Earl Of Essex Research Articles

Book Review: Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essex and the Colonisation of North-East Ulster, c. 1573–6 by David Heffernan

Book Review: <i>Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essex and the Colonisation of North-East Ulster, c. 1573–6</i> by David Heffernan

Unwresting the Past: The Poetics and Politics of Samuel Daniel's 1595 Civil Wars

abstract: This essay reads the 1595 edition of Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars in the context of the unsettled succession and its impact on the career of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Daniel rejected the imitative logic of monarchical-republican historiography in favor of a rhetorical strategy that rendered the past less "real" than notional. He reconfigured Sidneian categories of understanding and structures of feeling, and redeployed figures of speech— prosopopeia and prosopographia —designated as carriers of energeia , to replace reading for imitation with a historiographical poetics that diffuses agency while retaining moral responsibility.

The First Shakespearean Forgeries

Abstract The term ‘Shakespearean forgery’ generally conjures up nineteenth-century figures such as J.P. Collier or W.H. Ireland. This paper proposes an alternative history of Shakespeare and forgery, by establishing the prevalence of forgery as a crime in Shakespeare’s own lifetime. This had a material impact on early modern players, who were frequently accused of forging documents of authentication when touring. Bringing together legislation and actual cases of forgery, I demonstrate a symbiotic relationship between authors and forgers, which then makes its presence felt in the literary output of the time, from Nashe’s pamphlet war with Gabriel Harvey to Jonson’s suspect documentation in Bartholomew Fair. For Shakespeare, examples from Hamlet, King Lear, and Twelfth Night are paired with historical cases to show how Shakespeare’s forgeries are more than just a plot device. I finish by drawing parallels between Malvolio and the Earl of Essex, himself a prominent victim of forgery, to reveal new connections made possible through a serious consideration of forgery.

PERROT, PIRATES AND PARISIAN GROCERS: SIR JOHN PERROT, COURT FACTION, JURISDICTIONAL CONFLICT AND THE AFFAIR OF THE PETER AND PAUL

The Marseilles ship, the Peter and Paul, became the object of a bitter dispute that internationalized an incident involving the royal courts of England, France, Portugal and Spain. At the time it was something of a cause célèbre that preoccupied the court, Privy Council and High Court of Admiralty. The significance of the ship's detention lies not so much in the incident itself but in the events surrounding it and the light it sheds on competing and conflicting jurisdictions involving the Westminster and Dublin governments. It reveals much about the bitter factionalism at the royal court which involved the Pembrokeshire magnate Sir John Perrot and Walter Devereux, earl of Essex.

Spenser’s View and the Production of Political Knowledge in Elizabethan England

Abstract This article analyzes the View as an example of knowledge production, rather than plumbing it for representation or ideology as scholars have traditionally done. Tracing the process of construction, sources, and generic conventions that Spenser wielded not only illuminates some of the more curious elements of the View, but also reveals his practices and motivations for it. As this article suggests, such an approach reinforces the idea that Spenser designed the View as an appeal for the patronage and support of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, by modeling specific forms of expertise and counsel characteristic of the Essex circle.

:Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essex, and the Colonization of North-East Ulster, c. 1573–1576

:<i>Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essex, and the Colonization of North-East Ulster, c. 1573–1576</i>

Walter Devereux, first earl of essex and the colonization of north-east Ulster, c.1573–6. By David Heffernan. Pp 192. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2018. €60.

Walter Devereux, first earl of essex and the colonization of north-east Ulster, <i>c</i>.1573–6. By David Heffernan. Pp 192. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2018. €60.

Reading and writing Frances Howard: “From Katherins dock there Lanch’t a Pinke” in context

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the literary, political, and bibliographical context of “From Katherins dock there Lanch’t a Pinke,” one of the most popular libels of the early Stuart period. This satirical account of Frances Howard’s divorce from the Earl of Essex and remarriage to the Earl of Somerset made a distinctive contribution to English literary and political culture throughout the seventeenth century. The poem distils information, tropes, and themes into a succinct form, presenting an opinionated narrative that could have attracted attention. Surviving copies of the text show readers taking an active interest in the poem, making their own additions and copying it out in many disparate contexts. The poem opens a window into the politicization of early modern culture, showing how authors and readers alike engaged with ideas that implicitly challenged the supremacy of court and monarch, through a text that appealed to those with an active interest in court politics, and those who read the poem for other reasons.

