The deed was full of honor and deceit,/If gold will pay his raunsome he shall liue Footnote 1
Thus Cyrus, king of Persia, reassures the noblewoman Alexandra, seeking safety in the Persian camp. Her bondman Libanio, disguised as his mistress, has taken her place as a hostage of the Assyrian king. If ransom for Libanio fails, Cyrus vows, ‘then blood and death…/ shall ghastly march in Babylons waste streetes’.Footnote 2 The prince’s approval of an act both self-sacrificial and profoundly deceitful, and the promise of violence it elicits from him, alert the historian to a drama in which virtue is far from straightforward. The warres of Cyrus king of Persia, against Antiochus king of Assyria with the tragicall ende of Panthæa, printed in 1594 but most likely performed at court in the 1570s by the children of the Chapel Royal, offers revelatory insights into both early modern attitudes towards classical Persia, and wider Elizabethan political culture.Footnote 3
The place of drama in Elizabethan political culture is well established.Footnote 4 Performances at court and in theatres frequently addressed issues such as royal marriage, succession, and religious policy, with court drama often the subject of detailed ambassadorial reports.Footnote 5 Recent scholarship argues that, often engaging in the same discussions as more overtly polemical media such as parliamentary debates, pamphlets, and sermons, drama invited audiences to make their own judgements about political issues.Footnote 6 Repeated regulatory efforts – beginning with the 1559 royal proclamation precluding discussion of ‘matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal’ in plays intended for popular audiences – suggest that Elizabethan authorities recognized these political resonances.Footnote 7
The warres of Cyrus reworks part of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, first published in complete English translation in 1567.Footnote 8 The story of Panthea’s devotion to her husband Abradatas featured in compilations by Richard Taverner and William Painter in 1539 and 1566 respectively, but appeared here within a significantly wider-ranging dramatization of the Cyropaedia.Footnote 9 Printed in London in 1594, by Edward Allde for William Blackwal, its title page proclaimed its earlier performance by the children of the Chapel Royal.Footnote 10 Richard Farrant, master of the Chapel boys between 1576 and 1580, is the likely author.Footnote 11 A manuscript song signed ‘Farrant’ in a 1581 collection of court-music, in which a suicidal Panthea laments the death of her husband Abradad, strengthens this possibility.Footnote 12 So too does the classical tendency revealed by the plays Farrant presented annually to the queen: The history of Mucius Scaevola, Ajax and Ulysses, and King Xerxes (another Persian setting).Footnote 13 The dating of the play is disputed.Footnote 14 Close connections in language have been noted between the Warres and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, first performed in the late 1580s, prompting suggestions that the Warres postdates Tamburlaine.Footnote 15 Accepting the possibility of revisions before printing, several recent assessments, however, date the Warres to the late 1570s – positing its potential influence on Marlowe’s plays.Footnote 16 The key evidence for a late 1570s performance date is the drama’s title page statement that it was performed by the Chapel boys – who ceased playing in the mid-1580s; Panthea’s song (pre-1581); and its implication of the involvement of Farrant, who died in 1580.Footnote 17 Though the extent of any revisions before printing cannot be established, this article suggests that the drama’s significant connections to the politics of the 1570s present further evidence of performance in that decade.
Read in the context of its 1570s performance, the play illuminates one of many points of tension in Elizabeth’s reign. A key preoccupation is the disjuncture between appearance and reality. Almost every event and character in the narrative exists alongside a mirror image – faithful, distorted, or inverted – requiring Cyrus to disentangle honesty from dissimulation, and decide how much trust to place in others. Cyrus – opportunistically ruthless and manipulative, yet lauded throughout – navigates this conspiratorial world through a singular blend of virtue and brutality. The Warres suggests that, in a political climate troubled by intrigue and religious division, elements at court presented a vision of rule in which royal virtue was inseparable from ‘policy’.
In particular, a close reading of The warres of Cyrus illuminates the debate around Mary, Queen of Scots. The presentation of the captive Queen Panthea strongly suggests a sympathetic engagement with the Scottish queen’s predicament. Exploring key themes from the furore surrounding Mary – including the validity of royal status, and the jurisdiction for any potential trial – the drama appears to recommend Elizabeth showing leniency towards her counterpart. This suggests that at court, a more nuanced debate was possible than that manifested in the campaign against Mary in parliament, print, and rumour.Footnote 18 Existing analyses have neglected these connections with the domestic politics of the 1570s. Overlooking Cyrus’s brutality, Chloë Houston has described Cyrus as ‘an idealized, just king, who brings peace and prosperity’. Emphasizing Cyrus’s generosity, Houston argues that the drama reflects optimism about contemporary Safavid Persia as a potential ‘partner in trade and empire’, and presents England with a ‘scrupulously fair’ model of monarchy reliant upon counsel.Footnote 19 Jane Grogan, by contrast, notes Cyrus’s ruthlessness and his role in disentangling murderous duplicity, but argues for significant anti-imperial elements in the drama.Footnote 20 This article suggests an alternative political reading, and more immediate contemporary resonances.
More broadly, examination of the play enhances historical understanding of contemporary classical frameworks. Its intervention in the debate around Mary rests on an Achaemenid Persian setting. Literary scholarship, in particular by Grogan and Houston, has demonstrated early modern familiarity with classical Persia.Footnote 21 Yet the influence of Persia remains under-appreciated in studies of early modern classical reception. Recent scholarship has elucidated the importance of the classical Roman past.Footnote 22 Examinations of the English reception of the Warres’s source-text, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, suggest, however, that Achaemenid Persia formed a similarly significant feature in the Elizabethan intellectual landscape.Footnote 23 This article begins with an overview of the Cyropaedia’s English reception, suggesting that, in dramatizing Xenophon’s text, The warres of Cyrus drew on a Persian context with which its audiences were significantly more familiar than has been widely recognized. Turning to the Warres itself, this exploration reveals how this Persian setting facilitated a vision of the ruthless, opportunistic, yet virtuous, prince. Persian frameworks not only complemented those of Greece and Rome, but provided a distinct lens through which contemporaries could interpret and shape the political process. Anxious Elizabethans could find in classical Persia a monarch in whom honour and deceit combined to safeguard the realm.
