Elizabethan History Research Articles

Passion and Politics in Diego de Brea and Jakub Čermák’s "Edward II": Marlowe’s Controversial History on Czech Stages

The present article outlines the stage history of Christopher Marlowe’s history Edward II on Czech stages, focusing chiefly on how the respective directors approached the titular character of Marlowe’s play and his sexuality. The study focuses on two post-2000 productions of the play: Diego de Brea’s Edvard Drugy for the Slovenian National Theatre, which toured to the 16th “Divadlo” International Theatre Festival in Pilsen, West Bohemia, in 2008; and Jakub Čermák’s production of Edvard II. for the independent Czech theatre company “Depresivní děti touží po penězích” (Depressive Children Yearn for Money) that premiered in 2023 in Prague. Since for both Czechs and Slovenians, King Edward II is a minor figure of English history and Elizabethan history plays are generally less appealing to them than other genres, both the directors sideline the political dimension of the story to fully explore the issue of social and sexual norms and relate it to current social and cultural discussions both in the West and the former Eastern Bloc. Stressing the motif of social and sexual otherness even more bravely than most recent Western productions, de Brea and Čermák offered not only valuable contributions to both local and global reception of Marlowe’s Edward II, but also raised the visibility of LGBT theatre in a region where it has only a modest history and tradition.

Republican Reimaginings in Marlowe’s Edward II

This essay explores the intersection of republican and nationalist ideas in Marlowe’s Elizabethan history play Edward II. I read the play less in terms of recent dominant readings: that is, focussing on the same-sex relation between King Edward and his ‘minion’ Gaveston. Instead, I focus on the play’s critique of Edward’s authoritarian and arbitrary rule, a critique of monarchy informed by proto-republican ideology and a nascent nationalism. This essay also considers the play’s archipelagic angles within the context of the play’s initial inscription—Queen Elizabeth’s two-kingdom, three-nation rule—as well as its Jacobean publications.

Dostlar ve Hizipler Üzerine: Shakespeare’in Tarih Oyunları

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal and vertical social relations were to be conducted within theatricality; by performing a certain social role, while keeping one’s real ideas as confidential as possible. Deception and hypocrisy were necessary in order to survive verbal and non-verbal means of factionalism, which targeted, especially one’s reputation. This, however, problematized the perception of the reality of social behaviour. Friendship should be about sincerity. Yet, that sincerity was usually nonexistent in the overall pattern of Late Elizabethan theatrical behaviour that lacked demarcated lines between essence and appearance in a clear-cut way. Published or unpublished examples of advice literature, therefore, urged a thorough analysis of the behaviours of friends to instrumentalise them in utilitarian ways. One ought to be careful in choosing friends, who should both give support and provide advice. One should also be careful in rejecting double-dealers and flatterers. The problems to meet practice and theory led to many shifts of allegiance, double-dealings, and the lack to differentiate between advice and flattery. In Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays, the reign of King John, the Hundred Years War, and the Wars of the Roses found in chronicles provided several conflicting sets of values about the notions of friendships that were adapted to contemporary phenomena in the Post-Armada Period. Whether seen as plays or read in quarto versions, the plays reinforced the perception of friendship as performance liable to be a matter of appearance rather than essence. Therefore, this article will analyse the notions of friendships in the Late Elizabethan Period in Shakespeare’s history plays and illustrate how factionalism problematized those notions.

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.

THE COURT, THE NOBILITY AND THE MONARCH S RESPONSIBILITIES IN SHAKESPEARE S ELIZABETHAN HISTORY PLAYS

After 1588, several socio-political and economic problems appeared in the Elizabethan society. These problems were aggravated by Elizabeth I’s desire to live royally without responsibility. The correlation between good government and the responsibility of monarchs was emphasised in the literature of the period, as well. Particularly, the depiction of capable and incapable monarchs on the stage and in printed versions of plays made that correlation very topical. For instance, Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays depicted monarchs like Henry VI, Richard II or Henry IV who disused or misused their powers and created socio-political problems. The depiction of a possibly good government was depicted through Shakespeare’s Henry V. Henry V’s definition of responsibilities provided solutions for the failings of the system. The depictions of these fictive monarchs, on the other hand, might have been read by the contemporary Elizabethan audiences in relation with their own problems. Thus, this article will analyse to what extend Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays reflected contemporary issues about the responsibility of monarchs.

Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity by Ralf Hertel

Ralf Hertel. Staging Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. ix + 271. $149.95. In Staging Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity, Ralf Hertel argues that early modern English drama helped to shape the collective and develop the nation as imagined community well before became a factual nation-state (23). Englishness, he asserts, considered as something brought forth by spectators who participate theatre event by becoming eye witnesses of sorts of staged and who engage Englishness displayed theatrically (1). While Hertel, a Professor of English Literature and Culture at University of Hamburg, Germany, acknowledges that he is no historian (28), he also usefully summarizes historical debate about national identity and when it emerges. This political background is essential for understanding his book's contribution to field. As Hertel emphasizes throughout introduction, this study is focused on imagination of a national community, not on a nation which already has a fully functional political, legal or jurisdictional infrastructure (21). Although book fails to engage with much current scholarship, it demonstrates a reasonable connection between historical drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and idea of early modern English national identity. The introduction outlines historical theories of nationalism; explores contested meanings of terms such as nation, nation-building, and national consciousness; and presents debates surrounding concept and emergence of English national identity. The body of book comprises five parts, each titled for what Hertel calls widely accepted components shaping of national consciousness: Religion, Class, and Gender (28). Each part consists of two chapters: a discussion of theoretical perspectives and early modern English historical and political contexts, and a case study that applies these perspectives and contexts to interpret a late-Elizabethan English history play. Four of plays are Shakespearean: Henry IV Part 1, Richard III, King John, and Henry VI Part 2; fifth is Marlowe's Edward 11. The book also includes fourteen figures, through which author locates plays in context of non-fictional texts ... and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits) (1). A bibliography and index follow conclusion. Part 1, Territory, analyzes England's transformation from a territory into a homeland, or a site of historical, and historic, events (35). Hertel emphasizes the rise of cartography from late 1570s onwards (38) and corresponding late-sixteenth-century development of chorography, both of which, he states, facilitated England's transformation into a homeland. He shows how Saxton, Camden, and Drayton incorporated images of people into their maps to illustrate English people's connection to land (45), and how narrative aspect of early modern chorography similarly inserted people into places (47). The author then interprets effects of cartographic revolution Henry IV Part 1 (49). Hertel demonstrates that this centrifugal play (58), with scenes ... [set] all over England (64), places territory of on stage various ways, from play's wide range of English settings to its broad spectrum of English characters, many of whose names evoke geography of (66-68). In Part 2, History, Hertel builds upon his claims part 1 by arguing that transforming space into national territory and terrain into homeland involves charging topography with historical significance, providing expanse of land with a past, and adding a temporal dimension to spatial one (77). These two chapters focus upon constructed nature of history and historical drama. …

