Mass Petitioning Research Articles

The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

Fabricating opinion: the Duke of Northumberland’s subscription campaign for petitions to parliament against the 1831 Reform Bill

ABSTRACT During the first five months of the new Grey administration (22 November to the 22 April 1831 dissolution), parliament received more petitions over the contentious issue of parliamentary reform than in any prior episode of mass petitioning. This case study uses unusual records with granular evidence from the professional management of a reactionary campaign for petitions against the 1831 Reform Bill. The records are from the law firm that managed the campaign, underwritten by the Duke of Northumberland, one of the realms richest magnates. The duke’s initiative proceeded despite negative assessments by local Tory leaders, who correctly predicted the petitions would get few signatures and be a public relations disaster. The duke’s initiative received more derisive publicity than any other petition campaign in this first phase of the Reform Bill’s political odyssey. This study of a failed petition campaign does not alter what we know about the substance or progress of legislation that became the 1832 Reform Act. Instead, it sheds new light on the broader issue of change and continuity in public petitioning with regard to 1) the credibility of opinion represented in petitions and 2) professional management of mass petition campaigns as routine legal practice.

Prawo petycji do parlamentu Republiki Federalnej Niemiec

Petitioning the Parliament in the Federal Republic of Germany is seen as one of the fundamental rights. The article provides an analysis of the right of petition specified expressly in Article 17 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany which authorizes “everyone” to address written “requests” or “complaints” to “competent authorities” and to the “representation of the nation”. The right of petition is also provides all constitutions of the Länder. Petition is a request or complaint made on one’s own behalf, for third parties or in the general interest. Request is demand and proposal for act or omission by organs of state, authorities or other institutions discharging public functions. In particular it may include proposal for legislation. Complaint shall consist in objection to act and omission by organs of state, authorities or other institutions discharging public functions. It should be emphasized that there are different types of petitions: multiple petitions, collective petitions, mass petitions and public petitions. Public petition is a new form of a petition in the 21st century. It may be submitted to the Petitions Committee by anyone, either individually or jointly with others, using the form provided. Public petitions are published on the Petitions Committee’s webpage. Every natural person and every legal person under private law resident in Germany has the right of petition. The right of petition can be restricted for members of the armed forces. The right of petition does not depend on the one’s personal circumstances, such as nationality. Even legal capacity is not required in order to exercise the right of petition, however the petitioner have to express his concern intelligibly. Article 45c of the Basic Law obliges the Bundestag to appoint a Petitions Committee to deal with petitions addressed to the Bundestag. “A Law on the Powers of the Petitions Committee of the German Bundestag of 19 July 1975”, “Rules of Procedure of the German Bundestag” and “Principles of the Petitions Committee governing the Treatment of Requests and Complaints of 8 March 1989” regulate the committee’s powers. The Petitions Committee can in particular: request comments from the Federal Government and hear government representatives, require official bodies to provide it with files, visit federal institutions. The Petitions Committee cannot intervene in conflicts between individual citizens under private law, it also cannot review court judgments or other court decisions. As soon as the facts of the case raised by a petition have been clarified and the legal situation has been assessed, the Petitions Committee presents a recommendation for a resolution on how the petition should be dealt with conclusively before the plenary of the Bundestag. The recommendation as to how the Bundestag should deal with a petition conclusively may include in particular: referral to the Federal Government for remedial action or for reexamination, referral as background material, forwarding to the European Parliament. Once the resolution has been adopted by the plenary, the petitioner is sent an official reply setting out the decision reached and the grounds on which it was taken.

