The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare [1 ed.] 0199660840, 9780199660841

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E AG E OF SHA K E SP E A R E

The Oxford Handbook of

THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE Edited by

R. MALCOLM SMUTS

1

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 © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted 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: 2016933501 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​966084–​1 Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc 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.

Preface and Acknowledgements

Rather than concerning itself with specific aspects of Shakespearean drama, this collection seeks to provide a broad sampling of current historical research that sheds light on the environment in which Shakespeare wrote and the thematic content of his plays and poems. I have attempted to avoid duplicating topics already covered in the companion Handbook to Shakespeare edited by Arthur Kinney and other planned or published collections in the Oxford Handbooks of Literature series, such as the role of censorship or the history of acting companies and stage practices. I also make no claim to have provided systematic coverage of the historical ‘background’ to Shakespeare and other contemporary writers. This would not only be impossible to achieve even in a collection of this size but presumptuous to attempt, since doing so would imply that we can know in advance all the various ways in which history may become relevant to analysis of Renaissance literature. While some chapters in this volume do summarize current views on subjects of obvious importance to an understanding the period, I have included several chapters that adopt more unconventional approaches. The guiding principle has been a belief that relationships between literary and historical studies ought to remain flexible, open-​ended, and constantly evolving, rather than constrained by pre-​conceived ideas about the central issues and characteristics of the period. The collection will have succeeded if it stimulates readers to think more expansively about historicist approaches to Shakespeare, as well as the relevance of literary masterpieces to historical investigations. I would like to thank Arthur Kinney not only for commissioning this book but for numerous stimulating conversations, as well as both formal and informal opportunities to engage in interdisciplinary teaching within the highly congenial setting provided by the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, of which he is the founding director. My colleagues in the ‘Cultural History Group’ at the University of Massachusetts Boston—​especially Libby Fay, Robert Lublin, Woodruff Smith, and Nancy Stieber—​have also stimulated my thinking about interdisciplinary research. Keith Wrightson provided helpful advice on potential contributors at an early stage of the project. Paulina Kewes read and helpfully commented on the introduction to this collection, while she, Elizabeth Goldring, Paul Hammer, Roze Hentschell, Christopher Highley, Nicholas Popper, Deborah Shuger, Arthur Williamson, and Daniel Woolf provided constructive advice on preliminary drafts of several essays in the collection. Jacqueline Baker and Rachel Platt at Oxford University Press have been unfailingly helpful in answering endless detailed questions. Elizabeth Stone and Timothy Beck were exemplary copy editors. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Marybeth, for her support during the long gestation of this book.

Contents

List of Figures  List of Tables  List of Contributors  Abbreviations and Conventions  1. Introduction: Reflections on Interdisciplinary Frontiers  R. Malcolm Smuts

xi xv xvii xxv 1

PA RT I   P OL I T IC S 2. William Cecil Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabeth’s England  Norman Jones

21

3. The Earl of Essex  Paul E. J. Hammer

37

4. Robert Cecil and the Transition from Elizabeth to James I  Pauline Croft

51

5. James I and the Consolidation of British Monarchy?  R. Malcolm Smuts

66

6. War, Soldiers, and High Politics under Elizabeth I  D. J. B. Trim

82

7. Shakespeare, the Irish, and Military Culture  Rory Rapple

103

8. Catholicism and Tyranny in Shakespeare’s Warwickshire  Glyn Parry

121

9. Ancient Liberties, Royal Honour, and the Politics of Commonweal in English Forests, 1558–​1625  Dan Beaver

139

viii   Contents

PA RT I I   I N T E L L E C T UA L C U LT U R E A N D P OL I T IC A L T HO U G H T A N D I M AG I NAT ION 10. Poets, Patronage, and the Prince’s Court  Timothy Wilks

