1 - The kingly vice: the tyrant in early Tudor drama

Summary

‘For, as Saint Thomas says, when a king rules his realm only to his own profit, and not to the good of his subjects, he is a tyrant’—John Fortescue

Early Tudor political morality plays display a recurring concern with the manner in which the anointed sovereign wields his/her power, rather than the manner in which sovereigns often acquire absolute power. In later decades the focus of political drama shifts from the abuse of sovereign power to the nature and origins of sovereignty itself: that is, from consequence of power to its constitutive cause. But the plays discussed in this chapter foreground more significantly the problem of corruptibility of limitless power and the debate surrounding the possibility of resistance to such corrupt authority, only obliquely referring to the more fundamental question of the legitimacy of sovereign authority itself. What happens when an individual endowed with unlimited authority to protect his subjects from evildoers proves to be susceptible to corruption himself? The action of a number of political moralities of the early sixteenth century revolves around this pivotal question.

My analysis of tyranny in drama will be juxtaposed against the contours of the resistance-against-tyranny debate being shaped by Scottish and English Calvinist thinkers during the mid-sixteenth century to reveal the congruence of theatre and politics. In plays such as John Skelton's Magnificence, Nicholas Udall's Respublica, and R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, the central preoccupation for early Tudor dramatists is the shifting line between royal absolutism and abuse of royal authority; the figure of the tyrant becomes the prism through which playwrights analyse the effects of sovereign power on its bearer and on society at large.

In the allegorical–political ‘drama of abstract personification’, the tyrant always inherits his power lawfully, but is subsequently either tricked or lured into tyranny by the vices. An integral part of the traditional morality structure, the vices assume the guise of counsellors and connive at the oppression of the populace by taking advantage of the monarch's gullibility or susceptibility to corruption. The action of each play reaches its denouement when one or more agents of God come onstage to chastise the tyrant and the vices, and deliver the commonwealth from their excesses. As my discussion of the plays will show, this pattern repeats itself in all the extant political moralities that deal with tyranny.