I
In dramatizing the Cyropaedia, The warres of Cyrus drew on a Persian context with which its audience could be expected to be familiar. The Cyropaedia enjoyed an established status as a mirror-for-princes.Footnote 24 Cicero described Xenophon’s Cyrus as ‘the portrait of a just ruler’.Footnote 25 ‘The Cyropaedia, which I have worn out by reading, I have thoroughly exemplified during my command’, Cicero explained. From Lorenza Valla’s 1438 edition – the first Latin translation of the Cyropaedia – onwards, Xenophon’s text was a fixture in the work of leading European scholars, who presented Cyrus as a model for emulation.Footnote 26 As Cicero asserted, and Niccolo Machiavelli reiterated in Il principe (1513), it was by modelling himself on Xenophon’s portrait of Cyrus that Roman general Scipio Africanus attained his virtues.Footnote 27 The archetypal humanist speculum principis, Erasmus’s Education of a Christian prince (1516), commended to Charles V the Cyropaedia’s lesson that ‘the chief hope for the state is founded in the proper training of its children’.Footnote 28
The Cyropaedia’s prominence in England was tied to the popularization of Greek studies by the humanist circle surrounding John Cheke.Footnote 29 The role that Cheke – fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge (from 1529), Cambridge’s first regius professor of Greek (1540 to 1551), and tutor to Edward VI (from 1544) – played in ensuring the popularity of Greek in elite education is well established.Footnote 30 The place of the Cyropaedia in this group’s curriculum is less often appreciated. Cheke’s St John’s colleague Roger Ascham, tutor to the future Elizabeth I, recalled Cheke’s frequent injunctions that of ‘all Authors both Greke and Latin’, study of ‘Tullie in Latin, Plato, Aristotle: Xenophon: Isocrates: and Demosthenes: in Greke: must nedes proue an excellent man’.Footnote 31 In 1550, Ascham asked Cheke why his royal pupil was not reading the Cyropaedia; Cheke suggested that, after studying Aristotelian moral precepts, Edward would progress to the historical exempla provided by the Cyropaedia.Footnote 32 The king had already been presented with at least two copies: Jacques de Vintimille’s 1547 Paris translation, and Louis Le Roy’s compilation of Isocrates and the Cyropaedia.Footnote 33 Ascham’s own educational handbook, The Scholemaster, drew heavily on the Cyropaedia. It was written, its preface explained, in response to a conversation in which several Elizabethan privy councillors lamented that England lacked ‘the good order of many good olde common welthes of the Persians and Grekes’.Footnote 34
Xenophon’s Persia was a recognizable feature of the Elizabethan intellectual landscape, familiar to figures such as Thomas Hoby, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.Footnote 35 In 1567, William Barker, scholar-secretary to Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, produced the Cyropaedia’s first complete English translation. A member of Cheke’s circle at St John’s, Barker had translated the first six of Xenophon’s eight books in 1552.Footnote 36 Hoby, publishing his influential translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, defined it in relation to the Cyropaedia. There was ‘no more imperfection in this Courtier’, Hoby’s dedicatory epistle declared, than in Xenophon’s Cyrus: ‘the one as necessarie and proper for a Gentilman of the Court, as the other for a king’.Footnote 37 Sidney, asserting the superior capacity of poetry to instil virtue, pointed to the exemplary resonances of ‘the feigned Cyrus of Xenophon’.Footnote 38 In the letter to Sir Walter Raleigh appended to The faerie queene, Spenser explained his preference for the Cyropaedia’s portrayal of ‘gouernement such as might best be’ over Plato’s envisaged ideal ‘Commune welth such as it should be’.Footnote 39 In drawing on the Cyropaedia’s Persian setting, The warres of Cyrus was far from unusual. The vision of politics it presented, however, was striking.
II
In the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, court performances by boy companies vastly outnumbered those by adult groups.Footnote 40 During the Revels season between Christmas and Shrovetide, the school companies of St Paul’s, the Chapel Royal, Windsor, Westminster, and subsequently Merchant Taylors’ enacted plays written for the court.Footnote 41 Court plays were overseen by the Master of the Revels in conjunction with prominent court figures. Thomas Blagrave, for example, discussed repeated ‘pervzing & Reformyng of’ an unnamed play of Farrant’s with Charles Howard, earl of Nottingham – diplomat, lord admiral and temporarily lord chamberlain.Footnote 42 Performances therefore frequently reflected the political inclinations of elements at court. The 1562 performance of Gorboduc, probing Elizabeth’s potential marriage, provides a well-known example, but children’s performances similarly explored such issues. In September 1566, the Chapel boys performed Master Richard Edwards’s Palamon and Arcite – drawn from Chaucer’s The knight’s tale – before Elizabeth. Just a month before a parliamentary delegation urged Elizabeth to marry, the play presented the lady Emilia, seeking a virgin life, receiving instead a divine injunction to marry. Audiences were accustomed to identifying political commentaries within these plays. Edwards’s Damon and Pythias, performed at court in 1564/5, was printed with a playful ‘defence’ against such readings, urging, when ‘We talk of Dionysius’ court, we mean no court but that.’Footnote 43 Court performances were adept at placing political commentary within well-known stories.
