Shakespeare's history plays are not merely benign representations of various historical figures and events but the site of political, cultural, and ideological contestation at the time of their performance. Richard II documents two divergent theoretical approaches to sovereignty which are more applicable to the political climate in Shakespeare's time than Richard's. In this essay, I read this play through the lens of various political tracts and historical tendencies dominant in late Elizabethan England. Though such an analysis might best be understood as historical materialist in orientation, I offer a contextual analysis of various modes of early modern political thought drawing variously upon theoretical precepts associated with new historicism as well as the 'ideas in context' school associated with Quentin Skinner, among others. / Such an analysis reveals a shift in the mode of theoretical discourse. Richard's divine-right/monarchical approach to sovereignty based in an overarching ecclesiastical power base gives way to Bolingbroke's pragmatic and consensus driven politics. This shift mirrors the movement in late 16$ rm sp{th}$ and early 17$ rm sp{th}$ century England from traditional religious arguments offered by Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and residually by James I to a more secular political discourse inaugurated by Machiavelli and his English adherents and symptomatic of the reign of Elizabeth herself. Roughly speaking this modulation follows the pattern of paradigm shifts in the physical sciences exposed by Thomas Kuhn's influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The emergent theory, while marking a rapid and overwhelming reorientation of the terms and initial presuppositions of political discourse, draws in many crucial respects on the accrued tenets of the outgoing paradigm. The play therefore acts as a retroactive representation of a political reformation which occurred much later than the events depicted in the play.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 360-368).

The purpose of this study is to treat one aspect of Shakespeare's political views, his views on monarchy as found in the two great English history tetralogies, and to compare them to the monarchical views of his age.

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This dissertation investigates the role of the printing press in the global Iberian Monarchy of the Union of Crowns (1581-1640), when the Portuguese empire was annexed to Spain’s. I argue that the book printer Pedro Craesbeeck and the authors and editors who published works treating America, Africa, and Asia at his Lisbon house used the printing press to attempt to alter the Iberian Monarchy’s commercial and political composition. Pedro Craesbeeck reconfigured the printing industry of Iberian Europe by building a global publishing hub in Lisbon that attracted editorial projects from all over the monarchy while drawing business away from competitors in cities like Madrid, Antwerp, and Seville. Writers and publishers symbolically rearranged the two Iberian empires’ lines of administration, tying Spanish America to Lisbon and Portuguese Asia to Madrid through a variety of textual and material operations. These agents of the Iberian book trade wielded the printing press as a mechanism to ‘re-compose’ the global monarchy they inhabited, exploiting the flexibility of a multi-territorial, multi-jurisdictional state while working within and around the limitations imposed by the institutions of Church and Crown. Pedro Craesbeeck’s press gives us stories of global linkages and disconnections forged in productive tension. This thesis makes a crucial contribution to studies of early modern globalization, which have tended to focus on tracking connections and circulations rather than dynamics of reconfiguration and redistribution. The dissertation also problematizes longstanding views of the printing press as a top-down tool of the Habsburg monarchs by showing that this technology enabled subjects to participate in the monarchy’s construction according to their individual designs. The dissertation makes these claims by closely analyzing the textual and material contents of printed histories, hagiographies, treatises, reports, and poetry in Spanish and Portuguese alongside archival documentation in those languages and Latin, as well as large sets of bibliographical data. Among the canonical works that occupy a prominent place in the dissertation are Mateo Alemán’s Segunda parte de la vida de Guzmán de Alfarache, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s La Florida del Inca and Comentarios reales, Luís de Camões’s Os lusíadas, Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinaçam, and Diogo do Couto’s Décadas da Ásia. I also bring to light a range of little-known works: a hagiography of an ascetic in New Spain, a treatise on the corruption of the Caribbean pearl trade, and a discourse on the short-lived Portuguese takeover of Pegu (current-day Bago, Myanmar), to name a few. By building a corpus of study out of Pedro Craesbeeck’s press, I put into dialogue texts rarely read together due to linguistic and national disciplinary divides. The categories of Spanish, Portuguese, peninsular, and colonial literature, history, and culture dissolve, giving way to a global Iberian perspective.

Focusing on the works of Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), this thesis explores the complex engagement of popular drama with the political and religious writing of the Elizabethan fin de siècle. It focuses on the five plays by Marlowe that feature royal protagonists: 1-2 Tamburlaine (1587), Dido, Queen of Carthage (1588), Edward II (1592), and The Massacre at Paris (1593). By interpreting each play in its immediate political context, it shows that Marlowe did not deal with monarchy in the abstract but responded to current affairs - from the incursions of the Ottoman Empire to the threat of the Spanish Armada, from the conspiracy claims of Catholic polemic to the debate surrounding England's involvement in continental warfare. The introduction situates the thesis in the critical and historiographical context relating to Marlowe and to the relationship between literature and politics in the early modern period; it provides the justification for reading Marlowe's plays as topical statements. Chapter One looks at 1-2 Tamburlaine in the light of contemporary attitudes to the Ottoman-Safavid War. Chapter Two shows that Dido, Queen of Carthage adapted the stories and tropes of polemic to reflect fears of Catholic conspiracy and Spanish invasion. Chapter Three reads Edward II as a creative response to the print war of 1591-2, which centred on the moral character of the queen's closest counsellors. Chapter Four proposes that Marlowe's final play, The Massacre at Paris, employed arguments drawn from Reason of State to influence decisions at the 1593 Parliament. The thesis concludes by suggesting that despite Marlowe's reputation as a radical overreacher, his drama displays considerable sympathy for the monarchs who must rule precariously and without the option of private happiness.