159

11. The Theatre and the ‘Post-​Reformation Public Sphere’  Peter Lake

179

12. Rhetorical Training in the Elizabethan Grammar School  Peter Mack

200

13. English Vernacular Historical Writing and Holinshed’s Chronicles  Daniel Woolf and Jane Wong Yeang Chui

213

14. European Historiography in English Political Culture  Nicholas Popper

231

15. Roman History, Essex, and Late Elizabethan Political Culture  Paulina Kewes

250

16. Other Republicanisms  Debora Shuger

269

17. The Gordian Knot of Policy: Statecraft and the Prudent Prince  Alexandra Gajda

286

18. Seneca and English Political Culture  Curtis Perry

306

19. David Hume, Richard Verstegan, and the Battle for Britain  Arthur Williamson

322

20. The Politics of Race in England, Scotland, and Ireland  Brendan Kane and R. Malcolm Smuts

346

PA RT I I I   A SP E C T S OF R E L IG IOU S C U LT U R E 21. English Catholics and the Continent  Katy Gibbons

367

22. The Bible in English Culture: The Age of Shakespeare  Naomi Tadmor

384

Contents   ix

23. Religious Nonconformity and the Quality of Mercy: The Merchant of Venice in Reformation Context  Ethan H. Shagan 24. Protestantism and the Devil  Tom Webster

398 418

PA RT I V   S O C IA L B E L I E F S A N D P R AC T IC E S 25. The Affective Life in Shakespearean England  Linda Pollock

437

26. Chivalry and the English Gentleman  Richard Cust

458

27. Elizabethan Verse Libel  Alan Bryson

477

28. Gender, Writing Technologies, and Early Modern Epistolary Communications  James Daybell

493

29. The Shamings of Falstaff  Brian Weiser

512

30. Cuckold’s Haven: Gender and Inversion in Popular Culture  Susan D. Amussen

528

31. ‘Murder’s Crimson Badge’: Homicide in the Age of Shakespeare  K. J. Kesselring

543

32. Thinking with Poison  Alastair Bellany

559

33. Criminal London: Fear and Danger in Shakespeare’s City  Paul Griffiths

580

34. Families and Households in Early Modern London, c.1550–​1640  Vanessa Harding

596

35. Theatre, Church, and Neighbourhood in the Early Modern Blackfriars Christopher Highley

616

x   Contents

36. The Cultural Geography of St Paul’s Precinct  Roze Hentschell

633

PA RT V   A RC H I T E C T U R E , V I SUA L C U LT U R E , A N D  M U SIC 37. Art and Architecture in Provincial England  Robert Tittler

653

38. Garden Design and Experience in Shakespeare’s England  Luke Morgan

678

39. Art Collecting and Patronage in Shakespeare’s England  Elizabeth Goldring

704

40. Graphic Satire and the Printed Image in Shakespeare’s London  Helen Pierce

724

41. Music and the Stage in the Time of Shakespeare  Ross W. Duffin

748

Bibliography  Index 

765 787

List of Figures

19.1

Title page to David Hume, Daphn’Amaryllis (London, 1605) with heraldic image of the Scottish lion ‘unbounded’ (without tressor). 

338

19.2

Conventional heraldic image of the Scottish lion, bounded by tressor. 

339

19.3

Revised title page to David Hume, Daphn’Amaryllis, with the anchor of faith replacing the Scottish lion. 

339

22.1

A page from the only extant working copy of the King James Bible, showing revisions of the Bishop’s Bible in preparation for the King James Version. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

387

22.2

Needlepoint image, ‘The Queen of Sheba before King Solomon’ from Milton Manor House, Oxfordshire. Courtesy of Anthony Mockler-​Barrett. 

395

26.1

Sir William Drury (1550–​1590), by Daniel van der Queecborne. 

459

37.1

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-​upon-​Avon. 

655

37.2

Leominster Guildhall, John Abel, c.1633–​34, adopted from J. Claydon, A Collection of Ancient Timbered Edifices of England (1846). 

656

37.3

Norwich Guildhall, façade, 1535–​38. 

657

37.4

Titchfield, Hampshire. Town Hall, late 16th century. Author’s photograph, taken at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, Singleton, Sussex. 

658

37.5

Longleat House, Wiltshire, Robert Smythson, 1568–​80. 

663

37.6

Gate of Honour, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, c.1573–​75. 

664

37.7

Anon., ‘Bishop John Alcock’, oil on panel, c.1598. By Permission of the Master and fellows, Jesus College, Cambridge. 

