William Shakespeare’s Regnal Connections: Whose Court Is This Anyway?

Abstract

HORTLY after his arrival in London to ascend the throne of England, I^King James took under his protection the Lord Chamberlain's who were thenceforth known as the King's Men.1 This twentieth and nineteenth century way of thinking about Shakespeare in his milieu should by this time seem as out-of-date as the notion that Stratford-upon-Avon was a sleepy country village. Yet it is easy to understand how the yoking of England's premier poet with King James still holds an attraction for the authors of recent biographical comments about William Shakespeare. The King's Men: the phrase has a jaunty feel to it, redolent of camaraderie and masculinity as in Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, Men of Harlech, Give me some men who are stout-hearted men, and so on. Moreover, some kind of temperamental alliance between the king of England and England's king of poets seems to many commentators like a good idea because clearly Shakespeare had rare intellectual gifts and so, to some extent, did James. Yet this linkage, however intriguing, really has no place in appraisals of Shakespeare indicted in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It's therefore time to once again urge a narrative that conforms to our understanding of the cultural history of the period. This history suggests that if any royalty in the new Jacobean period was socially and intellectually situated to even be aware of