The Global Dialogics of the <i>New Age</i>

The London-based weekly the New Age, edited by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922, was known for promoting spirited debates on politics, literature, and the arts. Scholars have been attentive to what Ann Ardis terms the magazine’s ‘unusual commitment to […] Bakhtinian dialogics in the public sphere’, but less so to the role that the letters column played in facilitating these often contentious, often transnational debates. This essay argues that the letters column functioned as a forum for linking not only individual readers and contributors from around the world, but also wider discursive and periodical communities. A case study of global dialogics, the essay focuses on an eleven-month debate that unfolded in New Age correspondence concerning the so-called black peril — the purported epidemic of black men attempting to rape white women in South Africa, which historians today regard as a moral panic fuelled by a desire to reinforce white supremacy. The flames of the panic were stoked by the Umtali case of 1910, in which Lord Gladstone commuted the death sentence of an Umtali native convicted of attempted rape to life imprisonment. This decision sparked mass protests and petitions among the white community in South Africa and a heated discussion about race and racism that reverberated throughout the empire, including in the columns of the New Age. The letters column served as an international forum, drawing in white settlers from Johannesburg, Crisis editor and NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois, Sudanese-Egyptian writer Dusé Mohamed Ali, and British suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, among others. This essay examines the gendered and racial politics of this debate and how it was shaped by its specific periodical context and by the national and ideological contexts of its interlocutors.

Mass Petitioning, Education Reform, and the Development of Political Culture in Madras, 1839–1842

AbstractThis article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.

“What Value Should We Attach to All These Petitions?”: Petition Campaigns and the Problem of Legitimacy in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands

This article focuses on large-scale petitioning campaigns, or petitionnementen as they were called, organized between 1828 and 1878, including contemporary reflections and debates on this new phenomenon. Although there were only a handful of petitionnementen, they had a remarkable impact—not only on the issues at hand but also on the balance of power between Crown, Cabinet, Parliament, and people. Mass petitions necessarily challenged the political system, whose legitimacy was based on elections under a limited franchise. Based on parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and other sources reflecting on petitioning in general and the petitionnementen more specifically, this article asks how petitioners claimed legitimacy, and how politicians and other observers responded to those claims. Special attention is given to the international context within which Dutch petitioning practices developed. The article focuses on three case studies, representing the major petitioning campaigns of this period: the Southern petition movements of 1828–1830 that were a catalyst for the Belgian revolution (thus reinforcing the association between mass petitioning and revolution), the Anti-Catholic “April Movement” of 1853, and the so-called People’s Petitionnement of 1878, against the liberal education law. Remarkably enough, in the Netherlands it was not progressive reformers, but most prominently conservative Orthodox Protestants who organized petitionnementen.

What Did Chartism Petition For? Mass Petitions in the British Movement for Democracy

Chartism was in effect Britain’s civil rights movement and petitioning was at its heart: it defined who the Chartists were as well as the “other” against which they were implacably opposed. Its history has been effectively narrated around its three national petitions (1839, 1842, and 1848), and its decline almost habitually and directly linked to circumstances surrounding the last of these. More than 3.3 million people signed the 1842 National Petition. Chartism’s history after 1842 is partly one of how the State learned to manage the movement in general and petitioning in particular. The question posed by the title is deliberately ambiguous: What did the Chartists petition for and, equally, why did they bother? The first issue will be answered by a close reading of the three texts (surprisingly not undertaken by previous historians of the movement). The second will answered through an analysis of the wider uses of petitioning. The third issue addressed by this article is how petitioning constructed Chartism. In every contributing locality, canvassing was a major intervention in political life. The subscriptional community created by its petitions were “the people,” a term that clearly included not only men but also women and children. This was a different and wider meaning of the term “the people” from that used by Chartism’s opponents and it was a profound departure. Petitioning shaped, articulated, and mobilized the politics of a nascent working class, “banded together in one solemn and holy league” but excluded from economic and political power.

L’éruption patriote: The Revolt against Dalhousie and the Petitioning Explosion in Nineteenth-Century French Canada

As much as any other site in the nineteenth century, Francophone Lower Canada saw immense waves of popular petitioning, with petitions against British colonial administration attracting tens of thousands of signatures in the 1820s. The petition against Governor Dalhousie of 1827–28 attracted more than 87,000 names, making it one of the largest mass petitions of the Atlantic world on a per-capita scale for its time. We draw upon new archival evidence that shows the force of local organization in the petition mobilization, and combine this with statistical analyses of a new sample of 1,864 names from the anti-Dalhousie signatory list. We conclude that the Lower Canadian petitioning surge stemmed from emergent linguistic nationalism, expectations of parliamentary democracy, and the mobilization and alliance-building efforts of Patriote leaders in the French-Canadian republican movement. As elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, the anti-Dalhousie effort shows social movements harnessing petitions to recruit, mobilize, and build cross-cultural alliances.

