The Mirror for Magistrates
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The Mirror for Magistrates is a collection of English poems from the Tudor period by various authors which retell the lives and the tragic ends of various historical figures.
Background
This work was conceived as a continuation of the
Contributors
William Baldwin and George Ferrers were the first editors of the work and the principal contributors. Between them they are credited with writing fifteen of the nineteen lives which made up the work when it was published in 1559 by Thomas Marsh, although some of the lives are unsigned and are only conjectured to be written by them. Other contributing poets include: Thomas Phaer, Thomas Chaloner and Thomas Churchyard, with one poem supposedly by John Skelton despite his having died thirty years before. There are also some links in prose between the poems, conversations between the poets themselves which mention several other noble lives. Baldwin also sets forth his reasons for beginning the work:
When the printer had purposed with hym selfe to printe Lidgate's booke of the fall of Princes, and had made privye thereto, many both honourable and worshipfull, he was counsailed by dyvers of them, to procure to have the storye contynewed from where as
Bochas [Boccaccio]lefte, unto this presente time, chiefly of such as Fortune had dalyed with here in this ylande ... which advice liked him so well, that hee requyred mee to take paynes therein.
Editions
A first edition of the work was compiled as early as 1555 by the publisher John Weyland, but only the title page remains, attached to his edition of Lydgate. Weyland was apparently denied a licence to publish by the Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner effectively suppressing the work and putting the publisher out of business. Baldwin in a later printing commented that: "The wurke was begun & part of it printed iiii years agoe, but hyndred by the Lord Chancellor that then was."
Gardiner died the same year but the work was still not immediately published. This was a difficult time in England during the reign of Mary I when most works were suspected of having a political subtext. Poems dealing with the mistakes of the nobility of the preceding age were bound to be controversial, either by insulting the ancestors of the ruling class or, under the pretext of criticism, subtly praising the regime's political enemies.
The accession of
Traditionally the impetus and planning for the entire work has been ascribed to Thomas Sackville. As he was only eighteen years old at the time of the first edition this seems unlikely, and he is listed as a contributor only in the third edition of 1563. The reason for Sackville receiving much of the credit for the work is in part that he was the most famous of the writers to work on the Mirror but also because his contributions, "Induction" and "The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham", are often the only ones regarded as having any lasting literary merit. Another reason for the ascription to Sackville is due to the reorganisations the work underwent in later editions, giving accidental prominence to Sackville's sections and confusing later readers. The edition of 1563 contained only eight extra lives and of these at least one is known to have been written around the time of the earlier poems but left out when they were published. The next edition in 1574 was printed again by Thomas Marsh with the editor and main author being John Higgins. Confusingly the new edition was named The first parte of the Mirour for Magistrates as it dealt with much earlier lives which were placed before the poems of the previous editions. Whilst the poetic style is markedly similar to the other poems, Higgins is seen as a much inferior poet and he greatly changed the focus of the work.
The critical assessment of the lives of people from recent history which was evident in the compositions of Baldwin's and his contemporary writers, gave way to mostly laudatory accounts of the distant legends of the early Britons. What was once a politically contentious book, examining lives offering warnings to the present on the errors of the past, was now a work displaying national pride in England's history; many of which were taken from the largely mythical
Ignoring the omissions of the Niccols edition, the entire work contained almost one hundred lives, covering the period from Albanact in 1085 BC to Elizabeth in 1603 and written over 60 years. Whilst the work was dismissed and largely forgotten after 1610 the lives from the Baldwin era were popular and highly regarded during the
Modern reception
Most later critics, if they mention the work at all, can not avoid pointing out its many faults. Often only Sackville's contribution is regarded as worthy of preservation. Many of the other poems are told in a dull, didactic tone and Edmund Gosse, writing in 1913, whilst offering guarded praise, said "the unflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royal".[1]
The lives of the various editions
What follows is a list of the lives added in the principal editions of the Mirror for Magistrates:
1559
Story in prose of
1563
1574
1578
1587
1610
References
- ^ Gosse, Edmund, Gossip in a Library
- Budra, Paul, Mirror for Magistrates and the De Casibus Tradition (2000) University of Toronto Press Inc. ISBN 0-8020-4717-3
- Ward and Trent, eds. et al. 1907–1921. The Cambridge history of English and American literature: An encyclopedia in eighteen volumes. Retrieved 14 October 2006.
External links
- The Mirror for Magistrates parts I & II, poor quality scan of the first volume of an 1815 edition from Google Books
- Induction by Thomas Sackville
- Parts from the modernised and annotated edition by Scott C. Lucas (Cambridge U.P. 2019) at Google Books