In a footnote within this compelling study, Peter C. Herman comments that “given the poetic output of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, and Elizabeth I, there is nothing extraordinary about monarchs writing verse” (157 n. 3). And yet, as his intricate study of “royal poetrie” shows, for sovereign authors who were apprehensive, as James VI/I was, about how “the intent of the Author” may be “misconstrued by sundry” (177), the act of poetic creativity is freighted with all kinds of personal and political meanings. Herman's book significantly invests the work of these “monarchic poets”—Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, James VI/I, Charles I—with the importance that has been accorded visual iconography and other cultural and political emblems of royal authority and self-fashioning (although the chapters on Henry and Mary deftly interweave analysis of both visual and poetic material; in Mary's case, Herman argues that her early elegy on the death of François II deliberately sculpts a poetic self that responds to contemporary French portraiture). Yet, in demonstrating the vitality of the poetic within the “political imaginary”—a resonant phrase that Herman uses in Louis Montrose's definition of it as “the collective repertoire of representational forms and figures—mythological, rhetorical, narrative, iconic—in which the beliefs and practices of Tudor [and Stuart] political culture were pervasively articulated” (2–3)—he avoids the reductive trap of making the poetic subsidiary to the political. For Herman, the tradition of courtly verse, with its subtle, dynamic interplay between erotic and political languages, does not begin in the 1540s with the courtier-poets Surrey and Wyatt only to culminate in the familiar political Petrarchanism of the English Elizabethan court but originates in Henry's own courtly love lyrics. These exploit the rich potentialities of seductive discourse that, like the better known Henrician masques and disguisings, is designed as a courtly performance of power. Henry is enabled to do this, Herman suggests, because of the influence of humanism, which gave poetry enough aesthetic and philosophical justification, “cultural empowerment” (183), for a monarch to practice it, and the adoption of Burgundian cultural forms in the Henrician court that fused chivalric and political language.

Herman's study valuably attends to the contexts of manuscript circulation and publication in which these monarchic poems become enmeshed and to the thresholds between public and private that they often uneasily cross. For Henry, the public performances of his courtly love lyrics helped foster “the public illusion of marital bliss” (32); in her hymn on the sinking of the Armada, Elizabeth's rhetorical voice is insistently personal rather than an allegorical embodiment of England in order to assert the divine preservation of queen as much as nation; the successive printing of James's epic poem on the battle of Lepanto at different historical moments in the relationship between Scotland and England reveals the king's political opportunism. By 1591, an authorial preface is added in which anti-Catholic commentary, however contradictory of the poem itself, betrays James's desire to court English Protestant interests. Not all monarchic verse declared itself so publicly. In an illuminating rereading of Elizabeth's poem, “The doubt of future foes,” usually seen as a belligerently coded warning to Mary Stuart in 1570, Herman offers evidence that this was accidentally sent into enthusiastic English circulation; left unerased on the queen's writing tablet, it survived as “a private, self-revealing moment of intense frustration with Mary” (111) that acquired a political life of its own. The question of poetic and political “ownership” is most charged in the case of the amatory sonnets ascribed to Mary Stuart that contributed to her political downfall. Herman skilfully draws out how these poems reverse conventional gendered hierarchies of desire: the enacting of an active, masculine role by the Marian female lover only serves to undermine her monarchical power. Herman suggests that Elizabeth may have learned from the disastrous example of Mary's erotic poetry (preferring to keep private a lyric in which she displays “the shifting, unstable body” [132] of Petrarchan verse), but a corrective to any quick judgment about Mary's ineptitude is importantly found through his politicized reading of her elegy and her use of poetry in the form of monarchical gifts.

Herman's arguments are thoroughly deft, astute, and persuasive; though the number of texts he explores by each author are relatively few (discussion of Mary's religious poetry would have been rewarding, for example), the depth of historical, contextual, and critical analysis draws out their rhetorically and politically labyrinthine nature. It is a shame that Jane Rickard's important study, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester, 2007), seems not to have been consulted and, given that Mary and James are a central focus (and that their work discussed was composed in France and Scotland), the use of “Early Modern England” in the book's title is oddly delimiting, especially since Herman suggests how the Stuarts particularly seem to exemplify the limitations of the poetic-political imaginary. The final chapter on Charles I is shorter than the rest, though it asks fascinating questions about the Royalist poetic construction of a deposed monarch who did not write poetry himself: instead, this new kind of ventriloquized monarchic verse paradoxically “seek[s] to recapture authority” by emphasizing “the monarch's humanity and vulnerability” (199), something that, as Herman's book reveals, other examples of “royal poetrie” have sometimes inadvertently but powerfully betrayed.