Mirror For Magistrates Research Articles

Baldwin as phonographer

ABSTRACT William Baldwin wrote a variety of kinds of books, but through them all he displayed his skills as a phonographer, as a writer of sound. Geoffrey Streamer’s story about hearing animals speak is the best known of these works, but Baldwin’s compilation of ‘sayings’ of philosophers, his ballading of The Song of Solomon on the model of Sternhold’s Psalm tunes, his noisy tour of Hell in his satire on the death of Bishop Paul III of Rome, the transcribed voices collected in A Mirror for Magistrates, and his ‘funerals’ for Edward VI are all sound-rich books. What is more, the sounds in these books are located sounds. They are associated with particular acoustic environments, and they challenge readers to place themselves imaginatively in those environments. In this respect, Baldwin’s phonographies resemble the art of contemporary sound artists like Brandon LaBelle in Acoustic Territories.

«A Mirror for Magistrates». Ethics and the Practice of Power in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

«A Mirror for Magistrates». Ethics and the Practice of Power in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

Use Your Allusion: Echoes of Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, and Kyd in an Early Jacobean Poem

This article offers a critical reassessment of a much-neglected early Jacobean poem: Thomas Andrewe's The Unmasking of a Feminine Machiavel, a 904-line dream vision poem published in December 1604 at the end of King James I's first full year in power. The poem is modeled on a number of earlier works, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, John Lydgate's Complaint of the Black Knight, and the Mirror for Magistrates, and offers what scholars have tended to see as an autobiographical account of Andrewe's youth and misfortunes in love, as well as the part he played in the Battle of Newport (July 2, 1600). Though some of The Unmasking's intertextual features have been acknowledged before, this article seeks to fill a void in contemporary scholarship by addressing several other literary sources for Andrewe's poem and considering some of their more specific, political resonances. In so doing, this article shows that Andrewe echoes a number of contemporary authors—from Michael Drayton and Edmund Spenser to William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd—to articulate wider tensions and anxieties over the recent peace settlement with Spain. By providing new insight into the politics behind Andrewe's appropriation of these authors, this article also aims to bring Thomas Andrewe himself into sharper focus, using his relationship to key playwrights and poets of the period (in particular, the "Jacobean Spenserians") in order to illustrate the close textual and thematic connections between dramatic and nondramatic materials and between the canon's major and minor authors and to argue for the poem's status as topical allegory published under the guise of personal complaint.

Evan JonesLater Emperors

occupation of Gaza caused Aliya’s tragedy. Walls defend those boundaries, disfiguring the Holy Land and filling the angry rhetoric of America’s new president. Disturbed by these controls, Joseph draws a “naked map,” without borders. Boundaries, meanwhile, often signal violence and exile, a status Joseph and his family share. Benjamin left Poland, then Brooklyn; Flint abandoned Brooklyn; Rachel the reservation and her family; Aliya a refugee camp. Exiled from his Palestinian roots, Joseph leaves his mountain home to reclaim them. Its voices authentic, its scenes and settings vivid, the novel takes us down Alice’s rabbit hole or through her looking glass— among Joe’s favorite texts. The sharp vision of his single eye beholds a world where reality and magic converge, where the secular Judaism and Christianity of his parents coexist with Rachel’s Cherokee spirituality, where Gaza and Israel have become surrealities, deformed by walls and borders in a barren landscape both physical and symbolic. Finally, Mahmutović’s beautiful novel shows how love can bridge difference and level artificial walls, opening us to the world. As Joseph plants a mountain seed beside Aliya’s desert grave, he imagines his newfound half-siblings in the mountains playing “with Rachel’s ghost.” Having lain “at the foot” of both mothers and reconciled his roots, he can now construct his own identity. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T State University Evan Jones Later Emperors Manchester, UK. Carcanet. 2020. 73 pages. IN LATER EMPERORS, Evan Jones’s learning is clearly displayed in his engagement with Roman history and in the breadth of his allusions, but it is more deeply and subtly manifested in his deft exploration of such classical topoi as the ruins of time and the vanity of human desire. Jones’s spare, evocative, and imagistic verse offers, through half-glimpsed narratives of ambition and loss, a rumination on the transience of things in this world. The book is divided into four distinct yet thematically related sections. The first part of the book covers some of the later western emperors from “the year of the six emperors” in 238 to the reign of Diocletian. Typical among them is the fate of Aemilian as Jones tells it in “Aemilianus the Moor”: “He stepped out of his tent one night / woken by what he thought were goats / and his soldiers sacrificed him.” This part of the book especially brings to mind such Renaissance works as The Mirror for Magistrates and The Ruins of Time as well as the broad tradition of memento mori. The next two sections of the book turn to the Eastern Empire, giving voice to the Byzantine scholar Michael Psellos and to Anna Komnene, a Byzantine princess, scholar, and physician who was exiled for her failed attempt to usurp the throne. In the voices of these figures, Jones explores the relationship between political power and the life of the mind, evoking the classical debate of the active versus the contemplative life. Yet he also acknowledges that scholar and emperor share a common fate. “All glories to dust, yes, like / the library at Alexandria, / the Serapeum,” the scholar muses in “After Something Else.” Jones offers these meditations in delicate verse and in glimpses and fragments of these fascinating lives. The final section of the book reflects more directly on personal loss through a longer poem, which is an imagined first draft of Plutarch’s Consolatio ad Uxorem, the famed ancient historian’s response to news of his small daughter’s death. The elegiac tone of this section makes it a fitting and poignant finale for the book, as Jones imagines Plutarch writing to his wife: “Life is made thin / and there is so much in the grave past / and graver future.” Later Emperors is a lyrical book, somber yet lovely. Rare among works of poetry today, it offers not only beauty but also a wisdom rooted in time and timelessness. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Poupeh Missaghi trans(re)lating house one Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2020. 296 pages. POUPEH MISSAGHI’S debut, trans(re)lating house one, is a hybrid novel set in the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election. Missaghi ’s narrator searches for statues that are disappearing from Tehran...

