Doubtful and dangerous examines the pivotal influence of the succession question on the politics, religion and culture of the post-Armada years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Although the earlier Elizabethan succession controversy has long commanded scholarly attention, the later period has suffered from relative obscurity. This book remedies the situation. Taking a thematic and interdisciplinary approach, individual essays demonstrate that key late Elizabethan texts – literary, political and polemical – cannot be understood without reference to the succession. The essays also reveal how the issue affected court politics, lay at the heart of religious disputes, stimulated constitutional innovation, and shaped foreign relations. By situating the topic within its historiographical and chronological contexts, the editors offer a novel account of the whole reign.

Interdisciplinary in scope and spanning the crucial transition from the Tudors to the Stuarts, the book will be indispensable to scholars and students of early modern British and Irish history, literature and religion.

Part I: Contexts and approaches
1. Introduction: A historiographical perspective – Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes
2. The earlier Elizabethan succession question revisited – Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes

Part II: Religion and politics
3. The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean succession – Paulina Kewes
4. Taking it to the street? The Archpriest controversy and the issue of the succession – Peter Lake and Michael Questier
5. Bishop Richard Bancroft and the succession – Patrick Collinson

Part III: The court
6. Essex and the ‘popish plot’ – Alexandra Gajda
7. The Scottish King and the English court: the secret correspondence of James VI, 1601–3 – Alexander Courtney

Part IV: Imaginative writings and the wider public world
8. The succession in sermons, news and rumour – Arnold Hunt
9. Hamlet and succession – Richard Dutton
10. The poetics of succession, 1587–1605: the Stuart claim – Richard A. McCabe

Part V: Britain and beyond
11. Polemic and prejudice: a Scottish king for an English throne – Susan Doran
12. Brinkmanship and bad luck: Ireland, the Nine Years’ War and the succession – Rory Rapple
13. A view from abroad: continental powers and the succession – Thomas M. McCoog, SJ
14. States, monarchs and dynastic transitions: the political thought of John Hayward – R. Malcolm Smuts

Afterword – Blair Worden
Select Bibliography
Index