Tragedies of tyrants: political thought and theater in the English Renaissance (review)

142 Reviews materials might easily have been included as suitable for treatment The fact that such thoughts spring readily to mind, however, could be considered a real strength of this book. Like his seminal books explicating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1965), discovering a major literary grouping in the 'Ricardian' poets (1971), pinpointing the distinctive characteristics of Middle English literature at large (1982), this is in turn almost certain to generate a new series of studies. If 'formal doctrines' of the ages of M a n belong to the world of 'a lettered minority' such as Dante and Chaucer, for instance (p. 93 and passim), what informal understandings of the human life-span are to be found in the world of popular culture? Diane Speed Department of English University of Sydney Bushnell, Rebecca W., Tragedies of tyrants: political thought and theater in the English Renaissance, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xviii, 195; R.R.P. US$29.95 + 1 0 % overseas. Professor Bushnell's study begins by examining h o w politically focused writings from antiquity to the Renaissance variously constructed images of the tyrant. It then proceeds to explore how English Renaissance drama recreated and/or redefined those images. Vigorously, learnedly, and lucidly argued, her book further illuminates not merely individual texts but also the Tudor and Stuart debates over the nature and scope of monarchic power. Thefirsttwo chapters investigate an 'ideology of opposition' that Bushnell sees as 'constructing the tyrant's unstable figure in the tradition of western political thought that stems from Plato and Aristotle' (p. 9). Bushnell demonstrates that the tyrant in contrast to the king-as-true-ruler, is repeatedly represented as being passion dominated, effeminate, theatrical: one whose self, in its egocentric, frequently overreaching, desire and in its diverse transformations, moves toward dissolution. Bushnell's point is that '[t]he tyrant thus draws to himself everything that does notfitquite properly into the Western tradition of rationality' (ibid.). Of particular importance in the widely ranging discussion that substantiates her point is the focus on effeminacy as a supposed characteristic of tyrants. Ancient and Renaissance constructions of the female in terms of unreason, uncontrolled desire, instability and the impulse to illegitimate mie are shrewdly scrutinized. Important too is Bushnell's focus on political theory's recunent unwillingness, or failure, to keep the categories 'tyrant' and 'king' distinct. It might finally be mentioned here that an attractive feature of the initial chapters is Bushnell's moving beyond canonical texts of political theory. Her account of Senecan images of tyranny is valuable, the more so as she has previously examined Oedipus the King. Reviews 143 In the following chapters' accounts of Tudor and Stuart tyrant plays, many substantial as well as new readings are put forward, early and notable successes being the interpretations of Cambyses and of Baptistes in the third chapter. It might be argued, however, that the subsequent chapter's accounts of Shakespeare's and Jonson's tyrant plays are less successful. The readings of Richard 111 and of Macbeth are interesting: 'In Richard's and Macbeth's cases, we see how gender and sexuality can be used to construct and undermine the tyrant because w e watch those characters ambitiously seek to become kings and then mie unsuccessfully' (p. 131). Even more so is the study of Sejanus, in which Bushnell suggests that the play 'approaches the problem of representing the ambitious tyrant by splitting him into two figures: Sejanus the usurper and Tiberius the legitimate emperor, "excellent wolf (3.347) and "sphinx" (3.64)' (ibid.). Nonetheless, the plays are not adequately contextualized within the other writings of their respective authors. H o w Sejanus, for example, relates to Jonson's images of kingship in his masques and poems is left unexplored. Better contextualized, in that sense, is the account in chapter five of Beaumont and Fletcher's tyrant plays, a discussion in which Bushnell carefully examines apparent support of 'the absolutist ideology that privileges legitimacy over character as an index ofrightfulrule' and its seeming co-existence with apparent criticism of 'absolutism's exclusion of morality from political discourse' (p. 171). The ensuing study of Massinger's The Roman Actor...