Popularity in Early Modern England (ca. 1580–1642): Looking Again atThingandConcept

AbstractAn important object of study in the historiography of early modern England, popularity has been examined in relation to figures such as the Earl of Essex and the Duke of Buckingham. It has been equally accounted for as the activity of MPs who fostered the cause of patriotic and freeborn Englishmen during the absolutist reigns of the early Stuarts. Popularity has also been dealt with when addressing resistance theory and people's power in pre-societal arrangements (“popular power”) and with regard to the popular component within a mixed government (“popular sovereignty”). Far less studied is another meaning ofpopularity, identified with direct democracy and its practices (“popular government”). This article shows how a large portion of public debate between the 1580s and 1642 focused on what were perceived as the threats of democratic strategies pursued by various (subversive) actors in England. Besides setting forth a revised understanding of the pejorative “popular” that distinguishes it from constitutional (republican) meanings on the one hand and from elite or royal popularity seeking on the other, this article unearths usages that presented it as an anarchic empowerment of the meanest of people—neither a mere theoretical sovereignty nor a mere right to be represented by one body in a mixed regime. Considering a composite range of sources and analyzing political, social, and, above all, ecclesiastical controversies, the article explains what democratic popularity was thought to stand for, who its exponents were, and how it was attacked from a wide spectrum of perspectives.

Francis Bacon and policy-making in Ireland under Elizabeth and James

This paper explores the impact that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had on Irish affairs during the final years of the reign of Elizabeth and the reign of James I. Bacon advised Robert Devereux, earl of Essex; Robert Cecil, secretary of state; James, king of Great Britain and Ireland; and George Villiers, earl of Buckingham on politics, religion and colonisation during a traumatic and transformative period in Anglo-Irish relations. Bacon was involved in judicial proceedings against Essex after his return from Ireland in 1600/01 and against Irish parliamentary dissidents in 1613/14. He later participated in making Irish policy as lord chancellor in Buckingham's regime. Successively adviser, actor and influencer in an increasingly absolutist political system, Bacon was a moderately inclined imperialist in Irish policy. As a metropolitan intellectual dealing with Ireland, his type was represented in contemporary literature by Spenser's character Eudoxus.

Jeffrey S. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Refreshingly, Jeffrey S. Doty writes like an historian. In the tradition of Christopher Hill, Keith Thomas, and Keith Wrightson, he seeks to master complexities, rather than to exacerbate them through fashionably oblique postulation and self-regarding intricacies of hypostatization. His clean prose pursues with honest clarity the topics outlined in his title, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere, to produce a slim, but learned, and perhaps seminal volume. Elizabeth I and James I, he reminds us, each remarked disconsolately that monarchy occupied a public stage, recognizing thereby the vulnerability of supreme power to assessment by the ogling multitude. ‘Public performance could win assent and adoration; publicity could also stain, degrade, and produce resistance’ (4). Officially, the commoners’ political role was reverential passivity; they were ‘things created’, in Coriolanus’ exasperated words (3.2.9–12), ‘to show bare heads, / In congregations, to yawn, be still, and wonder’ (169). Peter Lake and Steven Pincus have shown, however, that through the sixteenth century, elite incitements of commons support cumulatively created a post-Reformation public sphere, establishing the widespread recognition that authority might be buttressed by ‘popularity’ (The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Manchester University Press, 2007). ‘Popularity’ remained nonetheless a dirty word, stigmatizing those who courted it illegitimately as pandering to the potential many-headed monster. Thus, whilst Elizabeth’s calculated showcasing of ‘love’ to her people on progresses comprised an unprecedented and successful stratagem, the Earl of Essex’s competitive street-wooings had him proclaimed in Star Chamber in 1601 ‘a popular traytor’ (16). The trick, for non-royal political actors, was to grasp the substance without incurring the stain. Prince Henry’s wiles in the Henry IV plays succeed here deftly: determinedly sullying himself at Eastcheap, his reformation upon accession glitters o’er his fault, to win him the popularity that he appears, falsely, not to have courted (74). It was Shakespeare’s prescient and timely achievement, argues Doty, to dramatize the political imperative of popularity for any regime: a phenomenon whose ubiquity today obscures recognition that ‘Shakespeare’s integration of publicity into political action has no precedent in early modern drama’ (3, 191).

