‘Whosoever Resisteth Shall get to Themselfes Dampnacioun’: Tyranny and Resistance in Cambises and Horestes
2008; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 38; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2222-4289
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Social Studies
ResumoThis chapter examines the interplay between Elizabethan discussions of tyranny and obedience and Elizabethan anxieties about damnation in Cambises (1560/1) and Horestes (1567). Both tragedies are important to the development of English Renaissance drama because they offer evidence of the impact of the discussions on tyranny and obedience and the impact of the fear that supernatural forces can infiltrate human actions. In determining what leads a king to behave like a tyrant, as in the example of Cambises, Elizabethans questioned whether the 'role of the sinister', or, more broadly, the supernatural, was crucial to understanding acts of tyranny. That questioning, which comes through in the tragedies' concern with forms of obedience and resistance, is intimately bound up with the uncertainty in the period with regard to damnation and Hell. The primary aim of this article is to reconsider the plays in light of the contemporary attitudes to tyranny and resistance, the concern with damnation and Hell the plays engage with, and how this affects the development of Elizabethan tragedy. ********** Thomas Preston's tragedy Cambises and John Pickering's Horestes address questions of obedience and resistance from opposite doctrinal perspectives. The distinction between Horestes' active duty to resist the tyranny of Clytemnestra and Egistus and the passive resistance to Cambises' tyranny in Pickering's play wholly encapsulates the complexities of Elizabethan polemical tracts on resistance and obedience. The vigorous thematic interest in rebellion and obedience in tragedies performed during the first decade of Elizabeth's reign links directly with contemporary debates concerning the possibility that God or the Devil could influence earthly events equally. From the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, when Luther famously nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517, until the 1550s, when English reformers were writing theological treatises, the Protestant argument concerning tyranny altered dramatically. Greg Walker's recent examination of how people reacted to what he labels 'the slide into an English tyranny' in the 1530s and 1540s during the Henrician Reformation pays particular attention to the mutable political climate that Elizabeth inherited when she came to the throne in 1558. (1) Throughout the sixteenth century the debates surrounding political resistance had been passionate, but the argumentation often lacked consistency. The Calvinists contributed significantly to these discussions by underlining a distinction between the office and the person of a magistrate, and with this distinction in place, the reformers attempted to distinguish between a lawful magistrate and an ungodly one. The next hurdle for the Protestant polemicists presented itself in the form of another question: was a magistrate who did not fulfil his duties nonetheless the recipient of a power ordained by God? On the one hand, it was agreed that magistrates were decreed by divine providence, yet, at the same time, it might be affirmed that tyrannous magistrates were not legitimate conduits at all for the expression of divine authority. Calvin's theory of constitutional resistance stated that it was for God, not private citizens, to rectify 'unbridled government', and only magistrates, on behalf of the people, should legitimately resist a ruler: 'any magistrates [...] I doe so not forbid them according to their office to withstand the outraging licentiousness of kinges'. (2) Furthermore, Calvin stated that if a magistrate did not resist a wicked ruler, then he was not fulfilling his duty to the people as an officer of God: if [the magistrates] winke at kinges wilfully raging over and treading downe the poor cummunalities, their dissembling is not without wicked breache of faith, because they deceitfully betray the libertie of the people, whereof they know themselves to bee appointed protectors by the ordinace of God. …
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