansion reveals a complex combination of aims at work. The oppositional stance posited by Glyn Pursglove and Michelle O’Callaghan represents one facet of Niccols’s 3 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Niccols, Richard (1583/4–1616)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20082, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. For Niccols’s place among the Jacobean Spenserians see Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 4 Budra, De casibus, pp. 28, 32. See also Campbell (ed.), Parts Added, pp. 11–13; Willcock, ‘Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates [Review]’, 104; Haslewood (ed.), Mirror, vol. 1, p. xxx. 5 Cf. O’Callaghan, Shepheards Nation, p. 71. See also Andrew Hadfield, ‘Richard Niccols and Tudor Nostalgia’, in MMC, pp. 164–80.

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nationalism, which is also manifested in his appropriation of Virgilian epic tropes, and his revisionist Protestant historiography. Niccols’s incomplete contribution reflects back on earlier Mirror texts, carefully reworking their generic features for a new era. His framing narrative draws on Higgins and Blenerhasset’s interpolations to Baldwin’s Mirror, conflating Higgins’s dream narrative with Blenerhasset’s personification of Memory, to create a coherent synthesis of Mirror work to date, while the complaints encapsulate the Elizabethan Mirrors’ interests, bringing together negative and positive exempla, unfortunate and deserving falls, conquest and civil discord, providence and mutability.6 Budra is scathing about Niccols’s recourse to the dream frame, in which he ‘attempts’ to imitate Sackville’s 1563 Induction.7 However, Niccols’s aesthetic choices are significant precisely because of their retrospective nature. Niccols’s portrayal of Elizabeth I, a standard feature of compendious histories like Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), and George Whetstone’s English Mirrour (1586), has been read as a ‘bid to give the tragic history of England a happy ending’, and a departure from the de casibus tradition.8 In combination with the Mirror’s Boccaccian origins, though, Niccols’s panegyric for Elizabeth becomes the most damning de casibus narrative of all, suggesting that after an upwards arc, England’s dynastic greatness has crumbled under James’s rule. Niccols’s edition of 1610 is important because it re-presents the Mirror as what it had come to signify: an archetypically Elizabethan monument of national history. From a twentieth-century perspective, this has been read as a flattening of the text’s intricate development. But by contextualizing its publication, this chapter will show how Niccols mobilized something of a literary white elephant to create a powerful oppositional symbol. THE TRIALS OF TRANSMISSION Authors inevitably face problems when they attempt to recast a hugely popular work for a new era. For Niccols, these problems were largely caused by the Mirror’s own success. The embeddedness of the collection within late sixteenth-century literature becomes evident in the extent to which Niccols’s Jacobean additions drew on poetry, forms, and ideas which had themselves been inspired by the Mirror tradition. In this respect, Niccols should have been perfectly placed to relaunch the Elizabethan Mirror, in a literary culture fuelled by the same British, 6 8

See Niccols, Selected Poems, p. 16. Budra, De casibus, pp. 36–8.

7

Budra, De casibus, pp. 34–5.

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Anglo-Saxon, and medieval narratives after the 1590s explosion of historical drama, and built on the development of shared genres and modes. Schwyzer notes, too, that ‘[r]enewed interest in the Mirror had perhaps been sparked by the unionist campaign [in Ulster], in which specters of Britain figured very prominently’, while the ghostly pageants in Anthony Munday’s early seventeenth-century Lord Mayor’s shows were about to forge further links between civic responsibility and reanimated historical worthies.9 But Niccols’s revised and extended Mirror failed to resonate with the Jacobean book-buying public, despite a series of changes apparently calculated to enhance its contemporary appeal. The complaint, whether in the pastoral mode or modelled on Ovid’s Heroides, had flourished during the last decades of the sixteenth century, reworking accounts by characters like Jane Shore, Eleanor Cobham, and Elstride, as well as new voices.10 The form continued to be a popular medium for the retelling of historical or mythic narratives into the 1600s, and at the turn of the century these subjects began to be depicted more specifically as ghosts.11 Niccols’s Mirror was the first edition to refer explicitly to the speakers of the complaints as such, and in this respect Niccols may be seen to keep pace with recent developments.12 However, Niccols may have been outstripped by the vogue for single-complaint publications, which deviated from the Mirror’s anthology-like structure that had fitted so well among Elizabethan compendia and miscellanies; the Winter Nights Vision might have been better received split into ten individually printed poems. The use of prosopopoeia to distance authors from potentially seditious utterances, though, made the ghost complaint and dream vision, ‘already near neighbours’, natural allies of the satirists who rushed to appropriate the Martin Marprelate persona’s irreverent style in the final decades of the sixteenth century, and by 1610 literary ghosts frequently carried satirical Schwyzer, Literature, p. 156; see Daryl W. Palmer, ‘Metropolitan Resurrection in Anthony Munday’s Lord Mayor’s Shows’, SEL, 46:2 (2006), 371–87. 10 Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, 57. See, for example, Thomas Lodge, Tragicall Complaynt of Elstred (1593); Anthony Chute, Shores Wife (1593); Giles Fletcher, complaint of Richard III (1593); Peter Colse, Penelopes Complaint: or, A Mirror for Wanton Minions (1596). Michael Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597) ‘englishes’ Ovid’s Heroides using characters also treated in early Mirror collections, notably the epistles between Humphrey of Gloucester and Eleanor Cobham. 11 See, for example, Christopher Brooke, The Ghost of Richard the Third (1614); the anonymous translation of The Duke of Mayennes Ghost speaking to the Princes, Lords, and Gentlemen of France (1622); Thomas Scott, Robert Earle of Essex his Ghost (1624) and Sir Walter Raleighs Ghost, or England’s Forewarner (1626). 12 Blenerhasset’s Edricus uses the term to describe himself, and Harolde suggests that the ‘guilty ghost’ of a (living) sinner will regret his past actions, but both of these instances take ‘ghost’ to mean ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ more generally, rather than the spirit of a dead person returning to walk the earth. 9

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or oppositional weight.13 O’Callaghan locates the rise of ghost complaint in the early part of James I’s reign ‘when the ghosts of the Elizabethan dead returned to lament the demise of a political ethos’.14 Participating in this trend, Niccols’s Mirror project arguably presents a coherent and perceptive synthesis of the existing Mirror material with contemporary literary inclinations as well as political concerns, resurrecting shades of the political function Baldwin originally envisaged.15 The landscape of history writing in the early seventeenth century, though, was very different to the intellectual culture of the Mirror’s genesis. Higgins’s 1574–5 complaints had attempted to compensate for the absence of ancient sources for British history, while his compendious 1587 edition had shifted the emphasis of Baldwin’s topical work, engaging with contemporary politics while also providing his new readership with a convenient digest of chronicle history. In the 1600s, this was no longer a priority for readers. Whether moving in the direction of chorography or politic biography, military, economic or natural history, interest in the past had become more specialized, leaving the broad sweep of chronicle behind.16 Niccols’s Jacobean account of the Elizabethan period illustrates a move away from generalized social memory to personal recollection, in keeping with the emergence of evidence-based historiography, and autobiography. While the Mirror tradition had played a significant role in the rise of autobiography in the period, its collection of short, imaginative lives and use of prosopopoeia quickly became outmoded in favour of real memoirs.17 The history play and historical tragedies on ancient British subjects such as the anonymous No-body and Some-body (1606), Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608), and, later, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent (1616–20), had all but supplanted verse retellings of chronicle narratives, so the Mirror’s function in that regard was also usurped, while Samuel Daniel was abandoning verse history and Mirror-inspired

13 Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Dreaming the Dead: Ghosts and History in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman (eds), Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 81–95, at p. 88. See The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, ed. Joseph L. Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Introduction; Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets, 1580–1640 (London: Athlone Press, 1983). 14 15 O’Callaghan, ‘Dreaming the Dead’, p. 82. Cf. Budra, De casibus, p. 38. 16 See D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology and ‘The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1990), especially on Camden and Selden. 17 See Meredith Anne Skura, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and the Beginnings of English Autobiography’, ELR, 36:1 (2006), 26–56.

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complaints for prose.18 Niccols’s Mirror might well appear antiquated in this context.19 A Winter Nights Vision does demonstrate Niccols taking some steps to update the Mirror. His inclusion of illustrative woodcuts, for example, framed by Budra as further evidence of how ‘the entertainment value of the de casibus form was heightened in a bid for wider acceptance’, was a popular feature of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historical accounts.20 The specific woodcuts chosen, extracted from the ultimate expression of high Elizabethan historiography, Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), did not speak to Niccols’s modish credentials but perhaps did position the text as a reputable historical work. Woolf ’s discussion of the prose histories of Britain printed during James I’s reign demonstrates that while methodologies were evolving in the more capable, innovative hands of writers such as William Camden, Francis Bacon, and John Selden, much early Stuart historical writing was still based on the model of ‘a series of regnal narratives’; in addition to John Taylor’s verse Remembrance of all the English Monarchs (1618), the prose histories of John Clapham, John Speed, and William Martyn’s histories of England (1606; 1611; 1615) share this structure with the Mirror.21 The historiographical remit of Niccols’s edition, tracing English history from its British origins, suddenly became problematic following the Scottish James’s accession, and the prospect of the union, or reunion, of England and Wales with Scotland.22 The political significance of Niccols’s treatment of Scotland will be addressed below. But where perhaps the task of Niccols’s Mirror should have been to adapt the tradition to the new demands of archipelagic regnal history, its aversion to the Scottish past actually increased by comparison with previous editions. While Holinshed and his co-authors had expanded the scope of English historiography by including the corporate history of the British Isles in their Chronicles, 18 See Bart van Es, ‘Michael Drayton, Literary History and Historians in Verse’, RES, 59:239 (2007), 255–67, at 268. 19 See D. R. Woolf, ‘Genre into Artefact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the Sixteenth Century’, SCJ, 19 (1988), 321–54 and ‘From Hystories to the Historical’. 20 Budra, De casibus, p. 37; see, for example, Thomas Talbot, Booke Containing the True Portraiture of the Countenances and Attires of the Kings of England (1597); John Clapham, The Historie of Great Britannie (1606); John Speed, History of Great Britaine (1611); John Taylor, A Briefe Remembrance of all the English Monarchs (1618). John Cunnally explores the contribution of coin illustrations ‘to the moral education of the Elizabethans’ in Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 121–2. 21 Woolf, Idea of History, pp. 69–74. 22 Cf., for example, Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Delving to the Root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English Race’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 101–15.

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Niccols’s Mirror effectively shut down the potential for expansion, and even narrowed his Mirror’s focus from Britain to England specifically. In this way the 1610 Mirror reflects a tension explored by Escobedo ‘between a sense of a British nation, awkwardly heterogeneous but linked to antiquity, and an English nation, potentially pure but severed from tradition’, as the vast array of existing British Mirror complaints by previous authors are funneled into the narrower national focus of England’s Eliza.23 Niccols’s Prince Edward suggests that in some way he might ‘reclaime thee’, ‘O England’, ‘By sounding former evils in thine eare’ (1610, p. 746), and there is a suggestion that Niccols, too, wants to reclaim a refined idea of England from its capacious and heterogeneous ethnic past. The ‘matter of Britain’ was central to early seventeenth-century engagement with national history, as well as to the imaginative literature created around James I’s accession.24 Higgins’s treatment of British history in his First Part partially engendered the proliferation of drama on this subject towards the end of the sixteenth century, which multiplied further as the political valency of ‘Britain’ shifted from the exploration of the current dynasty’s putative Welsh origins to a figure for the new united kingdom.25 While Higgins’s rehearsal of British history from the arrival of Brutus may have been showing its age historiographically, as antiquarians and historians grew ever more sceptical about the Galfridian legend, Brutus’s lineage still had plenty of cultural capital.26 Where George Salteren offered a reasoned take on the problem (‘there may bee some reasons to doubt which learned men have gathered . . . yet, why [should] the whole Historie of Britaine Princes . . . for the fabulous interposition of one or two men be rejected, as some have done?’), the Welsh antiquary George Owen’s Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James (1604) confidently went ahead in tracing James’s descent via Brutus from Noah.27 However, Niccols’s single portrayal of British legend, in his new complaint of Arthur, evaded the potential topical significance of his British identity, and rather focused on his pugnacious imperial expansion, drawn to contemporary literary engagement with the Roman invasion of Britain Escobedo, ‘Britannia to England’, at 63. For example, Anthony Munday’s pageant for the Merchant Taylors, The Triumphes of Re-United Britannia (1605). 25 See in particular the Scot John Gordon’s enthusiastic use of this putative union to promote the ‘ancient’, or Protestant, religion, in A Panegyrique of Congratulation (1603); England and Scotlands Happinesse (1604); Enotikon or A Sermon of the Vnion of Great Brittannie (1604); and The Union of Great Britaine (1604). 26 See Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, pp. 115–16; Woolf, Idea of History, p. 69. 27 George Salteren, Of the Ancient Lawes of Great Britaine (London: Edward Allde for John Jaggard, 1605), sig. G3v. 23 24

