Political Culture in the 1590s: The ‘Second Reign of Elizabeth’

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, John Guy argued that Elizabethan political culture was transformed in the late 1580s, as the regime increasingly endorsed authoritarian definitions of monarchical power. This article reconsiders the foundations of Guy’s hypothesis, analysing some of the key political and intellectual and literary contexts that conditioned the expression of political ideas in the final years of Elizabethan England.