Recent scholarship has examined the impact on drama of an Elizabethan political climate in which official emphasis on outward conformity in religion spurred anxieties over dissimulation.Footnote 44 An environment has been identified in which many Protestants feared that Catholicism, concealed amongst outwardly loyal subjects, represented a potential fifth-column for England’s French and Spanish enemies, and scholars of political thought have identified increasing preoccupation with deceit.Footnote 45 The Warres suggests that court drama not only provides a further window onto these anxieties, but was a means through which contemporaries explored their political implications.
An obsessive concern with the disjunction between appearance and reality haunts the Warres. The play opens with Cyrus congratulating his companions on Persian victory in battle. The defeated King Cresus is defined by his duplicitous appearance, with the lament that ‘so cowardly a king,/ Should vse so good an armour and a horse.’ Such, Cyrus explains, are ‘our foes,/ Glorious in shew, but cowardly in minde’, priming the audience to look out for signs of duplicity. Queen Panthea, discovered amongst the captives, is introduced with the question: ‘What are ye Ladie?’. She answers, ‘What I would not be’, a paradoxical reference to her captive status. The incongruity of her situation troubles Cyrus’s companion Araspas, who protests, ‘the graces that adorne your presence,/ Deserues a fortune milde as is your face.’ Yet Panthea finds solace in this disjuncture. Informed that she is Cyrus’s captive, she responds ‘Onely this outward person is his thrall,/ My minde and honour free and euer shall.’Footnote 46 The queen, reduced by the vicissitudes of war, maintains an internal character shielded from these surroundings. Deception, the Warres suggests, is double-edged. Deceit exemplifies Cresus’s iniquity, yet dissimulation provides a refuge for Panthea, whose virtue is illustrated throughout the drama. If Cyrus sometimes struggles against those concealing their true natures, Panthea makes positive use of the same ploy.
Araspas’s interactions with Panthea reveal the dangers of conflating appearance with reality. Charged by Cyrus with Panthea’s safety, Araspas becomes captivated by her beauty. Consumed by desire, he dismisses Panthea’s chastity, reasoning that ‘being beautious Panthea needes must loue’. Finding her refusal inexplicable, he concludes that it must be ‘figuratiue’, cloaking some truer meaning. Identifying Araspas’s logic, Panthea responds, ‘if my lookes be this preparatiue,/ Ile beate my face’ into resemblance of her feelings. In his desire to align appearance and reality straightforwardly, Araspas deludes himself, constructing an imagined Panthea who fits his own perceptions. His departure from reason, and the repellent character he becomes – threatening that ‘torments can enforce a womans will’ – follow from his failure to realize that appearances can mislead.Footnote 47 Character is more complicated than Araspas’s superficial analysis comprehends and, as Panthea’s defence of her chastity makes clear, this is not always a failing.
Amid these deceptive appearances, the drama suggests that rule requires accurate perception; the prince must see beyond both misleading appearances, and deliberate dissimulation. This task unfolds as successive Assyrian noblemen, Gobrias and Ctesiphon, arrive at the Persian camp, announcing their defection to Cyrus. Gobrias, seeking revenge for the Assyrian king’s murder of his son, is welcomed and serves Cyrus faithfully, making the prince ‘heire of all my prouinces’. A second, mirrored scene, however, reveals the dangers posed by deceit. On his arrival, there is little to distinguish Ctesiphon from Gobrias. He too is an Assyrian nobleman aiming to defect, seeking revenge for a crime apparently committed against his child by the Assyrian King Antiochus, who took his daughter ‘with violate hands’. Like Gobrias, he is met by Cyrus’s noblemen, then taken to the king. Unlike Gobrias, however, Ctesiphon is introduced to the audience before entering the Persian camp, shown plotting with Antiochus to murder Cyrus. Assessing Ctesiphon, Cyrus considers the possibility of ‘some forged or dissembled glose,/ To sounde our secrets, and bewray our drifts.’ Blinded by the resemblance of their circumstances, however, Gobrias urges Cyrus, ‘trust the man,/ No doubt his…complaints are true’, and Ctesiphon is welcomed into Persian service. Trusting his servant’s judgement, Cyrus’s suspicion is initially set aside. The audience are spectators of dissimulation dissected; Ctesiphon’s pre-departure prayer, asking the Assyrian gods to ‘Giue favour to my lookes, faith to my speech’, proves chillingly effective, and the audience observe how Ctesiphon’s deception mimics Gobrias’s reality.Footnote 48 Duplicity may obscure the judgement of loyal counsellors.