A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels’ by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays ed. by Dennis McCarthy, June Schlueter

 Reviews literacy) was not widespread among the Caribbean population. However, many of the essays make reference to oral storytelling traditions in the Caribbean without fully engaging with them. Given the lack of Caribbean-authored texts to draw on, it seems odd not to offer any real analysis of such works. ese concerns are somewhat addressed in Nicole N. Aljoe’s work on the ‘slave voice’ in Chapter  and in Candace Ward and Tim Watson’s work on the early creole novel in Chapter . But for only two chapters to focus on texts produced by Caribbean writers is disappointing. Nonetheless, this volume offers fresh analysis of a frequently overlooked subsection of literary history and makes good on its promise to demonstrate the potential for further fruitful scholarship in the field. Any scholar interested in the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean would do well to consult it, as would those studying the evolution of literature and book production within the British Empire. E S S C ‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels’ by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare’s Plays. Ed. by D MC and J S. Cambridge: Brewer in association with the British Library. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. ‘A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels’ is a hitherto unpublished manuscript written by George North in  and dedicated to Roger, nd Lord North (brother of the translator of Plutarch). It purports to demonstrate the evil of rebellion and the certain punishment of rebels, leading up to a discussion of ‘the calamity of the Low Countries’ and ‘the distressed government of those staggering states whose desperate disobedience against their King and Sovereign occupies all these parts of the world’ (p. ). It also offers verse laments in the manner of (and to some extent derived from) A Mirror for Magistrates, in the voices of Owen Glendower, Jack Cade, and Michael Joseph (‘the Black Smith’), leader of the Cornish rebellion. Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter offer colour reproductions of the manuscript, along with a modernized text. eir edition includes some odd choices: forms such as ‘hath’ and ‘dyeth’ are changed, surely unnecessarily, to ‘has’ and ‘dies’, and I think there may be a misreading of ‘lain’ for ‘tane’ (p. ). However, the editing of this volume is subordinate to its main aim, which is to assert the status of ‘A Brief Discourse’ as ‘one of the most influential Shakespearean source texts in any form’ (p. ). e first instance of alleged influence is perhaps the most plausible. e editors find similar clusters of words in North’s opening discussion of Socrates and Gloucester’s opening speech in Richard III: ‘proportion’, ‘glass’, feature’, ‘fair’, ‘Nature’, ‘deformed’, ‘world’, ‘shadow’ (p. ). However, their next example, which parallels North’s discussion of the obedience of bees and ants with Canterbury’s speech on bees in Henry V, exemplifies the problems of their argument overall. By tabulating the shared keywords they elide the spatial and contextual differences between them in North, where the relevant passage is spread MLR, .,   over five pages; by the time North gets to the ‘heavens’ commanding ‘obedience’ as they do at the start of Canterbury’s speech, he has moved away from bees entirely. e editors also mention omas Elyot as a possible shared source, but they ignore the locus classicus on bee society, the fourth book of Virgil’s Georgics, which (like North and Shakespeare) assigns them a king, a division of labour, and punishment for idleness. is reflects another factor telling against North as influence, namely the extreme familiarity of his arguments and instances. It is difficult to see what Shakespeare would have found of interest in a writer whose thought is so commonplace. Elsewhere, the editors undermine their case through over-argument. One example is their suggestion that details of Cade’s account of his downfall in  Henry VI are derived from Glendower’s account of his plight in the Welsh mountains in North, as well as from the similar lament by Cade that follows it. Like Shakespeare’s Cade, Glendower depicts himself as a starving fugitive; as Iden anticipates dragging the corpse of Shakespeare’s Cade by the...

