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Kernan Chapter 5: The True King (Lear, Whitehall, 1606)

  1. What were some "competing political forces" that seethed in the early 17th century?
  2. Nobles, merchants, and other subjects were increasingly taxed to finance what kinds of "prodigal expenditures"?
  3. Kernan mentions six battlefields on which people defended their "traditional liberties in a long series of revolutions." Name three.
  4. What did Luther, Calvin, Bodin, Castiglione, and Hobbes have in common?
  5. Whom did Oliver Cromwell cite to justify the execution of Charles I?
  6. Shakespeare's Macbeth relied on the "Stuart myth," James's elaborate fictional family tree that he traced back to "King Fergus," the mytical founder of Scotland in 330 BC, to argue that Kingship preceded law and that therefore Kings could dictate laws and abolilsh parliaments. He got this list from George Buchanan,who interpreted the same history differently. How?
  7. How was Humphrey Lhuyd's history, The Breivary of Britayne, different in its portrayal of the ancient Scots from Buchanan's or James's?
  8. How would George Buchanan have interpreted Macbeth's assassination of Duncan? Why?
  9. How did James react when George Buchanan dedicated his history of Scotland to him?
  10. What European city-state did George Buchanan hold up to James as a model? Why?
  11. What did Buchanan mean when he said he "whipp[ed] the arse of the Lord's annointed"?
  12. Where did James find precedent for his views on Kingshp expressed in his Trew Law of Free Monarchies?
  13. What "leading apologist" created a "remarkable and varied portrait gallery of Renaissance kingcraft"? Give an example of its "variation."
  14. Who was Archie Armstrong?
  15. What was significant about the titles of Dukes Albany and Cornwall in Lear?
  16. What "prominent weaknesses of James Stuart" did Lear possess, according to Kernan?
  17. How would James have read Lear's "existential heath images" differently than Shakespeare did?
  18. In Kernan's view, the heath symbolizes anarchy, among other things. in 1651, how would Thomas Hobbes describe the same state, which he calls the "state of war"?
  19. What Shakespearean kings, according to Kernan, try to "grasp the future in an instant"? What happens when they do?
  20. At the end of his life, in 1621, to what would James compare his subjects' reaction to his words about absolute rule?
 
Dr. Mary Adams, instructor
last updated 16-jan-20