ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the play's title for clues, using both Literature Online and EEBO-TCP to constrain the play's plot and to identify a possible source story. It concedes the possibility that the plot of The Cardinal's Conspiracy might have been entirely original: but, observing that such a feature would be untypical of other Personal Conspiracy plays, it will explore the possibility that The Cardinal's Conspiracy dramatized the conspiracy of Alphonso Petrucci. All the same, the initial search described above supports the suggestion that when early modern England thought of cardinal and conspiracy, it thought most immediately of Petrucci, while the potential of Petrucci's story to make a Personal Conspiracy play is sufficiently attested by Jenkins's later version. Thus the Petrucci conspiracy was much discussed in Renaissance Britain, and relished for both its anti-Papal and its anti-prelatical possibilities. It is possible to extrapolate some likely features of The Cardinal's Conspiracy from the evidence of other Personal Conspiracy plays.