As the plot develops, acts of deception begin to mimic not only reality, but each other. Ctesiphon’s entry into the Persian camp – already paralleling that of Gobrias – is followed by a startling reversal, in which he is converted to Persian loyalties and returns to Antiochus, outwardly loyal but intending to murder him. This finds a further echo in the subsequent dispatch of Araspas to the Assyrian camp, as yet another double agent, reporting to Cyrus on enemy battle plans. The cumulative effect of these entanglements is to place the audience in a hall of mirrors, every action performed before them offering glimpses – some informative, some misleading – of past intrigues. Antiochus voices the predicament of all: ‘thou art decevde’.Footnote 49
This atmosphere of suspicion characterized the world of the drama’s contemporary audience. Threatened by Catholic powers, Elizabethan public discourse acquired an increasingly paranoid tenor, as many looked inwards for potential traitors.Footnote 50 For the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestants in particular, Catholicism represented an existential threat. With Mary, Queen of Scots imprisoned in England, Catholic plots against Elizabeth appeared alarmingly likely. For those troubled by what they perceived as disturbing compromises in the religious settlement, veiled Catholic influence was the sinister explanation. Thomas Norton, writing after the 1569 northern rebellion, thought society ‘perilously infected’ with hidden Catholic sympathizers. ‘Cathedral churches are stuffed with them, as dens of thieves; they are in offices; the meaner sort depend upon them.’ Norton argued that the papal excommunication of Elizabeth had driven committed papists ‘by necessary consequence’ to ‘traitorousness’. Constant vigilance was required, for papists were adept at dissimulation, aiming ‘to insinuate themselves into freedom from mistrust’.Footnote 51 Contemporaries’ interactions with politics were increasingly couched in conspiratorial terms.Footnote 52 Safeguarding the realm, the godly urged, meant advancing a clearly delineated Protestantism. The alternative was to leave England defenceless against enemies who, hidden amongst their neighbours and sheltered by ambiguities in the Elizabethan settlement, awaited the regime’s overthrow, ‘mark[ing] men against another day’.Footnote 53
Many of the godly were profoundly afraid. Unease at the official emphasis on outward conformity – what Francis Bacon would later characterize as the refusal to build ‘windows into men’s hearts’ – triggered proposals for categorizing the realm into the trustworthy and the untrustworthy, a requirement for surviving ‘papistical conspiracy’.Footnote 54 To avoid the ‘spectacles of captivity, slaughter, murder’ seen elsewhere in Europe, it was necessary that the queen could identify, and mobilize if required, ‘assured good subjects’.Footnote 55 Three registers of names were envisaged: those subjects bound by oath ‘at all times and place, to defend’ queen and faith; those of uncertain loyalty; and those of ‘doubtful respects’, not to be approached.Footnote 56 Around 1572, probably after the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Northamptonshire Puritan George Carleton urged William Cecil to ‘try the corn from the chaff’. A force of those identified as ‘meetest in godliness’ had to be readied against ‘foreign practises’ and ‘home traitors’ ‘lest, upon the death of the prince…we may so perish all in one day’.Footnote 57 That these proposals found echoes in the Bond of Association suggests the persistence of this atmosphere.Footnote 58 The realm, many believed, was divided and beleaguered; an unsettled succession left it only ever one conspiracy away from disaster.
Dramatizing the conspiratorial atmosphere of the 1570s, The warres of Cyrus makes its audience both observers of and participants in this compulsion to discern and delineate. The drama’s main focus is Cyrus’s constant struggle against the intrigues threatening his camp. Battles frame the narrative, but occur off-stage. War is presented as a continual state of vigilance against lurking dangers. The audience partake of the same suspicion as did Norton, Carleton, and those who shared their fears, when they surveyed their neighbours. The echoes that the drama offers of itself, as each new development – yet to be revealed as good or ill – reflects a previous intrigue, recreate the thought-patterns of contemporary polemic.
The implication, however, is that uncertainty in politics should be utilized, rather than feared. Cyrus reaps the rewards of assessing shrewdly the characters of those around him. He resists any inclination to characterize loyalty according to easy binaries, calling into question the impulse to categorize – as ‘godly’ or ‘papist’ – so prevalent in contemporary polemical exchanges.Footnote 59 Gobrias – the new arrival whose previous association with a rival monarch might render him suspicious – gives faithful service. Araspas and Ctesiphon, both guilty of reprehensible behaviour, are differently charged by Cyrus with responsibilities commensurate with their reliability. Araspas is sent to spy on Antiochus’s camp, an action which apparently redeems his previous corruption; Ctesiphon is fit only to deliver a message that will result in his death. Assessments of character must be continually made and adjusted, and fixed categories are of little value. Araspas’s misguided desire for a seamless conjunction between appearance and reality evokes the Elizabethan longing for clearcut classifications. Acknowledging the realities of disjunction, the drama suggests, is far more fruitful. The play encapsulates both the threat of dissimulation, and the way in which deceit can be deployed to answer that threat.
III
Amidst this unsettling atmosphere, Cyrus presents a distinctive vision of princely virtue. Undaunted by ‘labour, hunger, thirst and colde’, his ‘sundry vertues…dayly increasing’, he reflects conventional ideals of kingship. An icy ruthlessness, however, is equally integral to Cyrus’s ‘grauenesse, power, and imperiall parts’: he is both ‘politique and liberall’. Cyrus defeats enemy intrigues through manipulation, and violence. Through this depiction, the Warres exalts a ‘politique’ form of monarchical authority as the antidote to the dangers of dissimulation. ‘[O]rdained of God,/ To enlarge the limits of the Persian raigne’, and employing any underhand methods he deems necessary, Cyrus’s behaviour is presented as not only necessary, but morally praiseworthy.Footnote 60
Cyrus governs a world characterized by cycles of violence and retribution. Gobrias’s defection is driven by a desire ‘to be reuenged’ for his son’s murder, Antiochus responding by threatening ‘reuenge vpon his daughters life’. This sets in motion the killing of an Assyrian nobleman, which in turn draws Antiochus’s vow to ‘be reuengde vnto the ninth degree,/ Both of Gobrias and his familie.’ Death and mutilation are commonplace. Cyrus promises ‘reuenge vpon the Assirian king’ – threatening to ‘rip his bowels’ – whilst encouraging Gobrias ‘in the meane time’ to ‘frolicke in our tent’.Footnote 61
In this world, the only effective virtue is allied with policy, and princes must excel their enemies in brutality. The moment at which Cyrus learns from Alexandra of Libanio’s sacrifice – but not yet of his survival – encapsulates this accommodation with necessity. The passage opens in the language of traditional, chivalric virtue, as Alexandra appeals to Cyrus, described by Ctesiphon as ‘knightly’, to ‘rescue poor Libanio’, Cyrus asking ‘From whom faire madame should I rescue him’? As Cyrus learns of Libanio’s deception, and his predicament, apparently guarded within the Assyrian camp, this evocation of the romance is abandoned. Cyrus exalts Libanio’s dissimulation, praising the combination of ‘honor and deceit’, and – silently discounting Alexandra’s suggestion of a dramatic rescue mission – offers a practical solution: paying his ransom. As Alexandra expresses her ‘fear theyle rate his raunsome at his head’, Cyrus again pivots to the possible, promising, ‘neuer was a bondmans death reuengde,/ as Cyrus meanes for this Libanio’.Footnote 62 Every attempt at resolution is progressively outmoded by the brutality of the situation, until Cyrus adopts an equally brutal method of justice.
