Authorship and Authority

James VI and I has often had a bad press, his reign generating a drip-drip of invective masquerading as analysis over the centuries. Probably only Edward II comes off worse in terms of stereotypical, homophobic caricaturisation. For film-makers this image still remains. Thankfully, however, Jenny Wormald and Pauline Croft, among others, have begun to transform poor James from a two-dimensional cartoon to a more rounded portrait of a complex king. Jane Rickard’s substantial assessment of the objectives and the tensions within James's large body of writings provides a much-needed evaluation of his mental world. In order to understand more fully the influences on his writing, Rickard places them within their historical and political contexts in four main phases: the ‘construction of James as an author’ in his early and overtly literary writings of the 1580s and early 1590s, and the scriptural exegeses of the same period; his increasing concern to control the projection of his kingship in the major prose works of the late 1590s and early 1600s; the ‘monumentalisation of the royal author’ during the middle years of his English reign; and finally his return to poetry in his last years to 1625. What emerges is James’s conscious use of his prolific writings throughout his life to further his political, diplomatic, literary and image-making objectives—epitomised for instance by the publication of his epic poem Lepanto in 1591, and reaching its zenith in his Workes of 1616. In such writings he was attempting to communicate with a wide audience, ranging from his critics within the Scottish kirk to the English political and literary élites, and European poets and princes

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