[In the following excerpt, Bevington summarizes scholars' attempts to link the action of Shakespeare's plays to specific topical events in Tudor England.]

Study of topical relevance in Tudor drama, especially in Shakespeare's plays, has a long history—much of it inglorious. Already in 1880, Swinburne was moved to lampoon the scholarly vogue, practiced ad nauseam by N. J. Halpin, Robert Cartwright, and others, of equating dramatic characters with historical personages. Swinburne's facetious suggestion was that Romeo covertly represents Lord Burghley. The total dissimilarity of the two merely proves that Shakespeare was being obscure to escape the censor. By 1930, Baldwin Maxwell was able to offer a more detailed parody, devastatingly true to type. Falstaff, he offered, is Robert Greene: licentious, surfeiting, on the verge of repentance ("Monsieur Remorse"), with a wife named Dorothy or Doll, ending his life broken and deserted. Most important, Shakespeare had a motive in responding to Green's attack on "Shake-scene." Well might Josephine Bennett write, in 1942, "Modern attempts to discover and interpret Elizabethan topical allegory have produced such absurdities at the hands of over-zealous devotees, that a scholar who desires a reputation for sanity hardly ventures to touch the subject."

Maxwell and Miss Bennett were reacting to a particularly energetic wave of publishing in the 1920's, inspired in part by the team of Manly and Rickert at Chicago. Triumphantly this school of criticism proclaimed its all-embracing theory of political usefulness in the Tudor drama. "What research is making continually clearer," wrote Miss Rickert, is "that in the sixteenth century the play and the masque did the work of the modern newspaper in guiding opinion" ["Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night's Dream," Modern Philology 21, 1923]. Acting companies adopted the political viewpoint of their noble patrons, and churned out plays that were, despite their guise of entertainment, little more than propagandistic weapons of a continuing factionalism at court. The drama performed editorial rather than newsgathering functions, and was in fact a "review" in the style of Punch, caricaturing everyone in public life.

At its extreme, such an approach was perhaps an un-avoidable abuse of the philological quest for source and background illumination. By no means all of its hypotheses were insane, and its contributions to factual knowledge were considerable. Nevertheless, the bulk of this scholarship has been written off as bizarre ingenuity, akin to Baconian or Oxfordian ciphering in its search for answers to a nonexistent mystery. More serious, the approach implies a debased and contentious view of Elizabethan dramatic art. Too often it has reduced even Shakespeare to the ignoble status of polemicist and mere copyist from life. Hamlet's assertion that dramatists should offer "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time" (a phrase Shakespeare might well have expunged if he could have foreseen its critical consequences) has become twisted into a creed of banal usefulness that denies the integrity of the artist. As Brents Stirling has shown, these critical heresies threaten to engulf the present-day student of Shakespeare's political meaning. If he defends the theory of didacticism in Renaissance art, the student must not look upon "message" as the sole or dominant aim of artistic expression. Most of all he must avoid the common temptation to argue that Tudor politics are relevant to modern ideologies, from Marxism to rightist totalitarianism.

On the other hand, romantic hostility to topical meaning is capable of producing its own distortions, especially when applied retroactively to the civilization of the Renaissance. Our world tends to overemphasize the separation of politics and art, partly because of our distrust of everincreasing state power over the minds of men. Yeats spoke for many modern intellectuals when he said, "We have no gift to set a statesman right," even if Yeats did not always follow his own advice. Auden, too, in eulogizing Yeats, argued that poetry "makes nothing happen." Both men were speaking in a romantic tradition exemplified earlier by Shelley, who insisted that a poet "would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither." Ben Jonson, however, who attempted to set many a stateman right, would have rejected the implied dichotomy between usefulness and poetic vision. He assumed, as did his contemporaries, that art could be both universal and didactic, and he did not hesitate to set forth his conception of right and wrong for his own time. Even if we view the decline of didacticism as necessary to the flowering of great Renaissance art, we should not pretend that didacticism was eliminated entirely in the late Elizabethan period. For this reason, it is a romantic exaggeration to suppose with A. F. Pollard that "no period of English literature has less to do with politics than that during which English letters reached their zenith; and no English writer's attitude toward the questions, with which alone political history is concerned, is more obscure or less important than Shakespeare's." One can applaud Tucker Brooke's efforts to rescue Shakespeare from the narrow topicalists and still object to his wishful depiction of Shakespeare as "that entrancing, brilliant moss-back" who "must have been one of the last men in London with whom an up-to-date Elizabethan would have thought of discussing politics, or religion, or geography, or current affairs."

Shakespeare, Jonson, and the best of their contemporaries did of course transcend mere pamphleteering. Yet their remarkable success in doing so cannot be measured without an awareness of the polemical norms of their day. Art as a weapon of propaganda was a commonplace in the sixteenth century, taken for granted by the politically active noblemen who provided the financial support for many of England's writers. During the formative midcentury years, religious politics was virtually the whole substance of drama, inevitably creating a tradition both of political commentary in the drama and of various dramaturgic techniques by which ideology could be given maximum propagandistic effect. Without this background it is not easy to assess the nature of Shakespeare's problem as a writer of history plays. The historical materials he used were habitually employed in topical controversy comparing Queen Elizabeth with her incompetent predecessors John, Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI. Shakespeare's use of these materials did not make him a polemicist, but it did oblige him to be conscious of latent meanings for his audience and for his government. Furthermore, there is no good reason to believe that Shakespeare and Jonson wished to shun the political preoccupations of their generation. However universal their vision, however much emancipated from the literal equations of some allegorists, they chose the political or courtly arena as a means of dramatizing their ideals about man in society. In a thriving commercial theater they fortunately achieved a fair degree of independence from ideological servitude, and they used their independence to look beyond the narrowly political. Hamlet's espousal of the "abstract and brief chronicles" is of course infinitely more than topical; it offers a transcendent rationale for the artist's depiction of life as he sees it. Without the providential demise of "pure" political drama during the years of Shakespeare's youth, later Elizabethan drama would have been indeed sterile and utilitarian. Yet even if a study of Tudor political drama must accordingly be anticlimactic in structure, looking forward with relief to the emancipation of the artist from a constricting view of his social function, it nevertheless is paradoxically true that contemporary political awareness contributed greatly to the highest literary achievement of English civilization. Shakespeare and Jonson did not use their freedom to eschew political responsibility but rather to speak as public moralists. They still believed in the power of art to guide and reform. Political dramaturgy was an inescapable and major portion of their heritage, and as in so many things their generation managed to transform stern realities into momentary splendor.

