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‘In a Christian Climate’: Religion and Honor in Richard II

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Shakespeare and Religious Change

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

This chapter is about Richard II, but I want to start from left field with the question of why in the late sixteenth century Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (c. 370 bc) became so important. Spenser’s letter to Raleigh cites the Cyropaedia as the model for The Faerie Queene, announcing that, as Xenophon ‘in the person of Cyrus ... fashioned a governement, such as might best be, …[s]o have I laboured to doe in the person of Arthure.’ Sidney’s Apology for Poetry hinges on the power of fiction ‘to make many Cyruses,’ and Frances Meres notes the relation between Xenophon’s Cyrus and Sidney’s own princes in his 1598 Palladis Tamia.1

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Notes

  1. Edmund Spenser, The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R.E. Neil Dodge (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 136

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  2. Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978), 32.

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  3. Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 203.

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  4. Beach Langston, ‘Essex and the Art of Dying,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 13 (1950): 118.

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  5. J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 353–4

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  6. Coke, Gardiner, and Taverner are cited in J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 180–1.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCLA, USA

    Debora Shuger (Professor of English)

Authors
  1. Debora Shuger
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Canada

    Kenneth J. E. Graham (Associate Professor of English) (Associate Professor of English)

  2. University of Toronto, Canada

    Philip D. Collington PhD (Associate Professor of English) (Associate Professor of English)

  3. Niagara University, Lewiston, NY, USA

    Philip D. Collington PhD (Associate Professor of English) (Associate Professor of English)

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© 2009 Debora Shuger

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Shuger, D. (2009). ‘In a Christian Climate’: Religion and Honor in Richard II. In: Graham, K.J.E., Collington, P.D. (eds) Shakespeare and Religious Change. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230240858_3

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