“Fair Sequence and Succession”: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan succession crisis

At a time when open discussion of the Elizabethan succession was effectively outlawed, Shakespeare's plays and Elizabethan theatre more broadly gave voice to the mounting political tensions and uncertainties of the period. By turning to the issue of monarchical succession in England’s past and by interrogating the tenets of political power and consensus, Shakespeare consistently grapples with the debates underlying the prevailing political crisis of his day even as he avoids addressing it directly. As such, his plays represent a significant working-through of the question of the succession; they also reveal how literature, decades before the term crisis came to be used to describe political turmoil and upheaval, fulfilled an important role in both responding to and shaping the collective understanding of profound societal disruption and the uncertainties of Tudor England’s political future.