A Mirror for Magistrates in Context
Literature, History and Politics in Early Modern England

The first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the Shakespearean age.

Harriet Archer (Edited by), Andrew Hadfield (Edited by)

9781107505827, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 January 2019

272 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.4 kg

'… this collection deserves significant praise. The editors, writing about a team of writers who each play their part in producing the works of Mirror, have themselves assembled a team of expert contributors who illuminate Mirror's significance for and impact on late-Tudor historiography and literature. Fittingly, the contributors often respond to one another's critical position; these debates and disagreements are always cordial and productive. Unlike Lewis's experience with Mirror, a reader can only lay down this collection feeling invigorated by its erudition and insight.' Rory Loughnane, Literature & History

This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

Part I. A Myrroure for Magistrates (1559–63): 1. A Renaissance man and his 'medieval' text: William Baldwin and A Mirror for Magistrates, 1547–63 Scott C. Lucas
2. 'A miserable time full of piteous tragedyes' Paul Budra
3. Tragic and untragic bodies in A Mirror for Magistrates Mike Pincombe
4. Reading and listening to William Baldwin Jennifer Richards
5. Bibliophily in Baldwin's Mirror Angus Vine
Part II. Later Additions (1574–1616): 6. 'Hoysted high vpon the rolling wheele': Elianor Cobham's lament Cathy Shrank
7. Romans in the Mirror Paulina Kewes
8. 'Those chronicles whiche other men had': Paralipsis and Blenerhasset's Seconde Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1578) Harriet Archer
9. Richard Niccols and Tudor nostalgia Andrew Hadfield
10. A Mirror for Magistrates: Richard Niccols's Sir Thomas Overburies Vision (1616) Michelle O'Callaghan
Part III. Reading the Mirror: Poetry and Drama: 11. Rethinking absolutism: English de casibus tragedy in the 1560s Jessica Winston
12. 'They do it with mirrors': Baldwin's Mirror and Elizabethan literature's political vanishing act Bart van Es
13. 'Most out of order': preposterous time in A Mirror for Magistrates and Shakespeare's histories Philip Schwyzer.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]