Edward II with Related Texts by Christopher Marlowe

Reviewed by: Edward II with Related Texts by Christopher Marlowe Andrew Fleck Christopher Marlowe, Edward II with Related Texts, ed. Stephen J. Lynch (Indianapolis: Hackett 2015) xiv + 156 pp. Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, Edward II, has enjoyed great popularity in the classroom over the last few decades. The play offers teachers of early modern literature the most overt example of homoerotic attraction in the canon. It also repays other kinds of historicist work as well. And it provides a strong counterexample that helps to combat the privileging of Shakespeare on syllabi treating early modern theater and culture; juxtaposing the play with Richard II often helps to open student readers’ eyes to the value of picking up the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Since Marlowe’s play can be found in a variety of modern anthologies and editions, it is worth wondering what another edition of the play might offer to classrooms. Stephen J. Lynch’s new edition for Hackett, Edward II with Related Texts, modernizes the spelling and standardizes the textual accidents, succinctly introduces and contextualizes the tragedy, and appends some useful source and contextual material that might entice undergraduates to historicize the tragedy and its themes. All in all, Lynch offers a usable and affordable classroom edition of Marlowe’s contribution to the Elizabethan history play. Lynch offers three sorts of preliminary material in his edition. He begins with a biographical sketch of Marlowe repurposed from an earlier edition of Marlowe, his Jew of Malta, also for Hackett. Lynch follows this biographical material with a very helpful introduction to Edward II, arranged according to [End Page 305] prominent themes in the tragedy. Most of these return to the nature of Edward’s relationship with his “minion” Gaveston and how the presentation of this obliquely homoerotic connection might structure the play. In addition to this transgressive relationship and its contrast with the queen’s adulterous relationship with Mortimer, the introduction does take up other more overtly political themes in the tragedy, particularly concerning the unruly nobles who chafe at the tyranny of their distracted monarch. Throughout this helpful introduction, Lynch directs his readers to portions of the “Related Texts” included later in the volume that help to illustrate Elizabethan concerns with these topics. The introductory material concludes with a bibliography (current through 2010) and a discussion of Lynch’s editorial practice. Lynch puts his view of the text into practice in a thoroughly annotated, modernized edition of the tragedy. He bases this edition on the first extant printed version of the play, from 1594 (STC 17437), but he does not indicate that he made any use of the derivative 1598 quarto or other early editions. Delving into the putative 1593 edition or mentioning Gaveston’s prominence on the 1598 title page, not to mention the allusion to a revival on the 1622 title page, might be a little recherché for a student edition. The text he offers to readers is usually quite readable. Brief glosses of archaic terms appear in the margins. For longer notes, Lynch provides footnotes with a wealth of information. Some notes offer simple definitions of technical terms, as when Lynch defines the political meaning of a “Protector” (5.2.12) as “a legal title for a lord selected to rule on behalf of a young king” (80). Other notes paraphrase syntactically convoluted lines, as the gloss of “We’ll steel it on their crest and poll their tops” (3.2.27) as “‘We will strike their helmets (with steel swords) and cut off their heads’” (49). Several notes offer helpful clarifications of classical allusions that our students may not recognize, such as “the Cyclops’ hammers” (1.4.313). Still other notes direct readers to Marlowe’s adaptation of his source material or his invention of material that Holinshed omits. Some readers may find a few of the notes intrusive, as when the editor instructs the reader that “Like Isabella, Mortimer misrepresents and exaggerates. Kent did indeed join the queen’s rebellion, but Kent returned his loyalty to Edward before the king was captured and imprisoned (see 4.6.1–18)” (83). But, in general, these notes and glosses will be quite helpful to undergraduates. The final...

“A Pattern for Princes to Live by”: Popery and Elizabethan History During England’s Exclusion Crisis, 1679-1681

Abstract This article investigates the intersections of historical memory and political behavior during England’s “Exclusion Crisis” of 1679-1681. In doing so, I bring together theorists of social and historical memory in interpreting the Exclusion Crisis polemic. Between 1679 and 1681, opposition Whigs and Loyalist Tories rehashed sixteenth-century Elizabethan history because it provided potent analogues to the contemporary crisis over the succession. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates and historical writing, I argue that England’s sixteenth-century history was an integral part of the contemporary political debate. The context of Elizabeth’s Treason Act and the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots provided historical parallels that opposition writers used to justify the exclusion of the Duke of York as well as make claims for parliamentary sovereignty in determining the succession. The Elizabethan era provided a wellspring of historical examples that could be culled to refute arguments for monarchial divineright absolutism. Rather than foreground the role of political theory in structuring attitudes and assumptions about the monarchy and parliament, this article sets out to show that sixteenth-century historical polemic set the terms of contemporary debate and, thus, influenced political outcomes.

Ralf Hertel. Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, x + 271 pp., 14 figures, £ 65.00.