670

37.8

‘Byrd’, attrib., ‘Sir Edward and Lady Elizabeth Stradling’, oil on panel, 1590. By kind permission of the Church in Wales. 

671

37.9

Anon., ‘John and Dorothy Kaye’, oil on panel, 1567. Kirklees Museums and Galleries. 

672

37.10 Anon., ‘The Towneley Family at Prayer’, 1593, oil on panel. Towneley Hall, Burnley Borough Council.  37.11

Anon., ‘John and Joan Cooke’, oil on panel, 1610s. Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery. 

673 674

xii   List of Figures 37.12 Anon., Wall Painting at 3 Cornmarket, Oxford. By kind permission of the Oxford Preservation Trust. 

676

Salomon de Caus, Problem 23, Book I, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes (Frankfurt: Jan Norton, 1615). Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, Washington, D.C.

680

38.2

Anthonis van Wyngaerde, Hampton Court Palace and Gardens, c.1555. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 

683

38.3

The Privy Garden, Kenilworth Castle, reconstruction by English Heritage, 2009. Photograph: Luke Morgan. 

687

38.4

Gillis van den Vliete, Goddess of Nature, 1568, Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photo: Luke Morgan. 

691

38.5

Costantino de’ Servi, Proposed Plan of Richmond Palace Gardens, 1611, Archivio di Stato, Florence, Miscellanea Medicea 93, ins. 3, n. 106. Courtesy of the Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. 

693

38.6

Giovanni da Bologna, Appennino, 1570–​80, Villa Medici (now Demidoff), Pratolino. Photograph: Luke Morgan. 

694

38.7

Fountain of the Dragons, 1570s, Villa d’Este, Tivoli. Photograph: Luke Morgan.

702

39.1.

Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, by Daniel Mytens, c.1618. Oil on canvas, 207 × 127 cm, © National Portrait Gallery, London.

713

39.2.

Alatheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel, by Daniel Mytens, c.1618. Oil on canvas, 207 × 127 cm, © National Portrait Gallery, London.

714

40.1

Gyles Godet, The Good Hows-​holder, 1564–​65, published 1607, © The Trustees of the British Museum. 

726

40.2

The Double Deliverance: 1588: 1605, designed by Samuel Ward, 1621, © The Trustees of the British Museum. 

731

40.3

The Royall Line of Kings, Queenes, and Prince, from the Uniting of the Two Royall Houses, Yorke, and Lancaster, c.1613, © Society of Antiquaries of London.  733

40.4

Whilst Maskinge In Their Folleis All Doe Passe, attributed to Reynold Elstrack, 1607. This impression published 1671, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

735

40.5

Martin Droeshout, Dr Panurgus, 1620s. This impression published 1672, © The Trustees of the British Museum. 

737

40.6

Broadside, Fill Gut and Pinch Belly: One Being Fat With Eating Good Men, the Other Leane For Want of Good Women, 1620, © Society of Antiquaries of London. 

739

38.1

List of Figures    xiii 40.7

Mistris Turners Farewell to All Women, © Society of Antiquaries of London. 

741

40.8

The Tree of the Papacy, c.1580, © The Trustees of the British Museum. 

743

40.9

The Revells of Christendome, c.1609. This impression published c.1690 for Mary Oliver, © The Trustees of the British Museum. 