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and the translatio imperii, and its implications for early modern imperial ambitions.28 He could have rewritten Blenerhasset’s complaint of Cadwallader, a satire of Tudor clergy, to capitalize on its new topical pertinence. In A Prophecie of Cadwallader, Last King of the Britaines (1604), for example, ‘William Harbert of Glamorgan rejoiced that James had fulfilled to perfection the angel’s ancient promise to Cadwaladr’.29 But Niccols played down the British content of his own Mirror collection. While the whole Mirror tradition is fundamentally appropriative and metatextually aware of its heredity, from its Marian inception and back through Lydgate to Boccaccio, Niccols did more than any of the other authors and editors to tie his work to the Mirror’s own Elizabethan history. The Mirror therefore reflected back on itself to a much greater degree in the seventeenth century than before, creating a retrospective sense of exclusivity and completion, in contrast with the expansive ethos of Baldwin’s collaborative model and Higgins’s broader readership. When Kyngston, Apsley, and Adams changed the title to The Falles of Unfortunate Princes for reissue in 1619, they took the text back to its original function as an extension of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, creating a circular compositional history, and writing out space for further additions. Having said this, while it is possible to overstate the contrast between the character of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century culture, Niccols’s work clearly engages with Elizabethan tropes from the perspective of a new regime, and a new literary age.30 We saw in Chapter 1 the kinds of changes that Niccols made to the body of early Mirror material in his 1610 edition, and the precedent within the Mirror tradition for editorial revision of that sort. It is possible to read Niccols’s Mirror not as a corruption of the original texts, but rather as the final expression of a literary tradition which was characterized by revisions in response to changed circumstances. Although they have earned him critical notoriety, the most heavy-handed revisions Niccols undertakes are metrical, and usually do neaten the complaints’ scansion. He clearly aims to unify the collection by making as many complaints as possible conform to the rhyme royal scheme. In Higgins’s complaints of Londricus and Severus, this entails cutting a whole line from each stanza, with mixed results as far as the fluency of the narrative is concerned, but Niccols’s individual lexical revisions generally also improve the scansion to this specification.

28

29 Schwyzer, Literature, p. 156. Schwyzer, Literature, p. 152. See O’Callaghan, Shepheards Nation; Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 30

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Most problematic for Niccols was the contemporary peeling away of history from fiction. Between 1587 and 1610, distinctions between imaginative literature and historiography had become further solidified.31 John Selden’s sceptical annotations to Michael Drayton’s verse chorography Poly-Olbion (1612) paradoxically demonstrate the separation of history from historical poetry by juxtaposing the differing disciplines, like Drayton’s own prose annotations to his verse Heroicall Epistles (1597). Claims such as Thomas Dekker’s in the preface to the Whore of Babylon (1607), whereas I may . . . be Critically taxed, that I falsifie the account of time, and set not down Occurrents, according to their true succession, let such (that are so nice of stomach) know, that I write as a Poet, not as an Historian, and that these two doe not live under one law,

which would have been unthinkable in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, became commonplace.32 The Mirror itself, and particularly Higgins and Blenerhasset’s First and Second Parts of the 1570s, contributed to this division, as the anxiety and scepticism those texts voice about the validity of poetic invention as a substitute for historiographical records was brought to prominence by Sidney and Spenser in later decades. Niccols’s Mirror text still hovers over the dividing line between imaginative literature and historiographical inquiry: it is unequivocally ‘historical poetry’. But rather than negotiating that dividing line sceptically, fretfully, and irreverently, as Baldwin, Higgins, and Blenerhasset had done, Niccols nails his colours to the historical mast, hammering textual uncertainty out of his new publication. In his first preface Niccols states that his revisions have ‘the storie in some places false and corrupted, made historically true’, while in his own additions, not taking a poeticall licence to fashion all things after mine owne fancie, but limiting my selfe within the bounds of an historicall writer, I have followed those authors, who in the censure of our best judgements are the most authenticall. (A Winter Nights Vision, ‘To the Reader’)

However, through this attempt to solidify the truth-claims of his ghostly speakers and assert, in a way that would not have been possible at the time of the Mirror’s inception, that their complaints are history and not fiction, Niccols renders his edition’s historiographical stance neither one thing nor another, and allows it to fall through the gap between heavyweight Cf. Worden, ‘Historians and Poets’; see Jellerson, ‘Spectral Historiopoetics’, 59–60. See Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Marginal Discourse: Drayton’s Muse and Selden’s “Story” ’, SP, 88:3 (Summer 1991), 307–28; Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1607), sig. A2r–v; Levine, Humanism and History, p. 51. 31 32

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antiquarianism and the full-blown imaginative freedom of fictive invention.33 It is notable that Niccols’s sources are not named in the preface as Baldwin, Higgins, and Blenerhasset’s are, perhaps because Niccols relied heavily in places on the poetry of Spenser and Drayton, and Shakespeare’s plays, rather than chronicle histories; indeed, he also follows Drayton’s ‘historiographical’ practice in this regard.34 His historical figures frequently claim that their accounts are true, but Niccols does not cite his sources here either, in contrast to the detailed marginal references and end notes which support his verse in Englands Eliza and London’s Artillery. While modern critics are only beginning to appreciate the extent of the Mirror’s interrogation of historiographical reliability, its centrality to Niccols’s reading of his hypotext is clear from the passages he chooses to excise. Where the sense of Higgins’s complaints is changed in the course of Niccols’s revisions, it often pertains to questions of transmission, either of texts—oral or written—or of reputation. ‘Fame’ and ‘shame’ are central to the way in which Niccols conceptualizes divine as well as worldly reward and punishment. Higgins’s Caracalla claims that, following his dissembling speech, ‘My brother’s householde then I made a way a pace’ (1587, f. 105v), but in Niccols’s version he admits ‘My brother’s house and fame I did deface’ (1610, p. 180), drawing attention to the lasting impact of his words. Where he acknowledges the tendency of spoken rumour to manipulate the truth, Niccols’s revisions reveal discomfort with the uncertain transmission of ancient narratives, and the equivocation of characters about factual details. Higgins’s Nennius had flagged up historiographical discrepancies, suggesting that although his father reigned less than a year according to some authorities, Hee raygned forty yeares, as other tell, Which seemes (as tis) a tale more true by farre.

(1587, f. 67r)

But Niccols excises altogether the stanza which claims that some historical accounts lie, and replaces the lines above to stabilize the claim: Hee raygned forty yeares, as stories tell, And fame did beare his name both wide and far. (1610, p. 116)

Bladud’s historical uncertainty is also suppressed—‘some say’ is removed from his account of the baths at Bath—while Niccols’s Caesar no longer allows the listener to adjudicate between versions of his story: ‘take the

33

Cf. Levine, Humanism and History, p. 53. Drayton appears to derive his history of Richard II, for example, in Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597) from Shakespeare’s play rather than a chronicle source. 34

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viewe | Thou maist by talke of those which erst me knewe’ (1587, f. 78r) becomes ‘write the truth’ (1610, p. 130). Niccols makes remarkably few editorial alterations to Blenerhasset’s complaints, even where the verse strays from his aesthetic ideal, although the excision of the paratexts and prose frame fundamentally changes their effect. Niccols makes a striking change, though, by interpolating seven new stanzas into the complaint of Uter Pendragon. The first stanza recaps Blenerhasset’s story, agreeing that Uter’s lust for Igren led him to ‘forgoe the golden flower of fame’, and ‘cast great Uter’s conquests in the dust’. However, the following stanza effects an outrageous revision of the complaint’s moral stance, as it continues, Yet no such blame as writers do record Do I deserve for this unhappie deed[.] (1610, p. 216)

Uter proceeds to justify his murder of Gorolus in terms which anticipate Niccols’s own complaint collection, and demonstrate the martial qualities he prized: enforc’d I was with Mars to rise From Venus’ bed, and arme me for the field, Where like a storme in thunder clad from skies, Upon my foes I fell[.]

Here, Niccols rewrites history to provide modern magistrates with an image of assertive leadership, clamping down on the malleability of textual histories even as he exploits it. The Mirror’s transmission ends with Niccols’s edition because, I would suggest, the Mirror itself was in part responsible for breaking open the monolithic amalgamation of fiction and history, as well as prompting the success of the single-character complaint and the history play as vehicles for historical fiction. Where Niccols failed was in making his dedication to historical truth-claims too brittle. He did this in order to resist what he seems to have seen as a schism between learned poetry and the meaningless babble of rhymesters, a sign of the wider moral decadence of his times. In his evident faith in the mobilization of a battle over textual stability against a perceived contemporary evil, he was a close ally of Baldwin’s. His mistake was trying to impose the appearance of order, truth, and ethical uniformity on a work which had always fought against it—even in his own additions. By removing first-person narrative from the sceptical framework of Baldwin’s poets-at-work, the freestanding complaint form set concerns about the subjectivity of historical narrative to one side. The unmediated clamour of Niccols’s multiple complaint collection, however, undermines

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their testimonies’ stability, despite the new solidity of their revised truthclaims. Moreover, Niccols’s unwillingness to fill gaps and his deliberate partitioning of his own set of complaints framed by their separate dream vision, suggests that quite contrary to the uniform regnal history it appears, his collection has more of Holinshed’s polyphony about it than critics allow.

A WINTER NIGHTS VISION Bolted onto the Elizabethan texts, as the third series of complaints dependent on a dream vision, the Winter Nights Vision presents Niccols’s bid for poetic fame to rival Sackville’s. In his preface, he describes conventionally how, I chanced in reading that worthy work, intituled, The Mirrour for Magistrates, to conjecture, if I should undertake that imperfect historie . . . that I could not better benefit others, by offering them a taste of the unsavourie fruits of my labours, then by giving them paternes to shun vice and follow vertue. (1610, Preface)

But even this modesty topos lets slip the young poet’s determination to foist his verse onto an unworthy public, and the Mirror’s role as a convenient vehicle for that imposition. Like Blenerhasset, Niccols foregrounds the amateur nature of his project: he spent ‘some truant houres’ studying poetry. Like Higgins and Blenerhasset, too, Niccols describes the Mirror as unfinished: he would ‘have continued through the whole worke, if time and mine owne affaires would have suffered me to proced’, recalling Memory and Inquisition’s departure from the Second Part: ‘nowe our idle houres be spent, tyme and our affayres doo call us from the further hearing these mens complayntes’ (1578S, f. 61v). This allusion to a passage which Niccols himself excised points to the work’s buried intertextuality. We are reminded that his paratextual claims are no more reliable than Blenerhasset’s fictional narrators, or Blenerhasset himself. Anything, though, to avoid being mistaken for a professional writer. Niccols’s ambition is critical to his project, shaping both his reception and re-presentation of the corpus. At the end of the Vision’s Induction, he states in Virgilian/Spenserian terms that his muse, who ‘rustick tunes did sing, | Now . . . must mount a pitch more hie’ (p. 555), setting up his Mirror as the epic counterpoint to the pastoral Cuckow. Similar epic ambitions begin the complaint of Robert Curthose, where Niccols’s muse must achieve a new ‘loftie pitch’ (p. 640), before Robert’s crusade is framed as an epic battle, superimposed onto the landscape of the

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Levant. His diction is riddled with borrowings from Sackville, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Drayton; this high Elizabethan style informs the nationalist work he wants his Mirror to do, but also speaks to the laureate role to which he aspires. In Englands Eliza’s Induction, he bemoans the ‘Faerie Queenes sweet singer’’s death, and desires ‘that heaven by influence would infuse | His heavenlie spirit on mine earth-borne Muse’ (p. 779). Englands Eliza is itself a Spenserian narrative, drawing on historiographical subject matter and techniques fused with chivalric heroism, and classical and biblical imagery. When Niccols considers ‘what a Mirrour [Elizabeth] might be | Unto all future times prosperitie’ (p. 779), we cannot tell if he is justifying the inclusion of his panegyric in the collection, or remembering the opening stanzas of The Faerie Queene.35 O’Callaghan observes that Niccols’s Mirror ‘was part of a broader Spenserian revival’.36 But while it drew on current aesthetic and ideological trends, Niccols’s Mirror was unlikely to attract a wide range of readers.37 Niccols categorically blames this on the decline of modern values, rather than his refusal to move with the times, using Memory to ventriloquize his vitriol towards contemporary literary culture. She claims it ‘grieves [her] to behold . . . The loathed lozell to prophane that sacred mysterie’ of poetry, who In ragged rimes with lips profane, will call the learned nine To helpe him utter forth the spawne of his unfruitfull braine.