‘The earth … shall eat us all’: Exemplary History, Post-Humanism, and the Legend of King Ferrex in Elizabethan Poetry and Drama

Abstract The legend of King Ferrex was employed by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville in their succession play, Gorboduc (first performed 1561), and by John Higgins in his Mirror for Magistrates (1574; 1587), to reflect on contemporary politics and offer topical warnings to Elizabeth I and her subjects based on legendary British history. However, as well as including a section specifically focused on environmental exploitation, Higgins imbues the earth with a destructive animism in his poem which stands apart as an anomaly in his collection of verse complaints and amongst wider treatments of the story. Higgins’s emphasis on the arbitrary amoral and areligious destruction of all by the agency of the earth and other non-human actors challenges the Mirror’s educative model, and renders the Gorboduc legend inert. Looking at various versions of the narrative in Gorboduc, Higgins’s Mirror, and William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), and analogous uses of environmental discourse in other contemporary poetic and dramatic texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, this article considers the role of the nonhuman, and specifically the earth itself, in early modern imaginative historiography and political commentary. In particular, it suggests that there are fruitful connections to be made between modern posthumanist theoretical approaches, and the post-humanism of Higgins’s approach to exemplary history, whereby his admonitory text appears to abandon its premise of human primacy and perfectability in response to the perceived failure of Elizabethan advice literature to effect political change.

Affective History in A Mirror for Magistrates: Embodied Encounters and Performative Pasts

Scholarship has largely ignored A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), and specifically its prose frame, because of the shamelessly unrealistic composition process it depicts. According to these prose pieces, the Mirror’s authors pretend to be fifteenth-century figures whose complaints they then record in the space of twenty-four hours. Passing over the Mirror’s fictionalized origins, however, obscures how its frame narrative transforms the act of writing historical verse tragedies into a performative, and problematically avant-garde, experience for the Mirror’s writers and readers. The Mirror’s prose frame enables its contributors to turn historical play-acting into an innovative methodology for experiencing the past in the present. The dramatized complaint poems require the Mirror’s authors to take on the stories, personalities, voices, and (imaginatively) mutilated bodies of past people; therefore, the prose frame invents a performative model of history, in which the past can be made emotionally and physically present. Changes in the Mirror’s second edition (1563) evidence a discomfort with and fear of the very encounters with history that this methodology enables. This affective reaction leads the Mirror authors to abandon a form of performative history that the following generation of English writers and playwrights deliberately seek out. [M.L.]

Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (eds), A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England

Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (eds), <i>A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England</i>

&lt;i&gt;A Mirror for Magistrates&lt;/i&gt; in Context: Literature, History and Politics in Early Modern England

This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England. Edited by Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+258.

<i>A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England</i>. Edited by Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+258.

HARRIET ARCHER and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds). A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History and Politics in Early Modern England.

