Playwrights increasingly intend the pageant texts for readers; these texts become commemorative books that both capture the event and add to it. They assume an expository and narrative function that sets them apart from the typical dramatic text. By examining the extant printed texts of Jacobean and Caroline Lord Mayor's Shows, I argue that these publications do not obliterate theatrical performance or displace it so much as they complete it. Dramatists and printers come to recognize the lasting value of textual performance in civic pageants.

This article argues that in the English legal disputes of 1616, specifically the conflict between common law and equity, the principles and systems of ideas, at least as much as the characters, of Coke, Ellesmere, and James were determinative of the triumph of equity. The first part of the essay traces the legal reasoning in the key cases of the dispute. The second part traces James's political theory from his time in Scotland through his dealings with the English Parliament to his pronouncements on the law in his Star Chamber speech of 1616. The article argues that there is a consistent line of principle which can be traced from Scotland to the Star Chamber speech and that James's thought has consequently had its most lasting effect on the relation in Anglo-American jurisprudence between common law and equity.

In the years 1599-1604, Grand Duke Ferdinando I de'Medici ordered state gifts of contemporary Florentine paintings for three influential Spanish noblewomen (Catalina de la Cerda, Marquesa de Denia; Magdalena de Guzmán, Marquesa del Valle; and María de Toledo y Colonna, Duquesa de Alba). The problem of producing images suitable for Spanish usage is discussed in explicit detail, in a series of documents recently discovered in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze.

The final books of The Old Arcadia rewrite two episodes from Livy's History: the rape of Lucrece and the execution of Brutus's sons. These episodes, which dominate Livy's account of the birth of the Roman republic, provide early modern republicanism with its foundational narrative, one that associates monarchy with aristocratic sexual license, and republicanism with the impartial rule of law. Sidney's plot hinges on this conflict between "unbridled desire" and "never-changing justice," and yet in flat contrast to both ancient and Renaissance republicanism, the work seems to privilege equity over law, clemency over justice, noble natures over impersonal codes. In what follows, I have tried to recover the unfamiliar politics - not republican and yet scarcely absolutist - structuring The Old Arcadia.

This article argues that, so far from being occasional or gold-greedy, Sidney's involvement with the New World was lifelong and more concerned with geopolitical strategy than with personal advantage. It traces his involvement through people such as Hakluyt, Eden, Willes, Gilbert, and Duplessis-Mornay, whose Vérité de la religion chrestienne (which Sidney had begun to translate when he died) contains a major theoretical defense of colonization as a means of saving the Reformation. It also offers a new explanation of Sidney's aborted voyage to the Americas with Drake.

Long dismissed as aping monarchical forms, Cromwellian portraiture has been neglected by art historians, historians, and literary critics alike. But rather than simply mimicking monarchical iconography, Cromwellian portraiture reflected the character — and contradictions — of Cromwell's own plain style. Paintings by Robert Walker, Samuel Cooper, and Peter Lely all drew upon and significantly revised courtly and idealized Van Dyck portraiture. During the protectorate, Cromwellian portraiture became less, not more, courtly, and the final portrait of Cromwell by Edward Mascall was the most puritan and plain style of all. Visual satire on Cromwell after 1660 attested to the ongoing influence of the plain style as an alternative mode of piety and of power.