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The first section presents a schematic model of early modern citizenship, which emphasizes the multiple dispersed centres of authority and allegiance of which members of the Tudor commonwealth would be aware. It argues that political readings of texts from this period should take more account than they have in the past of the large number of synchronic and diachronic relationships inhabited by early modern agents and writers. The second section relates this model to the Gloucestershire scenes in Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV, and shows how the scenes register anxieties about the conduct of justices in that county in the 1590s from the perspective of both commons and Privy Council. ********** I am presently writing the Elizabethan volume for the Oxford English Literary History. This has led me to do a range of more or less archaeological (and more or less pleasurable) reading in past and not so past ways of interpreting the period. I re-encountered many different versions of the early modern subject, and a correspondingly diverse range of ways of reading Tudor literature politically. Most of these were familiar friends: subjects dialectically fashioned from their relationships with material culture, and subjects (rather a lot of them) who endlessly construct and perform their identities by fashioning and refashioning them against an Other. Several of these were also constructs of power, who simultaneously subverted and supported a theatre-state. Then there were the bold, articulate citizens (I preferred these ones), who stride into a public sphere and, directly or obliquely, perform articulate republicanism. These might be friends or clients of the Earl of Essex, and might have Tacitus and Livy as their bedtime reading. (1) None of these different ways of thinking about early modern people and their politics quite seemed to fit the kinds of confusion and uncertainty that I repeatedly found in the writing of the period, or to explain how 'multiple and often contradictory intentions are present in the texts we read'. (2) The first section of this discussion presents a (highly) schematic model of early modern citizenship. Neither original nor subtle, it is intended to help explain why much early modern writing might appear in various ways confused and conflicted about its politics. (3) The second section is much narrower in its focus, but wider in its ambitions. It offers a detailed reading of the Gloucestershire scenes from 2 Henry IV. This emphasizes the divergent perspectives that operate within and around these scenes. It explores some of the local and national politics which may register in them, and which may shape both their larger concerns and the detail of their language. Although this may seem fine-grained, perhaps even marginal work, its aim is to show some ways in which many of the effects traditionally presented as literary--a multiplicity of partially reconciled aims, the production of divergent perspectives--might have arisen from the variety of structures simultaneously inhabited by members of the Tudor commonwealth. To my model. Each person in this period (as, indeed, in most others) subsisted within a complex web of what might be called, for shorthand, 'networks and affinities', 'juridical structures', and 'projects'. These terms are not (with the exception of 'affinities') early modern ones, and are not intended to be either rigid or precise. 'Networks' encompass a range of phenomena. An inhabitant of London might be part of a livery company, membership of which was the enabling condition of full citizenship. (4) The same person would also be a member of a parish, and might or might not have a confessional allegiance that coincided with the predisposition of the incumbent of that parish. Inhabitants of towns and villages alike could be connected by a variety of ties (probably forged by a hybrid of economics, geography, and kinship) to someone who might or might not, in the language of the period, 'be good lord' to them by assisting them materially or by exerting influence on their behalf. …
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