Deliberation, Tyranny, and Time in Early Caroline England

Abstract

This chapter explores how, with growing royal demands for the expeditious provision of financial and military support, time increasingly became an index of power in Caroline England. It begins with how in 1625 and 1626 disputes over royal finances became increasingly subsumed into a structural conflict between king and the Commons over deliberative prerogatives. This political conflict is modeled in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, which uses disputes over the temporal dimensions of political intellection to detail the limits of both theatrical efficacy and royal authority in Caroline England. The result is a play that rejects the immediacy of tyrannical authority in favor of a conceptualization of both theatrical and political power whose emphasis on delay yields a dynamic that is fundamentally collaborative rather than imperial.