The chapter concentrates upon the wealth of early modern responses to the demise of Elizabeth I in 1603. Particular attention is played to the Petrarchan discourse of eternizing, the memorialization of the last Tudor monarch in her own lifetime, and the scriptural and mythological associations which shaped the early modern reception of Elizabeth. The continuities between textual and artistic productions during the period are explored with reference to Elizabethan iconography and there is sustained analysis in this context of published miscellanies mourning the queen shortly after her death. The discussion concludes with a consideration of how dynastic change and the strategic deployment of cultural amnesia also influenced the age’s evocation of Elizabeth in the decades after her passing.

This Introduction sets out the key emphases of the book as a whole, exploring: the evolving theoretical debate concerning violence in the early modern and modern periods; the controversies surrounding militarism in Tudor England; the theatrical undertaking of Shakespeare’s histories; and European literary responses to the late Elizabethan court.

This chapter offers close readings of the Henry VI plays by Shakespeare (and his collaborators) in its exploration of a dramatic world convulsed by ‘incessant wars’. Late Elizabethan England remained thoroughly acquainted with the demands and traumas of resourcing multiple fields of conflict. Responding to the consuming debate surrounding militarism supported in late sixteenth-century publications and debate, these plays, written in the years directly following the defeat of the Armada, conjure up a tumultuous political landscape all too familiar to those attending the playhouse in the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign: the landscape of a nation beset by anxieties of suppressed religious and political identities as a consequence of unceasing military campaigns abroad, conspiracies at home, shifting allegiances of court factions and abiding questions surrounding the royal succession. Such texts spoke unflinchingly to the audience of what its world had been and what it might become again.

The 1590s witnessed enormous political success for Robert Devereux as he rose progressively from being a leading royal favourite and courtier, to military command in Europe (with varying success), to the Privy Council, and then to the title of Earl Marshall in 1597. Nonetheless, from the mid-1580s the Earl was exploring multiple routes by which he might showcase his various talents as warrior, spymaster, diplomat and court strategist in international conflicts. This chapter focuses upon the ways in which a pre-eminent courtier such as Essex gained access to power networks through military campaigning, acts of patronage and extravagant self-promotion. Paying particular attention to his elite identities as military commander, royal favourite and cabalist, this chapter explores how the Earl sought to eclipse Elizabeth herself on the European stage of power politics.

This discussion, devoted to close readings of the Henry IV plays, reflects upon the ways in which the performance of violence in all its forms can signal cultural decay and ethical failure at a personal and collective level. However, in this dramatic world where the British nations query any authoritative claim upon the English throne, blood-letting also yields up a peculiar community of interest: strategic forms of cooperation, individual empowerment and group identity. Ultimately, we are thrust into a realm groaning under the strain of constant civil war, where even the king, ‘this ingrate and canker’d Bullingbrook’, has more in common with the rebels than he cares to acknowledge. Shakespeare’s fifteenth-century England is characterised by moral and social dysfunction, and the insatiable appetite for violence, widely in evidence in both plays, unsettles the persuasiveness of any claim to political authority made onstage.

This chapter focuses upon the ways in which Shakespeare’s play not only engages with historical accounts of Henry V, but the way in which it probes the status and function of violence in the consolidation of a dynasty and the political redemption of a kingdom. As this discussion unfolds, it also become apparent how the investment in violence may not only constitute a deliberate attempt to forge group affiliation, but may also provide markers for gendered identity, political engagement and spiritual allegiance. Shakespeare’s play clearly interrogates the stunted concept of Bolingbroke’s government which Henry V has inherited, questions whether we should in fact demonise those (like Falstaff) who have refused in the past to participate in the Lancastrian political project, and continues to query in a most urgent manner how violence may be legitimised in the public exercise of nation-building.

This sequence of chapter studies concludes with an innovative discussion considering seventeenth-century dramatic texts in Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian which depicted for European audiences vicious court factionalism, illicit amours and military ambitions at the court of the ageing Elizabeth I. Paying particular attention to the religious and political affiliations of the audiences for which these productions were designed, discussion concentrates upon the reception of Elizabeth’s political project and erotic profile in the continent’s playhouses and upon the enduring profiles attributed to her prominent courtiers such as Essex and Ralegh by European counterparts to Shakespeare. By way of a coda to this chapter, brief consideration is also devoted to the ways in which these European narratives of Elizabeth’s court culture from seventeenth-century playtexts and prose romances are then reintegrated into English literary traditions through productions designed for the Georgian theatre in the eighteenth century.

In the Conclusion, discussion concentrates upon the ways in which Shakespeare himself was reintroduced onto the stages of Britain and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by succeeding generations of dramatists and librettists. By this period, Shakespeare was being identified as a highly lucrative commodity in which to invest and was seen progressively to adopt the unaccustomed identities of ghost, lover, domestic patriarch, theatre impressario and political activist for the entertainment of the paying public across Europe.

It is in this way that Sir John Harington, godson to Elizabeth I, addressed a letter to Lord Thomas Howard in the accession year of 1603. At this critical moment of political parturition, uppermost in the correspondent's mind was the radical re-configuration of political and military allegiances in the aftermath of the earl of Essex's vain attempt at a coup d’état in the armed revolt of 1601 and the death of the last Tudor sovereign in 1603, the year this letter was written. Harington had been knighted during the 1599 Irish campaign under Essex's command but, faced on his return with his godmother's implacable ire, he had soon come to wish that he ‘had never received my Lorde of Essex's honor of knighthood’

Decades earlier, in A Generall Rehearsall of Warres (1579), Thomas Churchyard recalled a time when