ABSTRACT
Following discussion of medieval ‘monarcho-populism’, and its late Tudor waning, is the close reading of two plays. Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and Shakespeare’s Richard III each present ostensibly loyalist, propaganda versions of history, wherein royal wickedness becomes displaced by the climactic enthronement of anomalous innocence: in the persons, respectively, of Henry of Navarre, Protestant hero on whom Elizabeth was lavishing staggering sums, and Henry of Richmond, founder of the Tudor dynasty. Each drama, however, attuned to late Elizabethan political realism, overturns that cartoon exceptionalism through an ensemble of devastating subtexts or sleights of stagecraft. They dramatise, at the fin de siècle of a century of turbulent deconsecrations, the irrecuperability of mystic trust in the ideal of monarchy.
