SOURCE: Herman, Peter C. “Authorship and the Royal ‘I’: King James VI/I and the Politics of Monarchic Verse.” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 4 (winter 2001): 1495-1530.

In the following essay, Herman contends that James's position as a monarch influenced both his poetry and its reception, and he discusses the diplomatic value of his verse.

Despite the reinvigoration of historicism in literary studies over the last twenty years or so, the poetry of King James VI/I has remained practically unexamined despite the copious attention given to his prose works.¹ The lack of attention, however, is part of the general neglect of monarchic verse. While one finds any number of studies on how Wyatt's or the Earl of Surrey's or Sidney's poetry somehow reflects and intervenes in contemporary politics, the fact that monarchs also regularly produced has seemingly gone unnoticed. This lacuna is particularly odd in James's case, for he not...