JANE RICKARD. Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I.

Abstract

Unusually for an early modern King, James VI and I not only wrote but published a substantial corpus of both poetry and prose. He also cultivated relations with other writers, ranging from the French poet Sylvester du Bartas, who visited the Scottish court at James's invitation, to the English and European scholars who helped him in his polemical battles against Jesuit defenders of the papacy. James enjoyed writing as a recreation, but he also regarded his texts as political instruments, through which he strove to exercise control over his kingdoms’ political cultures, while simultaneously representing himself before both domestic and international audiences. And yet remarkably no one before Rickard has attempted a systematic analysis of his entire literary output. Individual works—especially the King's addresses to Parliament and his two prose treatises on monarchy, The true lawe of free monarchies and Basilicon Doron—have attracted considerable attention for the evidence they purportedly shed on the period's ‘constitutional conflicts’. More recently a few scholars have begun to investigate other Jacobean writings, and a collection of essays devoted to James as an author, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, appeared in 2002. Even this recent scholarship, however, tends to treat individual texts in isolation without trying to gain a perspective on the entirety of James's literary career, which spanned a forty-year period.