(p. 560)

Niccols echoes the sentiments of John Harington, who in A Preface or Rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie (1591) decried ‘the common sort that term all that is written in verse poetry’ and ‘bestow the name of poet on every base rhymer and balladmaker’, typical of much late Elizabethan antipoetic sentiment.38 But Niccols also hints in Monodia, Or Waltham’s Complaint (1615), that it is not just the death of Honour Hay, his patron’s wife, but also that of Elizabeth I that has caused a recent decline in literary, and thereby moral, standards, in a passage loaded with markers of Jacobean Spenserian displeasure: your art must now needs perish, Since all are dead with her, that arts did cherish. Looke not in court or Citie anie more

35

36 Spenser, Faerie Queene, p. 2. O’Callaghan, Shepheards Nation, p. 71. See Niccols, Selected Poems, p. 21. 38 Cited in Penry Williams, The Later Tudors: England 1547–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 447, from Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, trans. Gayna Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 253–9. 37

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Niccols’s reading of the Mirror appears to lead him to the conclusion that the fall of ‘the vertuous and the vicious prince’ alike is inevitable, since death destroys everything (p. 557). Even a ‘vertuous name’ dies if it is not immortalized in verse, and when reading the Mirror, Niccols found ‘many a prince . . . exempt, as if their names be dead’. But the reason Niccols offers for the Mirror’s omissions hangs on the poverty of modern culture. Why should anyone wish to write, when not only ‘the baser sprite’ but also ‘they that boast themselves to be in honor’s bosome borne, | Disdaine . . . wisdome’? (p. 557). Niccols aligns learning and virtue, suggesting that under James I both have been lost. Claiming that, ‘To the learned only I write’ (1610, ‘To the Reader’), Niccols reaches out to a community of ‘learned wits’ (p. 560) held in contempt by their contemporaries. Rereading and rewriting the Mirror provide him with the means to reinstate lost moral and aesthetic values for the benefit of a particular community of learned readers. An Induction which opens the Vision describes how, having read the Mirror before bed, its narrator is visited by Fame and Memory. Fame will summon historical characters ‘That mongst our Mirrours are not found’ (p. 560), and Niccols must transcribe their stories. Memory produces an updated version of the Mirror from under Niccols’s pillow, and begins to read: Niccols hears complaints by King Arthur, King Edmund, Prince Alfred, Earl Godwin, Robert Curthose, Richard I, King John, Edward II, Edward V, Richard, duke of York, and Richard III, largely characters with popularity or notoriety on their side. Richard Coeur de Lion, for example, hopes that Niccols ‘will helpe to raise my name | Out of oblivion’s den’ (p. 661), but was really a familiar historical figure.40 Niccols argues that his complaints fill gaps left by the existing Mirror, and this is true of the period from 1066 to 1377. But he also rewrites aspects of previous complaints, notably Blenerhasset’s pre-Conquest tragedies. Niccols might indeed be expected to revisit the period when ‘[p]olitically, England was born’.41 The edition coincided with a resurgence 39 Richard Niccols, Monodia, or Walthams Complaint (London: William Stansby for Richard Meighen and Thomas Jones, 1615), sig. B5v. 40 Not least from the treatment of King John. See also the anonymousKynge Rycharde Cuer Du Lyon (London: The Son of Wynkyn de Worde, 1509), reprinted in 1528. 41 Donald Scragg, ‘Introduction: The Anglo-Saxons: Fact and Fiction’, in Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–21, at p. 3.

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of scholarly interest in the Anglo-Saxon period: Richard Verstegen’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605), which countered the Protestant motives of the Parker circle’s interest in Saxon religion, had prompted renewed engagement with Anglo-Saxon history and particularly pagan mythography by William Camden in his enlarged Britannia (1607), and Speed’s History of Great Britaine (1611).42 But Niccols excised King Alfred’s complaint, despite his high regard for learning, composing instead the tragedy of Prince Alfred, or Ælfred Ætheling (‘the Noble’), a lesser figure in Anglo-Saxon history, who serves principally to build up hostility towards Godwin, earl of Kent, before his complaint which follows.43 Niccols describes Alfred’s starvation, torture, and death on the island of Ely.44 He employs a classic Ovidian locus horridus, where ‘[t]he black night’s shreeking bird, the ghastlie oule | With balefull notes in waking woe did keepe | My greeved soule’, which abstracts Alfred as a tragic Philomel (p. 614), privileging his poetic interests over historiographical logic. Edmund Ironside, a chronicle history play written in the early 1580s, and the lost Hardicanute, possibly a sequel, dramatize episodes from the period covered by Blenerhasset’s Anglo-Saxon complaints, and might have prompted Niccols to revisit and flesh out this era. The portrayal of Edricus in Edmund Ironside as a Machiavellian villain anticipates Niccols’s handling of his character, which differs substantially from Blenerhasset’s Edricus.45 In the play, Canutus denounces Edricus as a ‘flatterer’ and ‘all-soothing sychophant’, terms closely mirroring Niccols’s rejection of court corruption generally, and Edricus’s tactics in particular.46 However, the focalization of Niccols’s Ironside necessarily depicts his Canute as a ruthless enemy, unlike the balanced, parallel roles of the play’s Edmund and Canutus.47 Ironside had been a point of contention in the late sixteenth-century succession debate: Robert Persons argued that the commonwealth’s interest had played a part in deciding his successor, while John Hayward’s response claimed that it would have been impossible for 42 Rolf H. Bremmer, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Pantheon According to Richard Verstegen (1605)’, in Timothy Graham (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000), pp. 141–72, at pp. 159–60. 43 Scragg, ‘Anglo-Saxons’, p. 4. 44 Niccols’s account of Alfred’s torture is closest to John Speed, The History of Great Britaine (London: William Hall and John Beale, to be sold by Iohn Sudbury & Georg Humble, 1611), p. 395, and probably shared a source. Speed’s marginal note ‘Wil. Caxton’ suggests Polycronicon but Niccols’s diction is closer to Speed’s; cf. Ranulf Higden, Polycronicon (London: William Caxton, 1482), f. 310r. 45 See Larry S. Champion, ‘ “By Usurpation Thine, by Conquest Mine”: Perspective and Politics in Edmund Ironside’, SP, 85:2 (1988), 211–24, at 213–14. 46 II.iii.801 and 799, quoted in Champion, ‘Perspective and Politics’, 215. 47 Champion, ‘Perspective and Politics’, 216.

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the English to exercise any kind of choice under Danish rule.48 Interestingly, Niccols comes down on the Catholic Persons’s side in this debate; the complaint of Alfred notes that Canute was ‘seated on the English throne | By joynt consent of the nobilitie’ (p. 609). More recently, George Buck had traced James I’s legitimacy via Edmund Ironside in Daphnis Polystephanos (1605).49 Niccols’s complaint focuses predominantly, though, on the conquest by the Danes; in the subsequent Argument, Memory claims that ‘By death of this brave prince . . . The English lost both fame and libertie’ (p. 603). The first half of the collection contributes to the metanarrative of national conquest. This is complicated, though, by celebration of King Arthur, Richard I, and Elizabeth’s international successes. Arthur, for example, forces Gwillamore to pay ‘golden tribute yearely’ (p. 570), which sits uncomfortably alongside Higgins’s portrayal of British resistance to Roman tribute, and Blenerhasset’s Anglo-Saxons ruined by the Danes’ financial demands. Much critical work on early modern British identity has noted the transference of imperialist behaviour from the conquerors to the conquered; Niccols’s narratives of invasion and colonization illustrate (but do not question) the contradictions between representations of conquest as defeat, and of colonization as providential progress.50 A notable addition, then, is an international sense of English history: a large proportion of Niccols’s narrative is set abroad, a marked change from the treatment of England, Britain, and continental Europe by previous Mirror authors, in keeping with the growing market for printed books on foreign history, travel, and colonial expansion.51 Niccols’s Arthur is inspired by his desire for fame to sail to the Arctic, Russia, and Lapland, extending ‘Oure Britaine empire’s bounds’ (p. 572). Such extensive description of foreign campaigns is rarely found elsewhere in the 48

Robert Persons and William Allen, A Conference About the Next Succession (Antwerp: A. Conincx, 1595), pp. 184–5; John Hayward, An Answer to the First Part of a Certaine Conference, Concerning Succession (London: Eliot’s Court Press, 1603), sig. Rr–v. 49 George Buck, Daphnis Polystephanos (London: G. Eld for Thomas Adams, 1605), ‘Preface’, sig. B3v. 50 See, for example, Escobedo, ‘Britannia to England’, 69; Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Ch. 2. Also Andrew Hadfield, ‘Bruited Abroad: John White and Thomas Harriet’s Colonial Representations of Ancient Britain’, in David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2002), pp. 159–77, and Joan Fitzpatrick, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Contours of Britain: Reshaping the Atlantic Archipelago (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), Ch. 3. 51 Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1599–1600) catalogues, for example, the voyage of Edmund Ironside’s sons to Hungary and that of Robert, duke of Normandy to Jerusalem.

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Mirror; indeed, it is explicitly rejected at times: James I of Scotland’s complaint prompts demands for the writers’ ‘returne . . . to our English storyes which minister matter enough of tragedy, without seking or travayling to forayne countreyes’ (1587, f. 140r).52 As Niccols’s chronology approaches the medieval period, the focus turns inwards again, this renewed emphasis on internal conflict heralded by King John’s evocation of the early Mirrors’ discourse, and Blenerhasset’s paratextual Senecan couplet, in his opening stanza: Where people hate, and where the prince doth frowne, What might builds up, dissension soone puls downe. (p. 681)

Throughout, the Vision offsets the threat of civil war with various paeans to ‘noble England’, ‘Queene of all ilands canoped of heaven’, whose ‘towring state’ risks being ‘troden downe’ (p. 587). The Saxons are ‘English’ under Danish rule, which situates the Danes as clear-cut enemies, in contrast to Blenerhasset’s more nuanced portrayal of the period. It is only in the revisionist complaint of King John that the epithets turn negative: John calls England ‘stubborne’ and ‘unkind’. In Englands Eliza itself, the nationalist stance which had directed the earlier histories becomes fully fledged, as the influence of Virgil and Spenser in combination with chronicle accounts resolves into an efficient national epic.53 Niccols’s Vision is not, for the most part, compromised by concerns about history’s transmission. This illusion of textual confidence foregrounds his moral message, where Baldwin’s and Blenerhasset’s were regularly destabilized. However, although ambition, dissembling, and indolence precipitate their falls, Niccols’s ghosts, even Richard III, are usually more unfortunate than villainous: Ironside, for example, dies ‘by the cruell fates unjust command’ (p. 585). If Blenerhasset sometimes struggled to fabricate fatal flaws, Niccols neglects more deliberately this aspect of the mode he purports to adopt. Robert Curthose’s complaint invokes Jove’s book in which individuals’ fates are decreed (p. 632). Refuting Godwin’s claim that he and his sons are killed deservedly, Robert states that even if you ‘Justly derserve [a crowne] for . . . deeds of fame’, you will never receive one ‘If thou in that star-text of every thing | Foredoom’d for fate, be not inrol’d a king’ (p. 633).54 In Monodia, Niccols finesses these ideas to explain how death, ‘written . . . In the star-text of 52

An exception is Thomas Montacute’s French campaign narrative (1559, ff. 33r–35v). Matthew Woodcock, ‘Edmund Spenser and the Commemorations of the Death of Elizabeth I’, N&Q, 42:6 (2009), 42–6, at 46. 54 Cf. Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Book (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 103–4; Virgil, Virgil I, Aeneid, Book I, l. 262. 53

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Heaven’ is inevitable, ‘but every end | Upon a mediate cause doth still depend’ directed by ‘divine providence’: ‘An evill cause [may] produce a good effect’.55 Just as Baldwin had hedged round the morality of rebellious traitors who effect the falls of tyrants, Niccols’s star-text combines evil acts with providential justice for all. Richard I, who rebels against his father Henry II, insists that he and his brother John are ‘rods of heav’n’s revenge’, but notes also that ‘rods, with which Jove executes his ire, | He oft in judgement casts into the fire’ (p. 663). Informed by classical, astrological imagery, Niccols’s ‘fate’ threatens to remove human agency from the tragic falls he describes, but it also contributes to the epic nature of his English history in which Roman gods play a newly central part. The obedient ‘pen-man of Mnemosynie’ (p. 562), Niccols must protect ‘Records’ from decay, but their composition is not complicated by questions of authorial responsibility. For Niccols’s Memory, a descendant of Blenerhasset’s, the Mirror is imperfect only in that ‘many Kings | Exempted are, whose noble acts deserve eternitie’ (p. 559), rectified simply enough. Richard Coeur de Lion echoes Blenerhasset’s first prose link and Baldwin’s lament for the duke of Exeter when he asks, Why should the glorie of so great a king Be darkned by oblivion’s cloudie frowne? Why should this age, as loathing every thing Of th’elder world, my trophies all cast downe, And let my deeds in waves of silence drowne? (1610, p. 661)

