James I and the Politics of Literature

Excerpt from the This is a study of the relationships between authority and its representations in the Jacobean period. As the prime example of the representation of authority, James I is a central figure in this investigation. Representation does not have only a political meaning, however, and in the course of the work I consider the writings of James I, his poetry as well as his political treatises and speeches; literature produced for the court, most notably Ben Jonson’s masques; representations that were not necessarily directed to the royal view – plays for the public stage by Chapman, Massinger Jonson, and Shakespeare, as well as poems and prose by Donne and Jonson. Visual representations that bear on public concerns are crucial, too, and I have taken as an important instance the genre of family portraits in the period.