Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

Chapter 1. Rex Absconditus: Justice, Presence, and Legitimacy in Measure for Measure

23 Rex Absconditus Justice, Presence, and Legitimacy in Measure for Measure Gale H. Carrithers Jr. and James D. Hardy Jr. An Elizabethan audience hearing Isabella’s cry to the duke in Measure for Measure for “justice, justice, justice, justice” (5.1.26) would have instantly understood that her anguished plea had invoked royalty’s primal, eldest obligation and their subjects’ constant concern. Giving substance within the civitas terrena to a duty sent from heaven required sovereignty’s every resource of royal grace, especially graces asked from God in the ceremonies of coronation. Uniting the tropes of moment and theater in their performance with the tropes of journey and ambassadorship in their promise, coronation proclaimed legitimacy and royal presence, the former a necessary precondition for a valid royal consecration, the latter a necessary sequel to it, with both connecting the sovereign to God, to the people, and to justice.1 These four tropes—moment, theater, journey, and calling or ambassadorship—were the way in which the Renaissance citizenry imagined action, order, and being and in which they longed for all things human finally to be put right. The 1v 24 Rex Absconditus tropes thus described a broad religious dimension of life, adding depth of meaning to ordinary occurrences, any of which could become a moment of conversion, an example of God’s theater, or a showing forth of ambassadorship for God, which was part of the human journey toward God. If this religious dimension of life exalted an ordinary act of love on the small stage of a single life, how much more did coronation illuminate the tropes on the general stage of communal life. Certainly, God would save the consecrated queen and the realm she ruled.2 The symbolic power of coronation lies in its traditional role of consecration, a service designed to link human polity to divine purpose by “hallowing” the sovereign before the people. In terms of the king’s temporal body it serves as a “solemn covenant between the king and his people—of devotion to their well-being on his part, and, in return, of loyalty and affection on theirs.”3 This covenant comes in the “recognition ,” the first of the traditional ceremonies of the coronation , and it reflects “the ancient form of the ratification by the people of the election of the Sovereign.”4 Concluding the civic elements of coronation are the “enthroning” of the sovereign and the vows of “homage” and “fealty” taken by lay and ecclesiastical peers, which reconfirm the ladder of feudal authority and the form of the realm. The consecration of the sovereign is (and was) an act of law and obligation as well as a symbolization of the king’s two bodies, both in the person of the reigning monarch and in the myth and institution of kingship wherein resided “the divine presence in man, the imago Dei, which cannot be obliterated.”5 This extended celebration took place upon a public stage, where attendance and applause signified the people’s assent. Queen Elizabeth I began her coronation day, January 25, 1559, with a procession from the Tower to the Abbey, where she could be seen and greeted by the people and the dignitaries of London. She replied to both English and Latin expressions of Gale H. Carrithers Jr. and James D. Hardy Jr. 25 loyalty and love given by allegorical figures along the route of procession, and she accepted a gift of rosemary from a poor woman and a Bible presented by a child, kissing the Bible and holding it up while giving “great thankes to the citie therefore.”6 The ceremonies at Westminster were as public as possible, conducted “in the sight of God and in the face of the congregation,” and, though a queen was being crowned and “hallowed” in the Church of England, the coronation followed the traditional Roman Catholic forms and words, with a bit of English added for Protestant sensibilities.7 The combination of Roman Catholic and Protestant elements in the coronation ceremonies persuaded the Marian archbishop of Canterbury that he could not officiate, so Elizabeth was crowned by the bishop of Carlisle, a lesser prelate and not the traditional officiant but still entirely valid, thus presenting an institutional but not a liturgical irregularity. The sovereign still represented God and ascended to authority, at the same time as she represented the commonwealth and accepted power from it...