Dr Alexandra Gajda: List of publications

This handbook presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on Shakespeare's period that it is hoped will prove useful to scholars of his poems and plays.

On 8 February 1601 Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, processed into London declaring that he was taking urgent action to prevent a ‘popish plot’ by his enemies to sell the Crown of England to Spain. Historians have dismissed these claims as fictitious or deluded – the chapter reassesses Essex’s claims. The intellectual and political contexts that framed Essex’s vision of politics provided strong foundations for the Earl’s belief that the Protestant succession was endangered by a cabal of evil counsellors, headed by Sir Robert Cecil, in the pay of Spain. The failure of the earl’s rising obscures the fact that this Elizabethan succession scare was no more ‘irrational’ than the ‘popish plots’ in the seventeenth century.

In sixteenth-century England Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, enjoyed great domestic and international renown as a favourite of Elizabeth I. He was a soldier and a statesman of exceptionally powerful ambition. After his disastrous uprising in 1601 Essex fell from the heights of fame and favour, and ended his life as a traitor on the scaffold. This interdisciplinary account of the political culture of late Elizabethan England explores the ideological contexts of Essex's extraordinary career and fall from grace, and the intricate relationship between thought and action in Elizabethan England. By the late sixteenth century, fundamental political models and vocabularies that were employed to legitimise the Elizabethan polity were undermined by the strains of war, the ambivalence that many felt towards the church, continued uncertainty over the succession, and the perceived weaknesses of the rule of the aging Elizabeth. Essex's career and revolt threw all of these strains into relief. Alexandra Gajda examines the attitude of the earl and his followers to war, religion, the structures of the Elizabethan polity, and Essex's role within it. She also explores the classical and historical scholarship prized by Essex and his associates that gave shape and meaning to the earl's increasingly fractured relationship with the Queen and regime. She addresses contemporary responses to the earl, both positive and negative, and the earl's wider impact on political culture. Political and religious ideas in late sixteenth-century England had an important impact on political events in early modern England, and played a vital role in shaping the rise and fall of Essex's career.

Readers of Roman history in early modern Europe showered praise on the timeless universality of Tacitus' wisdom: 'In iudgement there is none sounder, for instruction of life, for al times', wrote the author of the English translation of the Annals and Germania. But students of Tacitus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also believed that his writings communed directly with their own present; that Tacitus revealed political truths to all ages, but most especially 'to these our times'. Tacitus had been largely forgotten or overlooked in the medieval and early Renaissance periods, and, despite the print publication of his works in various editions from the 1470s, his relative obscurity persisted in the sixteenth century. The magisterial editions of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) from 1574 to 1607, however, anticipated a change in scholarly and political culture in the later sixteenth century, when Tacitus enjoyed an overwhelming and unprecedented popularity. Between 1600 and 1649 at least sixty-seven editions of the Annals and Histories were printed. The major works were translated into various vernacular languages, widening the readership of an author whose prose was deemed difficult even in a Latinate culture. Writers modelled the style, content and structure of their own histories on Tacitus, whilst the Annals in particular supplied dramatists with the most lurid of plots to realise on the stage.