Community, Authority, and the Motherland in Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc

Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1561-62) has elicited critical interest mainly because it is the first blank-verse tragedy in English and because it engages the politically delicate matter of the Elizabethan succession. As scholars of the play have noted, Gorboduc urges Elizabeth I to accept parliamentary advice by marrying, providing an heir, and ensuring the stability of the country. ¹ I shall argue that the play renders this advice emotionally legitimate by advancing the claims of what it calls the "mother land" (V.ii.179). ² In the process, Gorboduc questions dynastic notions of community: the play addresses the tendency of monarchies to promote "unnatural" behavior, it complicates the commonplace identification of the body politic with the monarch, and it circumscribes royal sovereignty by assigning authority to the "native land" (V.ii.170). Furthermore, in giving that "native land" a maternal shape, Gorboduc adapts Elizabeth I's own maternal rhetoric in order to urge the queen to accept its political vision.

Gorboduc was first performed during the Christmas season of 1561-62 at the Inns of Court; a second performance, apparently at the queen's behest, took place at court on 18 January. ³ Both performances were sponsored by Robert Dudley, whom the lawyers of the Inner Temple had elected revels prince for the season and who was, at this time, a serious contender for Elizabeth's hand. ⁴ Critics generally agree that Sackville and Norton used the play to advance a specific political agenda; David Bevington, for example, notes that Gorboduc urges "the power of virtuous parliamentary counselors" in withstanding "royal whimsy" and that it "insists on momentous prerogatives for Parliament: the right not only to offer specific proposals on succession, but to discuss all such matters freely." ⁵ An eyewitness account unavailable to Bevington suggests that the play's engagement of political topics is even more radical than he suspects. According to the anonymous courtier who recorded his impressions of the Inner Temple performance, in Gorboduc "[m]any things were handled of mariage, and that the matter was to be debated in parliament, because yt was much banding but yt hit ought to be determined by the councell." Aside from this general meaning, the courtier detected a far more specific one: the second dumb show, he claims, "ment that yt was better for the Quene to marye with L. R. knowen than wth the K. of Sweden." ⁶ Significantly, the testimony asserts that Gorboduc not only took the liberty to advise the queen to heed her Parliament on the issue of marriage, but that it went so far as to suggest that she should prefer a "knowen" English subject, Lord Dudley, to a foreign magnate and thus avoid what the play calls the "[u]nnatural thraldom of [a] stranger's reign" (V.ii.178). ⁷

If the unknown courtier is right, Gorboduc attests to the anxieties provoked by the queen's unmarried status in the play's aristocratic sponsor and its parliamentarian writers. It also attests to their ambitions. From the perspective of men such as Dudley, Sackville, and Norton, Elizabeth's eligibility affected the safety of England and was therefore the subject of masculine concern and the object of masculine management. Dudley proposed to still his anxiety and his ambition by marrying Elizabeth; Sackville and Norton, in promoting his case, find subtler means of exerting pressure on the queen. While supporting Dudley's claim to Elizabeth's hand, the play also uncomfortably insists on Englishness as a necessary qualification in a monarch: the "chosen king" should be "born within [the] native land" (V.ii.169-70). To whom these references to the "native line" apply may matter less then what they imply (V.ii.166). ⁸ Indeed, Gorboduc's preference for a dynastic "line" uncontaminated by foreign blood makes of Dudley not a good candidate who happens to be...