The Mirror for Magistrates is a tough nut to crack. A repeatedly revised and expanded collection of narrative poems first conceived as a continuation of John Lydgate’s sprawling fifteenth-century poem The Fall of Princes (itself a translation and adaptation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrem), the Mirror for Magistrates was intended to feed the early and mid-Tudor appetite for de casibus poetry: the morally instructive tales of the falls of great (or notable) persons. The Mirror poems feature reflective ruminations from English figures—historical and pseudohistorical—ranging from Brutus to Cardinal Wolsey, with prose framing. The poems were composed by a range of authors, initially overseen by William Baldwin. The Mirror was printed by Thomas Marshe in 1559 following the suppression of an earlier Marian edition, with expanded and revised editions appearing throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Though the Mirror has been acknowledged as a source for canonical Elizabethan writers, scholarly interest has been limited largely—to borrow a phrase from Paul Budra’s excellent 2000 monograph on the Mirror—to the ‘archaeological and apologetic’ (p. xi). This is due in no small part to C. S. Lewis’ influential castigation that the Mirror was emblematic of his ‘Drab Age’: indeed, Lewis derided the Mirror in his essay ‘Edmund Spenser, 1552-99’ as ‘about as bad as it could be’, though he acknowledged (or more accurately, lamented) that it was ‘fatally popular’ amongst Elizabethan writers. Yet the Mirror is more than just a footnote to Shakespeare’s works; even if we leave aside the subjective assessment of its artistic quality, we should recognize its importance on its own terms. It was hugely influential for writers and readers thinking about how to depict and make use of England’s past in a turbulent era, and it represents a seriously neglected opportunity for work in a wide range of fields. For this reason, it is wonderful to see this present volume emerge amidst a growing body of scholarship taking the Mirror seriously.

Epideictic Function of the Historical Narrative in J. Higgins’ Versified Monologues (“The Mirror for Magistrates”) and in E. Spenser’s “Briton Moniments” (“The Faerie Queene”, Book II, Canto X)

Epideictic Function of the Historical Narrative in J. Higgins’ Versified Monologues (“The Mirror for Magistrates”) and in E. Spenser’s “Briton Moniments” (“The Faerie Queene”, Book II, Canto X)

The Birth and Later Career of the Author William Baldwin (d. 1563)

Drawing on ecclesiastical and exchequer records, this essay offers new information about the Tudor author William Baldwin’s early life and later career, establishing such matters as his year and place of birth, date of ordination into the priesthood, and martial status. It also provides information about his ecclesiastical career (1560–63) and the network of supporters who helped him advance as a minister. Finally, it explores evidence suggesting the character of Baldwin’s religious beliefs at the opening of Elizabeth’s reign, the period in which he released A Mirror for Magistrates and other important works.

Naturalization in the Mirror and A Mask

This essay argues that John Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle is an early foray into the republicanism that shapes many of the author’s later works. As he writes his first major commissioned piece for the new English President of Wales, Milton taps into the advice tradition exemplified by John Higgins’s Mirror for Magistrates to explore a form of naturalized citizenship that respects Britain’s ancient internal divisions. The writer’s vision of mobile, identitively labile citizens rejects static ideals of British identity promoted by the central Crown to embrace a politics of local affiliations and regional sovereignty.

The Mechanics of Virtue: Quicksilver’s “Repentance,” the Test of the Audience, and Social Change in Eastward Ho

The Mechanics of Virtue: Quicksilver’s “Repentance,” the Test of the Audience, and Social Change in <i>Eastward Ho</i>

Scott C. Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English ReformationA Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation. Scott C. Lucas. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Pp. x+275.

<i>Scott C. Lucas</i>, <i>A Mirror for Magistrates</i> and the Politics of the English Reformation<i><i>A Mirror for Magistrates</i> and the Politics of the English Reformation</i>. Scott C. Lucas. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Pp. x+275.

Meredith Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for InwardnessTudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. Meredith Skura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+301.

<i>Meredith Skura</i>, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness<i>Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness</i>. Meredith Skura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+301.

“A Mirror for Magistrates” and the Politics of the English Reformation – By Scott C. Lucas

“A Mirror for Magistrates” and the Politics of the English Reformation – By Scott C. Lucas

A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation. By Scott C. Lucas. Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture. Edited by, Arthur F. Kinney. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Pp. xii+275. $39.95.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsA Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation. By Scott C. Lucas. Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture. Edited by, Arthur F. Kinney. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Pp. xii+275. $39.95.Karl GuntherKarl GuntherUniversity of Miami Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 83, Number 2June 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659166 Views: 3Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

'Not weighing well the end': Shakespeare's use of The Mirror for Magistrates in The Winter's Tale, I.II.258

'Not weighing well the end': Shakespeare's use of The Mirror for Magistrates in The Winter's Tale, I.II.258