ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys arguments in Western literature, philosophy and history—from Hesiod and Homer on, through the history of Greece, Rome, the Bible, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and the Reformation, to Shakespeare’s England—which were severely critical of the institution of kingship: prestigious writings, canonically enshrined, which came to haunt consideration of monarchic propaganda under the ageing, unpopular queen. It examines, too, the plight of the mass of Elizabethan commoners, social, economic and political, and the concomitant withering of ‘monarcho-populism’. Finally, it charts five traditions in late Tudor England fuming against royal prohibition of free speech: Ciceronian, biblical, parliamentary, poetic, and historiographic. The confluence of canonical anti-monarchism, economic devastation, and suppression of free speech among even the educated elite, produced a climate encouraging the staged desacralisations of kingship by Marlowe and Shakespeare.