Libanio’s actions, and Cyrus’s praise of them, suggest a philosophy reminiscent of Machiavellian virtù, requiring action in accordance with necessity.Footnote 63 Transported away from the Assyrian camp, Libanio tricks his captor, Dinon, before ‘slay[ing] him in his haplesse sleepe’ – an act presented, in its ready adaptation to circumstance, as morally praiseworthy. Libanio sees Dinon removing him from the Assyrian camp as ‘the gods’ offering ‘occasion to my hands,/ For sweete recouerie of my freedome.’ Killing Dinon with a ‘manly thrust’, Libanio seizes the opportunity offered by fortune. Cyrus rewards lavishly this ‘manly fortitude’.Footnote 64 Revealingly, the Libanio episode is one of only two plot-points not found in the Cyropaedia. The scene is undoubtedly gripping, but the playwright seems to have sought to highlight a readiness to act decisively, brutally if necessary, to exploit opportunities as key to masculine virtue.
Cyrus exploits opportunity, treating followers as expendable in the process. His manipulation of Ctesiphon reveals the chilling ends to which princely charisma could be deployed. Cyrus prompts an extraordinary conversion in his would-be assassin. Ctesiphon, seeing how the prince ‘by his wisdome winnes his followers hearts’, becomes ‘a vowed friend to Cyrus health,/ And in that resolution prest to die.’ Cyrus must remind the kneeling Ctesiphon – awestruck by the prince’s magnificence – that ‘Cyrus is no God’. This charisma allows Ctesiphon to be manipulated and discarded with disconcerting ease. Overcome with desire to serve, Ctesiphon asks Cyrus to send him to Antiochus with feigned peace terms, so that ‘In the deliuerie I will murther him.’ Cyrus agrees, but in fact provides Ctesiphon with documents spelling out to Antiochus his subject’s betrayal, thereby revealing to Antiochus ‘the difference twixt an open so & a dissembling friend’, ensuring ‘a villain shall not triumph in the murder of him whom I account an honorable conquest’.Footnote 65 The assassination of a fellow monarch lies beyond the limits of honourable policy. Ctesiphon, evidently untrustworthy, becomes a disposable tool. Cyrus’s honour is, emphatically, compatible with deceit.
The projection of personality that enables such deception is the force binding the Persian polity. Cyrus rules, through charisma, divinely sanctioned: his subjects cannot help but ‘foresee that he is ordained of God’, which compels their willing loyalty. The drama makes no suggestions of structures of governance, or formalized offices such as that of councillor. Captains are mentioned, but there are no lieutenants, or generals (except Cyrus). Each new arrival is bound simply by loyalty to the prince. When Cyrus identifies his followers’ failings, the standard set is his personal example. Assuring Panthea that Araspas will be stopped, Cyrus tells her, ‘[S]uch as I am, such must my followers be’. The prince rebukes Araspas: ‘for the excuse of this offeuce,/ You find no presi[d]ent in Cyrus life.’ Cyrus labels his camp as ‘the place the men that follow me’ inhabit. There can be no better description of the Persian polity. Libanio’s reward is a ‘chaine of golde from Cyrus necke’, to ‘weare…in the face of all the worlde’ as a symbol that emulation of the prince provides ‘the pathes…to aduauncement’.Footnote 66 Subjects’ moral worth in the Warres lies in reflecting their monarch, leaving little room for conventional theories of counsel.Footnote 67 Cyrus’s policy is purely his own, often concealed from his companions. He seeks counsel only once – asking Gobrias’s advice on Ctesiphon’s character – and, tellingly, this prompts an assassination attempt thwarted by the prince’s own charisma. Cyrus’s subjects reflect him; never the inverse. In the authority of the charismatic, politique monarch, the Warres seems to suggest a solution to the dangers facing Elizabethan England.
IV
This exaltation of monarchical authority hints at a remedy for one of the period’s most destabilizing issues.Footnote 68 The Warres’s depiction of the unfortunate captive Queen Panthea suggests a strikingly sympathetic engagement with the debate concerning Mary, Queen of Scots. By presenting Mary as unthreatening in relation to an all-powerful Elizabeth (the monarchs featuring respectively as Panthea and Cyrus), and as the embodiment of monarchical legitimacy, the drama appears to urge leniency towards Mary. The Warres’s distinctive vision of princely virtue thereby rebuts the peremptory counsel of the Elizabethan godly, and the campaign of pressure to execute Mary.Footnote 69 Links between the drama and the Ridolfi Plot reinforce this connection.
