The Mirour for Magistrates (1587)

Chapter 4 returns to John Higgins, who edited a selection of extant Mirror complaints for publication in 1586–7. Beginning with the reprinting of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Inns of Court tragedy Gorboduc in 1590 alongside John Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, a publication which similarly pulled together ancient British and Roman narratives of assassination and civil conflict, the chapter interprets Higgins’s revisions and additions to his own First Part of the Mirror and suggests that they point to a change of emphasis. Higgins seems to have updated the work to sharpen its political focus at a moment of heightened national and international tension. The chapter then turns to his engagement with the use of moral exempla in the collection of Roman tragedies with which he enlarged the edition, and argues for a growing sense of disillusionment in their efficacy.