In De Republica Anglorum Sir Thomas Smith makes a crucial distinction between the two faces of the ‘tyrant’—an appellation otherwise applied indiscriminately to both the illegitimate monarch and the evil monarch in the sixteenth century. As Smith points out, the illegitimate ruler might be an able one, but he would still be a ‘tyrant by the entrie and getting of rule’. While the usurper is tainted with tyranny from the moment he ascends the throne, the legitimate regnant monarch often acquired the reputation of a tyrant through the abuse of power. The twinned visage of tyranny resulted in an inevitable conceptual and representational overlap between the tyrant and the usurper, which had important consequences for the political drama of the century.

In Elizabethan and Jacobean political drama the theme of usurpation has a pervasive presence. For instance, almost all of William Shakespeare's history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device.2 Yet, in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we are hard pressed to find a single instance of usurpation. Instead, the central preoccupation of pre-Elizabethan Tudor drama is the problem of tyranny. In the later decades of the century, the tyrant who inherits the throne is replaced by the usurper, who, having acquired the throne by means of force or trickery, finds himself propelled into tyranny. The emergence and growing popularity of the figure of the usurper–tyrant in the drama of the later decades of the sixteenth century must have been indicative of certain transformations in the theatrical and political milieu of the century.