Elizabeth I and Her Circle. By Susan Doran.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xx+398. $39.95.

<i>Elizabeth I and Her Circle</i>. By Susan Doran.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xx+398. $39.95.

Nicholas Breton, the Earl of Essex, and Elizabethan Penitential Poetry

This essay reexamines the authorship of The Passion of a Discontented Minde (1601, 1602, 1621), a long penitential poem. It challenges on several counts the poem’s generally accepted attribution to Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, and argues the older case for Nicholas Breton. Analyzing aspects of the poem’s transmission in manuscript and print, I compare some verbal details in the poem with those in attested works by Breton. The poem’s attribution to Essex necessitates an extraordinary and implausible picture of his final hours in the Tower, whereas the work sits well alongside Breton’s contemporaneous devotional writings.

Henry Savile's Tacitus and the English role on the Continent: Leicester, Hotman, Lipsius

SUMMARYThis article argues that Henry Savile's widely admired Tacitus of 1591 should not be read as an implied call for a more aggressive English stance against Spanish advances on the Continent (as one recent article suggests), but precisely for a more restrained and prudential approach. Secondly, it calls into question the generally accepted view that Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, played a prominent role in the composition of the book. It argues that in reconstructing the work's original intellectual context and especially that of the supplement The Ende of Nero and the beginning of Galba, the main emphasis should not be on Essex's political and military career, but on that of his stepfather Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The article provides an investigation (as far as the surviving information allows) of the background in Continental politics and political thought in relation to the text of The Ende, which suggests that it should primarily be read from the perspective of the unsuccessful English intervention in the Low Countries in 1585–88.

Power, conflict and ritual on the fen-edge: the Anarchy-period castle at Burwell, Cambridgeshire, and its pre-Conquest landscape

ABSTRACTBurwell, Cambridgeshire, is best known as possessing a castle constructed by King Stephen during the mid- twelfth-century civil war commonly referred to as ‘the Anarchy’. Documentary sources confirm that the king built a series of fortifications around the East Anglian fen-edge during a.d. 1144 in an attempt to restrict the activities of the rebellious baron Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, who was using the Isle of Ely as a base to raid the surrounding countryside. Written texts also reveal how de Mandeville was mortally wounded during a skirmish or siege which subsequently took place at Burwell. A combination of topographic and geophysical survey, supplemented by documentary analysis, suggests that the castle was constructed in a landscape with a complex earlier history. It is suggested that during the Romano-British period a temple complex was developed on the site, with a spring rising on the edge of the fens providing the likely focus for ritual activity. Burwell later developed into an important early medieval place and the castle itself may have been inserted into a thegnly enclosure — an act which probably sought to appropriate a recognised pre-existing centre of power. The current research provides the most comprehensive assessment of the site to date, and supports existing interpretations which consider the twelfth-century castle to be incomplete. Analysis also gives additional insight into the functional and symbolic significance of the castle at Burwell, and sheds important light on the character of power and conflict in the fenland during the mid-twelfth century.

Lord Henry Howard, William Temple, and the Earl of Essex

This article reexamines a long and detailed manuscript narrative about the power struggle that took place in the latter half of 1600 around Elizabeth I’s famous favorite, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex (1565–1601). First studied in detail in 2012, this document offers insights into the political fall of Essex and the nature and operation of courtly politics in Elizabeth’s final years. Recent speculation has posited William Temple, subsequently the first lay provost of Trinity College Dublin, as the author of the narrative. This article conclusively demonstrates that the narrative’s author was not Temple but Lord Henry Howard, later Earl of Northampton. The article also sheds important new light on Temple’s career, especially in the aftermath of the Essex Rising of February 1601. More broadly, this article places both Temple and the manuscript narrative within the wider context of contemporary debate about which individuals or religious groups should be blamed for Essex’s fall.

Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and the Middle Way of Annals 1–6

Tacitus’s Annals 1–6 served as a guide to statesmen in the early Roman Empire, presenting the merits of a middle way in politics between the extremes of subservience and defiance. Drawing on Tacitus’s history, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus explores this Tacitean middle path, contrasting the prudent and moderate political strategy of the senator Lepidus with the destructive outspokenness of the Germanicans. Like Tacitus, Jonson engaged with contemporary political debates; he encouraged his audiences to observe parallels between the failure of the Germanicans and the downfall of the Earl of Essex.

Lytton Strachey : l’historien intime de deux reines

The British writer Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) wrote biographies of the two most eminent Queens of England : Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928). The two books made him a very famous historian. However, he would personally have preferred to be admired for his poetry or his plays, for he was a very gifted literary author. Nevertheless many of Strachey’s readers have appreciated his conception of biography, as a means of personal confession while studying the destiny of a public figure. Indeed the Stracheyan way of life, free from Victorian moral standards and guided by the rules of the Bloomsbury group, inspired his story of Victoria and Elizabeth. Both Queens at the end of their lives and at the height of their power carried on strange love affairs : Victoria with her Scottish gillie and Elizabeth with the Earl of Essex, thirty years her younger. In fact, both romances subtly reflect Strachey’s own love affairs. He was himself engaged in a kind of common life with Dora Carrington – the painter, thirteen years younger than him, with whom he was not sexually involved – while he engaged in numerous homosexual love affairs.

Illinois Shakespeare Festival (review)

Reviewed by: Illinois Shakespeare Festival Megan E. Geigner Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Bloomington. 1–2 August 2014. For the last thirty-seven years the Illinois Shakespeare Festival has produced three plays each summer, usually two Shakespeare scripts and a third non-Shakespeare script, in rotating repertory for its outdoor and indoor theatres. The twenty-five-to-thirty-person acting company plays roles in each of the plays, and usually the three productions do not reference one another. For instance, in the 2012 season, the festival produced As You Like It, Othello, and Sheridan’s The Rivals; in the 2014 season, however, artistic director Kevin Rich chose to produce Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, and Elizabeth Rex, and to interrelate the plays’ casting, allowing for a metatheatrical commentary on gender roles only possible in a rotating repertory season. Audiences were encouraged to see all three plays in order when possible: Much Ado About Nothing first, then Elizabeth Rex, and finally Antony and Cleopatra. The plays were bound together through Elizabeth Rex, an account of a fictional evening that Queen Elizabeth I spends chatting with Shakespeare, or Will (as he is called in the play), and his all-male acting company in a castle barnyard in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616. To distract herself from the impending death of her secret lover, the Earl of Essex, whom she has ordered to be executed at dawn, Elizabeth joins the actors just after they have finished performing Much Ado About Nothing. The acting company of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival had also just performed Much Ado About Nothing, either in the matinee hours earlier or the previous night. In fact, the festival actors began Elizabeth Rex as if they had just come backstage from Much Ado About Nothing. They were still wearing their Much Ado About Nothing costumes: a male Beatrice (Christopher Prentice) and male Hero (Colin Lawrence), among others, removing their wigs and makeup. All the while, Will (Thomas Anthony Quinn) wandered around the barn quoting from his new script-in-process, trying to understand the motivations of a queen, and priming the audience for the festival’s production of Antony and Cleopatra on the subsequent night. The look of the three shows and the marketing for the festival helped the audience to see them as parts of a whole. The front of the festival’s program featured side-by-side photographs of the actress playing both Cleopatra and Elizabeth (Deborah Staples) in full makeup, wig, and costume for each role, emphasizing the idea that she represented two iterations of a Shakespearean queen. Each production played on the same Globe Theatre–inspired set, with only set dressing to distinguish them, and the costumes were, for the most part, period. That said, each of the shows had its own director and could be viewed as a stand-alone production. Audience members who saw only Rich’s Antony and Cleopatra watched a production that set gendered Eastern decadence and Western discipline against each other, a theme in the script that was reiterated by the actors’ movement qualities. Cleopatra was portrayed as a self-indulgent, exotic, and at times hysterical (in the most gendered meaning of that word) queen whose uncontrolled emotions fueled her ultimate downfall. Dressed in silk gowns and lots of jewelry, she and her Alexandrian women, Charmain and Iras (Bethany Hart and Faith Servant), moved in ways markedly different than the Roman men. They danced, scurried, giggled, and draped themselves across men’s laps or the floor. In contrast, Octavius, Lepidus, and Pompey strutted and marched confidently around the stage dressed in togas and combat boots. Antony (Todd Denning), as the character straddling two cultures, was dressed like a Roman man, but moved like an Eastern woman: he danced, lounged on the floor, and wrapped himself around Cleopatra. His inability to conform to both gendered and Roman standards foreshadowed his doom. The striding men left little doubt that Rome held all the power. Cleopatra’s femininity was destabilizing though ultimately easily conquered, and the production suggested that women’s power is vulnerable, fleeting, and tied to men. Audiences that saw Paula Suozzi’s all-male Much Ado About Nothing, but not the other...

