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London Review of Books

Posthumous Gentleman subscriber-only content

Michael Dobson

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They were both eight-year-old grammar-school boys when news began to reach England of the bloody events of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 (news which bolstered moves towards Protestant reform in each of their provincial towns), and they remained sufficiently interested in French politics to write in a surprisingly well-informed fashion about the subject twenty years later. The dispute between Henri of Navarre and his estranged Catholic wife, Marguerite de Valois, over control of Aquitaine; the wider dynastic and religious feuding among the Valois and the Bourbons that culminated in the assassinations of the Duc de Guise and Henri III; the Earl of Essex’s subsequent mission to reinforce Henri of Navarre and his associates the Maréchal de Biron and the Duc de Longueville: both writers would refract this material into some of the most distinctive drama of the age. In the early 1590s each produced a play about recent French affairs that suggestively combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life.

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Michael Dobson is professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck. He is the author of The Making of the National Poet, among other books.