The Method of Zhangye Prefecture, Gansu Province Actively and Properly Handling a Mass Petition Incident

The Method of Zhangye Prefecture, Gansu Province Actively and Properly Handling a Mass Petition Incident

Ley de Protección Integral a las Mujeres: estudio sobre sus alcances y deudas pendientes

En el marco del modelo propuesto por Oszlak y O'Donnell (1995) para estudiar las políticas públicas a partir de las cuestiones que las originan y rodean, el objetivo de esta investigación es analizar las políticas estatales referidas a la protección integral de la mujer durante el gobierno de Cristina Fernández (2007-2015).Las políticas de Fernández en esa área surgieron como consecuencia de un proceso de lucha social que desencadenó sucesivos pedidos de justicia masivos y se convirtió en un tema de agenda, tanto en los medios de comunicación como en la opinión pública.En lo específico, el presente trabajo busca analizar la aplicación de la Ley de Protección Integral a las Mujeres (26.485) para prevenir, sancionar y erradicar la violencia contra las mujeres en los ámbitos en que desarrollen sus relaciones interpersonales a fin de determinar si la toma de posición de la ex mandataria Fernández frente a la problemática de la violencia de género fue efectiva respecto a los resultados obtenidos.

Contentious Veterans

What drives retired military officers in China toward contention? Decades of research on protest has produced little on veterans’ collection action, and even less on that by ex-officers. Newspaper reports, police journals, and veterans’ blogs show that contention by Chinese former officers (ranging from occupying government compounds to marches, mass petitioning, open letters, and class action lawsuits) is the result of bad luck in post-military job assignments, a fragmented political system that makes it difficult to ensure that pensions and other benefits reach retirees, and pervasive corruption that leads ex-officers to feel that local officials have embezzled funds meant for them. Contention by former officers typically uses military rhetoric and builds on military experiences, even for former officers who were employed in civilian jobs for many years. Although contention by ex-officers is not likely to rock the state, it says much about how “sticky” military identities are, where veterans fit in the political landscape, Leninist civil–military relations, and the treatment that old soldiers receive in a fast changing socioeconomic order.

‘A grudge among the people’: Commercial Conflict, Conspiracy, Petitioning and Poaching in Cranbrook, 1594–1606

Abstract:During the later sixteenth century, increasing competition for wood fuel supplies led to rising tension between Wealden cloth manufacturers and ironmasters and to a prolonged but unsuccessful campaign by clothiers seeking parliamentary legislation that would radically curtail iron production in the Cranbrook area. Remarkably revealing files among the papers of Sir John Leveson, one of Kent's late Elizabethan deputy lieutenants, show that during the winter of 1594–5, Cranbrook's frustrated clothiers and their allies among other chief inhabitants of the parish attempted to hijack plebeian distress over low wages and high food and fuel prices for their own ends. It is unlikely that those devising or encouraging industrial sabotage that winter included Cranbrook's richer clothiers, but they were certainly behind plans to mobilise a mass petition to the crown for the suppression of ironworks. In turn, two of Cranbrook's parish officials, deftly exploiting fears of a disorderly march on London, managed to persuade Sir John Leveson to lobby the privy councillor Lord Cobham on the clothiers’ behalf, although to no avail. Thereafter, Cranbrook clothiers vented their frustration against the Bakers of Sissinghurst, who owned the local iron forge and furnace, by frequently raiding the family's deer park, sometimes in conjunction with local gentry pursuing their passion for unlawful hunting.

Speaking Sharia to the State : Muslim Protesters, Tsarist Officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia

In the final decades of the 19th century, a crisis broke out in the relations between government officials and Muslim communities in the province of Kazan. A cultural borderland located a centralizing imperial heartland, Kazan represented one of the oldest and most important sites of Muslim--state interaction in the Empire. (1) From the late 1870s onward, however, Muslim--state relations in the region deteriorated sharply in the face of efforts to assert more direct control over the administration of the region's Muslim populations. Muslim opposition to these initiatives, taking the form of demonstrations and mass petition campaigns, would occur on an almost yearly basis throughout the final three decades of the century. How did Muslims in late imperial Russia view the tsarist and its institutions? For decades during the Cold War, scholars discussing the relations between the tsarist and non-Russian communities in the empire emphasized the theme of conflict, stressing the importance of identity and national resilience in the face of Russian rule. (2) More recently, however, this conflict-oriented view of Muslim--state relations in the empire has come under increasing pressure from scholars, mainly working with tsarist archival sources, who instead have stressed the importance of institutions (3) and their engagement by Muslims in the empire. (4) Perhaps the most forceful critique of older conflict-oriented scholarly narratives has come from Robert D. Crews. (5) Crews argues that Muslims looked to the state to protect their interests, particularly with respect to matters pertaining to faith. (6) Instead of viewing tsarist officials as enemies, writes Crews, Muslims saw them as agents of a shari'a to be realized in its entirety, and as allies of Muslims seeking to protect the cause of true religion. (7) Muslims meanwhile viewed threats to Islam as emanating less from authorities than from within the community in the form of neighbors who did not attend communal prayers alongside other villagers or townspeople. In the view of Muslims, Crews writes, religion not only found accommodation among tsarist officials but in fact came to depend upon the institutions of state. (8) This article looks beyond these narratives of rejection and embrace in an investigation of a series of protests taking place Muslim communities in the Volga region in the late 19th century. (9) I argue that, while Muslims did not reject tsarist institutions to the degree outlined in many older studies, (10) neither did Muslim subjects of Russia commonly view tsarist officials as defenders of the faith. (11) Indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, Muslim--state relations in the region were becoming increasingly complex, with Muslims looking to strengthen the role of some institutions of authority while resisting others. Even in Kazan, one of the most administratively integrated regions of the empire, Muslims were becoming increasingly alienated from tsarist authorities in the region, including both civil and spiritual officials. (12) Beginning with a discussion of spiritual (dukhovnoe) administration in Russia, this article examines a series of protests, petition campaigns, and mass rumors circulating in and around the province of Kazan in the final decades of the 19th century, as well as the response of local officials to these events. I pay special attention to the language of Muslim--state communications, especially with regard to what I describe as the use of Islamic discourses--that is, the invocation of terminology drawn from civilization. (13) How, I ask, did a series of conflicts pertaining mainly to administration come to be articulated--by tsarist officials and Muslim protesters alike---in terms of faith? (14) Administration in Late Imperial Russia Kazan Muslims, like other non-Russian populations of the empire, were governed through a system of spiritual administration that was religious in form but largely administrative in content. …

Mass petitions as a way to evaluate ‘public opinion’ in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman empire? The case of internal strife among Gaza’s elite

This article evaluates collective petitions (arz-ı mahzars) sent to Istanbul from Gaza at the end of the nineteenth century as a way of assessing the political mood of the elite in Ottoman provincial towns. Gaza was the theatre of considerable tension, cleavages, and rivalry among its elite. One of the key questions in this context is the implications of sending collective petitions from towns such as Gaza to the imperial centre given the political censorship and the absence of free press at a time when there was nonetheless greater communication between the centre and the provinces, and an altered relationship between the state and its subjects. Thus more than ever before collective petitions represented local political alignments and what could be very cautiously defined as ‘public opinion’ among the elite in provincial Ottoman towns such as Gaza.

Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right

Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entirely obscured in such portrayals is the agency of the militant separatist fundamentalists whose engagement with anticommunism was at once broader in scope, more systematic, organized and pervasive, and of significantly earlier lineage than that of their new evangelical rivals. The roots of the Christian Right do indeed lie in Cold War Christian anticommunism but the lines of influence stretch as much, if not more, from the fundamentalists gathered around the controversial pastor Carl McIntire and his American (and International) Council of Christian Churches as they do from the new evangelicals. A pivotal transitional figure who nurtured, renovated, and passed on to a new generation the anticollectivist public doctrines of the original fundamentalist movement. In his anticommunist work McIntire pioneered, as well, the faith-based mass demonstration and petition, the political use of Christian radio, and the lobbying of government officials that the later Christian Right perfected.

