A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition.

SESSIONS, WILLIAM A.

Paul Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2000. xiv + 119 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8020-47 17-3.

In his short study, Paul Budra offers a fine contemporary introduction to the reading of one of early modern England's most influential literary texts. It is no surprise that the early Elizabethan A Mirror for Magistrates should be attracting the recent high level of scholarship and analysis that it has. Far from the kind of old Historicist readings that saw these series of dramatic monologues as simply sources for the greater world of English tragedy, studies can now see the book following out Lily B. Campbell's brilliant insight over sixty years: in these monologues of fallen heroes, an important shift in the concept of the poet takes place. A victory for Erasmian humanism has taken textual reality: the poet now can be as comprehensive as the historian in showing the truth of time or, as in the coronation emblem of Queen Mary (later imitated by her sister), "Veritas filia temporis." Truth springs now from the study and representation itself of time, its vagaries and fortune.

In the Mirror, the realism that the humanism of Guicciardini and Machiavelli and Thomas More had advocated as proper ways to read history enters a dialectical relationship with metaphor, character, and, if not the world of allegory and Arthurian magic, a space where language evokes its own kind of transcendence and "still point of the turning world." This was the double-edged realism of language the poet Earl of Surrey, Thomas Sackville's beloved master, had wanted for representations of history in his invention of blank verse. It is no wonder therefore the Mirror's monologues provided a special mythology and method of mythologizing for the rest of the English Renaissance. History or its representations can now be interpreted as more than merely immanent or digital. It can enter an analogical space as representation. The title of the book is no accident.

Thus, Budra is quite right to make as the central focus and thesis of his book the de casibus tradition and its shaping of the Mirror. Without question, Boccaccio's greatest contribution to European culture -- the textualization of Dante's Fortuna in a far more ambiguous and plural setting -- acts as cultural and textual matrix for A Mirror for Magistrates. The Lutheran and Calvinism social pessimism that had pervaded English culture by the years of the composition of the Mirror text had been anticipated in Boccaccio's earlier modern text that dramatized the old momento mori in new narratives of incisive historical and mythological figures. For a generation less than thirty years removed from devotion to the saint-heroes of The Golden Legend, the Mirror reflected another type of endurance to reflect on -- secular and miserable but existing as linguistic artefacts that would surface from time because it was language that was, so to speak, canonizing them. The double edges of transcendent language and poetic m etaphor (however fluid) and ambiguous quite local history and communal and personal failure made for the tension of a dialectic that ensured Tudor audience enchantment and the popularity of the Mirror. Scot Lucas's recent study of the figure of the Edwardian Duke of Somerset -- his great rise and fall -- as backdrop for one of the monologues illustrates both the realism and the cosmic framing Edwardians, Marians, and early Elizabethans saw as the framing of human existence. Jim Ellis has further shown that at the heart of the text was the dramatization of deep cultural trauma.

Working from the various printed editions and editorial intentions behind the Mirror, Budra sets an historical context that allows him to explore, in dialogic interplay, the artefact of the text itself, specifically its English intertexuality, most strongly in Lydgate and Chaucer and their emphasis on fortune. As a digression, Budra investigates the role of women in this tradition, positing the negative pla to the living queen (who knew herself to translate Boethius). In his final chapter, Budra returns to the old territory of the Mirror as source for later English drama especially with a perceptive reading of Richard II. Although relatively brief, Budra's arguments remain good tracks with which to enter this text placed at a crucial moment of cultural breakthrough and breakdown in early modern England.