SOURCE: Walker, Greg. “Strategies of Courtship: The Marital Politics of Gorboduc.” In The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama, pp. 196-21. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Walker argues that the earliest stage performances of Gorboduc before royal audiences show that, despite the play's more universal appeal, its foremost intention was to influence Queen Elizabeth to marry Robert Dudley.

While Queen Mary readily conformed to male expectations, taking a husband and tempering her sovereignty in the political arena with wifely subservience in the domestic sphere, Elizabeth I resolutely did not. Her refusal to marry superseded all other issues to become the most pressing political problem of the first three decades of her reign.¹ Ministers, courtiers, and noblemen, foreign diplomats and their princely masters, all sought consistently to tempt, cajole, or frighten her into accepting a husband or naming an heir. They did so with...