Embodying opposition: Early modern libel and the politics of personality

© 2020 Anna Schneider CordnerEmbodying Opposition: Early Modern Libel and the Politics of Personality presents a study of libelling in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that situates this practice within the literary and political cultures of the period. Literary and historical debates that have positioned libels on the margins of discussions about the relationship between literature and politics in this period are revaluated. Instead, it is argued that libels can be read as a central vehicle for articulating political discontent. As the thesis demonstrates, libels’ ad hominem mode of address challenged an early modern system of spiritual and secular governance in which authority was insistently embodied and personalised. Accordingly, this thesis focuses in particular on those libels that sought to inflict reputational damage on the most prominent individuals associated with the church and court. The explanatory context for reading these libels is provided by the contested literary, legal, cultural and material constructions of ‘libel’ as a textual form, and of ‘libelling’ as a seditious activity, which is traced from the middle of the 1580s to the end of the 1620s. This period encompasses the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the succession of King James I and provides the historical basis for an examination of the transformation of libelling in response to two distinct styles of monarchical government. This study is developed through an investigation of the linguistic and rhetorical strategies of libellous texts that focus on, in turn: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Queen Elizabeth I; Richard Bancroft and John Whitgift, successive Archbishops of Canterbury; King James I; and, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. How these libellous critiques were received and perceived is further explored through close analyses of a range of other texts that comment on the phenomenon, including diaries, letters, royal proclamations, essays, and so-called counter-libels