But he also foregrounds Niccols’s key theme: modern contempt for, and degeneration from, the old world. Unlike Eumnestes’s wall of moth-eaten records and stacks of rotting books, or the shambolic partnership with Blenerhasset’s Inquisition, Niccols’s Memory and her companion Fame are impressive, efficient celestial figures: Fame, an agent of anamnesis, calls up historical characters at Memory’s request.56 Niccols’s Fame and Memory also draw on Drayton’s revised 1605 version of the Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy (1596). Both describe Fame as a lady of ‘Princely port’ (used by Spenser of Britomart, one of his more flattering ‘mirrors’ of Elizabeth I), while their personifications each sport garments which record heroic deeds.57 Drayton’s Fame wears

55

Niccols, Selected Poems, p. 181. Fame evokes Chaucerian and Spenserian allegory, but for Niccols the character is not problematic, and silently obeys Memory’s demands. Readers might question the logic of Fame’s following Memory’s lead rather than vice versa. 57 Spenser, Faerie Queene, II.iii.28. 56

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a robe of golde, whose traine old Time obsequiously did beare, whereon in rich Embraudry was enrolde, The acts of all the worthies ever weare, which all might reade depainted lively there, Set downe in loftie well composed verse, First the great deedes of Heroes to rehearse.58

By contrast, it is Niccols’s ‘Ladie Memorie’ who appears ‘In golden garments clad’, which time can never weare, Nor fretting moth consume the same, which did embroydered beare The acts of old Heröes dead, set downe in stately verse, Which sitting by the horse-foot spring, Joves daughters did rehearse[.]

(p. 559)

This stark lexical appropriation masks a radical sanitizing of Drayton’s Fame and Fortune’s ensuing quarrel, and the grotesque means by which he problematizes commemoration: Drayton’s Fortune, wearing a necklace of ‘Torne diadems and broken scepters’, calls Fame ‘a tumor of the minde, | A bubble blowne up with deceitfull breath’, whose ‘sad memorialls’ are ‘Written with blood’, their ‘letters . . . immedicable wounds’.59 By eliding these figures in his Lady Memory, Niccols sidesteps this confrontation; fame is upheld as a worthy aspiration, and written accounts go largely uncontested. The major exception is Niccols’s King John. The popularity of Peele’s Troublesome Reign (c.1589) and Shakespeare’s recent play may have prompted Niccols’s portrayal, but Memory claims he must appear because ‘many writers in his daies, | Of very malice writ in his dispraise’ (p. 681). John himself believes he might have been an exemplary mirror, If to this age my storie truth had told: But th’unkind age presents to judgement’s eye My shame at large, but lets my praise go by. (p. 682)

What were the ‘false traditions’ and ‘forged rimes’ ‘invented by [his] foes’, and why does Niccols choose to interrogate transmission so forcefully in this complaint? Recent scholarship has shown the work John’s narrative was made to do in the literature of the Elizabethan succession crisis, from pamphlets to the plays themselves.60 Following James’s accession, it was 58 Michael Drayton, Poems (London: Valentine Simmes for Nicholas Ling, 1605), sig. Dd4r. 59 Drayton, Poems, Dd5r. 60 See Paulina Kewes, ‘History Plays and the Royal Succession’, in Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed’s Chronicles

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the Protestant rhetoric of early Tudor revisionist accounts like John Bale’s which informed Niccols’s retelling, echoing the Reformation rereading of John’s confessional identity which enacted ‘a complete rehabilitation’ of his character amid centuries of antipathy; for that short period, ‘the medieval villain became a hero of English liberty . . . resisting the tyrannies of Rome’.61 Niccols’s John, too, rewrites himself as an incipient enemy of Catholicism, and Catholic ‘forgeries’, set against ‘blood-built Rome, our Albion’s ancient foe’ (p. 688). By eliding Pope Innocent’s Rome with that of Julius Caesar’s assassination, he creates a picture of political instability and religious corruption which resonates with both contemporary opposition to popery, and the current climate of court faction and unrest.62 Epic ambition, Elizabethan nostalgia, and contested historiography are united in the person of King Arthur, whose complaint begins A Winter Nights Vision’s series of tragedies. That Arthur had yet to be included in the Mirror, despite Higgins and Blenerhasset’s focus on ancient British and Roman subjects, speaks, as noted above, to his fraught political and historiographical significance. Similarly, it is revealing of Niccols’s priorities that his complaint is finally included here. Arthur had also found himself absent from ‘Briton Moniments’, the Mirror-esque verse chronicle he encounters in Spenser’s House of Alma.63 As a composite of ‘polliticke vertues’ in the conceit of the Faerie Queene’s purpose ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person’, Spenser’s Arthur aligns neatly with the Mirror’s own purported aims, although of course both texts deviate from the ‘education of princes’ model they each paratextually espouse.64 We know that Niccols was an avid Spenserian, and might expect something of Spenser’s Arthur in his complaint. But, while inflected by the Faerie Queene, it is more the Arthur of the Letter to Raleigh we encounter, ‘the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall [and pollitike] vertues’; Niccols’s king has little to do with medieval romance, descending rather from the Galfridian Alliterative Morte Arthure’s model military leader.65

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 493–509; also Robert Lane, ‘ “The Sequence of Posterity”: Shakespeare’s King John and the Succession Controversy’, SP, 92:4 (1995), 460–81. 61 Carole Levin, ‘A Good Prince: King John and Early Tudor Propaganda’, SCJ, 11:4 (1980), 23–32, at 23; see also Felicity Heal, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, HLQ, 68:1–2 (2005), 109–32. 62 63 Cf. Kewes, ‘Politics of Roman History’. Spenser, Faerie Queene, II.x.68. 64 Spenser, Faerie Queene, Letter to Raleigh. 65 See ‘Arthur in Middle English Romances’, and ‘Arthur in the Faerie Queene’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Routledge, 1991), esp. pp. 68–9.

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The quest for Gloriana which Spenser’s Arthur embodies was permanently frustrated by Elizabeth’s death in 1603; Niccols’s Arthur is, perhaps accordingly, preoccupied instead with commemoration and loss. It makes sense, therefore, that rather than The Faerie Queene, Niccols’s Arthur recalls Spenser’s Ruines of Time, when, in a dream, Arthur encounters not the sensual vision of Gloriana/Elizabeth but ‘a Ladie faire . . . making pitious mone, | Tearing the tresses of her golden haire’ (p. 565), clearly a relation of Spenser’s Verlame, ‘Rending her yeolow locks, like wyrie golde’, and making ‘piteous plaint’.66 Niccols’s lamenting vision is, she tells Arthur, ‘forlorne Ladie of this noble Ile . . . Of Saxon yoke now made a subject vile’, ‘scorne of Fortune and the Britons shame’ (p. 566), like Verlame: ‘The worlds sad spectacle, and fortunes scorne’.67 This choice of allusion locates Niccols’s poem not in the erotic romance tradition evoked by the dream of Gloriana, but in dialogue with a text whose uncertain, historiographically troubled narrative had raised some of the same questions about historical loss and textual instability as Higgins’s 1574–5 First Part.68 However, since she is speaking to the sixth-century Arthur, rather than Verlame’s sixteenth-century listener, it is within Arthur’s power to preserve this genius of Britain’s ‘antient glory’ (after her successful rout of the Saxons, Verlame is overrun again and all but obliterated), and Arthur’s patriotic optimism motivates his defeat of the Saxon Colgrim, the German Cheldrick, and their allies, the Picts. Rather than perpetuating the compromised oral testimony which undermines interpretative confidence in The Ruines of Time and Higgins’s First Part, Niccols’s Arthur is driven by the potency of speech: he exhorts his troops with threats to ‘Brutus farrespread name’, whose shame will ‘flie | Throughout this worlds whole round’ (p. 567), if his soldiers betray ‘those same glorious words, | With which of late your tongues did oft abound’, and observes that they are thence driven ‘With deepe impression of my words’ (p. 568). True to form, Niccols’s Arthur acknowledges his contested history, but dispels the earlier Mirror’s historiographical anxieties, promising that he will declare ‘the truth of my corrupted storie | Defac’d by fleeting times inconstant pen’ (1610, p. 562). Niccols’s attitude anticipates John Speed’s, who wrote of Arthur in 1611, ‘of his person we make no doubt, though his acts have beene written with too lavish a pen’, although 66 Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale, 1989), p. 233. 67 Spenser, The Ruines of Time, in Shorter Poems, p. 234. 68 Spenser, Faerie Queene, I.ix.13–14. See van Es, Forms of History, Ch. 1; Melehy Hassan, ‘Antiquities of Britain: Spenser’s “Ruines of Time” ’, SP, 102:2 (2005), 514–33.

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Niccols includes details Speed finds implausible.69 Appropriating the diction of Spenser’s Verlame, but not her nihilistic message, Arthur has total faith in earthly fame as a guarantor of his memory, ignoring the sceptical tradition most recently articulated by Francis Bacon, who in 1605 dismissed natural magic ‘as far differing . . . from such a knowledge as we require, as the storie of King Arthur of Brittaine . . . differs from Caesars commentaries’.70 Neither does he inherit Robert Chester’s interest in archaeological evidence and textual records, deployed to bolster truthclaims in Chester’s legend of Arthur, a series of poems bizarrely interpolated into his enigmatic collection, Loves Martyr (1601), about to be reprinted as The [Annals] of Great Britain (1611). Chester’s ‘Arthur’ is, nevertheless, a close antecedent; a paean to Elizabeth, which seems to have the mercurial reciprocity of monarch and subject at its heart.71 Niccols’s Arthur makes explicit the latent relevance of the story to Loves Martyr’s myth of the phoenix and the turtle, when he suggests that ‘Phoenix-like’, ‘in this death shall live my future grace’ (p. 584), conflating Arthur’s famous epitaph, ‘rex quondam rexque futuris’, with the function of the Mirror as memorial and exemplum. Niccols also follows Chester in his arrogation of Arthur for the militant Protestant cause, asking with lacerating topical resonance, ‘shall our thoughts be then so baselie bent, | As with subjection servilie t’imbrace | The yoke of loftie Rome the worlds disgrace?’ (p. 575), and reversing the association of Arthurian tales with false Catholic fables which had characterized early Elizabethan discourse.72 The fantastical facet of the legend, meanwhile, still going strong in, for example, the early seventeenthcentury reprinting of John Bourchier’s explicitly fictive prose Historie of Huon of Bordeaux (1601), in which peace is negotiated between Huon and a pugilistic Arthur by Oberon, king of the Land of the Fayrie, could now be recruited for Protestantism via its association with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Elizabeth, a cluster of cultural signifiers which had come to be invested in James’s son, Henry.73 Niccols’s Arthur still glances back to Elizabeth, though. The preceding Argument notes that he ‘heere at home subdues the Saxon 69

Speed, History of Great Britaine, pp. 316–17. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, f. 33r. See William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katharine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2007), The Phoenix and the Turtle, Introduction. 72 See Robert Chester, Loves Martyr (London: E. B., 1601), pp. 34–77. 73 See Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Pimlico, 1986) and Timothy Wilks (ed.), Prince Henry Revived: Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England (Southampton: Southampton Solent University and Paul Holberton Publishing, 2007). 70 71

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kings: | Then forren nations in subjection brings’ (1610, p. 562), echoing and modifying Blenerhasset’s Hellina, who had asked rhetorically, ‘Who did the force of forrayne foes withstand? | Who all the world subdude’ (1578S, f. 18v). As Niccols hints in his preface to Englands Eliza, whom he describes as a ‘worthie Mirrour answerable to that of the Empresse Helena in the first part of this volume’, Blenerhasset’s Hellina unambiguously reflects Elizabeth’s reign (while Arthur’s ‘taint of bastardie’ also recalls the claims of her opponents). James, of course, having ‘modelled himself upon’ the legendary king in his youth, was also figured as an Arthur early on in his English reign, fulfilling Merlin’s prophecy to rule over a united Britain.74 However, the complaint’s emphasis on the virtues of martial prowess and armed peace, again following Chester’s lead, seem more censorious than sycophantic; as Richard A. McCabe notes, ‘[t]he poetic fiction that helped to promote [James’s] success would ultimately define his failure’.75 When Arthur observes, ‘In Courts where Kings, adore Bellonaes shrine, | There the bright blaze of Chivalrie will shine’ (1610, p. 564), the plurals and future tense suggest that the ghostly speaker’s advice might just be locally applicable.

