The Consolation of Tragedy: A Mirror for Magistrates and the Fall of the "Good Duke" of Somerset

Abstract

 rebellion; others, however, point to different sections of the collection to declare that the Mirror instead seeks to undercut the exalted status of the ruler and even to lead readers to accept the idea that rebellion against the king is at times not a sin but a duty.3 Faced with such seeming confusion in the text, it is not surprising that many have described the Mirror as, at best, fundamentally inconsistent in its teachings and, at worst, incoherent.4 In recent years, some Mirror critics have highlighted an approach to the collection different from that of traditional criticism, one that avoids the pitfalls of past studies by abandoning attempts to reduce the collection to a set of philosophical statements.Two scholars, Andrew Hadfield and Paul Budra, have returned critical attention to Eveline Feasey's decades-old argument that several of the early Mirror poems offer not abstract instruction but engaged topical commentary.5 Both Hadfield and Budra rehearse Feasey's arguments about the engaged purpose of three Mirror tragedies thought to have been included in the first, prohibited version of the Mirror, the Marian collection A Memorial of suche Princes, as since the tyme of king Richard the seconde, haue been vnfortunate in the Realme of England ().6 To discover reasons why Mary I's 3

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