King Darius in the Archives

This chapter discusses the discovery of an extracted speech, copied into manuscript, from William Alexander’s Senecan play, The Tragedie of Darius (1603). It also presents a full inventory of National Records of Scotland, MS RH13/38, where the text was found among around thirty-five poetic items ranging from the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth. The chapter gives a full transcription of the speech, followed by a discussion of its language, circulation, and contemporaneous appeal in light of its potential political significance. Very little is known about Alexander’s Scottish reception (especially in bibliographical terms), so a copy of this play extract provides some rare evidence about Scottish readers of Alexander’s plays around the time of the Union of Crowns.