Suchergebnisse

This essay reconsiders late Elizabethan political thought by scrutinizing the significance of the Roman state in the passionate controversy about the royal succession. It explains the varied and often contradictory polemical utility of Roman history in contemporary discussions in England and Europe of monarchy and imperial expansion, and then analyzes its deployment in the most daring contemporary succession tract: the Jesuit Robert Persons's A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1595). While A Conference has been traditionally under-stood to advocate limited elective kingship, this essay demonstrates that its theoretical first part, in which the Roman example underpins a case for popular sovereignty, was open to far more radical readings. Persons's treatise attracted widespread charges of antimonarchism and, in the following century, served republican and Whig enemies of the Stuarts

This essay introduces a special issue: "Ancient Rome in English Political Culture, ca. 1570–1660," ed. Paulina Kewes, Huntington Library Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2020).

This essay provides a contextual reading of Titus Andronicus, paying close attention to the play's collaborative authorship. Peele and Shakespeare are shown to have manufactured a superficially compelling but in reality utterly fake image of the Roman state as an imaginary laboratory for political ideas, especially the elective principle. Topical allusions and deliberate anachronisms encourage the audience to relate the subject matter to the present, viz., late Elizabethan England in the throes of a succession crisis and rent by confessional divisions. Unlike Peele's solo works, which exhibit a potent anti-Catholic bias, Titus remains confessionally aloof. The play invites the audience to reflect on the viability of particular modes of succession without committing itself either way, and shows that it is not institutional structures and processes but those who use and abuse them that make the difference to the state of the polity.