Ralf Hertel. Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, x + 271 pp., 14 figures, £ 65.00.

Staging England In the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity by Ralf Hertel (review)

Staging England In the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity by Ralf Hertel (review)

RALF HERTEL, Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity.

RALF HERTEL, Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity.

Staging the Settlement: Shekhar Kapur and the Parliament of 1559

This article offers an assessment of Shekhar Kapur's depiction of the parliamentary making of the Elizabethan settlement in his 1998 film, Elizabeth. The settlement has always been a controversial subject, as indeed have Kapur's cinematic stagings of Elizabethan history. After surveying historians' accounts of the settlement, the author subjects the film's settlement sequence to a careful analysis, reading it as cinema as well as history, and argues that, despite a significant number of historical inaccuracies, the film captures much of value as a filmic representation of the past.

Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Ralf Hertel. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. ix + 272 pp. $119.95.

Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play: Performing National Identity. Ralf Hertel. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. ix + 272 pp. $119.95. - Volume 68 Issue 2

“And Touching Our Society”: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England. By Thomas M. McCoog S.J. Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods 3. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013. xiv + 480 pp. $95.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)And Touching Our Society: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England . By Thomas M. McCoog , S.J. Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods 3. Toronto : Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies , 2013. xiv + 480 pp. $95.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesTudor history in general and Elizabethan history in particular have generated a considerable degree of attention in recent years, both at the scholarly and popular levels. Jesuit history, especially pertaining to the early Society of Jesus, has also been a very fertile field in terms of both religious and cultural studies. The objective of Thomas McCoog's book is to examine multiple facets of the Jesuit mission in the Elizabethan era, focusing on various Jesuit strategies and activities in England as well as abroad. This is a collection of thirteen essays which, while in some ways interconnected, focus on specific individuals, strategies, developments, and conflicts. As such, this approach is not a comprehensive study of the Elizabethan Jesuit mission, but rather a combination of specialized topics that collectively broaden our understanding of this significant enterprise. In the preface the author states that eleven of these articles have been previously published in various venues, but he makes clear that these have been re-worked and updated, including the deletion of repetitive background information (although a certain amount of repetition does remain and is perhaps unavoidable). In the introduction the author discusses some of the general historical background and historiography, especially as related to the specific essay topics. While this provides a certain foundation, a bit more might have been said in order to place this mission in its broader late sixteenth-century, Renaissance, and Reformation contexts.Even so, one of the real strengths of this collection is the breadth and depth of its scholarship on the Elizabethan Jesuits. As is clear from the extensive bibliography as well as from the fulsome and detailed footnotes, McCoog is a very gifted archivist and historian. The archival and published primary sources are particularly impressive in both their quality and quantity. The collection of secondary sources is also quite extensive. The articles, as is clear from the footnotes, are heavily grounded in primary sources. While the author might have given a bit more background and context in some of the footnotes with regard to various secondary sources and historiographical debates, the overall scholarship here is well grounded and gives the reader a fair degree of confidence that, whether or not one agrees with some of the author's particular judgments or conclusions, they are based on extensive scholarly evidence. …

