Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe

<p>This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature history and philosophy tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the <i>Mirror for Magistrates</i> thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s <i>Massacre at Paris</i> in five chapters of close literary critical readings paying innovative attention to performance values.</p><p>Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that far from being an admirer of the war-crazed unstable bi-polar Essex as is regularly asserted Shakespeare launched in <i>Richard II</i> and <i>Henry IV</i> a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile likewise to the rash militarist Essex who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. </p><p>Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism studies of Tudor England and the history of ideas. </p>