Shakespeare's dominance on the Elizabethan dramatic scene ordinarily requires that he be treated at length or not at all. He is certainly the universally known poet on whom most criticism (good and bad) has centered.…

Shakespeare's political ideas emerge from the comparison as those of an eminently thoughtful man who catered neither to a complacent view of official policy nor to the firebrand rebelliousness of a man like the Earl of Essex. Among his contemporaries Shakespeare was, in fact, an unusually brave, sensitive, and humane defender of a middle position rapidly losing credence in the extremist temper of Elizabeth's last years. The burning issues of the 1590's were relevant to Shakespeare's career as a dramatist, not in terms of individual identities but of principles.

Apart from setting the political ideas of late Elizabethan drama in a broad perspective, this study attempts to achieve literary insight into the growth of dramatic forms. My emphasis is not on social and political history for which plays might be used as illustrative documents, but on the plays themselves. Techniques of characterization, for instance, were intensely affected by the Elizabethan dramatist's quest for ways to transform historical models into artistic abstractions or social types. The escape from the narrow didacticism of polemical portraiture was necessarily achieved in the context of a political tradition. Handling of viewpoint and use of chorus or of choral characters are matters for which a determining of political auspices is often vital. The artist's conception of the genre in which he writes is frequently the product of his political intent. These are literary questions for which a knowledge of historical background is a subservient but essential need.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of many topical interpreters of Tudor plays, with their grasping at coincidental similarities between drama and historical event (analogies often constructed on internal evidence alone), we would do well to survey two approaches to topical meaning; first, the considerable amount of external evidence concerning political activity in the drama, and second, some of the hypotheses advanced to explain the "secret" meaning of extant Elizabethan plays. The approaches are too often worlds apart. Yet the reliable external evidence, however cautiously it must be applied to the plays, is significant and pervasive throughout the Tudor period. The habit of analogizing, in drama as elsewhere, was universal. As Miss Campbell, M. M. Reese, and others have abundantly illustrated, history was studied and restudied for the light it cast on contemporary events. In Herodotus' account of the Greek wars against the Persians, for instance, Elizabethans could see a mirror of their own struggle with Spain. They eulogized Queen Elizabeth at her coronation festivities as Deborah the woman judge, or as Alexander, Diana, Phoebe, and Arthur. Mary Queen of Scots was flatteringly compared to Aurora, the Muses, Helen, Ceres, Juno, Lucrece, Pallas, Jove, Clio, Diana, Venus, Penelope, and the Virgin Mary; by her enemies she was likened to Circe, Clytemnestra, Dalilah, Jezebel, Medea, Pasiphae, Calypso, the Sirens, Medusa, and Duessa. The commonest source for such analogies were the Bible, English history and legendary history, and classical mythology and history.

In drama, this habit of mind is discernible in the earliest accounts of medieval street pageants and courtly disguisings. A pageant celebrating the reconciliation of Richard II with the City of London (1392) compared Richard to Solomon, Troilus, Absalom, and Christ; in a particularly pointed allegory he was depicted as Ahasuerus, with Queen Anne as the godly Queen Hester who could appease her husband's unjustified wrath toward his people. The advice was sharply critical, for the Londoners knew they had won their argument and could welcome Richard back largely on their own terms. Lydgate wrote a pageant for Henry VI's entry into London (1432) celebrating the king as Aristotle, Euclid, Boethius, David, and Solomon. Henry VII's progress to York, Hereford, Worcester, and Bristol in 1486 brought forth encomiums to a resurrected Solomon, Noah, Jason, Isaac, Jacob, David, Scipio, and of course Arthur. Lydgate's courtly disguisings of 1425-1435 similarly gave Biblical and mythological dignity to politically important embassies. Mummings were so potentially dangerous that they had to be prohibited at times (for instance, in 1417 and 1418). According to some chroniclers, a mumming provided the occasion for an attempted overthrow of Henry IV in 1400. Politically motivated disguisings continued into the Tudor period, as at the marriage of Prince Arthur to Katharine of Aragon (1501).

Well before the Reformation, Henry VIII encouraged political drama dealing with the international power struggle. On the occasion of the visit of Emperor Charles V in 1522, to cement an imperial alliance, the signatories witnessed a play by young gentleman that expressed Henry's viewpoint in the negotiations. According to Edward Hall's Union, a group of allegorical figures named Friendship, Prudence, and Might, representing the signatories, undertook to tame a wild horse representing King Francis I of France. In November 1527, after a characteristic shift in diplomatic ties, John Ritwise and the children of Paul's performed a Latin play before Henry and the French ambassador, needling the emperor and the Spaniards. Cardinal Wolsey is the hero of this piece of open propaganda. With St. Peter's authority, Wolsey unites England and France against the enemies of the church, bringing the emperor to his knees and freeing the two sons of the king of France. Also in the production are Religion, Ecclesia, and Verity, opposing Heresy, False Interpretation, Corruptio Scriptoris, and the heretic Luther and his wife. Wolsey and Henry are "Fidei Defensor." Hall reports drily that wise men smiled at the cardinal's vanity. The next year saw a companion piece performed before Wolsey on the release of the pope from captivity.

Not all political dramas of this early period favored the administration so tamely. John Roo wrote a play (1527) about Lord Governance, "ruled by Dissipation and Negligence, by whose misgovernance and evil order Lady Public Weal was put from Governance; which caused Rumor Populi, Inward Grudge, and Disdain of Wanton Sovereignty to rise with a great multitude" to restore Public Weal. Hall, a member of Gray's Inn, gives a first-hand account of this Christmas performance before lawyers who were evidently up in arms about Henry's "amicable loan" of 1525. Roo claimed that the play had been written at the end of Henry VII's reign, but Wolsey was sufficiently offended to send Roo to the Fleet and rebuke the young gentlemen who had acted in the play. In 1537, at a May-Day play in Suffolk, the actors told "of a king, how he should rule his realm," and "one played Husbandry and said many things against gentlemen, more than was in the book of the play."

With the Reformation, political drama took a more violent turn. A comedy appeared at court in 1533-1534 "to the no small defamation of certain cardinals." Even the pope heard that Henry "feist jouer ou permisi estre jouées des farces dedans Londres fort ignominieuses." Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, tells a grisly episode of Henry delighting in his own thirst for blood. In June 1535, Henry traveled thirty miles to Windsor one evening, walking ten of those miles "with a two-handed sword, and got into a house where he could see everything. He was so pleased at seeing himself cutting off the heads of the clergy," that "he sent to tell his lady [Anne Boleyn] that she ought to see the representation of it repeated on the eve of St. Peter."

