John Higgins’s First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1574–5)

Abstract

Chapter 2 introduces John Higgins’s first contribution to the corpus, and considers the ways in which his Mirror prequel works with Baldwin’s interest in textual transmission to retell the story of Britain’s legendary foundation. Contrasting the learned humanism of Higgins’s paratextual statements of intent with the dream vision in which his history is embedded, the chapter explores the anxieties attendant on Elizabethan historians of the English past, and what was at stake in the absence of a reliable national origin myth. We see Higgins employing a series of distancing techniques which evoke the inaccessibility and contested nature of ancient British history, such as medieval dream vision, while at the same time he draws his subjects closer by emphasizing the affective power and benefits of tragic narrative.