ABSTRACT
In his 1612 essay Apology for Actors, a contribution to the early modern debate over the morality of theater, dramatist and actor Thomas Heywood recounts a visit from Melpomene, muse of tragedy. In this set of anecdotes are encapsulated some fundamental assumptions about the relationship to one another of early modern drama, politics, and classical culture. Plays have a powerful role to play in politics: they speak with a public and a moral voice, holding rulers accountable for their behavior. A play or a poem about the past might also work to translate past actions or ideas into a present-day context - strategy similar to analogy, but with important differences. In casting the literal sense as a vehicle for the underlying meaning, political allegory leans strongly toward the allegorical sense, its political message. In late sixteenth-century England perhaps the most oppositional political idea imaginable, if not quite articulable, was republicanism.
