Seventeenth-Century Scribal Culture and "A Dialogue between King James and King William"

Kelly shows how political poems were circulated in manuscript in the later seventeenth century, not unlike some of Milton’s own political sonnets, which had a limited manuscript circulation, and were not printed in some cases some until many years after his death. The author of the anonymously-circulated poem, “A Dialogue between King James and King William,” is Charles Blount (1654–1693), a radical Whig author who wrote mostly in prose. In the manuscript poem, Blount imagines a conversation between King James and King William after James fled to Ireland, when William rose to power in what is known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688.