Ehud's Dagger: Patronage, Tyrannicide, and "Killing No Murder"

Staging Roman History, Stuart Politics, and the Duke of Buckingham: The Example of <i>The Emperor’s Favourite</i>

“…(Jonson claimed that the latter poem was written by his friend, Zouch Townley, who fled to the Hague. 58 ) As well as sharing with Jonson a taste for satire and an implicit desire to educate the court and its ruler through his art, Datus is disappointed in his quest to become master of the revels, as was the playwright at the Jacobean court, complaining at the start of act 5 Now may I goe hang my selfe, ^ I haue flatter'dthe em= perour seuen yeare together to get the master oth' reuells place, & now the blind iade furtune … kicks, & threatens me to be a stage keeper againe (5.1.2937-40) 59 The fact that Crispinus intercedes with Nero on Datus's behalf and that Datus consequently praises the favourite (3462-4) may glance, likewise, at the fact that Buckingham was Jonson's patron on at least one occasion, despite the playwright's reputedly ambivalent views of the duke. Buckingham commissioned The Masque of Gypsies from Jonson for performance before King James at Villiers's Rutland home, Burley-on-the-Hill (3 August 1621).…”

Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics

“…As James Holstun argues, the anonymous and surreptitious modes of libels' dissemination reveal contemporary consciousness of censorship and a consequent recourse to communicative strategies that would evade it. 58 Second, these evasive techniques worked. The censorship regime -organized around official licensers' pre-publication vetting of manuscripts and Stationers Company's oversight -cut off legal print publication for certain forms of political expression.…”

“…64 James Holstun locates 'the covert discursive culture of newsletters, gossip, and manuscript poetry' alongside Habermas's examples of 'specifically pre-political forms of sociability that create habits of publicness, preparing the way for the full-scale, even oppositional public sphere', and adds that we can glimpse in the later 1620s 'a sort of cross-class Caroline oppositional publicness that stretches from plebeian street riots to learned, humanist poetry'. 65 Following the definition of a pre-revolutionary public sphere given above, we might now draw from the historiography of libels to make the following case. Libels were a form of critical political speech, uttered primarily by private individuals who, given the communicative practices by which libels were circulated across space, imagined themselves to be addressing not merely a coterie of acquaintances but an anonymous public.…”

“…inside a monarchist and loyalist frame of reference'. 73 Provocatively integrating the perspectives of political, social, and gender history, David Underdown uses libel evidence to document the rise of a distinctly gendered sense that the court was a source of disorder. 74 McRae argues that 'early Stuart satire had distinctly radical effects on political discourse: not because it dared on occasion to challenge the status quo, but because it helped to delineate entirely new discourses of politics'; it gave 'contemporaries the resources to move beyond existing political structures'.…”

“…Holstun's brief close reading of one 1627 -28 poem illustrates these dynamics well. 99 The libel depicts Buckingham as a wild buck, a 'great beast so fair in sight', protected from the hunt by the 'much delight' he inspired in the king,'Our Charlemagne', who 'loves' the buck 'too well'. The buck pillages the forests as the duke, under royal protection, had plundered the nation.…”