Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Stangel, Francisca Louse (2020) Sapientia Solomonis: Negotiating Early Modern Anglo-Swedish Relationships Through Court Drama. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/84277/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html Sapientia Solomonis: Negotiating Early Modern Anglo- Swedish Relationships Through Court Drama By Francisca L. Stangel Presented to the School of English at the University of Kent, in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Canterbury, July 2020 (Wordcount: c. 71100) Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest appreciation for Dr. Marion F. O’Connor and Dr. Sarah Dustagheer for guiding me expertly through the rollercoaster experience of a doctoral thesis project, for sharing my excitement for this little gem of a performance, and for their never-wavering support. The suggestions from my examinors Dr. John J. McGavin and Dr. Sarah James were key to refining this thesis. I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Catherine Richardson for her continued support and encouragement during this project. I am extremely thankful to Dr. Michael Falk for his ongoing encouragement from day one and for proof-reading drafts of my thesis on day one thousand eight hundered and something. I am indebted to Dr. Rory Loughnane for reading drafts of chapters and providing valuable advice, to Dr. Rebecca Pope for proof-reading and for her friendship, and to Dr. Tamara Haddad for her ongoing support and shared love for practice-based research. Dr. David Rundle provided his expert advice about palaeography and for that I am very grateful. I would like to acknowledge the help and assistance that I received from the School of English at the University of Kent. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Clare Wright and Dr. Felicity Dunworth for their support and guidance throughout my time as a student, an assistance lecturer, and beyond. I would like to extend my gratitude to the many people and institutions who have facilitated this work and who have been of great assistance throughout my project. Particularly helpful to me during this time were Matthew Payne, Keeper of the Muniments at Westminster Abbey, and the team at Westminster Abbey Archives; and Elizabeth Wells, Archivist and Records Manager at the Westminster School, who showed me the hall where the performance of Sapientia Solomonis took place. I am extremely grateful to Elizabeth DeBold, Assistant of Collections at the Folger Library, for her instrumental assistance during the project. The team at Canterbury Cathedral 2 Archives and everyone at the Templeman Library provided the necessary assistance and support to make this project what it is today. Thanks also to Mel Johnson at the British Library for their help especially during times when the pandemic made it difficult to access sources in person. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to my own wonderful Anglo-Swedish network of friends and family for their continued support, never-ending patience, and their unconditional love. Thank you to mamma Angela and pappa Rikard for loving me and believing in me always. 3 Abstract In the year 1565 Cecilia of Baden, daughter to Gustav Vasa and sister to Erik XIV of Sweden, visited Elizabeth I’s court. During her stay the Swedish princess took part in a number of official events and attended performances at court and elsewhere. The Westminster performance of Sapientia Solomonis offers a unique opportunity to study the political significance of court performance in negotiating Elizabeth’s international relationships, as it took place in the midst of vitally important Anglo-Swedish marriage negotiations that had the potential to change the religious and political map of Europe, the development of liaisons with the Spanish superpower, and provides a new insight to the procedures and making of Tudor court drama. The Westminster performance of Sapientia Solomonis, given before Elizabeth I, Cecilia of Baden, and the Elizabethan council, has been acknowledged in some scholarship on neo-Classical drama, early modern boy- companies, and Tudor iconography, but has only been the subject of one book-length study. Elizabeth R. Payne produced a critical edition of BL. Add. MS 20061, a performance copy of the play, as a part of her doctoral thesis in 1938. In the eighty years since Payne’s study the performance event of Sapientia Solomonis has been largely ignored in scholarship. However, the Westminster School production of Sapientia Solomonis offers a unique opportunity to study the way in which performance was used as a political tool in negotiating Elizabeth’s relationships, and especially that with Cecilia, as it locates the English queen, the Swedish princess, and the Council at the same event. In this thesis I have analysed documents connected to the performance that have never before been studied, which enables this thesis to further our understanding of the significance of the performance event in negotiating Elizabeth and Cecilia’s relationship. This very topic also allows me to comment on wider relationships between the Westminster School, Cambridge University, the Continental printing houses, networks of Protestant exiles, and the Elizabethan court and its offices. This thesis combines archival studies, textual analysis 4 and theatre history, and brings together scholarship in English and Swedish, in order to further our understanding of the Westminster Performance of Sapientia Solomonis and these relationships. Chapter 1 presents the first comparative study of BL. Add. MS. 20061 and Folger V.a.212 – the latter of which has never received critical attention – which reveals the range of the manuscript production at Westminster School and that Folger V.a.212 was not intended as a presentation copy. As demonstrated by Payne, Westminster School’s Sapientia Solomonis was an adaptation of Sixt Birck’s drama with the same name, however by placing the event in its political and economic context this thesis is able to carry out a more thorough comparative study between the Westminster version and Sixt Birck’s version, which shows that the adaptation laid its focus on spectacle and splendour, rather than the education of a new generation of humanist citizens, emphasising its function as a court performance. In Chapter 2, I employ a typological analysis to the parallels the Prologue and Epilogue of the play set up between the main character King Solomon and Elizabeth I, and between the character of the Queen of Sheba and Cecilia of Sweden. In the process of this thesis I have transcribed and translated hitherto unstudied epistolary records, which are analysed in Chapter 3. The letters reveal how Elizabeth and Cecilia’s relationship was developed in a wider political and economic framework of Anglo- Swedish relations that was intrinsically linked to Erik XIV’s proposal to Elizabeth. The Westminster performance of Sapientia Solomonis used iconography of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba to negotiate Anglo-Swedish relations, and the performance took place in a complex system of patronage and gift-giving, designed to maintain and negotiate relationships between the court, the school, Cecilia, and the council, as shown in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents new manuscript evidence from Westminster Abbey Archive that I have transcribed during the course of this thesis. The records reveal that the Westminster School production of Sapientia Solomonis was costlier and more elaborate than other 5 productions by the school on the 1560s, which demonstrates the political significance of the performance event. These records enable this thesis to make a valuable contribution to discussions around the production of Tudor court drama and enables us to ascertain that the main producer of the performance was the school itself and not, as has previously been argued, the Elizabethan court. By using the Westminster School performance of Sapientia Solomonis as a case study, I am able to develop our understanding of literary, political, and religious networks of early modern Europe, and contribute to the academic discussion of court drama as a diplomatic tool in negotiating Elizabeth’s international relations. More generally, this thesis provides a new model for studying the role of performances in negotiating early modern diplomatic relations. 6 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 4 Table of Contents 7 0. Introduction 8 0.1 Literature Review 10 0.1.1 Sapientia Solomonis in Scholarship 10 0.1.2 Anglo-Swedish Relations 17 0.1.3 Networks 24 0.1.4 Iconography 29 0.1.5 Patronage and Early Modern Gift Culture 36 0.1.6 Court Performance 37 0.2 Thesis overview 42 1. Sapientia Solomonis: The Performance Copies 45 1.1 A Comparative Analysis of BL Add MS 20061 and Folger MS V.a.212 47 1.2 The Performance Copies 58 1.3 Sapientia Solomonis and Dramata Sacra, the source text 63 Conclusion 76 2. Critical Perspectives: Iconography 78 2.1 Tudor Iconography through a Typological Study 79 2.2 Solomon, the Queen of Sheba and Elizabeth I 86 2.3 Sapientia Solomonis: A Typological Study 90 Conclusion 112 3.