Ideology, Property and the Constitution

Massinger's Believe as You List and the Politics of Necessity

“…(IV.3. [36][37][38][39][40] This statement confirms that he is not an elect Christian expecting salvation in the afterlife. His mock puritanism is tainted with the same catholic vices it claims to reject, so it holds out no hope of ever reforming them.…”

“…Through Parliament, subjects also had a right to decide what constituted necessity because, as Sir John Strangeways put it, "if the king be judge of the necessity, we have nothing and are but tenants at will". 36 The outcome of this was the Five Knights' Case, in which five MPs were imprisoned for refusing to pay. They sought bail and release from imprisonment, but the court accepted the king's right of discretionary imprisonment for "reasons of state".…”

“…(I.1. [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] Even though these visions are real enough to Antiochus, who insists that "Heere, there, and every where they doe pursue mee" (49), they are clearly a figment of the imagination: Antiochus "thinckes" he can see his butchered army (47); the spirit of his enslaved country "seemes" to kneel before him (50-51); the Stoics attribute his symptoms to melancholia, which was believed to cause hallucination and fearful dreams. 53 Political necessity can interfere with belief; those who possess power also control dominant fictions and discourses.…”

“…(V.1. [36][37][38][39][40] Under such circumstances, treating both moral principle and political necessity as absolutes is self-defeating, creating contradictions which can only be disguised through the hypocrisy of Flaminius and Berecinthius or the self-deception of Prusias. Unlike Flaminius, Marcellus does not think in terms of absolute right and wrong: what is right for the state is not necessarily morally wrong, and vice-versa.…”