745

List of Tables

31.1

Domestic Killings

548

31.2

Means of Causing Death 

549

List of Contributors

Susan D. Amussen is Professor of History at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988) and Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–​1700 (2007). She is currently completing a book (with the late David Underdown) tentatively titled, Turning the World Upside Down: Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–​1640. Dan Beaver is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University. He is the author of Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester (1998) and Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (2008). He is currently working on a book project entitled Political Culture and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic: Cape Ann, 1623–​1692. Alastair Bellany is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. His works include: The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–​1660 (2002); ‘Early Stuart Libels:  An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources’ (2005) (edited with Andrew McRae); and (with Thomas Cogswell) The Murder of King James I (2015). Alan Bryson is a Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University. He works on the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, with a particular interest in relations between the Crown and the nobility and gentry. He has co-​edited Bess of Hardwick’s Letters (2013) and Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland (2016). He is writing a monograph on lordship and government in mid-​Tudor England. Pauline Croft is editor of, and contributor to, Patronage Culture and Power: The Early Cecils (2002), and author of King James (2003). She has also published numerous academic articles dealing with aspects of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean politics, including ‘The State of the World is Marvellously Changed: England Spain and Europe 1558–​1604’, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. S. Doran and G. Richardson (2005). Richard Cust is Professor of History at the University of Birmingham. He has published extensively on late Tudor and early Stuart politics and elite culture, most recently Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–​1642 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). James Daybell is Professor of Early Modern British History at Plymouth University, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is author of The Material Letter in Early

xviii   List of Contributors Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-​Writing, 1512–​1635 (2012), Women Letter-​Writers in Tudor England (2006); editor of Early Modern Women’s Letter-​Writing, 1450–​1700 (2001), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–​1700 (2004), (with Peter Hinds) Material Readings of Early Modern Culture, 1580–​ 1730 (2010), (with Andrew Gordon) Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain, 1550–​1642 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–​1690 (Ashgate, 2016), and has written more than thirty articles and essays on the subjects of early modern letter-​writing, women, gender, and politics. He is editor (with Adam Smyth, Balliol College, Oxford) of the Ashgate book series ‘Material Readings in Early Modern Culture’, Co-​Director (with Kim McLean-​ Fiander) of the British Academy-​Leverhulme-​funded project, ‘Women’s Early Modern Letters Online’, and Co-​Director with Svante Norrhem (Lund University) of the AHRC-​ Research Network ‘Gender, Politics and Materiality in Early Modern Europe’. Ross W. Duffin is Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Author of Shakespeare’s Songbook (W. W. Norton, 2004), he is at work on a book about songs in English Renaissance comedy. Alexandra Gajda is John Walsh Fellow and Associate Professor in History at Jesus College, Oxford University. She is the author of The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and other articles and essays on the political and intellectual culture of early modern England and Europe. Katy Gibbons is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth. She is the author of English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (2011), and is currently researching the Percy family and their connections to the continent in the Elizabethan period. Elizabeth Goldring is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick. Recent publications include Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art: Painting and Patronage at the Court of Elizabeth I (Yale University Press, 2014), which won the 2015 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Art History; and, as General Editor, John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources (5 vols, Oxford University Press, 2014), which won both the 2015 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Reference and the 2015 MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. Paul Griffiths is Professor of Early Modern British History at Iowa State University and author of Youth and Authority:  Formative Experiences in England, 1660–​1640 (1996) and Lost Londons: Crime, Control, and Change in the Capital City, 1550–​1660 (2008). He is currently finishing Inside Government: Information, Institutions, and Identities in England, 1550–​1700. Paul E. J. Hammer is Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is The author of The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–​1597 (1999), Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and

List of Contributors    xix Society in Tudor England, 1544–​1604 (2004), Warfare in Early Modern Europe, 1450–​1660 (edited 2007) and numerous articles. He is currently completing a book on the Essex Rising and the politics of treason in early modern England. Vanessa Harding is Professor of London History at Birkbeck, University of London, and has published on London’s social, economic, and demographic history, and the history of death and burial. She has a particular interest in urban space and topography and in the interaction of health and environment. Roze Hentschell is Professor of English at Colorado State University. Her works include:  The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England:  Textual Constructions of a National Identity (2008); Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson:  Laureations (co-​ edited with Kathy Lavezzo, 2011); and Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–​1650 (co-​edited with Amanda Bailey, 2010). She is currently working on a book on St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct. Christopher Highley is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. His books include Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2008). His book in progress is called Blackfriars: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood in Shakespeare’s London. He is also working on the afterlives of Henry VIII and memories of the Reformation. Norman Jones is Professor of History at Utah State University and Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellow at the Henry E. Huntington Library (2015–16). His first book, Faith by Statute Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559 (1982), won the Whitefield Prize from the Royal Historical Society. His other monographs include God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (1989), The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (1993), The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (2002), and Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (2015). His Being Elizabethan is forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell. He co-edited with David Dean Interest Groups and Legislation in Elizabethan England, a special issue of Parliamentary History (1989) and The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (1990). With Robert Tittler he co-edited the Blackwell Companion to Tudor Britain (2004). With Susan Doran he co-edited The Elizabethan World (2011). With Daniel Woolf he co-edited Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2007). Brendan Kane is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–​1641 (2010/​2014) and co-​editor with Valerie McGowan-​Doyle of the collection Elizabeth I and Ireland (2014). Currently he is completing a book on knowledge production and legitimacy in early modern Ireland, and directing (with Tom Scheinfeldt) a multi-​institutional, collaborative digital humanities project ‘Reading Early Modern Irish: A Digital Guide to Irish Gaelic (c.1200–​1650)’.

