Affective History in A Mirror for Magistrates: Embodied Encounters and Performative Pasts

Abstract

Scholarship has largely ignored A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), and specifically its prose frame, because of the shamelessly unrealistic composition process it depicts. According to these prose pieces, the Mirror’s authors pretend to be fifteenth-century figures whose complaints they then record in the space of twenty-four hours. Passing over the Mirror’s fictionalized origins, however, obscures how its frame narrative transforms the act of writing historical verse tragedies into a performative, and problematically avant-garde, experience for the Mirror’s writers and readers. The Mirror’s prose frame enables its contributors to turn historical play-acting into an innovative methodology for experiencing the past in the present. The dramatized complaint poems require the Mirror’s authors to take on the stories, personalities, voices, and (imaginatively) mutilated bodies of past people; therefore, the prose frame invents a performative model of history, in which the past can be made emotionally and physically present. Changes in the Mirror’s second edition (1563) evidence a discomfort with and fear of the very encounters with history that this methodology enables. This affective reaction leads the Mirror authors to abandon a form of performative history that the following generation of English writers and playwrights deliberately seek out. [M.L.]