An Attack of the Clowns: Comedy, Vagrancy, and the Elizabethan History Play

Serious treatment of the relationship between the nobility and the classes dominated by it cannot avoid portrayal of conflict that undermines the premises of the national history play. Dramatists interested in interclass relations but committed to patriotic appeal must accordingly choose between two alternatives, neither of them entirely satisfactory. They must either deny the reality of class struggle and posit social unity instead...or view popular rebellion in relatively unsympathetic light.-Walter Cohen, Drama of NationIn Drama of Nation, Walter Cohen argues that representations of class conflict were threat to the seriousness of the national history play in early modern England (223).1 Contemporary playwrights solved this problem by either eliding the importance of popular action or depicting it in negative terms, as the work of an archetypal mad multitude. On the surface, the history plays written and produced in the last decade of Elizabethan rule appear to fulfill Cohen's hypothesis in that they frequently present their lower-class characters as ignorant, violent, and anarchically opposed to hierarchically ordered body politic. This essay focuses on three such enactments of lower-class rebellion: The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 2 Henry VI, and George a' Greene. Performed between 1591 and 1594, the plays chronicle the reigns of Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward I, respectively, and focus on how weak monarchs, corrupt princes, aggressive foreign powers, and rebellious peasants could endanger the stability of the emerging nation-state. But unlike the first three categories, which focus on the political threat wielded by discontented nobility, peasant rebellion focuses on lower-class grievances, and is most often represented in comic terms. In this essay, I suggest that, instead of disabling class conflict, peasant rebellion's comic framework enabled critique of social and economic inequality within the precincts of the national history play.While recent studies have drawn attention to popular voice in the histories, literary-critical discussion on the subject has, by and large, presented lower-class insurrection as antithetical to articulations of genuine social protest.2 In her investigation of Shakespeare's first tetralogy, Phyllis Rackin writes: Segregated by restrictions, the plebeian characters . . . can rebel against their oppression, but they can never finally transcend the conventions of comic representation that keep them in their social place and mark their separation from the serious historical world of their betters (221). As opposed to the high political demands of the aristocracy, plebeian complaints are disregarded because of their comic tenor. Rackin thus posits generic restrictions as an insuperable obstacle to subversive portrayal of rebellion from below. This critical devaluation of comic characters appears to derive from neoclassical theories that were deeply influenced by Aristotle's brief discussion of comedy in Poetics. In that text, Aristotle traces comedy's etymological origins to dispute between the Dorians and Athenians:For the Dorians say that they call the suburbs comae whereas the Athenians call them demes, and from this fact the Dorians argue that the word comodoi (comedians) came not from the verb comazein (to revel) but from the wandering of the comedians among the comae, since they were held in low esteem and were driven out of the city. (3)Since comic performances were limited to the comae or villages, its practitioners were automatically equated with the lower classes.3 Sanctified in the Poetics, Aristotle's commentary had profound influence on medieval and Renaissance interpretations of the ludic.4In Elizabethan England, the association of comedy and rusticity was embodied in the term clown. Thought to have originated in the Latin colonus, or tiller of the soil, the term was synonymous with a countryman, rustic, or peasant. …

An Attack of the Clowns: Comedy, Vagrancy, and the Elizabethan History Play

The article discusses lower-class insurrection in three history plays from the 1590s: The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 2 Henry VI, and George a' Greene. Drawing attention to the leveling rhetoric of the texts' clown figures, Tom Miller, Simon Simpcox, Jack Cade, and Robin Hood, the article disputes the critical commonplace that their defeat at the hands of governmental emissaries comprised an endorsement of absolute monarchy. Instead, the article proposes that the clowns' refusal to recognize class differences was a leveling device that bolstered their potential for voicing social grievances. Accordingly, this essay posits that, rather than devaluing rebellion from below, ludic representation enabled popular resistance within the framework of the national history play.

Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I (review)