xx   List of Contributors K. J. Kesselring is a Professor of History and of Gender and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University. Currently completing a project on early modern homicide, her previous publications include Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (2003), The Northern Rebellion of 1569 (2007), and a series of articles on felony forfeiture. She has also recently co-​edited with Tim Stretton a collection of essays on Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (2013). Paulina Kewes is a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has published widely on early modern literature, history, and politics. Her books include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–​1710 (1998), This Great Matter of Succession: Politics, History, and Elizabethan Drama (forthcoming) and, as editor or co-​editor, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2006), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2013), and Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2014). She is a Co-​Investigator on the major AHRC-​funded Stuart Successions project. Peter Lake is Distinguished University Professor of Early Modern English History at Vanderbilt University. He has just completed, with Isaac Stephens, Scandal and Religion in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy and Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in Elizabethan England. He is in the process of completing a book on Shakespeare’s history plays and the politics of the 1590s. Peter Mack is a Professor of English at the University of Warwick. He has been editor of Rhetorica and Director of the Warburg Institute, University of London. He is the author of Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (1993), Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (2002), Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (2010), and A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–​1620 (2011). Luke Morgan is an Associate Professor in Art History at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His books include Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-​ Century Landscape Design (2007) and The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2015). His current research, which is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, focuses on the theme of enchantment in English Renaissance literature and gardens. Glyn Parry is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Roehampton, London, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He recently published The Arch-​Conjuror of England:  John Dee (2012), which was runner-​up for the Longman/​ History Today Prize 2013, and has published widely on Elizabethan History in The Historical Journal, The English Historical Review, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Parliamentary History, History of Science, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, The Huntington Library Quarterly, and other leading journals. He is currently writing an archival-​based study of Shakespeare in his Warwickshire and London context (with Dr

List of Contributors    xxi Cathryn Enis), as well as studies of magic at the Court of Elizabeth I, and the scandalous life of Thomas Digges. Curtis Perry is a Professor of English (with a courtesy appointment in Classics) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the author of The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He has also published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects pertaining to early modern English literature and culture, and he has been editor or co-​editor of three books, including (with John Watkins) Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book-​ length project with the working title ‘Shakespeare and the Resources of Senecan Drama’. Helen Pierce is a Lecturer in British Art at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Her research has explored the relationship between visual culture and political debate during the seventeenth century, and her publications include Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (2008). She is now working on a study of art patronage and production in Interregnum England. Linda Pollock is a Professor of History at Tulane University. Her publications include Forgotten Children. Parent-​Child Relations from 1500 to 1800; With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–​1620; ‘The practice of kindness in early modern elite society’ Past and Present, no. 211, 2011; ‘Anger and the negotiation of relationships in early modern England’. Historical Journal, 47 (2004) along with articles on such topics as honour, patriarchy, childbirth, younger sons and the education of women. She is currently writing a book on affect and morality in early modern England. Nicholas Popper is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). His work on early modern intellectual history, history of science, political practice, and book history has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Huntington Library Quarterly, Archival Science, TLS, and elsewhere. His current projects include a book examining how the proliferation of archives transformed politics and epistemology in early modern Britain. Rory Rapple is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland 1558–1594 (Cambridge, 2009). He is currently working on a biography of Sir Humphrey Gilbert as well as other topics to do with English political thinking in the sixteenth century. Ethan H. Shagan is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003) and The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraints in Early Modern England (2011), and editor of Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity

xxii   List of Contributors in Early Modern England (2005). He is currently writing a book entitled The Problem of Belief in Early Modern Europe. R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His publications include Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (1987), Culture and Power in England 1585–​1685 (1998), and numerous articles and edited works relating to the politics and culture of early modern England and Europe. Debora Shuger is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and author of Sacred Rhetoric (1988), Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (1990), The Renaissance Bible (1994), Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (2001), and Censorship and Cultural Sensibility (2006). She is also editor of Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (1997, with Claire McEachern), Religion in Early Stuart England, 1603–1638 (2012), and Religion in Tudor England (forthcoming, with Ethan Shagan). Naomi Tadmor is Professor of History at Lancaster University. She is the author of Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), and The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), and co-​editor of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996). Robert Tittler is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, Concordia University, and has published over fifty scholarly essays and ten books, the most recent of which are The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007; 2012), and Painters, Portraits, and Publics in Provincial England, 1500–​1640 (Oxford, 2012; 2013). He received a festschrift from his colleagues in 2007: Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Norman L. Jones and Daniel Woolf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). D. J. B. Trim is Director of the Archives of the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists and Professor of Church History at Andrews University. His publications include European Warfare 1350–1750 (co-edited, Cambridge, 2010) and Humanitarian Intervention: A History (co-edited, Cambridge, 2011). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Tom Webster is Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Godly Clergy in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), editor of The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–​1638 (Woodbridge, 2008), and co-​editor, with Francis J. Bremer, of Puritans and Puritanism in England and America (Santa Barabara, 2006). He has forthcoming work on demonic possession and is completing work on the relationship between diabolic possession and mystical vision between c.1580 and 1660. Brian Weiser is Associate Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He has published Charles II and the Politics of Access and several articles on representations of and to Charles II. His current project, ‘The Vicar, the Playwright, and the

List of Contributors    xxiii Horse-​Gelder’, uses the curious incident of the public shaming of a Thomas Payne, vicar of Waterbeach, as a window into a variety of aspects of early modern English society including the relationship of preacher and parishioner, sexual morality, drunkenness, and marital violence. Timothy Wilks is Professor of Cultural History at Southampton Solent University. His research interests include European court cultures and the history of collecting. He was the consultant for The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart exhibition and book (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2012). His recent publications include A Life of Richard, 1st Lord Dingwall and Earl of Desmond, c.1570–​1628 (2012), and, as co-​author, The Jacobean Grand Tour: Early Stuart Travellers in Europe (2014). Arthur Williamson’s most recent book is Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World (Praeger-​Greenwood). He has taught at the University of Chicago (Harper Fellow), at NYU where he served as the Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and at California State University, Sacramento, where he served as the Dean of Graduate Studies. He is currently completing a volume under the title ‘The Nation Epidemicall’: Scotland and the Rise of Anglo-​America. Jane Wong Yeang Chui is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She teaches Renaissance Literature and Modern Asian Literature at NTU. Her research interests include early modern history and literature, particularly in the representations of colonial administration in early modern Ireland, Asian Historical Fiction, and modern British drama. She has published essays on theatre and drama in Modern Language Review, TDR: The Drama Review, and the author of Affirming the Absurd in Harold Pinter (2013). Daniel Woolf is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he is also Principal and Vice-​Chancellor. The author and editor of several books and articles on early modern English historical thought and writing, his most recent book is A Global History of History (2011). He served as General Editor of the five-​volume Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011–​12; paperback 2015). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Historical Society, and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Abbreviations and Conventions

Unless otherwise indicated all references to Shakespeare’s plays are to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (general eds), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). APC

Acts of the Privy Council

BL

British Library

Bod

Bodleian Library, Oxford

CSPD

Calendar of State Papers Domestic of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I, 12 vols (London: Longman, 1856–​72)

HMC

Historical Manuscripts Commission

HMC, Salisbury Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 24 vols (London: HMSO, 1883–​1971) HMSO

Her (His) Majesty’s Stationery Office

N&Q

Notes and Queries

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition 2008 < http://​www.oxforddnb.com >)

