PHILIP, EARL OF PEMBROKE, AND THE ANALOGICAL WAY OF READING POLITICAL TRAGEDY
Do we know how people read historical drama in the seventeenth cen tury? We know something about how "auditors" responded to plays in performance, particularly when they thought topical satire was in tended. From Jonson's testimony to Drummond we know that Sir James Murray, Groom of the King's bedchamber, took offense when he heard a passage in Eastward Ho! (1605) satirizing grooms and sub sequently complained to the King about it.1 We also know that drama tists could write political allegory that everyone in London, it seems, understood perfectly well, as Middleton's sensational topical represen tation of the English and Spanish courts as opposing chess pieces in A Game at Chesse (1625) demonstrates.2 As an art form, topical satire stands some distance from historical tragedy, for whereas the former loses all its point without an external, contemporary frame of reference, the latter requires only its histori cal frame of reference to make sense. But did contemporaries read historical tragedy for its political matter alone, irrespective of its appli cation? We do know that playwrights liked to defend themselves from the dangerous charge that their dramatizations of Roman history, as well as Italian, French, Greek, or even Persian history were contrived to speak to the present by a process of analogic application. For ex ample, when Samuel Daniel depicted sympathetically the interroga tion and execution of Alexander's favorite in The Tragedy of Philotas, the Privy Council charged him with mirroring the fate of the Earl of Essex. Daniel's handwritten, cagey response to the charge offers more than mere denial; it asserts that in every age the affairs of men bear some resemblances, "the like supplantations, rysings overthrowes,