ABSTRACT
The real is as imagined as the imaginary', and the actuality of politics requires the fiction of poets. Indeed, as we have seen, politics and discourse are inseparably bound, knotted in contradictions. If we attempt now to loosen the threads a bit, it is easiest to start by seeing the shared impulses of writer and ruler. In the pages that follow, the central topic is the ideological function of writing as an instrument of royal power, and the argument is straightforward, locating an area of presumed univocality. The net cast here is rather wide and, in fact, the chapter ends considering images - family portraits - rather than literary production, for these realize images of state. James had declared his 'fatherly authoritie',1 and family groups answer this rhetoric. It is, in fact, with such echoes that this chapter is concerned, with patterns of replication that extend the political domain until we arrive at the private bedchamber. The course of this chapter begins with the form that mirrors the royal mind, the masque, and then passes through its reflecting surface to find that on the other side - in antimasques, but also in works not written for court consumption, lyrics by Donne, or Jonson's Volpone - privacy is pervaded by the public language of politics. Donne's lovers in bed alone; Donne himself in bed in illness; Stuart families in the intimacy of marriage, procreation, and death: the net of political discourse encompasses this territory. To negotiate it, I pursue here but one thread in political speech, the trope of state secrets, for it declares a domain of surface conformity to absolutist aims sufficiently complex to weave these various strands of argument.