For a 1570s court audience, any presentation of a captive queen would be suggestive. The Warres, though, establishes its parallel tenaciously. Panthea’s status – in Araspas’s words, that ‘of a Queene a captiue to become’ – is repeatedly emphasized, accompanied by discussion of how she arrived under Persian authority. A nobleman’s question – ‘what persuasion moou’d you/ To thrust your self vnto the Assyrian camp’? – echoes contemporary bewilderment at Mary’s decision to cross into England. Panthea’s response, that considering the unstable ‘fortune of the warres’, she could envisage no ‘likelier rescue’ than in the Assyrians’ ‘mightie campe’, seems similarly to echo Mary’s impulsive response to defeat at the battle of Langside. The ensuing discussion of the rights due to captives signals the drama’s engagement with the Scottish queen’s presence in England. Accepting Araspas’s assertion that ‘captiues are not to command the conquerors’, Panthea insists that ‘captiue as I am, honour commands,/ That you intreate and vse me honourably.’ At liberty or not, Panthea declares, ‘yet I am a Quene’.Footnote 70
As Peter Lake has shown, contemporary interventions for and against Mary appealed to their audiences by framing the case as a ‘tragedy’. The 1571 translation of George Buchanan’s A detection of the doings of Mary Queen of Scots referred to James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell preparing ‘the tragical stage’, distinguishing its ‘lookers on’ from the ‘part players in this tragedy’. The pro-Marian The copy of a letter made its ‘tragedy’ that of an innocent Mary’s fall from grace to the state of ‘prisoner’.Footnote 71 John Lesley’s Defence aimed to reveal how Mary’s accusers had ‘played such a Tragedie agaynst theyre…graciouse Sovereigne’.Footnote 72 The Warres’s title-reference to the tragicall ende of Panthæa, and her own reference to ‘my Tragedie’, therefore encourage its reading as part of an emerging tendency in depictions of Mary’s case.Footnote 73
The Warres appears to suggest that the imprisoned Mary retained her royal status, and should be treated accordingly. Against Panthea’s assertion of her queenship, Araspas argues, ‘they that once in state of bondage bee,/ Must yeeld to hest of others that be free.’ Cyrus’s position is clear. Berating Araspas, the most serious charge Cyrus levels against his nobleman is that Araspas threatened ‘Force to a Queen, and she a captiue too’. Even during his madness, Araspas himself recognizes Panthea’s regal status, lamenting that ‘She is a Queene what gifts can compasse her’.Footnote 74 Royal status resists the tarnishing effects of circumstance.
The drama can be seen in part as a response to the campaign for Mary’s execution. The inviolability of royal status was the key element of Mary’s defence, driving Elizabeth’s reluctance to execute her counterpart. As Francis Alford, one of Mary’s two parliamentary defenders, argued: ‘we ought not to touch God’s anointed’. Questioning this would threaten Elizabeth’s own queenship: ‘it were perilous for princes that the deposition of their subjects should make them no princes’.Footnote 75 The Warres’s Cyrus emphatically affirms, ‘The liues of kings are garded by the gods,/ Nor are they in the hands of mortal men’.Footnote 76 Lesley’s Defence additionally emphasized the ‘immortall fame, manie kynges haue purchased to them selves for suche benefitt bestowed vpon other Princes’.Footnote 77 When the Warres depicted the advantages Cyrus accrued by protecting Panthea, it struck a recognizable note. Panthea’s husband Abradates, motivated to fight for Cyrus because ‘neuer was captiue gentler vsde,/ Then Panthea of this gracious conqueror’, helps secure Persian victory.Footnote 78 By refusing to execute Mary, the drama suggests, Elizabeth would doubly reinforce her monarchical authority, asserting her independence from godly pressure, whilst pursuing the more exalted rule embodied by Cyrus and making evident the inviolability of the royal status that underpinned it.
Raising the issue of jurisdiction, the Warres reinforces another key argument in Mary’s defence. Mary maintained that, not being an English subject, she could not be punished by the English crown.Footnote 79 When Cyrus declines to punish Ctesiphon, instead returning him to Antiochus to be treated ‘according to his merits’, the Persian king seems to assert a monarchy’s exclusive prerogative to judge and punish its own subjects. Ctesiphon is of course likely to be executed for his betrayal, but Cyrus’s contribution is simply to provide a written summary of his behaviour. Determining which ‘Reward’ corresponds to these actions is left to the Assyrian prince.Footnote 80 Significantly, in the accounts of Panthea by Xenophon, Taverner, and Painter, no such discussions of royal status or jurisdiction feature, the latter two describing Panthea as a lady, not a queen.
In engaging with the debate around Mary, the Warres would not stand alone amongst Elizabethan literature. As Blair Worden shows, the trial of the princes in Sidney’s Old Arcadia elucidated and rejected the argument that Mary, as a foreign monarch, was exempt from English jurisdiction. These passages suggested, Worden argues, ‘how, and on what grounds of legitimacy, Elizabeth should eliminate the threat from Mary’.Footnote 81 Conversely, Lake argues that Shakespeare’s King John presented a deliberate analogy between the monarchs John and Elizabeth on the one hand, and the imprisoned royals Arthur and Mary on the other, placing ‘the play unequivocally on the Marian side of’ the pamphlet debate and engaging with Lesley’s Defence, which the Warres similarly echoed.Footnote 82
The Warres seems to question whether prosecution would be necessary. The contrast between Cyrus and Panthea suggests that a lenient Elizabeth would face no danger from her cousin. Panthea is dignified but meek throughout. She conforms to Cyrus’s authority: ‘Let be my vsage as shall please my conqueror’. Her authority is exercised only over her attendant Nicasia, and when she prays – apparently to non-Persian gods – her religion remains entirely private. Explaining that ‘I haue not learned to master chaunce’, she is content to be praised for ‘bearing these mishaps with patient minde’. Appealing to Cyrus for protection from Araspas, Panthea is easily exploited. Dispatching Araspas in feigned disgrace to spy on the Assyrian camp, Cyrus falsely tells Panthea, ‘for your sake hath Cyrus…lost the worthiest souldier of his band’. He manipulates the grateful queen into calling her husband Abradates to fight against Antiochus. Alongside defending her chastity, Panthea’s most decisive action is – when Abradates dies fighting for Cyrus – to kill herself.Footnote 83 This reflection of Mary seems to reject the persistent presentation of her as a scheming, potentially murderous, adulteress.Footnote 84 Panthea’s ineffectuality, inherent virtue, and unwillingness to seek revenge rebuff any suggestion that the Scottish queen could endanger either the English elite, or Elizabeth herself – least of all a politique, authoritarian Elizabeth in Cyrus’s mould.Footnote 85