‘POLEMIC TO PANEGYRIC’? The Mirror may have taken on the function of a nationalist panegyric with Niccols’s additions, as Budra claims.76 But it was a panegyric with polemical intent. The object of Niccols’s adulation, Elizabeth I, was dead, and his beloved nation was, in his view, poorly served by her replacement. The successive phases of nostalgia for Elizabeth which occurred during the first half of the seventeenth century articulated various shades of coded disaffection with the new monarch, James VI and I.77 A panegyric to Elizabeth in 1603 could stem either from genuine 74 Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Poetics of Succession, 1587–1605: the Stuart Claim’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 192–211, at p. 192. See, for example, Thomas Campion, The Discription of a Maske, presented before the Kinges Majestie (London: John Brown, 1607), ‘Epigram’; Philip Schwyzer, ‘The Jacobean Union Controversy and King Lear’, in Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 34–47. 75 76 McCabe, ‘Poetics of Succession’, p. 208. Budra, De casibus, p. 37. 77 Although this by no means works in a uniform way. See D. R. Woolf, ‘Two Elizabeths? James I and the Late Queen’s Famous Memory’, Canadian Journal of History, 20:2 (1985), 167–91, at 170; Rowland Wymer, ‘Jacobean Pageant or Elizabethan Fin de

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grief, or from relief at a succession crisis resolved without bloodshed, while the continuation of this topos into the late 1600s and 1610s might have been more heartfelt as the memory of the troubled 1590s receded, more patriotic as Elizabeth came to stand for an idealized form of the current regime, or more politically charged as a reaction to the distance ‘between Elizabethan expectation and Jacobean reality’.78 The 1610 Mirror’s place on this spectrum is not far to seek when we read it in the context of Niccols’s wider oeuvre. The seditious Beggers Ape, for example, thought to have been finished in 1607, posthumously published, and only understood to be Niccols’s work from his reference to it in the opening lines of A Winter Nights Vision, echoed the allegorical stance and scheme of Spenser’s Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale (1591) to voice antipathy towards court favourites Robert Cecil and Robert Carr (themselves ‘deeply antagonistic’ towards one another).79 The opening lines of the poem depict the sun, ‘[d]ayes bright King’, bringing ‘his golden Carre’ to Olympus, and describe the collusion of the sun/king and ‘Carre’ in violently destroying the pastoral landscape beneath.80 Roughly emulating Spenser’s allegorical key, Niccols’s Ape represents Cecil, based on his slight physical deformity. The Ape, ‘the proverbial imitator of human gesture’, arguably stands in Spenser’s poem for the ‘self-fashioning’ of the early modern courtier; Niccols decries this in his beast fable too.81 The allegorical bite of Spenser’s poem was still live in the early seventeenth century: his Fox had represented Lord Burghley, and William Oram suggests that Mother Hubberds Tale ‘was not reprinted . . . in the 1611 edition of Spenser’s works, probably for fear of antagonizing Robert Cecil . . . Burghley’s son’, while attacking the younger Cecil’s ‘growing political influence’.82 Siècle? The Political Context of Early Seventeenth-Century Tragedy’, in James Hogg (ed.), Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), pp. 45–58, at pp. 45, 50; Perry, Jacobean Culture, p. 12; Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 177; Steven W. May, ‘ “Tongue-Tied Our Queen?”: Queen Elizabeth’s Voice in the Seventeenth Century’, in Elizabeth H. Hageman and Katherine Conway (eds), Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), pp. 48–67, at p. 48; Alan R. Young, ‘The Phoenix Reborn: The Jacobean Appropriation of an Elizabethan Symbol’, in Hageman and Conway (eds), Resurrecting Elizabeth, pp. 68–81, at p. 68; Peter Hyland, ‘Re-Membering Gloriana: The Revenger’s Tragedy’, Hageman and Conway (eds), Resurrecting Elizabeth, pp. 82–94, at p. 84. 78 Perry, Jacobean Culture, p. 2. 79 Pauline Croft, ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, TRHS, 1 (1991), 43–69, at 63. 80 Richard Niccols, The Beggers Ape (London: Bernard Alsop and T. Fawcet for L. Chapman, 1627), sig. A2r–v. 81 Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 330; Niccols, Selected Poems, pp. 10–12. 82 Spenser, Shorter Poems, pp. 327, 329; Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 173.

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Niccols’s framing narrative follows Spenser’s closely, as both speakers suffer from the summer heat, hear a series of tales told amongst a group, then choose to retell the story of the ape. While Spenser’s speaker rejects high style, claiming that ‘No Muses aide me needes heretoo to call; | Base is the style, and matter meane withall’, Niccols overlays a stylized classical pastoral onto his beast fable, and evokes an ideal Elizabethan era through allusions to the emperor Augustus, a golden ‘old Age’, and ‘heavens faire Virgin in her silver throne’, ‘not many yeares’ since.83 Cutting to the quick much faster than Spenser’s satire, the Beggers Ape sets up the abhorrence of idleness, luxury and courtly sycophants which pervades Niccols’s Mirror complaints. The tale’s claim that ‘bare degrees that want true vertues merit | Shall in fames golden booke no place inherit’ also foreshadows A Winter Nights Vision, which is itself conceived as a scion of ‘fames golden booke’, recording mirrors for true virtue.84 The portrayal of Sackville, the Elephant, alludes to his ability to expose political corruption rhetorically: From his sweet mouth powr’d forth a fluent [fl]ood Of honied eloquence, . . . first against that sort O[f] hungry Beggers that frequent the Court Hee did inveigh[.]85

This reference to a previous generation’s Mirror personnel writes the Elizabethan Mirror into Niccols’s allegory, via Sackville’s stately rhetoric, and suggests similar ambitions for Niccols’s reworking of the text. A less prominent link in the intertextual chain, Middleton’s Father Hubburd’s Tales (1604), also uses a collection of tales framed by a verse narrative to satirize courtly excess, urban degeneracy, envy, and greed. Its concluding verses ‘evoke a paranoia about the danger of satirically attacking those in positions of power and rank’, expressed in familiar terms: the nightingale Philomel fears that the other birds ‘abroad will blab our words’ and in response her listeners, the ants, ‘hold their tongues’, ironically since in the Ovidian myth it is Philomel’s tongue which is removed.86 The particular danger of oral transmission, when words are taken out of context or misrepresented by others, echoes earlier editions of the Mirror, and Niccols’s own frequent allusions to Philomel perpetuate a latent sense of this threat. In 1610, therefore, a broad satirical tradition informed Niccols’s reconfiguration of the collection for a new political context. 83

Mother Hubberds Tale, in Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 336; Niccols, Ape, sig. A3r. 85 Niccols, Ape, sig. Cr. Niccols, Ape, sig. E2r. Adrian Weiss’s Introduction in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 150; Father Hubburds Tales, or The Ant and the Nightingale, in Taylor and Lavagnino (eds), Middleton, p. 182. 84 86

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Niccols’s Philomel in his pastoral satire The Cuckow (1607) is an exile, who first flees the ‘stately palaces of kings’ to escape ‘Tereus lothsome luxurie’, then tries to seek refuge in the city Trynobant from the ‘thrall of winters tyrannie’, having undeservingly lost to the Cuckoo in a singing competition. In flight, she meets her sister Progne, who warns her of the urban degeneracy of Trynobant, whose deviant sexual permissiveness provides a backdrop to the Cuckoo’s phony success. Unlike Drayton’s near-contemporary Owle (1604), who discovers equivalent levels of corruption in both the country and the city, as enclosure and spiralling rent make life as difficult among the remnants of feudalism as it has become amid venal urban capitalism, Niccols’s nightingale returns to the safety of the wood, where the threat posed by the changing seasons is militaristic rather than moral. Progne’s testimony leaves no doubt that Trynobant, a lexical and ethical perversion of Troynovant, is not even safe to discuss, let alone visit, but she, a more prurient version of Drayton’s Owl speaking truth to power, exposes the city’s secret sins as a foil for virtue. The best known of Niccols’s works, Sir Thomas Overburies Vision (1616), also framed his vilification of the contemporary court scandal as a spur to virtuous behaviour, this time using explicit allusions to the Mirror.87 The Overbury scandal lent itself to the de casibus complaint form, since its multiple participants could offer different perspectives on the narrative, as well as a different moral each. Public appetite for the salacious details of the scandal could be satisfied within an established morally educative framework. Since Overbury himself had been the author of the astonishingly popular poem, The Wife, and the subject of so many printed eulogies, the materiality of textual transmission and exchange became central to the contemporary retellings of his story by the ‘politicized textual community that had joined together to expose court corruption’.88 Niccols’s poem depicts Overbury’s ghost calling on ‘Thy pens assistance’ to ‘paint out my tragicke woe’, as in ‘that true (Mirrour for our Magistrates.)’, in order to stabilize and dignify ‘Those uncouth tidings’, which Fame had begun ‘with horried voice to sing . . . in 87 See also the anonymous Just Down[fall of] Ambition, Adultery, and Murder (1616); Samuel Rowland, Sir Thomas Overbury, or, The Poysoned Knights Complaint (1614). For details of the Overbury affair see the ODNB. For analysis of contemporary literary response, see O’Callaghan, ‘Sir Thomas Overburies Vision’; Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1990), from p. 175; Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 88 See, for example, Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Overburie His Wife with New Elegies Upon His (Now Knowne) Untimely Death (London: Edward Griffin for Laurence L’Isle, 1616), which contains six elegies for Overbury, and eleven poems in praise of The Wife; O’Callaghan, Shepheards Nation, p. 16.

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each itching eare’.89 The capacity of the Mirror to enact such a sanitizing feat could only exist now that Niccols had excised the uncertainty of orally transmitted narrative. Overburies Vision also effectively referred readers back to Niccols’s Mirror complaint of Edward II, in the couplet Thy foes decline, proud Gaveston is downe, No wanton Edward weares our England’s crowne.90

In the complaint, Niccols’s circumlocution on the subject of Edward’s homosexuality had allowed his metaphoric portrayal of it as a disease to stand more generally for corrupt favouritism: ‘In Court the leprous spots of his delights | Unto the Palace wals so fast do cleave’ (1610, p. 705), while the country at large is reduced to civil conflict: as a result of ‘[t]he ranke contagion of this foule disease’, ‘[w]arre rouz’d himselfe at home’. Outbreaks of plague in 1600s London would have given the description even greater topical resonance. The translation of Gaveston’s ‘evils’ from sexual to politic is made more overt when Edward’s ghost states that ‘[h]is lips were made the oracles, from whence | I tooke advice’ (1610, p. 708), while the pertinence of his warning is explicitly extended outwards: If slie dissimulation credit winne With any Prince, that sits on highest throne, With honied poyson of soure sugred sinne, It causeth him turne tyrant to his owne, And to his State workes swift confusion, Above his cedars top it high doth shoot, And canker-like devoures it to the root. (p. 704, emphasis added)

By alluding in Overburies Vision not only to Edward II’s actual reign but also to his own treatment of it, Niccols is able to highlight the progression from his warnings about court corruption to an analysis of its lethal effects in contemporary London—it is essentially a spectral ‘I told you so’. Overburies Vision ends with a passage in praise of James I. Niccols carefully separates his criticism of court corruption from any potential attack on James, as he does throughout A Winter Nights Vision too.91 However, his praise of the king as an enemy of a Catholic Antichrist (‘that seven-headed beast’) seems to write James into a religious policy not quite his own. The evocation of ‘A King, whose justice will at last not faile, | To 89 Richard Niccols, Sir Thomas Overburies Vision (London: for R. Meighen & T. Jones, 1616), pp. 17, 1. 90 Niccols, Overburies Vision, p. 48; see Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption, p. 177. 91 See, for example, King John’s plea for loyalty to the king, which seems to address the contemporary reader directly (1610, p. 697, ‘Woe to the wretched people of this land . . . ’).

