In a landmark essay, Stephen Greenblatt discussed a telling comment attributed to Elizabeth I in 1601.1 The queen learned that the steward of the Earl of Essex commissioned Shakespeare’s own theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to perform Richard II. Given the earl’s well-known seditious intentions, the queen responded, “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” As Francis Bacon explained in his treatise indicting the Earl of Essex for treason, the earl’s steward supported the production “to satisfy his eyes with the sight of that Tragedy, which he thought soon his Lord should bring from the Stage to the State.”2 Greenblatt argues that the earl’s steward, and apparently the queen herself, recognized that the story had “the power to wrest legitimation from the established ruler and confer it on another.” In short, “the queen understood the performance as a threat,” and the steward understood its galvanizing potential. The earl commenced his ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against the queen the day after the performance.