Gorboduc

Taking up the discussion of the influence of Scottish political events on English drama, this chapter focuses on a play traditionally seen to be a dramatic commentary on the succession anxiety surrounding Mary Stuart’s presence in England. However, this chapter attempts to move beyond topical political references, in order to analyze Gorboduc as the transitional play that not only broaches the issue of usurpation for the first time on the English stage, but also depicts regicide at the hands of rebelling subjects, all the while making oblique but identifiable references to the threat of usurpation emanating from Scotland. The overlap between monarchical absolutism and tyranny underpins the action in this play. Invoking Ernst Kantorowicz’s theorization of the ‘king’s two bodies’ and Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty as a critical framework, this chapter examines the way in which the play problematizes the relation of sovereign power to the person of the bearer, and thus problematizes the notion of monarchical absolutism itself.

Artful construction of the political realm

Continuing the discussion of Scottish texts and politics, this chapter focuses on George Buchanan’s Latin play Baptistes (roughly contemporaneous with Ane Satyre) and his later treatise De Iure Regni Apud Scotos, positing that unlike the playwrights and resistance theorists preceding him, Buchanan conceives of the state and its power as a human artefact rather than a product of divine making. This conception of politics not only aligns Buchanan with Machiavellian political thought in significant ways, but also, together with the fact that Scotland witnessed the actual deposition of the legitimate sovereign at the hands of her nobility, enabled him to formulate a defence of resistance that manages to overcome the limitations of traditional Calvinist resistance arguments.

Introduction

So as one may be a tyrant by the entrie and getting of the rule and a king in the administration thereof. As a man may thinke of Octavius and peradventure of Sylla. For they both comming by tyranny and violence to the rule did seeme to travaile verie much for the better ordering of the common wealth, although each after a diverse maner. Another may be a king by the entrie, and a tyrant by the administration, as ...

The kingly vice

Through a discussion of three early Tudor morality plays which foreground the figure of the tyrant, this chapter argues that, though early sixteenth-century English drama engages deeply with issues of tyranny and misuse of sovereign power, these plays are not concerned with the issue of usurpation. The nature or origins of sovereignty itself are not scrutinized in these plays. The ‘good king-bad tyrant’ conflict that is the central agon of later plays which pit the legitimate monarch against the usurper, is effaced as the good king himself transforms into the bad tyrant.

Sovereignty, counsel, and consent in Scotland

Prefaced with a discussion of the crucial importance of sage counsel in mitigating the debilitating effects of absolutist sovereignty in political theory, political practice and political drama, the second chapter looks at David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre as a departure from the standard pattern of Tudor moralities. It offers a reading of Ane Satyre as a play which attempts to counsel the counsellors of the monarch in political matters and tries to bring about social, political, economic, and religious reform, by exerting its influence on the convention of the three estates rather than the person of the monarch, thereby locating legislative and executive power in that representative body instead of the person of the sovereign.

Epilogue

The book concludes with a brief discussion of Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy: the one short-lived moment on the English stage which fully realizes the potential of the idea of a man-made etiology of politics through the figure of the ‘new prince’ who successfully establishes a new political order and a new dynasty. With particular focus on Richard II, I argue that even though Shakespeare, in the figure of Henry Bolingbroke, holds up for scrutiny what appears to be an exception to the usurper-tyrant overlap, by extending the central thesis of this book to this group of texts it can be shown that far from being an anomaly, in fact the operation of poiesis in political life is permitted legitimate theatrical expression in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy. A fuller analysis of this moment could be a potential subject for further research along the line of enquiry opened up in this book.

Tyranny added to usurpation

The last chapter analyzes three adaptations of the story of Richard III’s usurpation and trace a trajectory of the development of the usurpation plot from neo-Latin University plays to the commercial theatre of late-Elizabethan London in an attempt to delineate the politico-historical and ideological reasons for the gradual conflation of the notions of tyranny and usurpation. The usurpation plot and the tyrant-usurper protagonist, pushes against the ideological bulwark of divinely ordained sovereignty to foreground a cosmetic, manufactured notion of legitimacy. This movement can be read in conjunction with the Tudors’ concerted efforts of legally consolidating their questionable dynastic claims to the throne. Within the plays this conflictual intermeshing is complemented by the increasing importance accorded to the consent of the governed in matters of governance, both in drama and in contemporary political theory, marking a proto-liberal turn in humanist political thought.