SP State Papers TNA

The National Archives

Chapter 1

Introduc t i on Reflections on Interdisciplinary Frontiers R. Malcolm Smuts

Historicism has become the dominant approach to literary studies in the early twenty-​ first century. But what does it mean to study a writer such as Shakespeare historically, and how can we do so without emptying his plays and poems of their aesthetic value by reducing them to the status of mere documents?1 To answer this question we must first recognize that there is no single way of historicizing early modern literature because the history in which it is embedded is complex, multifaceted, and capable of being investigated from any number of directions. Rather than talking in monolithic terms about the relationship of ‘history’ to ‘literature’ we need to ask how different forms of historical investigation can aid literary analysis in specific ways. Far from generating formulaic interpretations, historicism, when properly practised, uses discoveries about the past to formulate questions and reading strategies that enrich understanding of texts and the processes involved in their creation and circulation. This is not simply a matter of discovering factual information that helps ‘contextualize’ literature, although historical research certainly can do this.2 It may also involve unearthing features embedded within well-​known texts that have gone unrecognized because readers have overlooked ways in which authors incorporated material from their environment into the fabric of their writing.3 Historicism and formalist close reading are often represented as opposing methodologies, but this need be the case only if we construe both in reductive ways. Proper attention to the formal and aesthetic qualities of texts can enrich our 1 

Marshall Grossman, ‘Limiting History’, in Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 65–​84. 2  Robert Hume, Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-​Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 3  See Arthur Kinney, Lies Like Truth: Macbeth and the Cultural Moment (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001) for a systematic discussion.

2   R. Malcolm Smuts understanding of their historical significance, just as expanded historical awareness can enhance our ability to understand the play of intelligence and imagination that makes great literature worth reading. Edited by a historian and consisting mainly, although not entirely, of essays by other historians, this collection seeks to provide a resource for undergraduates and more advanced students of literature who want to explore new ways of connecting current research on English history during Shakespeare’s lifetime to investigations of his drama and poetry. While a few chapters do offer fresh readings of specific plays, and many others relate their findings to particular themes in Shakespearean texts, we have deliberately avoided prescriptive discussion about applications of history to literary analysis. We hope instead to inspire readers to wrestle with historicist problems independently, using the essays assembled here as a fund of usable material.