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give to each his owne in equall scale’ remembers the injustice of the unequal rewards received by the Fox and Ape in Niccols’s beast fable, and ‘at last’ hints that this might represent a change of approach.92 As a part of this politically engaged oeuvre, it is impossible to consider the 1610 Mirror a passive reiteration of establishment-led historical narrative. Even in isolation, A Winter Nights Vision unmistakably alludes to a contemporary discourse of dissatisfaction with the Jacobean court. In this light, the new subtitle interpolated between the ancient and medieval complaint sequences, ‘Wherein may be seene the instabilitie and change of state in great Personages’, feels like something of a threat. Budra has Niccols remove references to Scotland from Blenerhasset’s complaint of Vortiger, and excise the complaints of James I of Scotland, James IV and Flodden Field, for fear of offending the new Caledonian king.93 While Vortiger’s epithets do not portray the Scots in a flattering light, though, to remove the three early Tudor complaints was actually to wipe out a seam of quiet pathos from Baldwin’s boisterous and macabre 1550s series. Why? Edward Ayscu’s near-contemporary Historie (1607) demonstrates that Anglo-Scottish conflict was not taboo for Jacobean historians, when he admits that the histories of both nations ‘containe matter of reproach and disgrace one against the other’.94 But on the occasion of their putative union, Ayscu asks, ‘Are we not all (for the most part) the broode and off-spring of the same parents, the auntient English Saxons?’, rewriting history with a new, pro-union slant. Niccols, clearly capable of large-scale revisions, could have edited the Scottish Mirror material to anticipate unity, had he wanted to flatter James. Instead, he expunged all Scottish references in the inherited complaints, and insinuated ‘barbarous Picts’, and the like, liberally throughout the Vision, signalling a more troubled relationship between the 1610 Mirror and the new administration. A Winter Nights Vision itself paints a clear picture of the current political situation and its failings.95 The pastoral setting uses the onset of winter to reflect dissatisfaction with the present, juxtaposed with a happier summer that has ended. The title extends this metaphor extra-textually, evoking Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and contrasting James’s reign with that of the ‘fairy queen’, around the time that Thomas Dekker allegorically resurrects Elizabeth as Titania in The Whore of Babylon 92

93 Niccols, Selected Poems, p. 226. Budra, De casibus, p. 28. Edward Ayscu, A Historie Contayning the Warres, Treaties, Marriages, and Other Occurrents Betweene England and Scotland (London: G. Eld, 1607). 95 See Alan T. Bradford, ‘Mirrors of Mutability: Winter Landscapes in Tudor Poetry’, ELR, 4:1 (1974), 3–39. Cf. O’Callaghan, ‘Dreaming the Dead’, p. 89. 94

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(1607), and Ben Jonson depicts Prince Henry, whose court had offered James’s an ‘Elizabethan’ rival, as the ‘Spenserian faerie king’ in Oberon (1611).96 Niccols’s ‘Sunne in heav’n shone pale on earth to see her wombe so wasted’ (1610, p. 556), a distant and ineffectual monarch unable to alleviate the country’s wintry misery. Some lines later, ‘The golden Sunne, daies guide, was gone, and in his purple bed | Had laid him downe’ (1610, p. 557), typical of the Jacobean Spenserians’ quarrel with the rotten languor of the Stuart court. In the late Elizabethan period, the sun had been used as a metaphor for Elizabeth’s successor, whose revelation would dispel the dark uncertainty of the 1590s succession crisis. Peter Wentworth, for example, pressed Elizabeth to name an heir using the image of a sun which will ‘cause the clouds to vanish and flee away’.97 Later, the Dedication of the Authorized King James Bible to James I appropriated the symbol to describe James’s accession: whereas detractors expected that, upon the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth . . . some thick and palpable clouds of darkness would so have overshadowed this land, that . . . it should hardly be known who was to direct the unsettled State; the appearance of Your Majesty, as of the Sun in his strength, instantly dispelled those supposed and surmised mists.98

Niccols’s critical image of the sun seems highly expressive of his disappointment in this Jacobean dawn. His discourse also propagates the contemporary association between peace, idleness, and vice.99 Barnabe Rich states in Faultes, Faultes, and Nothing else but Faultes (1606) that the ‘idlenes of Peace . . . enfeebleth the minds of yong men’ and ‘maketh them become Hermaphrodites; halfe men, halfe harlots’.100 Fulke Greville’s Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, completed in 1612, would describe how Sidney observed, in contrast to Elizabeth I’s prudent defensive warfare, ‘fatal passiveness’ in continental Europe, and Henri III of France ‘buried in his pleasures’, ‘his country apt, through scorn of his effeminate vices, either to become a prey for the strongest undertaker, or else to be cantonized by self division’.101 Niccols’s 96

Cf. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, pp. 181, 182. Wentworth, Pithie Exhortation, pp. 48–9. Cornelius Bol, The Holy Bible (London: Robert Barker, 1611), Dedication, sig. A2r. 99 See Phil Withington, ‘The Semantics of “Peace” in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 23 (2013), pp. 127–53. 100 Barnabe Rich, Faultes, Faultes, and Nothing Else but Faultes (1606), ed. Melvin H. Wolf (Gainsville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965), pp. 52–3; see also Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), Book 1. 101 Fulke Greville, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 48. 97 98

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complaints play repeatedly on a comparable image of the peaceful, indolent monarch as a catalyst for effeminacy and civil instability.102 Robert Curthose, for example, asks, ‘[s]ay, glorie, say, hath peacefull follie furl’d | Thy flag of honor[?]’, and describes his own era as an ‘[i]nglorious age, made drunke with dregs of peace’ (1610, p. 641). Particularly telling in this regard is Niccols’s complaint of Richard III, which drew heavily on Shakespeare’s play, first printed in 1597. Shakespeare had appropriated material for the opening soliloquy from Sackville’s Mirror Induction, manipulating Sackville’s vignette of the horror of war into a grotesque rejection of peace, which leaves the audience in no doubt of Richard’s villainy.103 Shakespeare’s Richard’s ‘grim-visaged War’ echoes Sackville’s War, who appears ‘in glitterying armes yclad | With visage grym’ (1563, f. 121v). But in the soliloquy, Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front, And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.104

For Sackville, war is explicitly negative—noble cities are ‘Consumed, destroyed, wasted’ (1563, f. 122r). By contrast, Shakespeare’s Richard’s portrayal of an effeminate, mincing figure, debased and corrupted in order to represent peace, marks the transition between his sarcastic acceptance of a ‘summer’ and ‘son of York’ he despises, and his disclosure to the audience that in fact he is ‘determined to prove a villain | And hate the pleasure of these idle days’, this ‘weak piping time of peace’.105 The poetics of peace which Shakespeare’s Richard uses to express his disdain chime precisely with Niccols’s militant discourse. Niccols’s Mars likewise laid by his Launce and took his Lute, And turn’d his rugged frownes to smiling lookes, In stead of crimson fields, warres fatall fruits, He bath’d his limbes in Cypris warbling brookes, 102

Cf. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 174. In addition Shakespeare drew on the relevant late medieval complaints, as well as Higgins’s complaint of Claudius. See William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (The Arden Shakespeare London: Methuen Drama, 2009), 1.1.50 n., 1.1.65 n., 1.3.196 n., 1.4.76–83 n., 1.4.180–7 n. (Clarence); 1.2.19 n. (Richard, duke of Gloucester, and Rivers); cf. 1.4.93–5 n. (Richard, duke of Gloucester); 1.2.156–7 n., cf. 2.2.123–40 n., cf. 3.3.18–22 n. (Rivers); 2.3.21 n. (Salisbury); 3.1.60 n., 3.2.21 n., cf. 3.4.67–71 n., cf. 3.4.74 n., 3.4.97–100 n., cf. 4.4.72 n. (Hastings); 3.2.39 n. (Richard); 4.2.63–4 n., 4.4.118 n. (Buckingham); 1.1.18–23 n. (Claudius). 104 Shakespeare, Richard III, 1.1.9–13. 105 Shakespeare, Richard III, 1.1.30–1; 1.1.25. 103

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And set his thoughts upon her wanton lookes, All noise of warre was husht upon our coast, Plentie each where in easefull pride did boast. (1610, p. 753)

So Niccols’s Richard internalizes Shakespeare’s distorted allusion to Sackville, to promote Niccols’s militant Protestant, oppositional stance. The prevalence of accounts of Richard III’s reign and usurpation in the sixteenth century laid his story open to a proliferation of allegorical purposes. Suitable for arguments against tyranny and usurpation, on the necessity of an established successor, and the importance of an adult rather than child monarch, the story could be put to work for any political cause, and had endlessly recycled local significance. In libels, too, Richard was a useful card to play; he was explicitly associated with Robert Cecil, for example, sometimes with the possible implication that Cecil was worse.106 This interpretative context, where Richard’s absolute villainy was not quite fixed, complicates Niccols’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s diction. In The Vision and Discourse of Henry the Seventh (1610), Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond and Richard’s killer, is explicitly used to prefigure James’s proposed unification of England and Scotland.107 The approving allusion in A Winter Nights Vision to one literary Richard by another tips the affective force of Niccols’s complaint against Richard’s allegorical opposite, Richmond/James, as Shakespeare’s Richard’s language is deployed in Niccols’s oppositional case. This is not to suggest that Niccols’s retelling of Richard’s story has so cut-and-dried a topical application as that. But his lexical borrowings invoke aspects of the range of contemporary allegorical possibilities, which jostle and coexist. We should think of Niccols’s complaint as composed in amongst these possibilities, not promoting an anti-Henry/anti-James Richard III, but not exactly condemning him either. In addition to the clear evidence of Niccols’s new complaints, I also want to suggest that the Mirror itself as a literary-historical event played into Niccols’s oppositional agenda, and that its cultural significance may have sweetened Kyngston’s offer of involvement in a project very like the one to which John Wayland had recruited Baldwin in the 1550s. For a 106 See Margaret Hotine, ‘Richard III and Macbeth: Studies in Tudor Tyranny?’, N&Q, 38:4 (1991), 480–6; Croft, ‘Cecil’; M. G. Aune, ‘The Uses of Richard III: From Robert Cecil to Richard Nixon’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 24:3 (2006), 23–47. 107 T. G., The Vision and Discourse of Henry the Seventh (London: G. Eld for Henry Fetherstone, 1610). T. G. was possibly Thomas Gainsford, the soldier and historian; see S. A. Baron, ‘Gainsford, Thomas (bap. 1566, d.1624)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, online edn [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10284, accessed 8 Sept. 2012]. Cf. Mark Rankin, ‘Henry VIII, Shakespeare, and the Jacobean Royal Court’, SEL, 51:2 (2011), 349–66, at 349.

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Jacobean readership, another edition of the Mirror was certainly not avidly anticipated. Where Higgins and Blenerhasset’s continuations capitalized on the formula at the apex of its success, Niccols’s sequel came forty-seven years after Baldwin’s death. So why commandeer the Mirror to market a modern polemic? Perhaps Higgins’s last edition, printed in 1587 when Niccols was only three or four years old, evoked a triumphant moment in Elizabeth’s reign, encapsulating all the qualities thought to be lacking from James I’s arsenal. The last years of the 1580s must have been characterized in collective memory by decisive, successful action against two major Catholic threats: Spain, and James’s mother, Mary Stuart. Niccols describes the Babington conspiracy in Englands Eliza (1610, pp. 808–11), and while he does not mention Mary Stuart he refers to ‘the Babylonian bawd’ (p. 810). His dedication of A Winter Nights Vision to Lord Charles Howard, his commander at Cadiz, also fixes his focus on those years. Howard was appointed Lord High Admiral by Elizabeth in 1585, and was instrumental not only in preparing the fleet that was to have countered the Spanish Armada but also in the final decision to execute Mary Stuart.108 Although not publicly available, Howard’s letters record his antipathy towards attempts at peace with Spain.109 While Howard continued to serve under James, his close familial and political association with Elizabeth evokes a previous era, and particularly the naval triumphs described in Englands Eliza. By including these reminders of Elizabeth’s successes alongside an iconic run-down of English history last printed at the height of that intense period, complete with woodcuts excerpted from another national monument reprinted in 1587–8, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Niccols makes a subtle but damning political point. The Mirror had been thoroughly transformed by 1610. So had the historiopoetic landscape. But Niccols’s Mirror shared with all of its earlier iterations a central preoccupation with the form, expression, and transmission of historical accounts, and the ways in which accounts that engaged with their own historiography might be deployed to reflect topical anxieties. In doing so, all four writers of the texts examined in this study, in different ways, made the constructed, textual nature of historical truth their subject, and probed its vulnerability to contingencies of transmission, local exploitation, and interpretative caprice. According to Hayden White’s 108 Robert W. Kenny, Elizabeth’s Admiral: The Political Career of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, 1536–1624 (London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 104–6. 109 J. K. Laughton (ed.), State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, Anno 1588 (2nd edn, Aldershot: Temple Smith for the Navy Records Society, 1987), vol. I, pp. 50–1.