Anti-Catholic drama and its opposite were staple in the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and of the early Elizabeth. Official fear of political drama and its two-edged potency was bound to increase, however, and Elizabeth's attitude was complex. Her sensitivity, combined with her fascination for allegorical subtlety, inevitably altered the method of political allusion. She was especially alert to the question of her marriage or establishing a successor to the throne. Did she merely drive political allusion into more tortuous and obscure forms of expression, or did she succeed in persuading her courtiers that the subject was too dangerous to mention? The question is central to Lyly's plays among others, and will be debated at length in the ensuing chapters. We cannot doubt, however, that Elizabeth suspected a never-ending commentary in most plays she saw. In July 1564, Guzman da Silva wrote to his Spanish master, King Philip, about a comedy he had seen in Elizabeth's presence: "I should not have understood much of it if the Queen had not interpreted as she told me she would do. They generally deal with marriage in the comedies." Similarly in March 1565, de Silva witnessed with Elizabeth a debate between Juno and Diana, representing marriage and chastity. After Jupiter had given his verdict in favor of marriage, "the Queen then turned to me and said, 'This is all against me.'" In 1567 de Silva wrote, "The hatred that this Queen has of marriage is most strange. They represented a comedy before her last night until nearly one in the morning, which ended in a marriage, and the Queen, as she told me herself, expressed her dislike of the woman's part." Late in her reign, John Harington could report that Elizabeth "utterly supprest the talk of an heir apparent, saying she would not have her winding sheet set up afore her face." Yet she still expected at this date to receive unwelcome advice in her plays. After witnessing a play in 1595 appearing to favor Essex, Elizabeth retired with the comment that "if she had thought there had been so much said of her, she would not have been there that night." And Lord Burghley wrote in a letter that same year, "I think never a lady besides her, nor a decipherer in the court, would have dissolved the figure [explicated the allegory] to have found the sense as her Majesty hath done."

Were Elizabeth's endless suspicions justified, however, in each case? Burghley's testimonial suggests rather that Elizabeth was a reader of deep meaning beyond the talents of highly accomplished decipherers in her court. If a comedy ending in marriage offended her, how could any comedy hope to please? Her remarks to the Spanish ambassador may well have been calculated to titillate Philip; she could depend on de Silva to repeat what she had said, and was not likely to offer an undiplomatic gambit. Philip long fancied himself as one of Elizabeth's wooers, and she was strategically in need of flirting with him. What we are left with is evidence that feeling did run high concerning the marriage question and that allegorical lock-picking was a courtly pastime amounting to a disease. No writer in Lyly's situation could overlook it, as his many disclaimers prove.

There are, to be sure, palpable instances in which courtiers did offer allegorical tributes to their queen, begging favors that were sometimes granted. These entertainments were not regular plays, however, but took the form of masques or pageants on the queen's progresses. At Kenilworth in 1575, the festivities planned by Leicester included a show "in which tale, if you mark the words with this present world, or were acquainted with the state of the devices, you should find no less hidden than uttered, and no less uttered than should deserve a double reading over." Leicester's audacity in urging his suit of marriage appears to have backfired, however, prompting a rejoinder in the entertainment at Woodstock that argues against unequal marriages for princesses. Later, in 1595, Arthur Throgmorton asked permission to present before Elizabeth a "masque of the nine muses," upon which occasion the sponsor planned to beg a royal favor. Thomas Churchyard tells of a sumptuous show by Sir Walter Ralegh and others "in which book was the whole service of my L. of Lester mentioned that he and his train did in Flaunders." When Elizabeth visited Burghley in 1593 "she was welcomed by a dramatic device in which it was suggested in the plainest terms that Burghley's mantle of councillor should be allowed to fall upon his son Robert." At Essex's pageant before the queen in 1595 "there was much guessing as to the meaning of the allegory."

This topical method, however, applies solely to private masques and shows, which were by nature occasional pieces, paid for by an aristocrat with the specific aim of cajoling or placating the queen. Regular plays, on the other hand, whether for adult or juvenile companies, were financed by a theatrical audience. The patron offered nominal protection in return for sporadic services; he did not commission the work. For these reasons it is unsafe to assume that plays like Endymion, Love's Labor's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, or The Merry Wives of Windsor fostered individual campaigns of flattery and begging on behalf of certain courtiers, as did the courtly entertainment. And in fact no Tudor document exists to demonstrate such a condition of performance. Conceivably, the goals of public repertory and of courtly flattery might be merged, allowing Shakespeare, for example, to fashion A Midsummer Night's Dream for a noble wedding with the added expectation of a successful run at the Theater. Such a play could combine a covert meaning for its aristocratic auditors and a broader meaning for the public. At the private theaters, hidden meaning (like that suggested for Endymion) might appeal even to a select paying clientele. Such conditions of performance are, however, purely conjectural. It cannot be overemphasized that the wealth of external evidence on topical relevance in the Elizabethan period relates chiefly to lost plays or to the tradition of masques and entertainments.

Apart from aristocratic struggles for the queen's favor, the subjects most often urged in topical interpretations of late Elizabethan drama are dynastic: the Scottish succession, Essex's challenge of the queen's authority, the threat of Spain. There is no dearth of evidence showing that such inflammatory issues were publicly aired, and that the authorities were disturbed. The drama was by no means the only outlet for extremist sentiment. The Lord Chief Justice, in the Star Chamber, November 1599, reported of Puritan activity that "the fashion of it has been to scandalize the queen, censure councillors, and write against all authority, and the purpose is to disgrace those in authority and cause disobedience and sedition, and bring all to confusion." In that same year, preachers spoke impertinently of the government, tolled bells for Essex, or prayed for him by name. Allegorical allusion served as an all-weather vehicle for purposes of disclaiming responsibility for seditious talk. In March 1600, the Bishop of Worcester, preaching at court, made many insinuations on behalf of Essex: "As he was understood by the whole auditory and by the Queen herself, who presently calling him to a reckoning for it, he flatly foreswore that he had any such meaning."

