In 1570, three years after Mary Stuart's deposition and her subsequent escape to England, Elizabeth I wrote in a letter addressed to the deposed monarch:

The threat to her person, her state, and her realm that Elizabeth perceived in Mary was a spectre that had already haunted English politics for more than a decade and was destined to do so until Mary's execution in 1587. The Catholic French–Scottish Mary Stuart, who was Elizabeth's closest living relative, had been perceived as a potential usurper of the Tudor throne long before she lost her own. Elizabeth's unmarried state, coupled with her refusal to name an heir presumptive, made the question of succession ‘the most pressing political problem of the first three decades of her reign’. Written months after Mary's return to Scotland following a thirteen-year stay in France, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc is often seen as a dramatic comment on this phase of uncertainty and anxiety in English political history.

Performed first as a part of the Christmas revels at the Inns of Court in 1561–2 and then in the presence of Queen Elizabeth in January 1562, Gorboduc is regarded as not just the first proper Senecan tragedy in English but also as the first English history play.4 My aim is to demonstrate that the innovations in dramaturgy it represents are also inextricably tied up with innovations in forms of political thinking: the poetics of composition crucially inflect the politics of the play.