PHILIP, EARL OF PEMBROKE, AND THE ANALOGICAL WAY OF READING POLITICAL TRAGEDY

Abstract

Do we know how people read historical drama in seventeenth cen tury? We know something about how auditors responded to plays in performance, particularly when they thought topical satire was in tended. From Jonson's testimony to Drummond we know that Sir James Murray, Groom of King's bedchamber, took offense when he heard a passage in Eastward Ho! (1605) satirizing grooms and sub sequently complained to King about it.1 We also know that drama tists could write political allegory that everyone in London, it seems, understood perfectly well, as Middleton's sensational topical represen tation of English and Spanish courts as opposing chess pieces in A Game at Chesse (1625) demonstrates.2 As an art form, topical satire stands some distance from historical tragedy, for whereas former loses all its point without an external, contemporary frame of reference, latter requires only its histori cal frame of reference to make sense. But did contemporaries read historical tragedy for its political matter alone, irrespective of its appli cation? We do know that playwrights liked to defend themselves from dangerous charge that their dramatizations of Roman history, as well as Italian, French, Greek, or even Persian history were contrived to speak to present by a process of analogic application. For ex ample, when Samuel Daniel depicted sympathetically interroga tion and execution of Alexander's favorite in The Tragedy of Philotas, Privy Council charged him with mirroring fate of Earl of Essex. Daniel's handwritten, cagey response to charge offers more than mere denial; it asserts that in every age affairs of men bear some resemblances, the like supplantations, rysings & overthrowes,

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