V
Intriguing connections with the Ridolfi Plot strengthen the suggestion of the drama’s engagement with Mary’s case. The Warres evokes the spectacular fall of Norfolk, England’s premier nobleman. The duke’s first steps towards disgrace – appointed to the 1568 commission to investigate the confined Mary, only to become fascinated by the prospect of marrying her – are replicated by Araspas, a nobleman who betrays his office in guarding a captive queen.Footnote 86 Norfolk’s eventual fate, moreover, finds clear echoes in that of Ctesiphon. Ctesiphon’s treason is revealed in the incriminating letter which, tricked by Cyrus, he presents to his king: ‘O prince my guilt is plaine before my face,/ And witnessed with a princes seale’.Footnote 87 The charges against Norfolk hinged on the discovery of a ciphered letter from Mary, proving he had continued to correspond with her, even after his submission to Elizabeth.Footnote 88 Norfolk’s humiliation at his trial is echoed by a remarkable scene in the drama. Norfolk impugned the status of the witnesses: John Lesley, bishop of Ross – ‘a Scot’ – could not be trusted; nor, being ‘not of credit’, could Norfolk’s servant. But Norfolk was told ‘You may not stand upon your honour and difference of degree’, and was degraded from the Order of the Garter, and stripped of all its accoutrements, including weapons and badges of rank.Footnote 89 This action is recalled by the spectacle of Ctesiphon being ‘Disgrade[d]…of all titles of regarde’. At his prince’s command, he is stripped of the ‘cote of armes’ and ‘squares of knightoode’ that signify his supposed ‘chiualrie’. As Norfolk was reminded of his equal status with Scots and servants whilst at trial, Ctesiphon is told he has ‘no title of Gentilitie,/ Nor stile of honor, left hereof to vaunt’.Footnote 90 No Ctesiphon, or enemy double-agent, features in the Cyropaedia. His appearance seems to have been calculated to reinforce the parallel with the Scottish queen’s case.
Strikingly, this servant against whom Norfolk railed was William Barker, translator of the Warres’s source-text, the Cyropaedia.Footnote 91 A trusted associate, Barker carried messages between Norfolk and Mary’s chief adviser, Lesley. As Norfolk pursued the match, Barker produced verses for Mary, for which he received her letter of thanks, and procured her two rings ‘sett with Dyamonndes’ as tokens from his master. Barker conveyed funds from the French ambassador to Scottish lords sympathetic to Mary and, when the Florentine merchant and papal agent Roberto Ridolfi drew up plans for a Spanish-backed invasion of England, Barker related these plans to Norfolk. The translator was, his interrogators concluded, ‘the most Doer betwixt the Duke and other Forene Practisers’.Footnote 92 When Norfolk refused to subscribe letters detailing the proposed invasion, Barker travelled alongside Ross and Ridolfi to meet the Spanish ambassador, Barker assenting in place of his master – without his consent, Norfolk claimed. When Pope Pius V provided 12,000 crowns for English rebels in Flanders, it was Ross, Ridolfi, and Barker who together ‘agree[d] how the Money shuld be destributed’.Footnote 93 Barker’s evidence was crucial to the crown’s case against the duke. Barker was interrogated on twenty-one occasions – nine more than any other member of Norfolk’s household.Footnote 94 Thomas Wilbraham, prosecuting, labelled the translator ‘a sly fellow’, ‘acquainted with the practices’ of treason.Footnote 95 Writing his final letters to his children, Norfolk exonerated those servants who testified against him, except Barker: ‘the Bishop of Ross, and especially Barker, did falsely accuse me, and laid their own treasons upon my back’.Footnote 96
The Warres not only presented striking parallels with the Scottish queen’s case but, in one of its most dramatic scenes, called attention to the deep involvement in this case of the Cyropaedia’s translator. Which edition of the Cyropaedia the author of the Warres used is unknown, but in calling attention to ‘That Zenophon from whence we borrow’, the Warres surely called attention to Barker, and the Ridolfi Plot.Footnote 97 Barker’s Cyropaedia was published just five years before Norfolk’s trial, written from Barker’s ‘chamber at Howard howse’, and dedicated to Norfolk’s heir.Footnote 98 Sentenced to death for high treason, Barker was pardoned in May 1574 at the suit of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester.Footnote 99 Two days later, archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker responded to a secret letter from Cecil, and denounced ‘This Machiavel government’ which favoured ‘the papist’ as much as ‘the true protestant’. ‘When the faithful subject and officer hath spent his wit to search, to find, to indict, to arraign, and to condemn’, he expostulated, ‘yet must they be kept still for a fair day to cut our own throats. Why is Barker &c. spared…?’Footnote 100 The drama was tightly bound into the conspiratorial atmosphere of Elizabethan politics. Playing on these connections, the Warres called its audience insistently to its engagement with the issue of Mary, Queen of Scots.
VI
The drama rests on a distinct vision of monarchy. Authoritarian rule, the Warres suggests, had a place at the heart of Elizabethan political culture in the 1570s: lauded, by some at least, as the means to defend virtue. The exaltation of Elizabeth’s monarchical authority is more usually associated with the 1590s, a response to anxieties surrounding an ageing queen and an unsettled succession.Footnote 101 Recent historical commentary suggests that it was the work of Tacitus which informed notions of ‘politique’ rule in the 1590s; this play suggests that such currents were already discernible in the 1570s, associated with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.Footnote 102
Amidst the anxieties of the 1590s, the Warres reappeared, in print. It has been suggested that this printing was in response to the success of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.Footnote 103 The relationship between Tamburlaine and the Warres remains disputed. Riding ‘in triumph through Persepolis’, styling himself and Zenocrate as Persian monarchs while handing lesser crowns to his lieutenants, though, Tamburlaine highlighted the popular dramatic appeal of a brutally magnetic king of Persia.Footnote 104 By 1594, several of Elizabeth’s closest advisers were dead. Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, loudly advocated both aggressive prosecution of war against Spain and his own importance in England’s defence. That year, Essex claimed to have unravelled an assassination plot implicating Elizabeth’s physician, Roderigo Lopez.Footnote 105 Little can be established regarding the drama’s printing and subsequent reception, but amid war, aristocratic ambition, and conspiracy, Cyrus’s model of unassailable monarchical authority perhaps proved resonant once again.
