Abstract
Any relationship between Bale’s King Johan and Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561/2) appears to be one of disparity rather than resemblance. These two plays are distinct not only in matters of form and content, but also in the historical and political understanding they solicit from their audiences. If King Johan urges its auditors to act ‘in the light of Christian virtue, expressed in the service of a theocratic society’, Norton and Sackville encourage a more ‘classically inspired, more distinctly secular virtue, expressed in the service of the national state’.1 The latter’s work also derives from the Elizabethan watershed whereby ‘the humanists of the 1560s reshaped England’s consciousness of historical processes’ so enabling ‘the recognition of a generational and philosophical change in the country’s leadership’.2 In his opening address to the Elizabethan parliament in January 1559, the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, stressed the need to forgo divisive polemic and wished (optimistically) that a new spirit of concord be expressed through temperate speech:
by councell provision would be made that all contentious, contumelious or opprobrious wordes, as ‘heretike’, ‘schismatike’, ‘papist’, and such like names and nurces of seditious faccions and sectes may be banished out of men’s mouthes, as the causers, continuers and increasers of displeasure, hate and malice, and as utter enemyes to all concorde and unitie, the very marke that you are now to shoote at.3
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Notes
Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1965), p. 191.
Kent Cartwright, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 101.
E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), p. 94.
Greg Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 196–221; p. 201.
John Guy, ‘Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques’, in The Tudor Monarchy, ed. John Guy (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1997), pp. 78–109, p. 99; emphasis in original.
David Colclough, ‘Parrhesia: the Rhetoric of Free Speech in Early Modern England’, Rhetorica, 17 (1999): 177–212.
David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: a Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 144; p. 145.
See Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, The English Historical Review, 110 (1995): 109–21
Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics: an Elizabethan Playgoer’s Report of the Premiere Performance’, ELR, 26 (1996): 3–16.
For other readings that emphasize the play’s status as pro-Dudley propaganda, see Marie Axton, ‘Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels’, HJ, 13 (1970): 563–78
Susan Doran, ‘Juno Versus Diana: the Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561–1581’, HJ, 38 (1995): 257–74.
John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 292–310, p. 292.
F.W. Conrad, ‘The Problem of Counsel Reconsidered: the Case of Sir Thomas Elyot’, in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise, ed. P.A. Fideler and T.F. Mayer (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 75–107, p. 75.
See Peter Wentworth, A pithie exhortation on to her Majestie for establishing her successor the crowne (1598), p. 30.
For an analysis of the circumstances surrounding this text in the context of Wentworth’s career, see J.E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), pp. 251–66.
For accounts of the ethos of the Inns of Court, see A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931)
Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (London: Longman, 1972)
J. H Baker, The Third University of England: the Inns of Court and the Common-law Tradition (London: Seiden Society Lecture, 1990).
For considerations of its educational and rhetorical culture, see R.J. Schoeck, ‘Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth-Century England’, SP, 50 (1953): 110–27, and ‘Lawyers and Rhetoric in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Renaissance Eloquence, pp. 274–91
D.S. Bland, ‘Rhetoric and the Law Student in Sixteenth-Century England’, SP, 54 (1957): 489–508
W.R. Prest, ‘The Learning Exercises at the Inns of Court, 1590–1640’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 9 (1967): 310–13.
Eric Rasmussen, ‘The Implications of Past Tense Verbs in Early Elizabethan Dumb Shows’, English Studies, 67 (1986): 417–19.
O.B. Hardison, Jr., Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 172. Hardison is stressing here, however, the authors’ independence from Senecan influence. Compare Gordon Braden’s observation that the foreshadowing found in Seneca’s dramatic prologues ‘is usually extensive but also incomplete, contradictory, and even wrong’, in Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 40.
William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: a Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 143–9.
C.O. McDonald, The Rhetoric of Tragedy: Form in Stuart Drama (University of Massachussetts Press, 1966), p. 33.
John Stow, Annales, or, A general Chronicle of England (1631), p. 635.
See, Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990)
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, P&P, 129 (1990): 30–78.
Sir Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (1579), sigs. iiiiv; iiiir.
Lorna Hutson, ‘Fortunate travelers: reading for the plot in sixteenth-century England’, Representations, 41 (1993): 83–103, 89.
A.N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 19.
See also, C.H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940).
J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Speech’, in Language and Politics, ed. Michael J. Shapiro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 25–43.
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© 2003 Dermot Cavanagh
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Cavanagh, D. (2003). The Language of Counsel in Gorboduc . In: Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230005839_3
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