Resurrecting Ralegh: the 1620s and 1630s

Abstract

Up to this point I have offered interpretations of Ralegh’s works in terms of their original occasions and audiences, elucidating their significance within the political and literary culture of the 1610s, their time of writing and first reception. Now I turn to the ways in which Ralegh’s texts, and indeed the character ‘Ralegh’, were reformed and re-interpreted in the decades after his death. This process was a complex one, and the material I have suggests that any crude binary division between consensus and conflict are inappropriate, a point made in general terms by Peter Lake (1994, p. 173) when he warns his fellow historians about reducing the historiography of the period to

the view of a calmly unifying ‘political culture’, a series of divergent but compatible rhetorics of law and divine right, running through this period, on the one hand; and a rather crude rendition of ideological commitment in which the actions of contemporaries were simply determined by their adherence to coherent and mutually exclusive bodies of ideas, on the other.

‘Stab at thee he that will, no stab thy Soule can kill.’