About the author

Richard Niccols (1584–1616) was part of the Earl of Nottingham's 1596 expedition against the Spanish at Cadiz. He wrote at least one play, two beast fables and several poems indebted to Spenser.

About the text

Niccols was the last of several writers to work on the Mirror (between 1559 and 1610 it went through eight editions and four editors), a series of exempla in which ghosts of famous people recount their tragic lives. It was highly esteemed by contemporaries for its edifying features, most notably Meres and Sidney. Based on the medieval speculum tradition, the Mirror is a continuation of Lydgate's Fall of Princes, which in turn is modelled on both Boccaccio's Latin prose de casibus vignettes and Chaucer's ‘Monk's Tale’. Niccols's changes and main additions involving English monarchs are placed at the end along with a new title page and an ‘Induction’ excerpted here.

The arts of memory

The de casibus tradition is suffused with memory; its aim is to call to mind and use as object lessons the rise and fall of notable people. The biographies are like portraits in a vast gallery of memory through which the reader is guided as shades of the deceased return to lament and narrate their stories. Remembering the power of the Mirror for Magistrates, thirty years after its last publication, Niccols gave renewed life to this bestseller. Unlike Sackville's celebrated 1563 ‘Induction’ (a dream vision where Sorrow conducts the author though a Virgilian underworld of fallen princes), Niccols's less ambitious poem sets the melancholy tone for his additions and accounts for his authority to do so – granted by Memory herself, described according to her iconography as Mnemosyne.

Textual notes

Richard Niccols, A Mirour for Magistrates…Newly enlarged with a last part, called A Winter night's Vision (London, 1610), Oo7v-Oo8v. Owing to the excerpted nature of this passage, line numbers are provided for reference.