“This is no flattery; these are counsellors /That feelingly persuade me what I am”: Duke Senior's pert reply to the sharp winter winds in As You Like It (II.i.10–11) sounds the contrast and continuum between flattery and counsel in Renaissance theories of political speech. Ivan Lupić's Subjects of Advice argues for the centrality of plain-dealing counsel and its suave cousin flattery in English Renaissance drama. Counsel, Lupić argues, is inherently dramatic, since it involves risky exchanges whose audiences are multiple and whose consequences are contingent. The hero of the book is Sir Thomas More, counselor to Henry VIII, a theorist of counsel in his greatest work Utopia, an amateur thespian in house entertainments, and a character in the collaboratively written history play that bears his name. Another frequent visitor in these pages is Seneca, who, like More, experienced the dangers of counsel in his political career, wrote about counsel in his prose works, and staged various scenes of counsel in his tragedies. Along the way, Lupić draws on Michel Foucault, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Leo Tolstoy.

Lupić's introduction is a tour de force account of counsel in ancient drama, contemporary philosophy, and Renaissance drama. Lupić brilliantly reads the classical figures of Echo and Narcissus as figures of counsel and kingship, and he sets up the close relationship between civil philosophy and decorum. Chapter 1, “Playing Good Counsel,” tracks the fortunes of Thomas More, culminating in a revelatory reading of the play Sir Thomas More, which exists in manuscript and has been argued to contain the hand of young William Shakespeare. Rather than focusing on Shakespeare's contributions, as most scholars have done, Lupić looks at the play as a whole, which includes a play-within-a-play and builds dynamically on the morality play tradition, including More's own efforts as an amateur entertainer.

Chapter 2, “Counsel's Tyranny,” is a study of two dramatic works by George Buchanan, a leading figure in the Scottish Reformation who wrote both prose dialogues and plays in Latin designed for performance at court. Buchanan's original Latin plays on biblical themes are works of counsel (to James VI of Scotland) as well as works about counsel. Buchanan's plays, Lupić argues, stage the tensions within the humanist political project about monarchy, right rule, and rhetoric. Lupić also addresses the early afterlife of these plays: he presents James I as the exemplary royal reader of the works, and he follows the English translation of Baptistes into dialogue form in the 1640s, in an edition once attributed to Milton.

Chapter 3, “Governed by Examples,” is a study of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's play Gorboduc, the first drama to use British history as subject matter for a classically inspired tragedy. Lupić suggestively pairs Gorboduc with Thomas Preston's Cambyses, a popular play based on an episode from Persian history and also performed at court. Lupić argues that both plays call into question the reliability of examples and commonplaces drawn from history to guide political deliberation in the present. The plays contribute to the Renaissance crisis of exemplarity, in which the task of seeking political wisdom from the works of historians, a staple of humanist counsel and study, was ceasing to yield simple guidance in the face of the lived complexity of political speech and deliberation. The juxtaposition of the two works supports Lupić's larger claim that an overemphasis on genre has prevented scholars from seeing the common themes addressed by drama in this period.

Chapter 4, “Vehemently Pressed,” presents another pair of contrasting plays, Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pythias and Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Both plays, Lupić argues, present friendship as a form of counsel, in which emotional investment and intimacy have the potential to transform the sovereign. This chapter integrates classical and Renaissance friendship theory (Aristotle, Cicero, Bacon, Montaigne) with Hobbes's commentary on counsel and command in the Leviathan to produce a compelling comparative reading of these two plays.

Chapter 5, “Words out of Season,” takes up counsel in King Lear. The plain-speaking Kent is the exemplar of a counselor who refuses to flatter and thus fails to advise. Drawing on Foucault and reading Shakespeare's source texts with his characteristic care, Lupić links plain speech to the classical tradition of parrhesia, “speaking truth to power.” Lupić argues that Shakespeare refuses to draw a clear line between flattery and plain speech, and between “good” and “bad” characters, presenting a world instead in which effective political language and counsel depend on both direct and indirect modes of address. The book ends with thoughts on counsel in Hamlet, continuing the Shakespearean theme but drawing on a Polish advice manual published in Venice and focusing on the Polish/foolish character of Polonius as a collector of commonplaces, wisdom drawn from the ancients to advise political actors in the present.

Subjects of Advice is written with great care, often following its English and Latin texts through different stages of composition, publication, reprinting, and reception. The chapters on More and Buchanan will become the definitive statements about these works and authors, while the other chapters contribute significantly to scholarly considerations of politics, rhetoric, and drama on the Renaissance stage. Though deeply historical in its methods and focus, the issues this book raises about good counsel, plain speech, and strategic flattery remain pressing in our public institutions today.