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definition, Baldwin, Blenerhasset, Higgins, and Niccols are all in this regard ‘philosophers of history’, providing ‘commentary not only on the historical record but also on the activity by which a given encodation of the historical field can be permitted to claim the status of knowledge’.110 The foregoing analysis shows that, by approaching the Mirror corpus through its metatextual engagement with reading, writing, and representation, the abiding tragic narrative of its own development may be challenged, and its significance recognized for a wider early modern poetics of historiography.

110

White, Metahistory, p. 428.

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Index Admiral’s Men, the 124 Aelfric 105, 107 Aeneas 70, 90, 113 affect 27, 64, 68–71, 169 Albanact 48, 52, 54 Albion 55, 158 alchemy 61, 131 Alexander the Great 45, 69, 123, 137 allegory 7, 11–12, 36, 54, 88, 92, 99, 102, 106, 110, 114, 123–4, 128, 131–2, 140, 156, 162–3, 166–9 Anglo-Saxons 3, 11, 47, 53, 55, 90, 104–7, 139, 142, 152–5, 159–61, 166 Antarctic, the 134 antitheatricalism 113–14, 131–6 apparel 95, 107 archaeology 56, 71, 160 Arctic, the 134, 154 Aristotle 44–5, 86–9, 91–2 Armada, Spanish 114, 170 Arthur, king 57–8, 88, 90, 158–61 Arthurian legend 57, 90, 160 Ascham, Roger 29, 42, 57 astrology 65, 156 Augustus, emperor 69, 163 autobiography 78, 143 Babington plot 114–15, 124, 170 Bacon, Francis 1, 91–2, 124–5, 144, 160 Baldwin, William 1–4, 6, 11–12, 14–20, 22–7, 29, 31, 34–5, 38–44, 52, 56, 58, 62–3, 67–70, 72–4, 76, 78, 83–4, 90–1, 98–9, 114–16, 120, 123, 127, 131, 138–9, 143, 147, 149, 169 Beware the Cat 15–16, 19–20, 23, 43, 56, 135 death 5–6, 15, 24, 62, 170 Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt 29 Mirror, see Mirror editions Treatise of Morall Philosophy 16, 42–3 Western Will 34 Bale, John 42, 46, 104–6, 158 St Bartholomew’s Day massacres 80 beast fable 99, 162–6 Blenerhasset, Thomas 1–6, 11–12, 14, 23, 38, 40, 47, 57, 62–3, 72–109, 113–14, 131, 134, 138–9, 141, 149–50, 152–6, 158, 161, 166, 170–1

Direction for the Plantation of Ulster 74, 108 Revelation of the True Minerva 74, 90, 92–3, 95, 107–8 Second Part of the Mirror, see Mirror editions, 1578 Blundeville, Thomas 58–9, 69 Boccaccio, Giovanni 3, 16, 21, 28, 53, 65, 90–1, 112, 116, 132, 146 Boethius 68 Bossewell, John 44, 82 Breton, Nicholas 99–100 Britain, matter of 56, 145 Brutus, legendary founder of Britain 28, 39, 46, 50, 52, 54–5, 58, 77, 90, 93, 110, 113, 116, 124–5, 145, 159 Brutus, Marcus Junius 58 Buchanan, George 57 Buck, George 154 Cadiz 1587 124 1596 140, 170 Cadwaladr 53, 103, 146 Calvinism 95 Camber 52, 54 Camden, William 3, 56, 112–13, 144, 153 capitalism 164 Carr, Robert 162 cartography 55 Cartwright, Thomas 95 Cassivellanus 125 Catholicism 14, 16, 36–8, 47, 57, 95–6, 104, 107, 154, 158, 160, 165, 170 Cavell, Humphrey 15 Cavendish, George 74 Cecil, Robert 162, 169 Cecil, William 81, 162 Chaloner, Thomas 15 Channel Islands 80–1 Chantries Acts 37 Chaucer, Geoffrey 20–2, 65–7, 121 Canterbury Tales 20–1 House of Fame 20, 57 Legend of Good Women 66 Monk’s Tale 21 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 3–4, 21 Troilus and Criseyde 21, 66

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Index

Chester, Robert 58, 160–1 chivalry 151, 161 chorography 3, 51, 53–6, 71, 143, 147 chronicle history 3, 9, 22, 28–31, 39, 46–51, 57–61, 63, 76, 82–5, 88, 96–7, 100, 104, 111–12, 117, 130, 143–4, 148, 153, 155, 158 Churchyard, Thomas 15, 19, 25–6, 29–30, 32–7, 41, 45, 57, 83, 109, 131 Davy Dycars Dreame 34 First Part of Churchyards Chippes 34 Worthiness of Wales 57 Cicero 2, 21, 33, 44–5, 69, 85 cities 55–6, 60, 140, 163–4, 168 Clifford, Anne 65 Cloten 53, 125 Cnut 106, 153–4 commonplacing 2, 9, 16, 42–3, 69, 84, 135 Constantine 102 Cooper, Thomas 51, 60, 82, 85 Cope, Anthony 45 Cornish Rebellion 21 counsel 13, 22, 36, 51, 69, 111, 114, 127, 130, 136–7 Cyrus the Great 45, 128

Druids 53 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester 81, 85, 92 Dunwallo (Dyfnwal Moelmud) 53, 115, 125

Danes 98, 104, 106–7, 154–5 Daniel, Samuel 8, 143 Dawson, Thomas 74 de casibus tragedy 3, 9, 16, 33, 37–8, 43, 49, 71, 109, 132, 141, 144, 164 decorum 22, 98, 120 Dekker, Thomas 147, 166 Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex 140 dissolution of religious houses 37–8, 46, 107 Dolman, John 15, 21–2, 25 Drake, Francis 124–5, 134 drama 8, 22, 32–3, 37, 50–1, 64, 92, 110, 123, 126, 131–8, 142–5, 153, 157 Drant, Thomas 29 Drayton, Michael 8, 35–8, 138–9, 148, 156 Englands Heroicall Epistles 36, 147 Legend of Great Cromwell 36 Matilda 36 Owle 36, 164 Piers Gaveston 36 Poly-Olbion 147 Robert, duke of Normandy 156–7 dream vision 22–3, 29, 31, 34, 36, 40, 48, 52–4, 63–8, 70–2, 79, 84, 99, 116, 119, 139, 141–2, 150, 159

Fabyan, Robert 42, 51, 73, 96–7, 134 fame 20, 32, 37, 55, 59–61, 70, 84, 100, 108, 118, 148–50, 152, 154–7, 160, 163–4 Ferrers, George 15, 18, 25–6, 28–9, 40–1, 76, 92, 114, 120 Ferrex 125 feudalism 164 Fleming, Abraham 91, 130 Florus 121 Fluellenism 9 fortune 8–9, 26, 37, 50–1, 69, 112, 117, 121, 131–3, 157, 159 Foxe, John 29, 105 France 80, 104 Francis, duke of Anjou 102–3 Fulwell, Ulpian 35

Edmund, earl of Rutland 27 Edmund Ironside 89, 106, 154 Edmund Ironside 153 Edward II 165 Edward III 14 Edward VI 18, 29, 40, 113 Elizabeth I 8, 12, 18, 22, 57, 81, 90, 92, 102–3, 108, 110, 113–15, 122, 124–9, 136–7, 140–1, 147, 151, 154–62, 166–7, 170 succession 57, 110, 114, 124–7, 153, 157, 162, 167 Elyot, Thomas 29, 42, 44–5 empire 122, 124, 145–6, 154 epic 3, 48, 61, 71, 141, 150, 155–6, 158 Erasmus, Desiderius 42, 90 equivalence 22, 56, 60, 120 exemplarity 3, 7, 13, 21–2, 46, 49–50, 69, 97–8, 111–16, 122–3, 128–31, 136–8, 141, 157 exile 82, 108, 164

Gardiner, Stephen 18, 28, 37 Gascoigne, George 8, 67, 83 Complaint of Phylomene 67 Hundreth Sundrie Flowres 24 Jocasta 9 Gaveston, Piers 36, 164 Genette, Gerard 62–3, 75 Geoffrey of Monmouth 39, 46, 48, 53–9, 97, 117, 145

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Index ghost complaint 140, 142–3 Glamorgan 55, 146 Golding, Arthur 29, 61 Gorboduc, legendary king 52 Gosson, Stephen 135 Grafton, Richard 48, 51, 59, 63, 82, 104 Greene, Robert 100–1 Greville, Fulke 167 Guernsey 74, 80–2, 95, 103 Hall, Edward 42, 73, 84 Hall, Joseph 10 Hannibal 45, 123 Hardyng, John 39, 50–2, 57–8, 97 Harington, John 151 Harvey, Gabriel 78–9, 121 Haslop, Henry 124–5 Hawes, Stephen 86, 88 Hay, Honor and James, earl of Carlisle 140, 151 Hayward, John 153–4 Hector 70 Helen of Troy 68 Henri III 103, 167 Henri IV 140 Henry VI 110 Henry VII 23, 113, 169 Henry VIII 19, 36, 46, 113 Henry, Prince of Wales 140, 160, 167 Henryson, Robert 65–7 Heywood, Jasper 123 Heywood, John 29 Higden, Ranulph 84, 107 Higgins, John 1–2, 4–6, 11–14, 22–3, 25–6, 28–31, 33–4, 38–77, 82–5, 88–92, 94, 98–9, 109–39, 141, 143, 145–8, 150, 154, 158–9, 168, 170–1 Answere to Master William Perkins 40 First Part of the Mirror, see Mirror editions, 1574–5 Flowers of Eloquent Phrases of the Latine Speech 29 Huloets Dictionarie 40–1 Nomenclator 40 Holinshed, Raphael 29–30, 112, 130, 144, 150, 170 Holland, Philemon 122 Homer 69, 123, 137 Horace 137 Howard, Charles 170 Howlet, Richard 40, 42 humanism 2, 28–9, 41–51, 57, 60, 69, 71, 121, 130, 136–7 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester 28, 46

199

Icarus 60, 117 Innocent, Pope 158 Inns of Court 2, 12, 22, 51 Inquisition (personification) 73, 84–91, 93, 96, 99, 102, 108, 150, 156 Ireland 71–2 James VI and I 13, 129, 141, 143–6, 152, 154–5, 157, 161, 165–70 Jerusalem 154 Jonah 60 Jonson, Ben 138 Catiline 123 Bartholomew Fair 10 Oberon 167 Sejanus 123 Julius Caesar 39, 45, 54, 74, 99, 110, 112, 123–5, 158, 160 Justinian 45 Kelton, Arthur 50 Kenilworth 92 King James Bible 167 King Leir 124 Knollys family 8, 92 Kyd, Thomas 8–9 Kyngston, Felix 31, 36, 139, 146, 169 Laurent de Premierfait 16 Layamon’s Brut 56, 58 Leighton, Thomas 81, 92, 95 Leir, legendary king 52, 55 Leland, John 46, 51, 57 Livy 45, 82 Lloyd, Ludovic 45, 50, 69 Locrine 9, 117 Locrinus 52, 54 London 32, 55–6, 106, 139 Lud, legendary king 55–6 Lycurgus 81 Lydgate, John 3, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 28, 44, 49, 64–5, 112, 121, 132, 146 Fall of Princes 3, 11, 14, 16, 24, 28, 44, 49, 112, 116, 118, 127–8, 130–1 Serpent of Division 49, 110–11, 130 Lyly, John 1, 113 Machiavelli 127, 153 magic 59–61, 117, 160 Marlowe, Christopher 8, 132–3, 138 Tamburlaine 131–4 Marprelate, Martin 142 Marshe, Henry 14, 25, 30, 74, 114

