ABSTRACT
This chapter reassesses three major figures wrongly taken for buttresses of sixteenth century regal imperium: Ernst Kantorowitz, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas Elyot. Scrutinising Kantorowicz’s claims that Shakespeare and educated Elizabethans believed monarchy sacral, possessing an ‘angelical’ second body, the chapter demonstrates Kantotorwicz’s falsification both of Shakespeare’s drama and Elizabethan law. Erasmus’ writings on monarchy are surveyed, revealing his eloquent horror of kingship’s irrationality and destructiveness. Elyot’s supposed loyal championing of one-man rule in The Book Named the Governor turns out to be the artfully subversive demonstration, by a horrified Henrician intellectual, of monarchy’s perennial enmity to freedom and cultural flourishing. Confuting the modern myth that that Elizabethans believed only in divine right absolutism, the chapter demonstrates six political paradigms circulating under Elizabeth: Caesaropapal monarchy, baronial conciliarism, neo-roman civic republicanism, religious conditionality of fealty, the egalitarian plebeian commonweal, and black realpolitik. England’s political paralysis was haunted by pluralism.
