The April issue of Harper's includes a review of a book by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, Shakespeare's Montaigne. Joshua Cohen, writing the review, calls it "a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multi-culti study of the development of English and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence." So the working hypothesis of the study is that Shakespeare got his classical education second-hand, largely by reading Montaigne, and that he was at the same time willing to bite the hand that fed him some good material. For example, in his essay "Of the Cannibals," Montaigne sentimentalizes the just discovered people of the Americas, seeing them as peaceful anarchists. He writes that they: hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic super...
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Much of Ackroyd's discussion of Elizabeth's reign is given over to the rivalry between Liz and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. That theme comes to its inevitable end in chapter 35, a chapter evocatively titled "The Dead Cannot Bite." By early February 1587 all was in readiness for the end of this rivalry as an earthly contest. Mart had been effectively deposed. Her (Protestant) son, James VI, had been formally recognized as King of the northern neighbor by the English government, though James insisted on referring to his mother as "Queen Mother" anyway. Mary had been convicted in a trial before the Privy Counselors of conspiring to kill Elizabeth and usurp her throne. All Elizabeth had to do was to give the final order and the execution would proceed. But ... she hesitated. And sought to find a way to kill her Stuart cousin by indirection, to keep her own sovereign hands free of regicidal blood. Here's a fine passage from pp. 422-423: ...
One more quotation from the Ackroyd book, TUDORS, which is the second volume in his ongoing history of England . I quoted him last week on Mary and Reginald Pole, and the week before on Henry VIII and the dispossession of the monasteries. This week's lesson involves Pope Pius V and Mary's youngest Protestant sister Elizabeth. In early 1570, Pope Pius V issued a bull in which he excommunicated Elizabeth as a paramount heretic and tyrant. It stated that 'the pretended queen of England' could no longer command allegiance, and that she was the 'servant of iniquity'. Its denunciation covered any person who obeyed her laws and commands. The Queen herself was now a legitimate object of attack by any assassin of the old faith; her death would speed his way to heaven. It was the last stand of medieval religion, the final occasion when a pope would try to depose a reigning monarch.... I'm certainly glad Popes don't do that any more. In honor of that mil...
The second of Barzun's four revolutions was that of and on behalf of the monarchs. Or, more strictly, it was of and on behalf of kings and queens, and it is the way in which they made themselves into monarchs properly speaking. Monarchs in the strict sense are monocrats, the only rulers of their realms. Anyone else who exercises authority in a realm is doing so as the agent of the monocrat, or is in rebellion. That was not true of kings in medieval times. Indeed, King Louis XIV, in a memoir, complains that it still wasn't true enough in his own day. He said that every provincial gentleman feels free to "act the tyrant toward his peasants," and that rather than a single ruler, the people "have a thousand." If that same King also said, "I am the state," (Barzun doubts it, but the legend is tenacious) he meant it in a rather different sense from the way in which it is usually quoted. It was an aspiration . One could paraphrase it this way: ...