Literary Historicism and the Discipline of History since the 1980s It may nevertheless be useful to offer some initial observations, from one historian’s perspective, on how interdisciplinary frontiers have shifted over the past generation. A turn back towards history famously intensified in English departments in the 1980s, with the rise of American new historicism and British cultural materialism. But this was a particular kind of historicism, strongly shaped by theory—​ especially the work of Michel Foucault and various forms of Marxism—​a long with a desire to address political and social issues in the present. It also represented a reaction against formalist methodologies and related concepts of great literature as embodying timeless aesthetic values, which seemed constraining to younger critics eager to find new ways of interpreting texts and connecting them to contemporary concerns and the insights of other disciplines.4 The best New Historicist work breathed a spirit of intellectual adventure, a desire to break the shackles of established methodologies in pursuit not only of new discoveries but new ways of reading. Ironically, at almost exactly the same moment a ‘revisionist’ movement among historians of early modern English politics had begun moving in an opposite direction, by reacting against the expansive syntheses of scholars such as Lawrence Stone, H. R. 4  Early surveys of the historicist turn in literary studies include Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992) and Jonathan Dolimore and Alan Sinfeld, Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Reflections on Interdisciplinary Frontiers    3 Trevor Roper, and Christopher Hill, which had been shaped by debates over Marxism and social theory, and calling for a return to rigorous archival research into political events in precisely defined periods.5 Sceptical of interpretations driven by theory rather than empirical research, revisionist historians like Conrad Russell and J. S. Morrill also downplayed the significance of ideological conflict over secular issues, and attempts to explain political division as a manifestation of underlying social and economic stress. The Marxist historiography of Hill, along with Stone’s ambitious attempt to synthesize political, social, and economic history into an analysis of the deep ‘causes of the English Revolution’ of the 1640s, became particular targets. Although the revisionist movement encountered resistance, especially in the United States, it led to a decidedly more sceptical and empiricist historiographical climate, favouring tightly focused research over large speculative claims.6 Revisionists also undermined the ‘Whig’ and Marxist master narratives that had long provided frameworks for understanding the broad contours of early modern English history, including cultural history. Until the 1970s it was generally assumed that a relatively stable Elizabethan society had entered a period of crisis and eventual revolution in the seventeenth century, culminating in the 1640s. Historians argued over the nature and causes of this crisis and the ways in which political disputes over Stuart absolutism merged with other conflicts involving religion, class interest, structural tensions between the state and society and cultural divisions between court and country. But few questioned that some sort of revolutionary crisis had developed over a fairly prolonged period, or that it had something to do with both political resistance to Stuart monarchs and a wider array of socio-​economic and cultural issues. Revisionists attacked this model at its roots by questioning the existence of Stuart absolutism and a formed opposition to the Crown in the period before 1637, while debunking attempts to relate the civil wars of the 1640s to a ‘crisis in society’.7 This implicitly undercut cultural materialism’s reliance on Marxist theory and new historicism’s central concern with a relatively monolithic concept of monarchical state power. In many ways, the revisionist history and literary historicism of the late twentieth-​ century were therefore temperamental and philosophical opposites, for reasons having more to do with the internal evolution of two disciplinary traditions than with any fundamental incompatibility of textual analysis and historical research. Although this did not entirely prevent interdisciplinary dialogue it did somewhat inhibit it. One leading revisionist, Kevin Sharpe, embraced the call for studies of the role of literary and artistic ‘representations’ in early modern politics, and from the 1980s a handful 5  Revisionist scholarship is, of course, capable of taking any number of different forms but in this context the term refers specifically to a reaction against the historiographical orthodoxy of the third quarter of the twentieth century, by historians including Conrad Russell, J. S. Morrill, Kevin Sharpe, and Mark Kishlansky. 6  For revisionist arguments and methodology see, esp., Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War 1630–​1648 (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1999), with its autobiographical introductory chapter on how the author became a ‘revisionist’. 7  See, esp., Russell, Causes of Civil War.

4   R. Malcolm Smuts of interdisciplinary collections of essays began to appear.8 But many historians either ignored or sharply criticized interpretations of literary historicists as thinly documented, irresponsibly speculative, and rooted in discredited historical interpretations. Fortunately, matters soon began to improve as the result of convergent trends in both disciplines. The relative decline of Marxism and theory within English departments encouraged more empirically grounded work, including archival research. Many historians meanwhile became more interested in culture and rhetoric, partly in reaction against an excessively narrow revisionist concept of politics. They argued that political history must properly involve not only the reconstruction of sequences of events but investigations of how those events were perceived, interpreted, and publicized, and therefore of the media and rhetorical strategies through which information was disseminated and interpreted.9 This ‘cultural turn’ had the potential to dovetail into efforts by some literary historicists to extend their enquiries beyond criticism of a restricted list of canonical works to incorporate analysis of lesser-known writings and genres, the processes through which texts were created, disseminated, and consumed, and the porous boundaries separating literary work from other social practices. The confluence of interests has been especially evident in work on the 1640s and 1650s, no doubt because the explosion of politically motivated print culture in those decades provides ideal material for interdisciplinary analysis.10 But it has also affected other periods, in part through the emergence of new fields that straddle conventional disciplinary boundaries, including histories of reading practices, the book and other forms of print, manuscript culture, and relationships between literacy and oral communication.11 James Daybell’s chapter in this collection on ‘Gender, Writing Technologies and Early Modern Epistolary Communications’ and Alan Bryson’s discussion of ‘Verse Libels and the Public Sphere’

8

  Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the Age of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 9  Among many examples see Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Anne Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-​Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); and The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 10  Compare Hughes, Gangraena to, e.g., Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) and Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–​1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, revised edn, 2005). 11  e.g. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–​78; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2000); Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–​ 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Reflections on Interdisciplinary Frontiers    5 provide good examples of how recent work has begun to integrate social history with analysis of previously under-​studied literary forms, such as the personal letter and defamatory po