The Book of the Governor
From Thomas Elyot, The Book of the Governor
Para1The most renowned prince, King Henry the Fifth, late king of England, during the life
of his father was noted to be fierce and of wanton courage. It happened that one of
his servants, whom he well favored, for felony by him committed was arraigned at the
King’s Bench, whereof he being advertised and incensed by light persons about him,
in furious rage came hastily to the bar where his servant stood as a prisoner, and
commanded him to be ungyved and set at liberty. Whereat all men were abashed, reserved
the chief justice, who humbly exhorted the prince to be contented that his servant
might be ordered according to the ancient laws of this realm; or if he would have
him saved from the rigor of the laws that he should obtain if he might of the king
his father his gracious pardon, whereby no law or justice may be derogate. With which
answer the prince, nothing appeased but rather more inflamed, endeavored himself to
take away his servant. The judge, considering the perilous example and inconvenience
that might thereby ensue, with a valiant spirit and courage commanded the prince upon
his allegiance to leave the prisoner and depart his way. With which commandment, the
prince being set all in a fury, all chafed and in a terrible manner, came up to the
place of judgment, men thinking that he would have slain the judge or have done to
him some damage. But the judge, sitting still without moving, declaring the majesty
of the king’s place of judgment and with an assured and bold countenance, bade to
the prince these words following: “Sir, remember your self. I keep here the place
of the King your sovereign lord and father, to whom ye owe double obedience, wherefore
eftsoons in his name I charge you: desist of your willfulness and unlawful enterprise,
and from henceforth give good example to those which hereafter shall be your proper
subjects. And now, for your contempt and disobedience go you to the prison of the
King’s Bench, whereunto I commit you, and remain ye there prisoner until the pleasure
of the King your father be further known.” With which words being abashed, and also
wondering at the marvelous gravity of that worshipful Justice, the noble Prince, laying
his weapon apart, doing reverence departed and went to the King’s Bench as he was
commanded. Whereat his servants, disdaining, came and showed to the King all the whole
affair. Whereat he a while, studying after as a man all ravished with gladness, holding
his eyes and hands toward heaven, abraided, saying with a loud voice, “O merciful
God, how much am I above all other men bound to your infinite goodness, specially
for that ye have given me a judge who feareth not to minister justice. And also a
son who can suffer semblably and obey justice!”
Para2Now here a man may behold three persons worthy of excellent memory. First a judge,
who being a subject, feared not to execute justice on the eldest son of his sovereign
lord, and, by the order of nature his successor. Also a prince and son and heir of
the King, in the midst of his fury more considered his evil example and the judge’s
constance in justice then his own estate or willful appetite. Thirdly, a noble king
and wise father, who contrary to the custom of parents rejoiced to see his son and
the heir of his crown to be for disobedience by his subject corrected. Wherefore I
conclude that nothing is more honorable or to be desired in a prince or noble man
than placability, as contrariwise, nothing is so detestable or to be feared in such
one as wrath and cruel malignity.
Prosopography
Andrew Griffin
Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate
professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early
modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the
EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the
anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.
Anonymous
Helen Ostovich
Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder
and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series
Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge),
and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several
works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published
many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book
collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to
essays; video; link to Queenʼs Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605,
Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of
Victoria, Director of The Map
of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama
Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she
co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old
Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s
A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML
and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice
(with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not
Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in
Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern
Literary Studies, Shakespeare
Bulletin, Renaissance and
Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives
(MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern
England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and
the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in
Early Modern England (Ashgate); New
Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter);
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating
Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and
Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking
Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital
Technologies (Routledge); and Civic
Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern
London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he
assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on
LEMDO.
Karen Sawyer Marsalek
Karen Sawyer Marsalek (Famous Victories of Henry V, early modern text) is an associate professor of English at St. Olaf College. She
has edited, directed and performed in several early English plays. Her publications
include essays on
trueresurrections in medieval drama and The Winter’s Tale,
falseresurrections in the Chester Antichrist and 1 Henry IV, and theatrical properties of skulls and severed heads. Her current research is on remains and revenants in the King’s Men’s repertory. She can be contacted at marsalek@stolaf.edu.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the
UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for
over two decades, and has been involved with dozens
of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on
the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of
the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as
lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on
the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Mathew Martin
Dr. Mathew R. Martin is Full Professor at Brock University, Canada, and
Director of Brock’s PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is the
author of Between Theatre and Philosophy (2001)
and Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher
Marlowe (2015) and co-editor, with his colleague James
Allard, of Staging Pain, 1500-1800: Violence and Trauma
in British Theatre (2009). For Broadview Press he has edited
Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2010),
Jew of Malta (2012), Doctor Faustus: The B-Text (2013), and Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Part Two (2014). For
Revels Editions he has edited George Peele’s David and
Bathsheba (2018) and Marlowe’s The Massacre
at Paris (forthcoming). He has published two articles of
textual criticism on the printed texts of Marlowe’s plays:
Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of(Early Theatre 17.2 [December 2014]), and (on the political inflections of the shifts in punctuation in the early editions of the play)Materialin Tamburlaine the Great
Accidents Happen: Roger Barnes’s 1612 Edition of Marlowe’s Edward the Second(Early Theatre 16.1 [June 2013]). His latest editing project is a Broadview edition of Robert Greene’s Selimus. He is also writing two books: one on psychoanalysis and literary theory and one on the language of non-violence in Elizabethan drama in the late 1580s and 1590s.
Navarra Houldin
Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Peter Cockett
Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster
University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor
of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM),
directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process
behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players,
he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director
with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.
Scott Matthews
Thomas Elyot
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)
The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text), with the support of an Advisory Board.
Queenʼs Men Editions (QME1)
The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | The Book of the Governor |
| Type of text | Primary Source |
| Short title | FV: Elyot |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | Queenʼs Men Editions |
| Source |
Born-digital, peer-reviewed document written by Mathew Martin. First published in the QME 1.0 anthology on the ISE platform. Converted to TEI-XML
and remediated by the LEMDO Team for republication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
|
| Editorial declaration | Edited according to the ISE Editorial Guidelines |
| Edition | Released with Queenʼs Men Editions 2.0 |
| Sponsor(s) |
Queenʼs Men EditionsThe Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
|
| Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
| Document status | published, peer-reviewed |
| Licence/availability | Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Mathew Martin. The critical paratexts, including this Book of the Governor, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, QME, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of QME, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom. Production photographs and videos on this site may not be downloaded. They appear freely on this site with the permission of the actors and the ACTRA union. They may be used within the context of university courses, within the classroom, and for reference within research contexts, including conferences, when credit is given to the producing company and to the actors. Commercial use of videos and photographs is forbidden. |