ABSTRACT
A work of composite authorship first issued in 1555, with another version in 1559. With the addition of Thomas Sackville’s Induction in the 1563 edition, the Mirror achieved its permanent format, though not its final bulk, as a collection of verse monologues or ‘tragedies’ spoken by the ghosts of important historical figures. Unlike its predecessorsnotably Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (1355), and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1431-8) to which it was conceived as a sequel-the Mirror selects its tragic figures only from English history. As its editor, William Baldwin, tells his readers in the 1559 preface, ‘Howe [God] hath delt with sum of our countreymen your auncestors, for sundrye vices not yet left, this booke… can shewe’ (ed 1938:65). The number of tragic complaints was expanded through editions of 1571, 1574, 1578, 1587, and 1610. In each monologue, a character laments a fall from high to low degree and discusses its cause-sometimes fickle Fortune, as in the medieval analogues, but often moral deficiency, political misjudgment, or both. As a’mirror,’ the book as a whole is intended as a reminder, or warning, to the reader, much as the head of the pagan decapitated by Artegall is called ‘a mirrour to all mighty men’ (FQ V ii 19).