Basic to covert criticism of the government was the historical method of Robert Parsons, a seditious Catholic whose diatribe of 1584, known as Leicester's Commonwealth, likened Elizabeth to Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI, weak kings who had been supplanted by successful and sane usurpers. Leicester, in this analogy, epitomized the parasitical frivolities of Gaveston and the Spencers, Mowbray, or the Earl of Suffolk. Elizabeth and her courtiers could hardly be unfamiliar with the analogy, and its implications. Her closet counselors were anxious not to be viewed as favorites. As early as 1578, Sir Francis Knollys fretted that if Elizabeth did not heed wise counsel, she would soon find herself surrounded by sycophants willing to "play the parts of King Richard the Second's men." Lord Hundson employed the same phrase, saying "I was never one of Richard II's men." It was in such a taut context that Elizabeth remarked of Essex's rebellion (February 1601), "I am Richard II. Know ye not that?" Essex's followers had ordered a revival of a play on Richard II, by the Chamberlain's men, on the very eve of the abortive rebellion. Whether the play was Shakespeare's cannot be ascertained, but it seems likely. The analogy does not implicate Shakespeare and his company, who were exonerated by the queen's examiners, but it surely indicates the extraordinary atmosphere in which the play was written and performed. Sir John Hayward, whose History of Henry IV appeared in 1599, was not as lucky as the Chamberlain's men, probably because of his ill-timed dedication to Essex himself. Although Hayward argues respectably enough that deposing a sovereign is unlawful whatever the provocation, the detailed exposure of Richard's weaknesses was deemed seditious and Hayward was sent to prison.

If Shakespeare's company successfully avoided prosecution for intentional slandering of the queen, despite their use of a Richard II play, where then are the dramas that actually did revile public authority and support Essex? Topical interpreters have claimed many, but again the external evidence of sedition relates to plays no longer extant. We know only that the government was continually alarmed, and purportedly even took countermeasures by directing its own propaganda in the theaters. The Earl of Derby may have been promoted by such a motive when he was reported, in 1599, to be "busy penning comedies for the common players." William Cecil threatened, apropos of a Star Chamber case having to do with cozening, that "he would have those that make plays to make a comedy thereof and to act it with those names." Personal libel against men in authority was viewed as a danger to the state. As the Privy Council wrote in 1601 to certain justices of the peace of Middlesex: "We do understand that certain players, that use to recite their plays at the Curtain in Moorfields, do represent upon the stage in their interludes the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive, under obscure manner but yet in such sort as all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and of the persons that are meant thereby." Acting could apparently convey meaning not specified in the text. Middleton's pageant The Triumphs of Home and Industry (1617) was not derogatory to Spain, but one of its actors, overdressed as a Spanish dandy, persisted in kissing his hands to the unpopular Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who was in the audience. According to a Spanish eyewitness, perhaps biased, the laughter thus provoked was unmistakable in meaning. Abuse of the Scots by "the comedians of London" was so flagrant in 1598 that an English agent in Scotland wrote Burghley, "It is wished that the matter be speedily amended, lest the king and the country be stirred to anger." Even in Ireland, in 1603, it was common knowledge "that the very stage-players in England jeered at him [James] for being the poorest prince in Christendom." Neither of these witnesses, however, was on the scene in London.

Since we lack the plays specifically implicated in these allegedly vivid abuses, we are hard pressed to judge the merits of the charges. Council members and magistrates were, like Elizabeth, predisposed to see plays in the most controversial light possible. We are still left, therefore, with an inadequate means of demonstrating intentional topicality in the extant drama of the 1590's. On the other hand, we have many eloquent testimonials from those who felt they were being unfairly accused of conspiratorial purpose. Samuel Daniel, in 1605, was brought before the Privy Council to answer charges of having shown a sympathetic picture of the Essex rebellion in his Philotas. Fortunately he was able to show that his first three acts had been read by the Master of the Revels and Lord Mountjoy in 1600, before the rebellion occurred. Michael Drayton's changes in depicting Richard II in his England's Heroical Epistles (1599-1600) reflect Elizabeth's touchiness and perhaps Hayward's troubles with the law; the Epistles were dedicated to the Earl of Bedford, an Essex supporter. Fulke Greville, on the advice of friends, burned his Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1600) because there were things in the play "apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governor, and government." His Alaham (ca. 1600) had also awakened the suspicions of the Cecil clan. Ben Jonson's Sejanus inevitably produced a confrontation with the authorities. In the dedication to Volpone (printed 1607), Jonson commented acidly that "application is now grown a trade." Satire of needless deciphering appears too in his Poetaster and in Epigrams 92. Nicholas Breton lamented, "Who doth not find it by experience That points and commas, oftentimes misread, Endanger oft the harmless writer's head?"

Thomas Nashe was brilliantly caustic on the subject, in his play Summer's Last Will and Testament and in several pamphlets. Authors, he said, are like men at a Persian banquet: "if they roll their eye never so little at one side, there stands an Eunuch before them, with his heart full of jealousy, and his bow ready bent to shoot them through, because they look farther than the laws of the country suffer them." Again, "Let one but name bread, they will interpret it to be the town of Bredan in the low countries." If a writer fails to qualify and disclaim sufficiently, "out steps me an infant squib of the Inns of Court … catcheth hold of a rush, and absolutely concludeth it is meant of the Emperor of Ruscia, and that it will utterly mar the traffic into that country if all the pamphlets be not called in and suppressed, wherein that libelling word is mentioned."

External evidence, then, indicates overinterpretation as much as conspiracy. Clearly the possibilities of allusion were on everybody's mind. Yet the evidence does not provide a clear mandate for discovering court scandal in Love's Labor's Lost or particular reference to Essex in the history plays. The best that can be said for modern decipherers is that they are playing a venerable game, such as was practiced by Elizabethan courtiers and magistrates and by Elizabeth herself. In order to obtain perspective on proper rules for conducting such inquiries, let us examine some theories of topical identification, noting the frequently wide divergence between hypothesis and the reliable evidence already summarized.

A constant theme of the decipherers is the relationship of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights to the Earl of Essex. However far afield or utterly unrelated some of the theories may seem, they almost invariably reveal their origin in a consistent myth. It explains Shakespeare's entire dramatic production. His admiration for Essex is supposed to have begun early and to have been soon fostered by his closeness to the Earl of Southampton, one of Essex's men throughout most of the period. Southampton was Catholic; Shakespeare, according to the myth, sympathized with the old religion; Essex was tolerant of it (as he was of Puritanism). Both young nobles were inveterate playgoers and friends of the players. Essex was unquestionably the darling of the London populace, or at least a rowdy section of it. Both young men were chevaliers, anxious for glory, hawks in their advocacy of war. They were enemies of the Cecil faction, which Essex unfairly accused of favoring the claims of the Spanish Infanta and opposing James of Scotland. Essex believed in a union of the British Isles, brought about by James's accession to the English throne and a tolerant peace in Ireland. Essex has been interpreted as something much better than a rash malcontent: he was a true "liberal," champion of the common man, of modern economics, the supremacy of Parliament, religious toleration—a man ahead of his time and a martyr for the causes of science, reason, and liberty that were to triumph in the ensuing century. These, according to the theory, were Shakespeare's politics as well, and as the crisis mounted he threw more and more of his dramatic energy into the earl's defense.

