Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- A note on abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I The art of memory
- PART II Rhetoric and poetics
- PART III Education and science
- PART IV History and philosophy
- PART V Religion and devotion
- PART VI Literature
- Introduction to Part VI
- POETRY
- VI.1 John Skelton, ‘Upon a Dead Man's Head’ (1527)
- VI.2 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590)
- VI.3 Anthony Sherley, Wit's New Dial (1604)
- VI.4 Richard Niccols, Mirror for Magistrates (1610)
- VI.5 Abraham Holland, ‘A Funeral Elegy’ (1626)
- VI.6 George Herbert, The Temple (1633)
- VI.7 Francis Quarles, Emblems (1635)
- VI.8 Mary Fage, Fame's Rule (1637)
- VI.9 Margaret Cavendish, selected works
- VI.10 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674)
- PLAYS AND PROSE
- Index
- References
VI.4 - Richard Niccols, Mirror for Magistrates (1610)
from POETRY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- A note on abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I The art of memory
- PART II Rhetoric and poetics
- PART III Education and science
- PART IV History and philosophy
- PART V Religion and devotion
- PART VI Literature
- Introduction to Part VI
- POETRY
- VI.1 John Skelton, ‘Upon a Dead Man's Head’ (1527)
- VI.2 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590)
- VI.3 Anthony Sherley, Wit's New Dial (1604)
- VI.4 Richard Niccols, Mirror for Magistrates (1610)
- VI.5 Abraham Holland, ‘A Funeral Elegy’ (1626)
- VI.6 George Herbert, The Temple (1633)
- VI.7 Francis Quarles, Emblems (1635)
- VI.8 Mary Fage, Fame's Rule (1637)
- VI.9 Margaret Cavendish, selected works
- VI.10 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674)
- PLAYS AND PROSE
- Index
- References
Summary
About the author
Richard Niccols (1584–1616) was part of the Earl of Nottingham's 1596 expedition against the Spanish at Cadiz. He wrote at least one play, two beast fables and several poems indebted to Spenser.
About the text
Niccols was the last of several writers to work on the Mirror (between 1559 and 1610 it went through eight editions and four editors), a series of exempla in which ghosts of famous people recount their tragic lives. It was highly esteemed by contemporaries for its edifying features, most notably Meres and Sidney. Based on the medieval speculum tradition, the Mirror is a continuation of Lydgate's Fall of Princes, which in turn is modelled on both Boccaccio's Latin prose de casibus vignettes and Chaucer's ‘Monk's Tale’. Niccols's changes and main additions involving English monarchs are placed at the end along with a new title page and an ‘Induction’ excerpted here.
The arts of memory
The de casibus tradition is suffused with memory; its aim is to call to mind and use as object lessons the rise and fall of notable people. The biographies are like portraits in a vast gallery of memory through which the reader is guided as shades of the deceased return to lament and narrate their stories. Remembering the power of the Mirror for Magistrates, thirty years after its last publication, Niccols gave renewed life to this bestseller. Unlike Sackville's celebrated 1563 ‘Induction’ (a dream vision where Sorrow conducts the author though a Virgilian underworld of fallen princes), Niccols's less ambitious poem sets the melancholy tone for his additions and accounts for his authority to do so – granted by Memory herself, described according to her iconography as Mnemosyne.
Textual notes
Richard Niccols, A Mirour for Magistrates…Newly enlarged with a last part, called A Winter night's Vision (London, 1610), Oo7v-Oo8v. Owing to the excerpted nature of this passage, line numbers are provided for reference.
Mirror for Magistrates
[…]
As thus in bed with book in hand I sat contemplating,
The humorous night was waxed old, still silence hushed each thing,
The clock chimed twelve, to which as I with listening ears attend,
As figures of frail mortality all things I apprehend.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Memory Arts in Renaissance EnglandA Critical Anthology, pp. 293 - 296Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016