No abstract

No abstract

The legend of King Ferrex was employed by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville in their succession play, Gorboduc (first performed 1561), and by John Higgins in his Mirror for Magistrates (1574; 1587), to reflect on contemporary politics and offer topical warnings to Elizabeth I and her subjects based on legendary British history. However, as well as including a section specifically focused on environmental exploitation, Higgins imbues the earth with a destructive animism in his poem which stands apart as an anomaly in his collection of verse complaints and amongst wider treatments of the story. Higgins’s emphasis on the arbitrary amoral and areligious destruction of all by the agency of the earth and other non-human actors challenges the Mirror’s educative model, and renders the Gorboduc legend inert. Looking at various versions of the narrative in Gorboduc, Higgins’s Mirror, and William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), and analogous uses of environmental discourse in other contemporary poetic and dramatic texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, this article considers the role of the nonhuman, and specifically the earth itself, in early modern imaginative historiography and political commentary. In particular, it suggests that there are fruitful connections to be made between modern posthumanist theoretical approaches, and the post-humanism of Higgins’s approach to exemplary history, whereby his admonitory text appears to abandon its premise of human primacy and perfectability in response to the perceived failure of Elizabethan advice literature to effect political change.

No abstract

Chapter 4 returns to John Higgins, who edited a selection of extant Mirror complaints for publication in 1586–7. Beginning with the reprinting of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Inns of Court tragedy Gorboduc in 1590 alongside John Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, a publication which similarly pulled together ancient British and Roman narratives of assassination and civil conflict, the chapter interprets Higgins’s revisions and additions to his own First Part of the Mirror and suggests that they point to a change of emphasis. Higgins seems to have updated the work to sharpen its political focus at a moment of heightened national and international tension. The chapter then turns to his engagement with the use of moral exempla in the collection of Roman tragedies with which he enlarged the edition, and argues for a growing sense of disillusionment in their efficacy.