A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781558497061)

Perhaps no other work of secular poetry was as widely read in Tudor England as the historical verse tragedy collection A Mirror for Magistrates. For over sixty years (1559-1621), this compendium of tragic monologues presented in the voices of fallen political figures from England's past remained almost constantly in print, offering both exemplary warnings to English rulers and inspiring models for literary authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare.

In a striking departure from previous scholarship, Scott Lucas shows that modern critics have misconstrued the purpose of the tragic verse narratives of the Mirror, approaching them primarily as uncontroversial meditations on abstract political and philosophical doctrines. Lucas revises this view, revealing many of the Mirror tragedies to be works topically applicable in form and politically contentious in nature.

Lucas returns the earliest poems of A Mirror for Magistrates to the troubled context of their production, the tumultuous reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558). As Protestants suffering from the traumatic collapse of King Edward VI's "godly" rule (1547-1553) and from the current policies of Mary's government, the Mirror authors radically reshaped their poems' historical sources in order to craft emotionally moving narratives designed to provide models for interpreting the political failures of Edward VI's reign and to offer urgent warnings to Marian magistrates.

Lucas's study also reveals how, in later poems, the Mirror authors issued oblique appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, boldly demanding that they allow the realm of "the literary" to stand as an unfettered discursive arena of public controversy. Lucas thus provides a provocative new approach to this seminal but long-misunderstood collection, one that restores the Mirror to its rightful place as one of the greatest works of sixteenth-century English political literature.

Author: Scott Lucas
ISBN-10: 1558497064
ISBN-13: 9781558497061
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Language: English
Published: 08/01/2009
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 12/04/2009 pg. 17