Jane Shore and the Politics of Cursing
Thomas Churchyard's contribution to the 1563 edition of The Mirror for Magistrates, "Shore's wife," one of the first literary treatments of Jane Shore's role in pre-Tudor English affairs, is notable for its political exploitation of one of several of Edward IV's concubines. Narrating her fall from politically influential mistress of a king to an impoverished, friendless woman, Churchyard's Shore bitterly curses Richard III, whom she regards as the cause of her suffering. Engaging in the historiographical hazing of one of England's most unpopular monarchs, Churchyard's tragic heroine is subversive, if not treasonous, in her stance against Richard III.
Scripting Public Performance: The Representation of Officeholding in Early Modern Literature
Title of Document: SCRIPTING PUBLIC PERFORMANCE: THE REPRESENTATION OF OFFICEHOLDING IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE Helen Louise Hull, PhD, 2009 Directed By: Donna B. Hamilton, Professor, Department of English This study argues that early modern English dramatists and prose writers were reevaluating the subject’s offices. Officeholders appear frequently on the early modern English stage, in roles ranging from lord mayors to constables to lord chancellors. Widely circulated prose tracts established officeholders’ authority and defined their duties. Dramatists who staged officeholders, along with men who wrote officeholding manuals, drew on humanist and classical republican concepts of citizenship in depicting officeholders; they were also responsive to contemporary religious and political pressures. They were redefining the very parameters of office by redescribing officeholding as a site of political representation. I begin by establishing the investment subjects had in officeholding as evidenced by the proliferation of contemporary officeholding manuals. My first chapter canvases the range of manuals as well as their socio-political context. I then focus on William Lambard’s Eirenarcha (1581), a manual for justices of the peace. By emphasizing that the justice is duty-bound to God and to the common law as well as to the monarch, Lambard raises questions of obligation and representation for officeholders. In chapter two, I consider representations of justices of the peace in Anthony Munday’s Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor (all three c. 1597-98). By juxtaposing officeholding with quasi-feudal and chivalric models of service, these dramatists define what officeholding was not and what it could be. In my third chapter, I consider depictions of the lord chancellor in Anthony Munday’s Play of Sir Thomas More (c. 1592-94) and in Henry VIII (1613), by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. I argue that these plays challenge the claims made by early modern magistrates to be ministers of justice. The last chapter considers scenes featuring London’s lord mayor in Shakespeare’s Richard III (c.1593), Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV (1599), and Heywood’s 1 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1604). I read these plays in the light of contemporary disputes over free speech in Parliament. By asking how freely the lord mayor can speak, these plays associate office itself with the representation of subjects. SCRIPTING PUBLIC PERFORMANCE: THE REPRESENTATION OF OFFICEHOLDING IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of