Richard Niccols’s Mirour for Magistrates (1610)

The final chapter addresses Richard Niccols’s ghost complaint collection, A Winter Nights Vision, and the edition to which it was appended in 1610. It reflects on the changed political and literary landscape within which Niccols situates his new Mirror, and considers potential explanations for the collection’s declining popularity. Niccols made substantial editorial changes, perpetuating the narrative of imperfection which had characterized its Elizabethan evolution. Using Niccols’s wider oeuvre and late Elizabethan influences to reconstruct a picture of his ethical and aesthetic priorities, this chapter presents the Jacobean revisions to the text as part of a coherent political project. Propounding the militant Protestantism of the Jacobean Spenserians, Niccols is seen to mobilize a monumental Elizabethan publication to reinforce his dissatisfaction with James I’s regime. Attention to Niccols’s revisions also shows his clear investment in the shoring up of historiographical stability, even as he refashions the text to suit his oppositional agenda.