Nor was Shakespeare the only Essexian dramatist on the scene. Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido, according to one interpreter, compares the Carthaginian queen's maneuvers to keep Aeneas at court with Elizabeth's reluctance to send her favorites (Essex most of all) on dangerous expeditions. The implied flattery of Essex as the founder of his country's true destiny is momentous. In Tamburlaine, Marlowe supposedly satirizes Philip II for his arrogant claims of universal dominion and his maltreatment of other princes. Thomas Heywood, in his Royal King and Loyal Subject (debatably dated in 1600) portrays an Earl Marshal faithful to his sovereign but hated by the counselors who ultimately drive him into trial for treason and banishment. This typical story of ingratitude is of course parallel to Essex's disgrace, and hence the idealized ending must be a plea for Essex's restoration.

Shakespeare's fascination for the earl supposedly began with his earliest dramatic efforts. An incidental reference in The Comedy of Errors to "the salt rheum that ran between France and [England]," joined to some comic discussion on Spain and the Netherlands, conjures up the expedition of Essex and Biron on behalf of Henry IV (III, ii, 118-145). The Taming of the Shrew is offered as an elaborate allegory berating Burghley (Baptista Minola) for auctioning off his daughters. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in a "transparent veil," attacks Essex's foe Robert Cecil in the false friend Proteus. Proteus' father and uncle are Burghley and Sir Nicholas Bacon. The unsavory Thurio is Lord Rich; Silvia and Valentine are of course Penelope Rich and Sir Philip Sidney. The affair takes place not at Milan but at Leicester's camp in the Netherlands, and the idealized ending describes the bliss that Sidney might have found with his true love. 1 Henry VI derives important details from the siege of Rouen in 1591-1592; accordingly Talbot's patriotism and his betrayal by the lords at home owe something to Essex's situation. In 2 Henry VI the unflattering account of Eleanor Cobham does no credit to the powerful Lord Cobham who later sided with Cecil and the Admiral's men.

Love's Labor's Lost has exercised the ingenuity of investigators more than any other of Shakespeare's early plays, partly because its names of Navarre (Henry IV), Berowne (Biron, Henry IV's general), Dumaine (Du Mayenne, brother of the Guise), Longaville (Longueville, Governor of Normandy), and perhaps Armado (Armada) and Moth (Marquis de la Mothe, Henry's amiable diplomat) were unquestionably names in the news during the early 1590's. In 1591 Essex banqueted with Navarre, Biron, and Longueville. Mayenne, however, was fighting bitterly on the other side, in the Guisian wars. Furthermore, in 1593 Navarre turned from the Protestant faith. To allude frivolously to these matters after 1589, when Henry III had been killed by a crazy monk and Navarre had inherited his unstable throne, Shakespeare would have had to be contra-topical. Yet still-prevalent theories assert that the play attacks Burghley in 1591 for urging one of his daughters on Southampton, or Oxford for his affectation of foreign mannerisms, or above all the "school of night," whose members had quarreled with the Essex faction around 1593-1595. Other figures drawn into the supposed satire include Nashe and Harvey, Florio (Southampton's tutor), Lyly, the Fantastical Monarcho, Antonio Perez, Philip of Spain, Don John of Austria, Chapman, and Bishop Cooper.

Saner criticism has given its attention to the court of Henry of Navarre at Nérac in 1578, where Henry was visited by Catherine de Medici, with her daughter Marguerite, to settle the sovereignty of Aquitaine. The famous escadron volant accompanied the queen and boasted a series of conquests. The social atmosphere was like that of Shakespeare's play. Navarre wrote love letters. Navarre's court had a reputation as a "safe" place to educate Protestant English gentlemen who wished to travel. Another visit occurred in 1586 at St. Bris, but without l'escadron volant. European politics had not yet rendered such a setting woefully out of date and trivial. Social gossip from this never-never land would have suited admirably an imitative Lylyan comedy in the late 1580's, possibly for boys.

Equally fruitless have been the various attempts to link A Midsummer Night's Dream with various state weddings: Stanley-de Vere, Berkeley-Carey, or Thomas Heneage and the Countess of Southampton (the Earl of Essex's dowager-mother). To be sure, Shakespeare does seem to have had in mind the spectacular entertainments of Kenilworth (1575) and especially Elvetham (1591) in his recollection of "a mermaid on a dolphin's back" and "certain stars" that "shot madly from their spheres," when Cupid was unable to wound "a fair vestal thronèd in the west." Elizabeth had participated in such a flattering device. Nor have critics erred too greatly in detecting a distant compliment to Elizabeth in Theseus.

To suppose a closer and more political involvement of Elizabeth is, however, extremely hazardous. Miss Rickert has argued, in a classic article of the lock-picking type, that Elizabeth should be identified as in other literary works with the Faerie Queene, or Titania. Her crossing the will of Oberon alludes then to Elizabeth's refusal to accede to the will of her father, Henry VIII. (Oberon is of course Titania's husband, not father, but some changes were needed to disguise a controversial topic.) Henry VIII had settled the royal succession after his own children on the issue of Lady Katharine and Lady Jane Grey. Lady Katharine had married the Earl of Hertford in 1561, much to Elizabeth's displeasure; their son was Lord Beauchamp, whom Elizabeth had declared illegitimate and refused to recognize as heir. Politicians of the 1590's, desperately looking for an English heir as alternative to James VI of Scotland, made much of Beauchamp's so-called "Suffolk claim." He is the "changeling boy," and Shakespeare's endorsement of his right is central to the playwright's presumed crusade for an established succession.

Accordingly, Elizabeth (Titania) is punished for her obstinacy in not settling the succession by receiving the attentions of an unwelcome lover (Bottom the Weaver). Who else but the aspiring, unlovely James VI? James had in fact courted Elizabeth, and his own poems compared himself to Pyramus. In August 1594, in a pageant at the christening of his son Prince Henry, a lion was to have drawn in a ship of state but was withheld for fear of frightening the ladies. James was notoriously timid and could not bear the sight of a drawn sword. He was laughed at in England for his countrified manners and his "humour for a tyrant"—his preoccupation with divine right. Elizabeth was deeply offended with James in 1595, and the Scottish king for his part was considering a plan to enter England in concert with Philip of Spain. Thus, Shakespeare had a motive and a license to discredit James in the person of Bottom, while he urged the Suffolk claim. Only later, after sensing that the Suffolk claim was no longer tenable, did Shakespeare come around to Essex's view that James was at least preferable to a Catholic claimant.