Reviewed by: Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I Pauline Croft Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I. By Francis Edwards, S.J. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed in the United States by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 2002. Pp. 296. $50.00.) Francis Edwards was archivist of the English Jesuit province and later director of the central archives of the Society. He has written extensively on Elizabethan politics, and this book deals with eleven plots, or rumored plots, which occurred between 1571 and 1601. These, he argues, were all manipulated, or invented [End Page 321] outright, by William Cecil Lord Burghley and his son Sir Robert Cecil, successively the leading ministers of Elizabeth I. They were "the only contrivers with sufficient daring, intelligence and influence" to do so. "Their imprint lies on all the plots." They "behaved with complete ruthlessness and an astonishing degree of success," using the plots to eliminate all their opponents. In the obscure and frequently ludicrous Squier plot of 1597-98, which admittedly "teems with absurdities," the younger Cecil nevertheless made his "first truly independent excursion into the dark realm of plot management." Finally in 1605 with the Gunpower plot (not treated here), Cecil "produced a masterpiece...a contrivance flawless enough to deceive for centuries." The aim was the most extreme repression of Roman Catholics in England, smearing them by association with treachery. After 1605, "the papists came increasingly to occupy the position of the Jews in Nazi Germany." In the course of their deceptions the Cecils succeeded in "losing" large numbers of volumes of the privy council registers, organizing the poisoning of Ferdinando fifth earl of Derby, and forging (along with Sir Francis Walsingham) any documents that might come in useful. Both Cecils aimed at an absolute monopoly of power: anyone who "attempted to exercise independent political judgment was destined for removal" (pp. 13-14, 17, 27, 129, 253-258, 282-283). It would be tedious to enter into detailed argument here. Father Edwards ignores a large quantity of modern scholarship which does not support his picture of the Cecils, and does not discuss numerous scrupulous studies which show that the Roman Catholic minority could, in many circumstances and places, live largely unmolested by the English authorities. It is simply untrue—and surely offensive to Jewish people all too aware of the reality of Nazism—to see the flexible regime of James VI and I as equivalent to a Holocaust. On the contrary, with the exercise of only a token amount of discretion, Roman Catholics flourished at court and in the counties. Queen Anne of Denmark was one of them: so was the Earl of Northampton, a leading privy councillor. In 1611 the king, on the advice of Robert Cecil himself, allowed the central group of Roman Catholic families linked to the Gunpowder plotters—the Treshams, Throckmortons, Brudenells, and Tuftons—to buy hereditary baronetcies from the Crown, a move intended to re-integrate them into the county elites from which their relatives' disastrous extremism had excluded them. The overstatement of the argument is regrettable since it is perfectly true that the plots have been treated over-simplistically by Protestant historians. Father Edwards is right to point to "the seamy side of Elizabethan history" and to contest "the over-optimistic view" (pp. 13-14). His earlier researches on the 1571 Ridolfi Plot have produced good evidence for suspecting that the Genoese banker Ridolfi was a double agent for the Elizabethan privy council. Even at the time, the Duke of Alba thought Philip II was very naive to trust him. Similarly, Father Edwards is on excellent ground in seeing the Lopez plot of 1594 as largely an invention, whipped up by the Earl of Essex as a factional ploy to out-manoeuvre the Cecils, who thought there was little evidence against Dr. Lopez, the queen's crypto-Jewish physician. The implications of this interpretation, [End Page 322] however, are not explored: to depict the Cecils as outwitted by an even more antipapist and ruthlessly ambitious politician hardly supports the author's argument. Many of the lesser "plots" belong, as Father Edwards indicates, to the realms of fantasy, criminality, and mental illness rather than sedition...

The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney's ‘French Tune’ Identified

The writing of English contrafacta in the later sixteenth century was an important route for the importing of Continental music, and for the influence of Continental poetic styles and musico‐poetic relations. The contrafactum can tell us a great deal about how its writer understands English poetry and versification in relation both to music and to literary and musical practices in other countries. It also offers a model for thinking about how the use of a pre‐existent poetic or musical form cannot avoid encountering and responding to the residues of previous occupants. The song that lies behind Robert Sidney's Song 12, ‘To a french Tune’, is identified and its implications both for our knowledge of the poetry of Sidney and his contemporaries, and for the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean song, are discussed. The French song ‘Puis que le ciel’ is witnessed by a number of versions and Sidney's contrafactum in fact adds much to what we can say about them.