Religion Around Shakespeare by Peter Iver Kaufman (review)

Peter Iver Kaufman. Shakespeare. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. iii + 256. $34.95. Peter Iver Kaufmans appears as first installment in a series called Religion Around, of which Kaufman is general editor. series intends to bring religious background into foreground for cultural icons. For as recent to in studies suggests, this is no small task. difficulties, as Kaufman sees them, are first, that criticism has attended to the religion of Shakespeare rather than the religion around him (1); and second, that the ways plays are read (as laments for a religion that was lost or as intrigued, bemused, or cleverly critical reactions to religion found around him) often determine ways in which contexts are patched together (2-3). Kaufmans remedy is to begin by ignoring plays and reconstructing late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century religious milieu, and then by imagining what kind of religious views (and news) may have encountered, first in Stratford and then in London. Only after Kaufman has isolated times' religious character does he turn to Shakespeare's plays, but even here Kaufman insists he is uninterested in new dramatic interpretations, but instead docks evidence drawn from some plays alongside evidence left by preachers, churchwardens, vestrymen, polemicists, theologians, and diarists (4-5) to recover circumstance (5). Circumstance, Kaufman assures us, --the religion around playwright, not his faith or plays' proper interpretations--is my subject (5). Two chapters, Religion and Around Shakespeare, comprise book's first section. Religion begins in 1558 with establishment of a reformed church that owed due obedience to Queen Elizabeth and her bishops--a demand that challenged consciences of Catholics and Calvinists alike. Kaufman attempts to avoid contagious logophobia among historians of this contested Elizabethan Protestantism by adopting Charles Prior's choice of conformist and reformist--defined by degree of satisfaction with English church's state of reform--with caveat that puritan is useful for Calvinist pietists who internalized their dissatisfaction with reform by emphasizing their co-religionists' prodigality through excessive sermonizing and devotional literature (11). conformist/reformist binary envisions Jacobethan religion as conflicted both within church and between Protestants and Catholics. This chapter, then, considers both doctrinal differences (the efficacy of sermons versus sacraments, tensions between episcopacy and laity) and religious, or quasi-religious, political confrontations: Elizabeths conflict with Archbishop Grindal over prophesying; Pope Pius Vs excommunication of Elizabeth; Mary Queen of Scots' Catholic claim to succession; Alencon's courtship of Elizabeth framed by French wars of religion; Jesuit mission to England; Spanish threat, including Dutch Revolt, Armada, and earl of Essex's preemptive strikes against Spain and subsequent fall; and continuity into James I's reign of attitudes associated with these events, beginning with Hampton Court Conference and culminating in Gunpowder Plot. Kaufman skillfully weaves into his narration of these events their reception by Catholics, reformists, and conformists identifiable through sermons and printed texts. In considering such public responses, Kaufman is cautious about what could have known--as, for example, regarding Essex's fall, he notes, The importance of all this for a politically and confessionally non-aligned playwright living in London at time is hard to gauge (37). next chapter, Around Shakespeare begins in Stratford, where despite Shakespeare's family's possible fondness for old religion, power of local reformist notables like Robert Dudley, Thomas Lucy, and Edwin Sandys would have made outright expression of Catholic positions politically unwise. …