The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice

It is a critical commonplace to note sharp cultural differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean England. But how and why did this transition take place? What kinds of decisions and assumptions were involved as writers responded to the new king? How did residual Elizabethan expectations and habits of mind shape the English response to James I, and what were the consequences? How much control did James have over his reception? This study examines these questions in detail by exploring a wide range of texts written during the first decade of his reign in England, from 1603 to 1613. At stake in these questions are some larger issues which have been central to much recent historically orientated work on English Renaissance literature, concerning the relationships between king and culture, literature and authority. Curtis Perry’s study provokes a fresh examination of the contingencies shaping long-familiar notions of what constitutes the Jacobean as a literary period.

• Examines a wider range of familiar and non-canonical texts than most such studies, giving a broader historical and cultural picture • Examines the relationship between monarch and culture by looking at the transition between two reigns • Engages with questions made fashionable by New Historicism, but with more attention to the nuances of individual writers and subjects

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; A note on texts; Introduction; Part I. Negotiations in Genre and Decorum: 1. Panegyric and the poet-king; 2. Arcadia re-formed: pastoral negotiations in early Jacobean England; Part II. Staging Jacobean Kingcraft: 3. Theatre of counsel: royal vulnerability and early Jacobean political drama; 4. Nourish-fathers and pelican daughters: kingship, gender and bounty in King Lear and Macbeth; Part III. Structures of Feeling: 5. The politics of nostalgia: Queen Elizabeth in early Jacobean England; 6. Royal style and the civic elite in early Jacobean London; Epilogue: warrant and obedience in Bartholemew Fair; Notes; Index.