House ofMirrors: Textual Variation and theMirror for Magistrates

Abstract

Lily B. Campbell's 1938 edition has decisively shaped current scholarship on the Mirror for Magistrates, a sixteenth/seventeenth-century poem taking as its subject British history. Though sixteen texts calling themselves the Mirror for Magistrates (or some variation thereon) were published between 1554/5 and 1620, under the leadership of several editors (William Baldwin, John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols), Campbell focuses on the earlier versions, selectively including the 1554/5–1587 editions (the material edited by or connected to Baldwin), and excluding the seventeenth-century texts entirely. My essay endeavors first to illuminate this complex textual history, and to suggest that a reckoning with the Mirror whole opens on to some crucial concerns for the literary history of the period, such as the role of the printer in producing the text, the uses of history in public discourse, and the status of the author in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.