The drama of counsel: Advice and favor on the Tudor stage

This broadly interdisciplinary project addresses the relationship between literature and politics from both a theoretical and a historical perspective, and in doing so, it interrogates fundamental assumptions underlying new historicist critical practice. The dissertation focuses on counsel literature and dramatic representations of royal advisers and favorites, arguing that these texts and performances played an active role in English Renaissance political discourse. To establish counsel literature\u27s political significance, it first addresses theoretical problems surrounding agency and the efficacy of political action. Poststructuralist theory obviates both individual and collective political agency; therefore, to establish the grounds for meaningful political action, the first chapter takes a systems approach employing models drawn from the sciences of complexity--chaos theory, Prigogine\u27s theories of dissipative systems, and catastrophe theory, among others--to form the dissertation\u27s basis for nonlinear and nondeterminist treatments of the relationship between politics and literature. The second chapter explores issues of political agency and counsel in the Renaissance by looking at texts in European political thought, English humanist statecraft literature by such authors as More, Erasmus, and Elyot, and events in English history. The third chapter focuses on the stark opposition delineated in this period\u27s dramatic literature between the monarch\u27s flattering non-noble favorite and his antithesis, the plain-speaking noble counselor. By examining the predominantly hostile stage representations of the upstart in plays by Skelton, Preston, and Marlowe, among others, it demonstrates the drama\u27s role as a rival counselor, actively competing in the discourse that surrounds royal advice and favor. The final chapter is a detailed analysis of Shakespeare\u27s Richard II, using the play\u27s pervasive mirror imagery to explore the issues of counsel and the upstart raised in previous chapters. This play is a self-reflexive and highly metadramatic work whose use of mirror imagery comments on its own counselor role. As its troubled stage history demonstrates, it played an active part in the public discourse late in Elizabeth\u27s reign and is a striking example of the drama\u27s potential for political agency