The study of early Tudor drama has been revolutionised in the last three decades, benefiting in equal measure from developments in historical and literary scholarship. The entrenchment of various forms of historicism at the heart of literary studies has identified fruitful synergies between dramatic texts and historical contexts, while among early-modern historians there has been a less obvious but nonetheless significant change in the ways that literary sources have been approached and understood. In particular, a greater appreciation of the role played by counsel (advice to the monarch and/or his ministers) as the organising principle of courtly culture has led to new ways of looking at political discourse, freer of the obvious dichotomies of ‘loyalty’ or ‘opposition’, power or resistance, subversion or containment, that constrained earlier debates.

In studies of the reign of Henry VIII in particular, this ‘conciliar turn’ allowed historians who were then mired in a rather reductive debate over whether Henry was a ‘strong king’ independent of mind and action, or merely ‘the plaything of faction’, to think instead of individuals and groups as attempting to persuade a relatively strong king (whatever ‘strong’ means in this context) rather than simply to ‘bounce’ a weak one into decisions. And this permitted them to think of poems, plays and prose tracts aimed at the king or courtly audiences as political texts, worthy of attention alongside statutes, chronicles and correspondence as evidence of the political process.