書本目錄:
  • 1. Introduction: the imagined empire
  • 2. ‘In this noble region’: politics and counsel in The Godly Queene Hester (Anonymous, c. 1530)
  • 3. ‘[A]dvice unto a Prince’: kingship and counsel in Kyng Daryus (Anonymous, 1565) and Cambises (Thomas Preston, c. 1560)
  • 4. ‘A crown enchas’d with pearl and gold’: wealth and absolute rule in The Warres of Cyrus (Richard Farrant, 1576-80) and Tamburlaine the Great Parts 1 and 2 (Christopher Marlowe, 1587-8)
  • ‘I wish to be none other but as he’: friendship and counsel in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607) by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins and contemporary closet drama
  • 6. ‘Read[ing] philosophy to a king’: ideals of monarchy in William Cartwright’s The Royall Slave (1636)
  • 7. ‘[R]eally acted in Persia’: counsel, regicide and restoration in John Denham, The Sophy (1642) and Robert Baron, Mirza (1655)
  • 8. To ‘dispose of Crowns’: Conversion, the Authorityof Monarchy and the Issue of Succession: Elkanah Settle’s Cambyses (1667)
  • 9. ‘The king, who loves the Persian mode’: tyranny and excess in The Rival Queens (1677)
  • 10. ‘[D]evour’d by Luxury’: Gender, Governance and Absolute Kingship in John Crowne’s Darius, King of Persia (1688) and Colley Cibber’s Xerxes (1699).