Within the conventions of Renaissance drama and within the protocol of the Tudor court, being a messenger was hazardous duty. Inevitably, it fell to the messenger to hazard the wrath of the powerful by delivering precisely the information that no one really wanted to hear. However, since I could find no way to survey the trends in Shakespearean scholarship on the family without stumbling right into the politics concurrently going on in the “family” of Shakespearean scholars, my analysis of Renaissance literary research on the family, marriage, and sex commits me, I fear, to the hazards of playing the messenger. My title beribbons itself with the de rigueur deconstructive chiasmus and that most trendy of opening entitlements, “The Politics of… . “ It finally arrives, however, at what serves for both the title's ultimate deconstruction and the paper's ultimate subject: “The Politics of Politics.”

The initial impression given by the foregoing papers is of sharp differences between the approaches of historians, art historians, and Shakespeare scholars to family, marriage, and sex. It is quite en historien, for example, that Barbara Diefendorf chooses to dwell on the collective, outward-looking institutions of family and marriage, rather than the intimate, individual, hard-to-plot matter of sexuality. Historians traditionally have been more accustomed to concerning themselves with groups, above all with traceable patterns in what groups do, than with the private quirks of individual actors in the past. This makes an intriguing contrast with Rona Goffen's emphasis on individual sensibility: of the artist, of the patron, and of the modern interpreter of visual evidence.