Economic development and mass political participation in contemporary China: determinants of provincial petition (Xinfang) activism 1994–2002

Rapid economic development has increased mass political participation in market reform China. Many electoral authoritarian regimes with a good record of economic development have experienced the growing participation of elite/middle-class citizens. Under the Chinese Communist Party regime, however, the poor mass is the main group to participate drastically more. This is because despite rapid aggregate growth, the mass have suffered extensively from excessive exploitation with high levels of corruption and inequality, which benefits many local elites. The regime has evaded authoritarian election but channeled such mounting participatory demands into an extensive petition ( Xinfang) institution nationwide. As a result, the mass petition activism has rapidly increased since the early 1990s. This article finds the specific determinants of such petition activism with newly assembled data on provincial petition frequency and multiple case studies.

The Internal Politics of an Urban Chinese Work Community: A Case Study of Employee Influence on Decision-Making at a State-Owned Factory

As economic reforms have unfolded, China's has become a patchwork of very different patterns. In industry, for example, some state-owned enterprises have fired large numbers of employees as a coiporate strategy, either because firm is going broke or because it wants to replace them with cheaper short-contract workers.1 Some other state enterprises, such as in textile and footwear industries,2 have driven their long-term workforce to labor under worse conditions for depressed wages. Yet there are also profit-making state enterprises that have acted in a paternalistic fashion, that have been solicitous of concerns of employees, and that have sought to improve their livelihoods. The managements of such firms, as will be seen, have been responding to workcommunity norms and expectations that effectively pressure them to act in such a fashion. We are currently engaged in conducting research for a book-length social history of a state enterprise of this latter type.3 It is a large liquor distillery located in one of China's largest inland cities. It is not a local model factory, and there was no effort by Chinese authorities to steer us to it.4 During 2002-2004 we undertook full-time research there for a number of months and were able to conduct unsupervised in-depth interviews with dozens of its employees and retirees. It is not known exactly what percentage of state-sector firms are similar to this distillery in their relations with employees, as there are no known relevant surveys and very few studies of individual state-owned factories.5 But our interviewees insist that many of state-owned enterprises in their city's food-processing sector have workplace environments similar to distillery's. It is quite possible that such enterprises represent a significant part of Chinese industrial society-a type of firm that has not previously been examined by foreign observers. In this paper we will focus on a scenario that got played out at distillery when it was announced in mid-1990s that a substantial number of new apartments were to be built for subsidized sale to selected employees. It will be seen how pressures emanating from workforce obliged management to put into play a form of grass-roots democracy to resolve this issue of paramount importance to work community, and how, in this setting, economy arguments earned day. We will also examine two further episodes at distillery involving housing-in 1999 and in 2003-04-and we will witness how rapidly changing political and economic landscape in China has influenced employee and management behavior. The Moral Economy The term as employed in writings of E. P. Thompson, James C. Scott and others, encapsulates several important features of work-community ethos that prevails in such a Chinese enterprise. Thompson used term in a famous paper analyzing food riots in 18th century urban England, in which he noted that riots cannot be explained simply as an effort by hungry people to grab food; rather, their actions were in protest against violation of a 'moral economy' in which they held a right to subsistence: ... men and women in crowd were informed by belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and in general, that they were supported by consensus of community ... as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices. ... An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was usual occasion for direct action. ... [These 'moral-economy' notions] found some support in paternalist tradition of authorities; notions which people re-echoed so loudly in their turn that authorities were, in some measure, prisoners of people.6 Although Thompson was focusing on riots as a means to make these people's voices heard about violations to a moral economy, he also noted that such rioting is not the only or most obvious form of collective action-there may be alternatives such as mass petitioning of authorities. …

Petitioning as popular politics in early sixteenth–century England

Abstract This article offers the thesis that petitioning by collective groups, whether occupational, regionally constituted, or simply the body of people called the commons, was an important form of political communication in the early sixteenth century which, although poorly documented and consequently overlooked by historians, allows us an entry into the world of popular politics. The article offers illustrations of the way in which petitions were employed within the city of York, by groups such as weavers or by the commons of East Anglia in 1549 and 1553. The right to petition could not be denied, but mass petitioning was viewed with apprehension by government. Nonetheless, petitioning may be seen as a conservative form of behaviour when compared to calls for insurrection.

Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilization in the Revolution of 1848/49: A Microhistorical Actor-Centred Network Analysis

A great part of the political movement in the Revolution of 1848 took place in the form of group and mass petitions. The National Assembly in Frankfurt, the first national German parliament, received 17,000 petitions from more than three million people. A great number of petitions, analysed by German scholars such as Best, dealt with the question of a liberal market economy, with problems resulting out of the developing process of industrialization, and with protective duties. The petitions expressed different group interests, articulated by craftsmen, merchants, entrepreneurs, and workers, who responded to current economic and social restraints. Another complex of petitions formulated requests regarding the constitution, the liberalization of the political system, or the organization of education, especially the separation of church and state. Another large mass of revolutionary petitions was addressed to the rulers or the ruling bodies of the different German states and was concerned with regional conflicts, and the adoption of ideas that were developed at national level.

"All Language Then Is Vile": The Theatrical Critique of Political Rhetoric in Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus

“All Language Then Is Vile”: The Theatrical Critique of Political Rhetoric in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus Victoria Hayne Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus seems to demand a political interpretation. By 1680, when the play was probably written and certainly first performed, the widespread and apparently unifying enthusiasm which had greeted the restoration of the monarchy two decades earlier had given way to a “series of complex, intense, factional intrigues” which contemporaries feared might lead to another civil war. 1 Unresolved conflicts over the relative powers of the crown and Parliament and over the degree of toleration the re-established Church of England would extend to Catholics and to Protestant dissenters crystallized in the late 1670s in two bitterly divisive sociopolitical phenomena, known in historical shorthand as the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. When Lucius Junius Brutus appeared, the nation had been gripped for two years by nearly hysterical fears generated by the continuing (and, historians now believe, perjured) revelations of the Popish Plot informers, who spun a lurid tale of Catholic plans to assassinate Charles II, infiltrate the nation under the reign of his Catholic brother and heir James, and reestablish Catholicism through the persecution of Protestants. By 1680, the testimony of the informers had resulted in the trial and execution of several alleged plotters. 2 The religious fears and hostilities stirred up by the Plot helped to generate popular support for Parliamentary opponents of Charles; a major focus of their efforts to assert the rights and powers of Parliament was an attempt to pass and force Charles to assent to a Bill of Parliament excluding James from the line of succession. Although 1680 is probably too early to use the term “party” in the modern sense to describe the political groupings that struggled over this issue, the political labels of “Tory” and “Whig” were coming into common use to describe the complex and still-fluid alliances of those who supported the king and those who opposed him. 3 It was in this period as well that the word “mob” was invented to describe the crowds who demonstrated in the streets and organized mass petitions, political actions that harked back— [End Page 337] alarmingly for some, proudly for others—to the popular movements preceding the Civil War. In this feverish political atmosphere, Lucius Junius Brutus takes as its subject the revolution which overturned the monarchy of the Tarquins and established the Roman republic; Brutus himself was traditionally renowned as a hero of republican liberty for the steely devotion to the state he displayed in executing his own sons for treason against the republic. The figure of Brutus, as a symbol of republicanism, was, in fact, employed in propaganda efforts during the exclusion crisis by both Whigs and Tories. And in this explosive political climate, the play was certainly regarded by Lee’s contemporaries as political: one or more of them “informed” the Lord Chamberlain that the play contained “Scandalous Expressions & Reflections vpon ye Government,” which prompted him to ban it from further performance. 4 Despite these strong inducements toward reading the play as engaged with contemporary politics, critics cannot agree on its political content. The main strand of criticism has seen the play as strongly pro-Whig. John Loftis, for example, considers the play “a Whig manifesto,” “a statement of the Whig constitutional position during the Exclusion controversy.” 5 Those who argue this position emphasize the political views articulated by Brutus, his endorsement of republican principles and condemnation of royal tyranny; his speeches are, in this view, a mimetic representation of the political views of contemporary Whigs and his actions an allegory of Whig political aspirations. Certainly, the language of the play is imbued with the political rhetoric of the period, in speeches such as Brutus’s appeal to the Roman populace as “a free-born people” (2.1.192) or in his arraignment of Tarquin for Invading fundamental right and justice, Breaking the ancient customs, statutes, laws, With positive power and arbitrary lust. (2.1.179–81) As Richard Ashcraft cogently remarks, a poet “really has to want to use words like petitioner, arbitrary power, prerogative, or the Good Old Cause, since they do not...