Tyranny and Usurpation
Subtitle: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence in Early Modern Drama
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781786941688
Subjects: English drama, history and criticism, early modern and elizabethan, 1500-1600
Description: In the middle years of the 16th century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the 'tyrant by entrie' or the usurper, who supplanted earlier 'tyrant by the administration' as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own 'virtue' and through an act of 'lawmaking' violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the 16th century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. Devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in 16th-century drama and politics, this book will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.