Measure is Treasure: Financial and Political Prudence in John Skelton’s Magnificence
Kim, Tai-Won
Medieval English Studies, vol.10 (2002) No.1
Abstract
John Skelton’s Magnificence (ca. 1515-21), the only extant play of the English poet laureate and “orator regius,” stages the ways in which the lack of self-control and temperance renders Magnificence unable not only to manage his personal wealth but also to fulfill his obligations as a governor. With its primary focus on Magnificence’s financial mismanagement and the political and economical consequences of his willful conduct, Skelton’s play calls for a royal balance between extravagance and parsimony and thereby links the arts of political and personal government. “In the physical interaction of monarch, courtiers and anti-courtiers,” Greg Walker suggests, Skelton’s Magnificence “provides a symbolic representation of the theory of conduct in the early modern court” (Plays 90). Drawing upon the traditional literature of advice to the prince, he takes pains in this morality play to speculate on “the proper management of the royal household, especially in relation to finance” (Scattergood 22). With the shrewd fusion of economic and ethical principles, Magnificence supplies the early Tudor audience–mainly, the monarch and courtiers–with practical advice on how best to conduct themselves and how to govern their households and subordinates. In Magnificence, as I will show, Skelton offers a revisionary idea of sovereignty when he implies that Magnificence becomes a truthful sovereign by shifting his allegiance from the feudal relationship with aristocrats to his intersubjective one with his counselors.
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