Revisionist and post-revisionist historians alike still discuss politics in nineteenth-century terms, paying little attention to the politics of rhetoric and display that characterized Renaissance states. Literary critics and art historians, however, have focused attention on representations of authority and have developed critical methods to illuminate the performance and reception of texts in early modern culture. This essay reviews recent interdisciplinary work on theatre and poetry, painting and pageant, vital to historians of politics, and suggests a series of negotiations and exchanges over images of rule, and a dialogue about and for authority, between governments and subjects, in early modern England.