ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Charles I’s Eikon Basilike (1649) utilized a visual iconography and allegorical language derived from contemporary emblem books and masques. Although this is a well-trod royalist artifact, nonetheless, scholars have yet to examine how the book incorporated these traditional media of monarchical image-making through visual illustration and pictorial metaphor, guiding reader interpretation and limiting the possibilities of textual misrepresentation. Previous analyses have unintentionally replicated contemporary criticisms of this text as an effort at political enchantment—the overpowering of reason in favor of emotional identification—thereby neglecting the sophisticated interpretive strategies engaged within royalist print culture. The Eikon Basilike was created for and circulated among a wide audience, thus making it a product of changes in the press rather than a backward-looking or reactionary attempt to overwhelm audiences with the spectacle of suffering kingship. Emblems and emblematic metaphors insist upon an identifiable correspondence between form and content—between signifier and signified and between word and thing—offering interpretive certainty within the context of the midcentury political and representational crisis. Utilized throughout the text, they helped stabilize meaning, promising the ability to see substance through surface and to probe beneath the artifice of partisan division and religious hypocrisy.
