Allegories of Kingship: Calderón and the Anti-Machiavellian Tradition by Stephen Rupp (review)

204 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 September 1622, and the king had liked it so well that he recommended that it be pr:inted. It is against this background that DOlU1e preached his Gunpowder Plot sermon on 5 November of the same year. The annual sermons of thanksgiving for the king's deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had often been used to attack Roman Catholicism (and sometimes the king's policies), and James probably wished to see Donne's sermon - about which he had received reports - in order to satisfy himself that the newly appointed dean of St Paul's was adhering closely to the prohibitions laid out in the Directions. Shami argues persuasively that the fair scribal copy of Donne's Gunpowder Plot sermon, corrected in his own hand, was made at the king's order, hence its preservation among the Royal manuscripts collection in the British Library. It is noteworthy that James did not recommend that the Gunpowder Plot sermon be printed, which may indicate his less than enthusiastic reception of it. To facilitate the comparison of the original version of the Gunpowder Plot sermon with the revised version eventually published in 1649 (the copy-text followed by George Potter and Evelyn Simpson in The Sermons of John Donne 4:235-63), Shami presents a photographic facsimile ofRoyal MS 17.B.XX with each page faced by a documentary transcription to which are footnoted the verbal variants and additions made by Dorme in preparing the sermon for the press some seven or eight years after its delivery. To this parallel text, she has appended a list of Dorme's corrections and detailed notes on the transcription, and she has prefaced the whole with a critical introduction that includes a bibliographical description of the artefact, a persuasive conjecture concerningits production and earlyprovenance, and interpretive discussions of Donne's immediate corrections of the scribal copy and his later revision of the text. What is immediately apparent when the original version of the Gunpowder Plot sermon is compared to the revised version is that Donne was cautious in the former (though it does contain implied criticism of the king and his policies), but felt freer to speak his mind in the latter, which was prepared after the death of James and shortly before his own death. What is also clear is that DOlU1e's attitudes towards James and his government were more nuanced than most biographers and critics have supposed. Shami's discovery, then, is significant in helping us grasp more fully the complexities of Dorui.e's religio-political stance in the tumultuous final decade of his life. (TED-LARRY PEBWORTH) Stephen Rupp. Allegories ofKingship: Calderon and the Anti-Machiavellian Tradition Penn State Press. t88. us $28.50 This fine book examines the political theatre of Calderon de la Barca in terms of both contemporaneous political theories and the political realities HUMANITIES 205 of early modem Spain. Rupp's over-arching view is that Calderon's political position was consistently shaped on the one hand by antiMachiavellian principles that 'urge[d] an uncompromising ideal of Christian kingship on the Spanish Crown',and embraced a providentialist view of the role of the Spanish monarchy in history, and on the other by an acute awareness of and response to varying political circumstances. After an introduction that provides an overview of the book's theses, chapter 1 surveys political theories of the period as represented by a body of treatises that Rupp divides into Machiavellian vs (more or less) everyone else, the latter including the 'ethicists,' who associated true reason of state with divine providence and' invoked the figure of the Christian prince guided in his statecraft by Christian doctrine; and the 'realists,' who accepted politics as grounded on pragmatic (if still Christian) principles. Rupp provides useful if brief summaries of the political theories of Machiavelli , Furio Ceriol, Rivadeneira, Saavedra Fajardo, and Botero. Anticipating the argument to be made in the remainder of the book, he finds that Calder6n 'presents an articulate and detailed defense of the ethicist position ,' central to which are the importance of history, which can supply examples and cOW1ter-examples for the education of the prince, and the...