Reckoning with History: Essays on Uses of the Past for Daniel Woolf, ed. Krista Kesselring and Matthew Neufeld (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024)., 2024
Thomas Preston’s Cambises (1561) and the Coming to Terms with the Marian Past
Thomas Preston’s L... more Thomas Preston’s Cambises (1561) and the Coming to Terms with the Marian Past
Thomas Preston’s Lamentable Tragedy mixed ful of Pleasant Mirth, conteyning the Life of Cambises King of Percia (1561) might seem straightforward in its use of Persian history. Derived from a brief sketch in Richard Taverner’s The Second Booke of the Garden of Wysedome (1539), a compilation of instructive historical vignettes aimed at Henry VIII, Cambises has been read as a gruesome anatomy of royal tyranny reassuringly cut short by divine justice. For does not the wicked king get his comeuppance, his accidental death delivering his subjects from oppression just as Mary I’s providentially saved England from popish tyranny? Certainly, this assumption underpins both older critical accounts by David Bevington, Kent Cartwright, and others, and newer studies of Elizabethan depictions of ancient near-East by Edith Hall, Jane Grogan, and Dermot Cavanagh. Yet such moralizing readings are only persuasive so far as they go. Things get more complicated, however, as we begin to recover the contemporary flavour of the story. Ruler of ancient Persia, Cambyses II (d. 522 BCE) was not only a fixture in humanist discourse on counsel but also a salient presence in religious polemic because he impeded the building of the second Temple. With a finale that sees the tyrant fall, Preston’s piece, which may have been performed at court on 17 February 1561, gave vent to collective relief at the passing of Marian persecution. But, rife with anachronistic references to Bishop Bonner and the singing of psalms, it also subjected to stringent scrutiny the less-than-impressive conduct of the country’s governing classes. Coming shortly after the first edition of the Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a tremendously influential collection of poetic tragedies set in England’s medieval past which includes a pointed reference to its eponymous hero, Preston’s Cambises, I argue, revisits the Marian years in order to remind its audience of the conformist, Nicodemite past of England’s ruling elites. A sort of counter-factual history – by staging the murder of Cambises’ brother and heir Smirdis, it poses the harrowing question ‘what if Elizabeth had been killed too?’, Preston’s exceptionally popular play also ventilates the nascent fears about the royal succession. This essay draws on important recent studies of mid-sixteenth-century religion, politics and political thought by Karl Gunther, Anne Overell, and Ryan Reeves, to explain how and why Preston deploys Persian history to come to terms with the recent Marian past and uncertain, possibly dangerous, present.
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Thomas Preston’s Lamentable Tragedy mixed ful of Pleasant Mirth, conteyning the Life of Cambises King of Percia (1561) might seem straightforward in its use of Persian history. Derived from a brief sketch in Richard Taverner’s The Second Booke of the Garden of Wysedome (1539), a compilation of instructive historical vignettes aimed at Henry VIII, Cambises has been read as a gruesome anatomy of royal tyranny reassuringly cut short by divine justice. For does not the wicked king get his comeuppance, his accidental death delivering his subjects from oppression just as Mary I’s providentially saved England from popish tyranny? Certainly, this assumption underpins both older critical accounts by David Bevington, Kent Cartwright, and others, and newer studies of Elizabethan depictions of ancient near-East by Edith Hall, Jane Grogan, and Dermot Cavanagh. Yet such moralizing readings are only persuasive so far as they go. Things get more complicated, however, as we begin to recover the contemporary flavour of the story. Ruler of ancient Persia, Cambyses II (d. 522 BCE) was not only a fixture in humanist discourse on counsel but also a salient presence in religious polemic because he impeded the building of the second Temple. With a finale that sees the tyrant fall, Preston’s piece, which may have been performed at court on 17 February 1561, gave vent to collective relief at the passing of Marian persecution. But, rife with anachronistic references to Bishop Bonner and the singing of psalms, it also subjected to stringent scrutiny the less-than-impressive conduct of the country’s governing classes. Coming shortly after the first edition of the Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a tremendously influential collection of poetic tragedies set in England’s medieval past which includes a pointed reference to its eponymous hero, Preston’s Cambises, I argue, revisits the Marian years in order to remind its audience of the conformist, Nicodemite past of England’s ruling elites. A sort of counter-factual history – by staging the murder of Cambises’ brother and heir Smirdis, it poses the harrowing question ‘what if Elizabeth had been killed too?’, Preston’s exceptionally popular play also ventilates the nascent fears about the royal succession. This essay draws on important recent studies of mid-sixteenth-century religion, politics and political thought by Karl Gunther, Anne Overell, and Ryan Reeves, to explain how and why Preston deploys Persian history to come to terms with the recent Marian past and uncertain, possibly dangerous, present.
Thomas Preston’s Lamentable Tragedy mixed ful of Pleasant Mirth, conteyning the Life of Cambises King of Percia (1561) might seem straightforward in its use of Persian history. Derived from a brief sketch in Richard Taverner’s The Second Booke of the Garden of Wysedome (1539), a compilation of instructive historical vignettes aimed at Henry VIII, Cambises has been read as a gruesome anatomy of royal tyranny reassuringly cut short by divine justice. For does not the wicked king get his comeuppance, his accidental death delivering his subjects from oppression just as Mary I’s providentially saved England from popish tyranny? Certainly, this assumption underpins both older critical accounts by David Bevington, Kent Cartwright, and others, and newer studies of Elizabethan depictions of ancient near-East by Edith Hall, Jane Grogan, and Dermot Cavanagh. Yet such moralizing readings are only persuasive so far as they go. Things get more complicated, however, as we begin to recover the contemporary flavour of the story. Ruler of ancient Persia, Cambyses II (d. 522 BCE) was not only a fixture in humanist discourse on counsel but also a salient presence in religious polemic because he impeded the building of the second Temple. With a finale that sees the tyrant fall, Preston’s piece, which may have been performed at court on 17 February 1561, gave vent to collective relief at the passing of Marian persecution. But, rife with anachronistic references to Bishop Bonner and the singing of psalms, it also subjected to stringent scrutiny the less-than-impressive conduct of the country’s governing classes. Coming shortly after the first edition of the Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a tremendously influential collection of poetic tragedies set in England’s medieval past which includes a pointed reference to its eponymous hero, Preston’s Cambises, I argue, revisits the Marian years in order to remind its audience of the conformist, Nicodemite past of England’s ruling elites. A sort of counter-factual history – by staging the murder of Cambises’ brother and heir Smirdis, it poses the harrowing question ‘what if Elizabeth had been killed too?’, Preston’s exceptionally popular play also ventilates the nascent fears about the royal succession. This essay draws on important recent studies of mid-sixteenth-century religion, politics and political thought by Karl Gunther, Anne Overell, and Ryan Reeves, to explain how and why Preston deploys Persian history to come to terms with the recent Marian past and uncertain, possibly dangerous, present.