Although the allusions to Prince Henry's christening and to Elvetham may have been conscious, the rest of the allegory is clearly unacceptable—not merely because it darkens one of Shakespeare's brightest comedies, but because it implies outrageous treatment of Elizabeth. If she was increasingly sensitive to any mention of the question of succession, how little would she have enjoyed viewing herself punished for her stand, and grossly in love with James whom she then abhorred? Shakespeare's supposed concealment of the allegory will not serve, for if Elizabeth with her mastery of decipherment could not read the message it would fail of its purpose. The record seems clear that the play did not offend.

Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice have also been explicated as part of the Essex-Southampton program. Although Shakespeare drew upon Brooke's Romeus and Juliet for his source in Romeo, his immediate inspiration was purportedly the Danvers-Long feud of October 1594. The Danverses were Essex roisterers who managed to escape prosecution for murder only with the aid of Southampton. Thus Shakespeare wrote "not in vacuo but in an actual environment the events of which stimulated his imagination along with his reading and his memory." Perhaps also he mirrored the major rival factions at court, with Capulet as Burghley, Montague as Leicester, and Romeo as Essex, who had incurred the Prince's (Elizabeth's) wrath for secretly marrying Sidney's widow in 1590. The Merchant of Venice is supposed to have grown out of the conspiracy of Roderigo Lopez, the Jewish physician charged with a plot to murder Elizabeth and the Portugese pretender Don Antonio, in the interests of Spain. Essex brought the charge against Lopez and was an intimate of Don Antonio. Elizabeth herself appears in the play as the merciful Portia, Essex as Bassanio. The play reflects the excitement of the Cadiz expedition of 1596. More farfetched still is the reading of Shylock as Philip Henslowe, the tightfisted entrepreneur who extracted many a pound of flesh from his underpaid writers, and who married an illegitimate daughter to Edward Alleyn (Lorenzo). Thus the play was a major attack in the Chamberlain's men's war on the Ceciloriented Admiral's company, who had had so much success with The Jew of Malta.

Not surprisingly, Shakespeare's histories are the heart of his supposed campaign for Essex. King John, for instance, does in fact tone down the anti-Catholic virulence of its chief source, The Troublesome Reign of King John. The Essex theory supposes that Shakespeare's reasons for doing so were partly his own tenderness for the old faith and partly his deference to the platform of Southampton and his leader. (Essex, though no Catholic, preached tolerance.) Shakespeare also virtually eliminated the role of "Essex" as one of the rebellious barons in his source. Both Shakespeare and the author of Troublesome Reign purportedly modeled Faulconbridge on Sir John Perrot, an illegitimate son of Henry VIII. Perrot was in danger of his life in 1591 for having spoken contemptuously to the queen, and died in the Tower in 1592. Essex took his part. This allegiance of Shakespeare to Essex would have predated his meeting with Southampton.

We have already seen the analogy, familiar to the Elizabethan mind, that Elizabeth was Richard II and Essex Bolingbroke. Extremists of the Essexian persuasion would have us believe that Shakespeare wished to see the earl on the throne, and that Essex's military and pragmatic virtues are reflected not only in Boling-broke but more especially in his son. A more temperate but still highly debatable interpretation is that Shakespeare sympathized with the earl and his platform, but feared the rashness of the passionate young nobleman and did not approve of the dangerous tendency beginning in 1599 toward insurrection. Either reading supposes that Shakespeare's censures of Richard II are highly critical of Elizabeth, as in Robert Parsons' infamous analogy. Miss Evelyn Albright goes so far as to assert that Bolingbroke's claims to his Lancastrian titles reflect Essex's own line of descent from Thomas of Woodstock. She believes too that Shakespeare had actually read Hayward's History of Henry IV in manuscript, and borrowed from it censorious anachronisms such as the forced "benevolences" and the general agitation over taxes. "Benevolences" were not known by name in Richard II's time; hence Hayward and Shakespeare were simply describing the condition of England after 1592.

Miss Albright sees correspondences to Essex and Elizabeth in every aspect of Shakespeare's treatment of Bolingbroke and Richard. The allusions to Richard's deafness to counsel and love of flattery capitalize on often-repeated charges against Elizabeth. Essex, like Bolingbroke, complained of "letting of the realm to farm." Essex openly courted the commons, vailing "his bonnet to an oyster-wench." Essex's Irish expedition was popularly regarded as political banishment. Other analysts have suggested further corroborative details. The names of Percy, Blount, and Vernon, among others, glorify the ancestors of several prominent members of the Essex group. The reference in 1 Henry IV to the ebbing and flowing of the moon (I, ii) implies the uncertainty of Elizabeth's favor. Gower's mention of "a beard of the general's cut" (Henry V, III, vi) signals the famous "Cadiz beard" worn by so many rufflers after the expedition of 1596. Henry V's mercy to the citizens of Harfleur, unsubstantiated in history, reflects Essex's mercy to the citizens of Cadiz.

This line of reasoning has never won much support, chiefly because the plays themselves are so eloquent on the dangers of faction and instability. External considerations also militate against the theory. If Shakespeare's intent was visibly inflammatory to his audience, why did the Chamberlain's men escape censure in 1601? Why would the authorities have allowed the plays to go on at all, instead of excising a few scenes like that of Richard's deposition? Its offense was probably not the treatment, but the subject itself in such dangerous times. Shakespeare very probably did not know Hayward's work when he wrote Richard II, for Hayward testified that he began the history one year before its publication in 1599. Shakespeare has long been thought to have spoken admiringly of Essex in the chorus to Act V of Henry V, but the tribute may instead have pointed to Charles Blount, Lord Montjoy, Essex's far more victorious successor in Ireland and a constant favorite of the queen's. The choruses give evidence of having been composed after the quarto of 1600. Essex was dangerously in disgrace almost from the moment he began his Irish campaign. Mountjoy in 1603, holding titles of "Lord Deputy" and "General," was safe and popular. If Mountjoy was intended, we lose the one supposedly tangible proof in all his plays of Shakespeare's devotion to Essex.

