1.Citations of Buchanan are to George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship Among the Scots: A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s “De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus,” trans. Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004).
2.According to the statute (Treasons Act, 26 Henry VIII, c. 13, in Statutes of the Realm 3.508), it was treason to “sclaunderously & malyciously publishe & pronounce, by expresse writinge or wordes, that the Kynge” was a schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the Crown.
3.See Misha Teramura, “Richard Topcliffe’s Informant: New Light on The Isle of Dogs,” in Review of English Studies, new series, 68 (2016), pp. 43–59. The loathsome Topcliffe was the government’s most notorious interrogator, feared and hated for his sadism. The Catholic John Gerard, who was tortured by Topcliffe, characterized him as “the cruelest tyrant of all England” (46). In a splendid piece of detective work, Teramura identifies the chief informant, in the case of The Isle of Dogs, as the scoundrel William Udall.
4.All citations of Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). About half of Shakespeare’s plays exist in two versions with a claim to authority, a quarto and a folio. Except where noted, quotations derive from the First Folio text. (All versions are available on the digital site of The Norton Shakespeare.)
5.Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), pp. 179–80.
6.“On the Religious Policies of the Queen (Letter to Critoy).” The letter was signed by Walsingham but was evidently prepared by Francis Bacon, in whose work it appears, in Notes upon a Libel, composed in 1592 but not published until 1861. The letter describes Elizabeth I as “not liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt and express acts or affirmations, tempered her law so as it restraineth only manifest disobedience, in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her Majesty’s supreme power, and maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction.” See Francis Bacon, Early Writings: 1584–1596, in The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. Alan Stewart with Harriet Knight (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012) 1:35–36.
7.Cardinal of Como, letter of December 12, 1580, in Alison Plowden, Danger to Elizabeth: The Catholics Under Elizabeth I (New York: Stein and Day, 1973). Cf. Wilson, Walsingham, p. 105.
8.Wilson, Walsingham, p. 121.
9.F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Chelmsford, U.K.: Essex County Council, 1970), pp. 57–58.
10.John Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (New York: Viking, 2016), p. 364.
11.Playwrights could venture complimentary allusions to Elizabeth, as when Oberon, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, refers to the “imperial votress” whom Cupid’s arrow missed. In Thomas Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday (1600), the figure of the queen makes a cameo appearance.
12.In How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), the historian Peter Lake argues in rich detail that by the time he wrote Henry V Shakespeare had adopted “a distinctly Essexian agenda, organised around the national unity, and returning monarchical legitimacy, to be gained through a vigorous prosecution of war against a papalist, but by no means virulently popish, version of the foreign threat” (584). That this agenda proved to be a delusion and that Shakespeare therefore got it all wrong only proves, Lake concludes, “that it is not necessary to be politically correct, or at least correct about politics, to write plays that last” (603).
13.Essex’s insult is reported by Sir Walter Ralegh in his posthumously published The Prerogative of Parlaments [sic] in England (London, 1628), p. 43. In Ralegh’s view, Essex’s intemperate words “cost him his head, which his insurrection had not cost him, but for that speech.”
14.Guy, Elizabeth, 339.
15.In the government-authorized Declaration of the Practises and Treasons . . . by Robert Late Earle of Essex, Francis Bacon suggested that Meyrick wanted to see enacted in the theater what he hoped Essex would accomplish in reality: “So earnest hee was to satisfie his eyes with the sight of that tragedie which hee thought soon after his lord should bring from the stage to the state” (quoted in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1930], 2:326).
16.By the statute of 25 Edward III, c. 2, it was an act of treason:
When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King, or of our Lady his [Queen] or of their eldest Son and Heir; or if a Man do violate the King’s [Companion,] or the King’s eldest daughter unmarried, or the Wife [of] the King’s eldest Son and Heir; or if a Man do levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, or be adherent to the King’s Enemies in his Realm, giving to them Aid and Comfort in the Realm, or elsewhere (Statutes of the Realm, 1.319–20; brackets are per the original).
I am indebted to ongoing work on this subject by Nicholas Utzig.
17.See Jason Scott-Warren, “Was Elizabeth I Richard II? The Authenticity of Lambarde’s ‘Conversation,’ ” Review of English Studies 64 (2012), pp. 208–30.
18.Manningham (1602) in Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:212.
19.In Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 5:557. See, likewise, The Arden Shakespeare: Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 60–61.
20.On the affinities between Shakespeare and modern mass entertainment, see Jeffrey Knapp, Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
21.Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Eugene M. Waith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), Induction, lines 78–80.