Beyond The Spanish tragedy: a study of the works of Thomas Kyd

Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of Works of Thomas Kyd, by Lukas Erne. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, Pp. xix + 252. Cloth $74.95. Without risking overstatement, we say with reasonable certainty that Thomas was author of one extraordinarily generative play.1 Within decade and half of its initial appearance, The Spanish Tragedy had been produced and performed, prefaced, and parodied, printed and reprinted, amended and printed again. All while, was inspiring Kyd's better-known contemporaries, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, along with host of lesser dramatic lights, who freely cribbed lines and allusions from work they realized had become fixed in imaginations of contemporary theatergoers. Whereas earlier commentators reduced to this of his plays, in Beyond Spanish Tragedy: A Study of Works of Thomas Kyd, Lucas Erne sets out to that dramatist can be identified with some confidence as author of least five plays: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, Corelia, Don Horatio . . . and lost Hamlet (xi). As his ten chapters comprehensive scholarly and critical introduction to Kyd's works that reviews, amends, and updates previous work on Kyd (9), Erne seeks to demonstrate that when we push beyond Thomas Kyd's seminal tragedy, coherent body of work emerges. To canon five major works is to set playwright on plane with his famous roommate Christopher Marlowe, which Erne does outset by establishing Kyd's place in history of Elizabethan two-part play (9).2 This attempt, in turn, rests upon affirming between the spanes comodye donne oracioe, which, according to Henslowe, was playing in rotation with The Spanish Tragedy by February of 1592, and farcical First Part of Hieronimo, not printed until 1605.3 In order to persuade us of their connection-and of forepiece's dialectical relationship with tragedy-Erne parses short play's two textual layers, discerning them both stylistically and in terms of dramatic symbol. Here, as elsewhere in study, Erne positions himself against Arthur Freeman, who regarded style of 1 Hieronimo as unquestionably . . . not Kyd's.4 Where Freeman saw crude imitation, Erne discovers stylistic harmony, which inspires him to claim that Kyd's stands with Marlowe's Tamburlaine at head of Elizabethan vogue for two-part plays (10).5 Enre's opening analysis gives rise to problem that will return to trouble later moments of study. For while dividing text's political and private layers, Erne maintains that any apparent discontinuities may be explained by limitations of stage realism, imperfections which members of an audience are asked to piece out with their thoughts, while inconsistencies between Horatio's account of Andrea's death in forepiece and event as reported in tragedy must seemed a petty detail that would not have mattered much to Kyd (27). Such claim may suggests that in his determination to prove that should be regarded as having written diptych in mode of Marlowe's far more coherent Tamburlaine cycle, author is led to make more of his evidence than ought to be deduced by construing intention. Indeed, this effort to establish congruence through an insistent focus on continuity of form leaves under-examined significant divergences in content. For discernible in forepiece are several discursive formations minimally present (if all) in tragedy it presumably prefaced. Among these are Armada tone most critics found lacking in original (which enters 1 Hieronimo via new character, Duke of Medina's son), discourse of Portuguese patriotism (also largely absent in original), and low Hispanophobic and anti-Semitic discourses that are quite out of keeping with Senecan, Vergilian, and Petrarchan codes that energize tragedy. …

‘It will be a Scandal to show what we have done with such a number:’ House of Commons Committee Attendance Lists, 1606–1628

That committee membership has played a significant role in parliamentary history is beyond question. It formed an important part of the analysis of the importance of Members of Parliament in the Elizabethan History of Parliament volumes and appointments have frequendy been used to illustrate the particular interest of Members in parliamentary issues and legislation. However, much of the analysis has been undertaken in a simplistic fashion, derived solely from the Underclerk's record in the Commons Journal and subjected to little more than superficial scrutiny. Stuart historians have been slow to heed Lord Macaulay's advice that Victoria Tower is ‘that dark repository in which the abortive statutes of many generations sleep a sleep rarely disturbed by the historian or antiquary’, for it is in the House of Lords Record Office that the majority of committee lists survive. And the existence of these attendance records allows us to expand and clarify previous analyses of Commons attendance. In particular, they show the munutiae of Parliament at work on a day-to-day basis as well as providing valuable biographical information. Viewed individually or taken as a whole, the documents also allow the development of broad and far-reaching conclusions about Parliament itself. The thirty-three committee lists transcribed below cover the period 1606–1628 and offer insights into local issues, such as the presentment to the parsonage of Radipoll, Dorset, and matters which concerned the commonweal, for example, purveyance and debt collection.