It is as easy to argue that Shakespeare voiced disillusionment and fear of Essex in his histories. Similarity to Hotspur emerges from the aftermath of the Cadiz expedition, when Essex "claimed the ransom of his prisoners for himself when the Queen demanded them." Essex was a rash warrior headed for disaster, a devotee of honor. Another line of analogy is to speculate on Shakespeare's boyhood recollection of the Northern Rebellion of 1569, prominently featuring the names of Northumberland and the Percies and conducting its operations more or less in Shakespeare's back yard. This approach may contain some merit in suggesting Shakespeare's sources, although it must be granted that thirty years is a long time back for a theater audience to recall.

All of Shakespeare's festive comedies have yielded Essex clues. One of Malvolio's innumerable supposed counterparts in Elizabeth's court was Ambrose Willoughby, an enemy of Southampton, who as squire of the presence in 1598 felt he ought to keep the earl quiet at bedtime, scuffled with him, and was thanked by the queen for his zeal. Twelfth Night thus stands on the side of Essex's roisterers and opposed to the cold sobriety of Burghley's faction. A passage in Much Ado about Nothing alluding to "favorites, Made proud by princes, that advance their pride Against the power that bred it" (III, i, 9-11) has suggested Essex's troubled relations with the queen-although whether in hostility to the anti-Essex faction barring the earl's entry to Elizabeth upon his return from Ireland in 1599, or in hostility to Essex's own challenge of the queen's power, is a matter for the individual reader to decide. As You Like It, according to one literary sleuth, "undoubtedly" tells of Essex's banishment from the court in the person of Duke Senior. The tragedy of Julius Caesar also idealizes Essex in the insurrection of Brutus against tyranny and illegitimate rule.

Hamlet offers a rich field for topicality, as for other critical approaches, and reveals perhaps most clearly the basic error of the lockpicking sleuth. One starts with the assumption that Hamlet provides "abstract and brief chronicles of the time" (since Shakespeare tells us so) and one searches the annals for a young nobleman whose father has disappeared under suspicious circumstances and whose mother has married the suspected criminal. In other words, one takes a legend of archetypal significance and sees if it will apply to real life. It needs no ghost come from the dead to predict that the legend will so apply, for that is the strength of its fiction. The error is essentially comparable to that imposed on Bolingbroke and Essex: Shakespeare was fascinated with the recurring phenomenon of rebellion in English history as it applied to virtually every generation before his time. Any contemporary reenactment of the pattern was bound to resemble the artist's creation.

In Hamlet's case history, three theories have dominated. The first is of Leicester and Amy Robsart, back around 1560. Leicester himself had died in 1588. But a rumor supposed that Leicester (then Sir Robert Dudley) had done away with Amy in order to marry Elizabeth—the "seeming virtuous queen." The guilty lovers hushed up the affair as best they could ("a forgèd process of my death") and may even have fixed the jury ("great command o'ersways the order"). Such bald criticism of Elizabeth could not have been staged until 1603. This preposterous theory received short shrift from H. H. Furness, who objected that Shakespeare had no motive to attack the dead Leicester, that the audience would not have cared for Shakespeare's opinion on this old scandal, that Cecil would not have permitted it even after 1603, that Shakespeare had probably allied himself with Leicester's players, and that Hamlet was surely staged while Elizabeth was still alive.

A closer correspondence, but just as uninviting, concerns James of Scotland—Essex's white hope for the succession. James's mother Mary had been deeply involved in the scandal of James's father's death, and had married Bothwell, the supposed murderer of Darnley. Bothwell was a heavy drinker, like Claudius. Rizzio (Polonius), the meddling counselor, had been murdered in the presence of the queen (though not by James) and had been disposed of "hugger-mugger" by means of a staircase. James, in 1600-1601, was a melancholy, retiring, and vacillating prince (his sanity was doubted by some), interested in learning. Shakespeare was at this time deeply committed to the Essex strategy of Scottish succession. Alternatively, Hamlet's hesitation in killing Claudius might reflect Elizabeth's delay in executing Mary of Scots. Significantly, these theories are not even discussed by J. E. Phillips in his thorough book on literary treatments of Mary.

The only interpretation still given serious attention is that Hamlet reflects the plight of Essex himself, or, more broadly, Shakespeare's gloom occasioned by Essex's disgrace. Essex's family history contained the necessary closeted skeleton. Rumor had it that Dudley (Leicester) had poisoned Essex's father to live in sin with Essex's mother, Lettice Knollys (who, parenthetically, is supposed to have been the "little western flower" of A Midsummer Night's Dream). Essex was moody, brilliant, unstable, a procrastinator, ill-fated, a hater of women (especially the queen), one who affected black in his costume. He scorned Burghley, whom many critics have seen as a model for Polonius. Burghley was charged with being a master spy and tyrant's ear, a prosy busybody, tedious in his loyalty to the Establishment, hostile to the stage and stingy to poets, wealthy and frugal, affected in style and famous for his worldly-wise precepts left for his son Robert, complacent to studied insolence. Again, it should be argued that historical fact is perhaps merely reflecting Shakespeare's art rather than the reverse. If Hamlet were Essex, the Chamberlain's men would have been deeply involved in sedition. Fortinbras says of Hamlet, "For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royal." The espousal of Essex as heir apparent was treason, before or after his death.

Traces of Essex have been found everywhere in the play. The "little patch of ground" calls up the siege of Ostend in the summer of 1601. Laertes' demagogic summons to the mob reflects Essex's public appeals at St. Paul's cross in 1601. Other speculations have run to the extremes of ridiculousness. If Hamlet is Sir Philip Sidney (why not?) then Horatio is Herbert Languet, Marcellus is Fulke Greville, Bernardo is Edward Dyer, and Francisco is Gabriel Harvey. Old Norway is Sir Francis Knollys, the poison is Leicester's Commonwealth, and the incestuous marriage naturally is that of Katharine of Aragon. Sober consideration requires one to ask, however, whether the political situation in Hamlet is even remotely parallel to that of Tudor England, or whether Shakespeare deliberately chose a constitutional framework that could not be analogized. Even if Hamlet is presumptive heir to the Danish throne, did an elective system make it possible for Claudius to be king legally? The English throne, however much subject to disputed succession as in the case of Henry VIII's will, would not countenance the displacing of a mature crown prince by his uncle. Perhaps topical politics are simply irrelevant to Shakespeare's most popular play.