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200

Index

Marshe, Thomas 12, 14, 28–31, 39, 62, 72, 74, 82, 139 Marston, John 10 Mary I 11, 14, 16, 18, 25, 113, 117, 129 Mary, Queen of Scots 27, 102, 124, 127–9, 170 Matthew of Westminster 48, 59, 97, 121 Medea 68, 117 medievalism 64–7 memory 2, 6, 12, 20, 39, 56, 72, 73, 85–93, 96–7, 104, 143, 160, 170 Memory (personification) 73, 84–93, 95–6, 99, 101, 108, 141, 150–2, 154, 156–7 Merlin 161 metre, quantitative 93–5 Middleton, Thomas 143, 163 Minerva 116 Mirror complaints Albanact 39–40, 48, 52, 54, 59–61, 63, 116 Alvrede (King Alfred) 74, 97, 99, 105, 153 Prince Alfred 152–4 King Arthur 57–8, 145, 152, 154, 158–61 Aulus Vitellius 112 Bladud 39, 42, 48–9, 60–1, 117, 128, 148 Brampton, battle of 30, 166 Brennus 115–16, 120, 126 Burdet, Nicholas 12, 30, 32–3, 59 Cade, Jack 17, 93, 134 Cadwallader 74, 95, 103–4, 107, 146 Caligula 112, 117, 132 Caracalla 30, 112, 126, 136–7, 148 Carassus 74, 98–9, 104, 114, 134 Chirinnus 115, 131 Claudius 1, 112, 132, 168 Clifford 17 Cobham, Eleanor 18, 26, 28, 100, 134, 142 Collingbourne, poet 21, 23, 25–6, 117 Cordila 39, 70, 124, 128–9 Cromwell, Thomas 30, 35–8 Ebbe 74, 97, 100, 107 Edmund Ironside 152–3, 155 Edmund, duke of Somerset 21, 24 Edricus 74, 86, 89, 106, 114, 142, 153 Edward II 152, 165 Edward IV 17–20, 26, 35 Edward V 145, 152 Egelrede 74, 106 Elstride 39, 63, 117, 142 Emerianus 115, 118, 131 Forrex 39, 51, 114, 124, 128, 135

Fulgentius 112 Geta 112, 117, 128 Glendower, Owen 17 Godwin 152–3 Guidericus (1578) 74, 104 Guiderius (1587) 112 Harold 74, 97, 105, 107–8, 142 Hellina 74, 97, 100–3, 161 Henry VI 17, 26 Henry, duke of Buckingham 21–2, 112, 168 Humber 39, 55, 120 Humphrey, duke of Gloucester 17, 26 Irenglas 49, 64, 70, 115 Jago 30, 115, 131 James I of Scotland 17, 166 James IV of Scotland 30, 166 King John 152, 155, 157–8, 165 Joseph, Michael, blacksmith 21, 23–4, 30, 120 Julius Caesar 112, 118, 122, 130, 148 Kimarus 39, 117 Laelius Hamo 112 Locrinus 39, 63, 118 Londricus 112, 134, 146 Madan 39, 117, 119 Manlius 39, 63–4, 119, 128 Mempricius 39, 42, 59, 70, 72, 117, 128 Montacute, Thomas, earl of Salisbury 17, 155 Morgan 39, 50, 55, 124, 128–9 Morindus 39, 60, 70 Mortimer, Roger 17, 26–7 Mowbray 17 Nennius 39, 58–9, 69–71, 115–16, 119, 125, 148 Nero 112, 136–7 Neville, Richard, earl of Warwick 17, 26 Pendragon, Uter 57, 74, 93, 98–9, 134, 149 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland 17 Pinnar 115, 120, 125 Plantagenet, George, duke of Clarence 17, 168 de la Pole, William, duke of Suffolk 17 Porrex 39, 51, 121–2, 124, 128 Richard, duke of Gloucester 21, 26, 30, 120, 132, 168 Richard, duke of York 26–7 Richard, duke of York (WNV ) 152 Richard, earl of Cambridge 17 Richard I 152, 154, 156 Richard II 17, 32 Richard III 152, 155, 168–9

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Index Robert, duke of Normandy 36, 150–1, 155, 168 Rudacke 115, 125 Sabrine 39, 117 Sergius Galba 112, 117 Severus 112, 117–18, 146 Silvius Otho 112, 114 Shore, Jane 21, 24, 30, 33–5, 100, 142 Sigebert 74, 99, 103 Stater 115–16, 118–20, 125 Tiberius 112, 121 Tiptoft, John, earl of Worcester 17 Tresilian, Robert 17, 19, 26 Varianus 115, 118, 130–1, 136 Vortiger 74, 98, 166 Cardinal Wolsey 12, 30, 32–7, 109, 131, 134 Woodstock, Thomas, duke of Gloucester 17 Woodville, Anthony, Lord Hastings 21–2, 27, 117, 168 Mirror editions Memorial 8, 14, 16–17, 45, 78, 123, 134 1559 3, 5, 8, 11, 14–20, 22–3, 25–7, 35, 41, 43–4, 50, 64, 67, 73, 78–9, 120, 156, 166 1563 3, 5, 8, 11, 14–16, 21–5, 30, 39, 41, 50, 52, 64–9, 79, 98, 117, 120, 132 1571 3, 15, 23–6, 79 1574, First Part 3, 11–12, 22–3, 25, 28–9, 39–72, 74, 76–7, 79, 82, 85, 88, 111–12, 115–16, 119–20, 128, 130–1, 143, 145, 147, 159 1574, Last Part 3, 12, 15, 23–5, 78–9, 111, 131 1575, First Part 25, 29–30, 39, 41, 49–50, 64, 70, 111, 115, 143 1575, Last Part 12, 15, 23–5, 78–9 1578, Second Part 3–4, 11–12, 23, 40, 47, 57, 62, 72–109, 113–14, 131, 134, 147, 156 1578, Last Part 3, 12, 15, 20, 24–8, 32, 100 1587 3–5, 11–15, 24–5, 29–30, 32, 35, 40–1, 72–5, 109–38, 143, 170 1610 3–5, 11–13, 15, 24, 30–1, 35, 57–8, 74, 88, 90, 123, 139–71 A Winter Nights Vision 6, 10, 22, 30–1, 36, 57–8, 88, 90, 139–42, 144, 147, 149–63, 165–6, 168 1815 7, 31, 74, 139 1938 6 1946 6, 74

201

mirror trope 18, 85, 129–30 Montaigne, Michel de 91, 108 Morpheus 66–8, 84 Munday, Anthony 45–6, 74–5, 142, 145 Murad III 54 muses 10, 83, 150–1, 163 music 61, 83, 164 mutability 8–9, 50, 55–6, 72, 74, 109, 121, 131, 141 myth 39, 48, 57–60, 68, 71, 90, 92, 98, 113, 116–17, 140, 142, 153, 163 nationalism 12, 29, 49, 61, 71, 128, 141, 151, 155, 161 Neoplatonism 68 Newton, Thomas 29, 32, 41, 123–4, 135–6 Nero 112, 118 Neville, Alexander 123 Niccols, Richard 2–6, 12–15, 22, 24, 30–4, 36, 38, 58, 74, 88, 90, 123, 139–71 Beggers Ape 140, 162–3, 166 Cuckow 36, 140, 150, 164 Englands Eliza 30, 139, 148, 151, 155, 161, 170 Expicedium 140 London’s Artillery 140, 148 Monodia 140, 151, 155–6 Sir Thomas Overburies Vision 140, 164–5 Three Sisters Teares 140 Winter Nights Vision, see Mirror editions Noah 145 Norman Conquest 104–5, 108, 113, 152 North, Thomas 47, 86, 122 Northern Rising 51 Norton, Thomas 22, 51–2, 81 Gorboduc 22, 51–2, 110–11, 124, 126, 136–7 nostalgia 140, 158, 161 oblivion 73, 84–6, 93, 117, 152, 156 Oedipus 98 orality 4, 6, 10, 12, 20–1, 27, 37, 47, 56, 62, 89, 100, 107, 117, 134–5, 137, 148, 159, 163, 165 Ortelius, Abraham 55, 101 Orwin, Joan 139 Orwin, Thomas 31 Ottoman Empire 54 Overbury, Thomas 164 Ovid 60–1, 94–5, 140, 153 Heroides 142 Metamorphoses 117, 140, 163 Remedia amoris 74, 94

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202

Index

Owen, George 145 Oxford 105 university 40, 139 pageant 20, 92, 130, 142, 145 Pandarus 21 panegyric 13, 30, 74, 139, 141, 151, 161–2 Parker, Matthew 47–8, 51, 104–7, 153 pastoral 82, 140, 142, 150, 162–4, 166 Peacham, Henry 112 Peele, George 111, 157 Perkins, William 40 Perseus 60 Persons, Robert 153–4 Petrarca, Francesco 92 Phaer, Thomas 15 Philomel 140, 153, 163–4 plague 23, 33, 136, 165 Plato 44, 87 Pliny the elder 76 Plotinus 43–4 Plowman, Piers 38 Plutarch 45, 47, 86, 90, 113, 122–3, 125 Pluto 68 Polybius 45, 94 Pompey 45, 69, 123 Porrex 125 Procne 117 prosopopoeia 92, 142–3 providence 9, 43, 107, 127–8, 133, 141, 154–6 Puttenham, George 113 Queen’s Men, the 124 Quintilian 86 Rankins, William 86, 134 Reformation, the English 19, 21, 36–8, 43–4, 46, 52, 57, 94, 104, 158 revisionism 6, 141, 149, 155–8 rhetoric 61, 79, 86, 92, 98–9, 163 Rich, Barnabe 167 Richard II 8, 27 Richard III 21, 117 Robinson, Richard 19, 27, 68, 75 romance 59, 61, 101, 113, 158–9 Rome 37–8, 49, 53–4, 105–6, 124–5, 137, 157, 160 Empire 53, 104, 111, 118, 121–2, 126–7, 154 Empire, Holy Roman 54, 102–3 Republic 58, 111, 121–2, 140 Romulus and Remus 127, 137

Sackville, Thomas 14, 22–3, 25, 31, 51–2, 68, 83, 112, 150–1, 163 Gorboduc, see Norton, Thomas Induction 14, 22–3, 31, 52, 65–9, 141, 168–9 Samson 117 Saravia, Adrian 81 satire 9–10, 19, 23, 36, 56, 103, 131, 140, 142, 146, 163–4 Menippean 16, 56 Savile, Henry 122 Saxons, see Anglo-Saxons Scipio Africanus 69, 123–4 Scotland 17, 30, 35, 52, 58, 121, 125, 127, 137, 144–5, 155, 166, 169 Selden, John 3, 144, 147 Sempill, Robert 121 Seneca (dramatist) 81, 123 Seneca (philosopher) 136–7 Seymour, Edward 18 Shakespeare, William 8–10, 22, 138, 148 Henry V 9, 103, 131 King John 157–8 Midsummer Night’s Dream 160, 166 Richard II 8–9, 148 Richard III 132, 168 Romeo and Juliet 87 Titus Andronicus 111, 126, 137 Sheffield 75 Sidney, Philip 58, 89, 113, 138, 147, 167 Simon Magus 117 Skelton, John 18–22, 29, 35, 88, 99, 121 Smith, Thomas 42 Somnus 66–8, 70 Sparta 81 speculum principis 16, 18–19, 114 Speed, John 144, 153, 159–60 Spenser, Edmund 8, 65, 72, 99, 107, 111, 121, 138, 147–8, 150–1, 155 Jacobean Spenserians 140, 151, 167 Faerie Queene 45, 50, 60, 87–9, 92–3, 99, 106, 109, 151, 156, 158–60, 167 Prosopopoia 162–3 Ruines of Time 55–6, 72, 159–60 Shepheardes Calender 65, 82, 95, 107, 113, 121 View of the Present State of Ireland 71–2 St Albans 55 battle of 21 Stafford, Henry 15, 26 Stow, John 29, 48, 51, 53, 59–60, 63, 97, 112, 115 Stuart, Mary, see Mary, Queen of Scots Stubbes, John 103

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Index Stubbes, Phillip 126 Suetonius 122 Tacitus 122–3 Taylor, John 144 Terence 41–2, 98 Terpsichore 83 Throckmorton plot 115 Thucydides 123 Tomkis, Thomas 88 Tours 55 translatio imperii 56, 146 translation 3, 16, 28, 40–2, 44, 71, 74, 93–5, 101, 122–4, 140 Troy 39, 48, 54–5, 57–8, 116–17 Turbervile, George 121 Tyler, Margaret 101 tyranny 16, 25, 51, 60, 81, 115, 126–8, 156, 158, 164–5, 169 Udall, Nicholas 29, 40, 42, 99

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Venus 76, 149 de Vere, Edward 1 Vergil, Polydore 53, 57, 82 Verstegen, Richard 153 Viking invasions, see Danes Virgil 23, 48–9, 69–70, 123, 141, 150, 155 virtues, cardinal 44, 71, 106 Wales 52–4, 57, 71, 103, 144–5 Warner, William 113, 139, 141 Wayland, John 14, 169 Webbe, William 113 Webster, Richard 74, 76–9 Wentworth, Peter 110–11, 167 Whetstone, George 75, 113, 127–8, 141 Whitchurch, Edward 42 White, Hayden 5, 170–1 William I 68, 74, 104–5, 108 Winsham 40 woodcuts 144, 170 Wyrley, William 35