The Queen’s Men Editions: Mirror for Magistrates

Mirror for Magistrates

From John Higgins, Mirror for Magistrates (London: Thomas Marshe, 1574)

How the Queen Cordila in Despair Slew Herself: the Year before Christ, 800

If any woeful wight have cause to wail her woe,

Or griefs are past do prick us Princes, tell our fall:

Myself likewise must needes constrained eke do so,

And show my like misfortunes and mishaps withal.

Should I keep close my heavy haps and thrall,

Then did I wrong: I wronged myself and thee,

Which of my facts a witness true mayest be.

A woman yet must blush when bashful is the case,

Though truth bid tell the tale and story as it fell,

But sith that I mislike not audience, time, nor place,

Therefore, I cannot keep my woes in counsel well.

Not greater ease of heart then griefs to tell,

It vaunteth all the dolors of our mind,

Our careful hearts thereby great comfort find.

For why to tell that may recounted be again,

And tell it as our eares may compass ease,

That is the salve and medicine of our pain,

Which cureth corsies all and sores of our disease:

It doth our pinching pangs and pains appease,

It pleads the part of an assurèd friend,

And tells the trade, like vices to amend.

Therefore if I more willing be to tell my fall,

With my mishaps to ease my burdened breast and mind,

Some others haply may avoid and shun the thrall,

And thereby for distress more aid and comfort find.

They keeping measure, whereas I declined,

May be as prompt to fly like bruit and blame

As I to tell, or thou to write the same.

Wherefore if thou wilt afterwards record

What Queen Cordila tells to ease her inward smart,

I will recite my story tragical each word,

To thee that giv’st an ear, and ready art.

But lest I set the horse behind the cart,

I mind to tell each thing in order, so

As thou may’st see and show whence sprang my woe.

My grandsire Bladud hight, that found the baths by skill,

A feathered king that practiced high to soar,

Whereby he felt the fall, God wot against his will,

And never went, rode, reigned, nor spake, nor flew no more.

After whose death my father Leir therefore

Was chosen king, by right apparent heir,

Which after built the town of Leircèstere.

He had three daughters, first and eldest hight Gonerell,

Next after her his younger Ragan was begot:

The third and last was I the youngest, named Cordell.

Us all our father Leir did love too well God wot,

But minding her that loved him best to note,

Because he had no son t’enjoy his land,

He thought to guerdon most where favour most he found.

What though I youngest were, yet me judged more wise

Than either Gonerell, or Ragan more of age,

And fairer far, wherefore my sisters did despise

My grace and gifts, and sought my wreck to wage.

But yet though vice on virtue die with rage,

It cannot keep her underneath to drown,

For still she sits above, and reaps renown.

My father thought to wed us unto princely peers,

And unto them and theirs divide and part the land.

For both my sisters first he called (as first their years

Required) their minds, and love, and favor t’understand.

Quod he, “All doubts of duty to aband”,

I must assay your friendly faiths to prove:

“My daughters, tell me how you do me love”.

Which when they answered him they loved their father more

Than they themselves did love, or any worldly wight:

He praised them, and said he would therefore

The loving kindness they deserved in fine requite.

So found my sisters favour in his sight,

By flattery fair they won their father’s heart,

Which after turned him and me to smart.

But not content with this, he asked me likewise

If I did not him love and honor well.

“No cause”, quod I, “there is I should your grace despise”,

For nature so doth bind and duty me compel,

To love you, as I ought my father, well.

Yet shortly I may chance, if Fortune will,

“To find in heart to bear another more good will”.

Thus much I said of nuptial loves that ment

Not minding once of hatred vile or ire:

And partly taxing them, for which intent

They set my father’s heart on wrathful fire.

“She never shall to any part aspire”

“Of this my realm,” quod he, “amongst you twain,

But shall without all dowry aye remain.”

Then to Maglaurus Prince, with Albany, he gave

My sister Gonerell, the eldest of us all,

And eke my sister Ragan to Hinnine to have,

And for her dowry Camber and Cornwall.

These after him should have his kingdom all.

Between them both he gave it frank and free,

But nought at all he gave of dowry me.

At last it chanced a prince of France to hear my fame:

My beauty brave, my wit was blazed abroad each where.

My noble virtues praised me to my father’s blame,

Who did for flattery me less friendly favour bear,

Which when this worthy prince, I say, did hear,

He sent ambassage liked me more than life

And soon obtained me to be his wife.

Prince Aganippus reaved me of my woe,

And that for virtue’s sake, of dowries all the best.

So I contented was to France my father fro’

For to depart, and hoped t’enjoy some greater rest.

Where living well beloved, my joys increased:

I got more favour in that prince his sight

Than ever princess of a princely wight.

But while that I these joys so well enjoyed in France,

My father Leir in Britain was unwieldy old.

Whereon his daughters more themselves aloft t’advance

Desired the realm to rule it as they would.

Their former love and friendship waxed cold,

Their husbands revels void of reason quite

Rose up, rebelled, bereft his crown and right,

Caused him agree they might in parts equall

Divide the realm, and promised him a guard

Of sixty knights on him attending still at call.

But in six months such was his hap too hard,

That Gonerell of his retinue barred.

The half of them, she and her husband rest,

And scarce allowed the other half they left.

Eke as in Albany lay he lamenting fates,

When as my sister so, sought all his utter spoil:

The meaner upstart courtiers thought themselves his mates,

His daughter him disdained and forced not his foil.

Then was he fain for succor his to toil

With half his train, to Cornwall there to lie

In greatest need, his Ragan’s love to try.

So when he came to Cornwall, she with joy

Received him, and Prince Maglaurus did the like.

There he abode a year, and lived without annoy,

But then they took all his retinue from him quite

Save only ten, and showed him daily spite.

Which he bewailed complaining durst not strive

Though in disdain they last allowed but five.

What more despite could devilish beasts devise

Than joy their father’s woeful days to see?

What vipers vile could so their King despise,

Or so unkind, so curst, to cruel be?

Fro’ thence again he went to Albany,

Where they bereaved his servants all save one,

Bade him content himself with that, or none.

Eke at what time he asked of them to have his guard

To guard his noble grace where so he went;

They called him doting fool, all his requests debarred,

Demanding if with life he were not well content,

Then he too late his rigour did repent.

’Gainst me, my sisters fawning love that knew

Found flattery false, that seemed so fair in view.

To make it short, to France he came at last to me,

And told me how my sisters evil their father used.

Then humbly I besought my noble king so free,

That he would aid my father thus by his abused.

Who not at all my humble he ’hest refused,

But sent to every coast of France for aid,

Whereby King Leir might home be well conveyed.

The soldiers gathered from each quarter of the land

Come at length to know the noble prince’s will,

Who did commit them unto captains every band.

And I likewise of love and reverent mere goodwill

Desired my lord, he would not take it ill

If I departed for a space withal,

To take a part, or ease my father’s thrall.

He granted my request, thence we arrived here,

And of our Britons came to aid likewise his right

Full many subjects, good and stout that were.

By martial feats, and force, by subjects sword and might,

The British kings were fain to yield to our right,

Which won, my father well this realm did guide

Three years in peace, and after that he died.

Then I was crowned Queen this realm to hold […]

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.

John Higgins

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.

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.

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	Mirror for Magistrates
Type of text	Primary Source
Short title	Leir: Mirror Magistrates
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Queenʼs Men Editions
Source	Born-digital, peer-reviewed document written by Andrew Griffin. 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 Editions The 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, Andrew Griffin. The critical paratexts, including these Mirror for Magistrates, 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.