Essex's ignoble end can be used to explain the mood not only of Hamlet but of Shakespeare's problem comedies. Troilus and Cressida bequeaths a plague to both factions; Shakespeare had never liked the Cecils, but was bitterly disillusioned by the extremists in his own cause. Essex's sulkiness and irresponsibility can be seen in Achilles, whose relationship to Patroclus is not unlike that of Essex to Southampton. Shakespeare speaks through Ulysses, deploring the frivolity and divisiveness of his own tarnished heroes. Shakespeare had in mind Chapman's dedication of his Homer "to the most honored now living instance of the Achilleian virtues eternized by divine Homer, the Earl of Essex." Alternatively, one can read Shakespeare's Trojan debacle as still pro-Essex, lamenting the demise of a noble band ground under by superior force and guile. Shakespeare blames not Elizabeth for the death of his champion, but the Cecils.

All's Well that Ends Well can also be considered critical of the Essex camp, for Bertram's dutifulness toward his mother and his reluctance to marry call back memories of Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon. If Parolles is Pearse Edmonds, a minion of Southampton's and hence a rival of Shakespeare, the motivation for Shakespeare's soured disposition becomes clear. In Measure for Measure, however, we catch a brighter glimpse despite the play's moral complexities. With James's accession to the English throne, Essex's party was obviously back in favor as reward for its martyred leader's efforts in behalf of the Scottish succession. The Chamberlain's men received the title of King's men in recognition not only of their talent but of their pro-Scottish dramatic activity. Shakespeare did not even bother to eulogize Elizabeth—a fact noticed unfavorably by his countrymen. Elizabeth had been guilty of Essex's death and Southampton's imprisonment. The figure of the Duke in Measure for Measure is supposedly Shakespeare's first tribute to his new ruler, who like Vincentio shunned crowds of people and scoffed at Puritans like Angelo. James was notoriously sensitive to slander; hence the punishment of Lucio. Shakespeare probably read Basilikon Doron and set its theories into practice as homage to a new hero.

Even later plays have been related to Essex and Scotland. Macbeth, according to Henry Paul and others, was written especially for performance before James, as a defense of the new king against the attacks of the private theaters. Purportedly the play reflects the hysteria of the Gunpowder Plot, Scottish witch trials, and James's theories on divine right and on curing of the king's evil. As in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare voices his gratitude for an end to dynastic uncertainties. Such an interpretation tends, unfortunately, to read much of the play as flattering intrusion rather than as relevant thematic material, or to minimize Shakespeare's independent political philosophy concerning obedience due an evil king. King Lear supposedly recalls Mary Stuart's treatment of Darnley, repulsing him when he rode with a train to follow her, giving orders to the Earl of Murray's wife not to receive him, depriving him of servants, and turning him out in inclement weather to seek refuge in a hovel on the wild heath. Coriolanus attacks Ralegh for his contempt of the plebeians, in contrast with the popular Earl of Essex. The earl is portrayed directly in Timon of Athens' Alcibiades, or in Timon himself.

The investigation of this book ends, however, with the deaths of Essex and Elizabeth. If space permitted, the story might well go on into the ample material available on Jacobean political activity in the drama. Yet the year 1603 serves as a convenient stopping point, for an era was ending in drama as in politics. No longer did the stage represent the many voices of political conflict. In the impasse brought about by James's confrontation with the Puritans, drama gravitated to the court and so lost its popular base. Although plays still appeared at public theaters after 1610, most drama became attuned to upper-class opinion only, and came to be despised by the average London citizen. Plays reflected the movement toward civil war only negatively, in their satires of shopkeepers and Puritans and in their increasingly patrician pursuit of refined emotion. Even Shakespeare laid aside his history plays. We are interested in the years of debate 1603, when even the more moderate Puritans were still clamoring to be heard through drama.

I hope it is by now apparent that I am skeptical of topical identification of historical personages and particular events. Let me assure the reader at the start that I offer few if any new historical equations of this sort, and tolerate few of those already proposed. Even less am I concerned with non-political identifications supposedly arising from personal or literary feuds, such as Justice Shallow and William Gardiner, Slender and William Wayte, Malvolio and John Marston or William Ffarington, Falstaff and Florio, Fluellen and Captain Roger Williams, Holofernes and Chapman, Thersites and Marston, Hamlet's Lamord and Sidney, Endymion's Sir Tophas and Stephen Gosson, Fair Em's Mandeville and Robert Greene. [I believe] that politics is germane to a remarkable percentage of Tudor plays, but in terms of ideas and platforms rather than personalities. Even the allusions to kings or queens, although obviously referring in many cases to the reigning monarch, pertain to the office instead of the man. Granting then that we are dealing with a drama of conventional type rather than of historical verisimilitude, the Tudor drama is nonetheless sharp in its delineation of issues. How should men come to authority? By what means are the various pressure groups of which Tudor society is composed to obtain their wishes from the central authority? What role are church officials to play, or nouveau riche courtiers, titled nobility, merchants, apprentices? To what extent may the populace demonstrate about just grievances? How far may powerful counselors enforce their "advice" on the monarch? What voice is Parliament to have in naming a successor in the absence of an undisputed hereditary heir? Who determines policy about war with Spain, the execution of Mary Stuart, exposure of Catholic plotting, influx of cheap immigrant labor, rent inflation, pensions for disabled soldiers?

These are questions on which every Englishman wished to be heard, and conversely on which the government, when it was not divided among various factions, wished to implant its own formula. The impulse for debate and criticism was no less than that for official propaganda. Not that the two concepts were always opposed to one another. At its best, Tudor political playwriting supported Tudor policy in essence while maintaining a noble spirit of free discussion. Again, this is a framework in which our investigation properly ends with the death of Elizabeth.

It will appear that I have used the term "politics" broadly, though I hope not loosely. To me it connotes the wide range of activity in which men argue over the structure and method of decision-making in government. It embraces economic and social conditions, but only in the context of formulating and administering law. Interclass marriage is not in itself a political issue, but attitudes toward dueling and private revenge can bear importantly on conceptions of the state's authority to punish crime. Satire as a neoclassical genre does not concern us, but as a controversial weapon for reviling public authority it became centrally involved in an Elizabethan debate on law and order. In matters of religion we are interested not in doctrinal controversy but in the ever-present implications of political and dynastic revolution. Such an approach necessarily eliminates or minimizes some of the finest plays of the Tudor period. I hope no reader will presume that I offer a complete reading of even the most avowedly political play, much less of the masterpieces with which the century ends. I apologize for the distortion that sees more matter for discussion in Respublica than in Doctor Faustus, but I trust that, if read in correct proportion, this book tells a story which the Tudor period itself would have recognized as central to its literary and political development.