Contemporaries made this connection between the Cyropaedia and a ruthless vision of politics. To a Huntington Library copy of Barker’s 1552 edition, a sixteenth-century hand appended the sinister label, ‘How to mak men obay’.Footnote 106 Sidney appealed to the Cyropaedia and a ‘stratagem performed by Abradatas in Cyrus’ behalf’ to inspire readers to seize an ‘occasion…to serve your prince by such an honest dissimulation’ – a phrase tellingly redolent of the Warres’s blend of honour and deceit.Footnote 107 The most famous exponent of such stratagems, Machiavelli, asserted in the Discourses that the Cyropaedia ‘demonstrate[d] the necessity for deception’.Footnote 108 The Cyropaedia is the only text – other than Machiavelli’s own – which The prince recommends to its readers.Footnote 109 Scandalously appearing to prefer Roman religion’s civil utility to that of contemporary Christianity, however, the Discourses – and Machiavelli more widely – became synonymous in Elizabethan England with the immoral use of religion for political ends.Footnote 110 Cyrus, by contrast, was familiar not only through classical sources but also through scripture. In the Book of Daniel, Persia was one of the divinely ordained empires. In Ezra and Isaiah, Cyrus was a divine instrument – God’s ‘anointed’, directed to free the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity, and rebuild the Jerusalem temple.Footnote 111 Leading divines could refer to Elizabeth as ‘Our Cirus our anoynted’.Footnote 112 Biblical familiarity could ease the elision between virtue and ruthlessness that characterized both the Warres and its source-text. While Machiavelli was widely condemned well before The prince and Discourses appeared in English print, Persia – untainted by irreligious associations – offered an alternative channel in the development of ‘reason of state’ approaches to politics.Footnote 113 Machiavelli has been described as Xenophon’s ‘best-known and most devoted reader’, but historians should recognize wider interest in the Cyropaedia’s political vision.Footnote 114 Scholars know how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy, but the uses to which he put the Xenophon Opera he acquired in 1570 remain unexplored.Footnote 115 Henry Savile’s Tacitus is, rightly, much-discussed.Footnote 116 Less often remarked upon is Savile’s 1613 Greek edition of the Cyropaedia – printed at Eton, and likely intended for educational use there.Footnote 117
Recognizing this Persian framework can alter historians’ understanding of Elizabethan political culture. The relationship between prince and counsellor has been described as ‘the lynchpin of the humanist conception of the state’.Footnote 118 Traditional humanist authors envisaged the counsellor helping to direct and mitigate the exercise of princely authority.Footnote 119 In the political discourse of 1570s England, fears that a female monarch might be controlled by her potentially self-interested counsellors became increasingly prominent. The Treatise of treasons pamphlet attributed to its targets Cecil and Nicholas Bacon ‘what so euer of importance commeth foorth vnder’ Elizabeth.Footnote 120 Scholars have examined in particular one set of responses to these fears: ideas of a ‘mixed-monarchy model’, where ‘the legitimate advice of parliament and privy council would bind’, or at least significantly guide, the queen.Footnote 121 The Warres, however, suggested an alternative solution: a vision of the prince exalted so far above their subjects as to render counsel not only unthreatening, but superfluous.
Patrick Collinson famously highlighted the 1572 debates around Mary, Queen of Scots as one of the first points at which the ‘monarchical republican’ tendencies of Elizabethan England became clearly visible.Footnote 122 Scholars have since excavated the classical Roman frameworks underpinning these tendencies.Footnote 123 Lake suggests that parallels between Elizabethan England and late republican Rome encouraged a binary understanding of politics, as a struggle between integrity and conspiracy, in which ‘The crucial question at issue was,…who was Cicero and who Catiline?’. Within these debates, Lake argues, contemporaries contested ‘possession of essentially the same ideological and moral’ discourse. The result, Lake shows, was that both sides of these pamphlet debates treated ‘political calculation and manoeuvre’, or ‘policy’, as ‘nearly always a bad thing’, ‘a characteristic of the evil counsellor, the Machiavel’.Footnote 124
Achaemenid Persia provided an alternative discourse, in which policy was not ‘a bad thing’, but a lauded aspect of princely virtue. As the label ‘monarchical republic’ suggests, analogies between Elizabethan England and republican Rome could be fraught with difficulty. Elizabeth might appear as less independent – hemmed in by her counsellors – than she might wish, whilst analogies with imperial Rome might paint the queen as a usurper of republican virtue.Footnote 125 For those wishing to exalt royal authority, the divinely ordained monarchy, glittering court, and martial nobility of Xenophon’s Persia, by contrast, provided far more fitting structural echoes. It is striking, therefore, that elements at court pursued this analogy amidst those same 1570s debates in which scholars have located the emergence of ‘monarchical republican’ discourses. For some, at least, of those debating the nature of princely rule, Persia provided the classical framework for a political vision that exalted ruthlessness and independence in the prince, and obedience in the subject. It is time that historians restore Persian parallels to prominence in their discussions of early modern England.
Acknowledgements
For their comments on earlier drafts of this article, I would like to thank Alexandra Gajda, Lucy Wooding, Fred Smith, Gabriel Smith, and the reviewers from The Historical Journal.
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