The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature.

These two books are typical of the current phase of consolidation in Renaissance studies. They conform to the agenda set by the innovative 'new historicism' of the 1980s, but they invest the subject-matter with a historical and semantic rigour that was lacking in most of the original practitioners of this kind of criticism. Hence their scholarly solidity, but hence also a certain caution, resulting in a lack of freshness and excitement.

Richard Hardin's book is the more wide-ranging. It begins with a strong critique of the view that divine-right theory was widespread in the Tudor period. In particular, it reveals the flaws in - and the inapplicability to England of - Ernst Kantorowicz's influential The King's Two Bodies. Hardin attends well to detail. He shows, for instance, how the epigraph to Kantorowicz's chapter on Richard II and Henry V contains an ellipsis which obscures the fact that the 'god' to which Harry refers is not monarchy itself but the 'idol' Ceremony. Critics who persist in reading Elizabethan literature as both formative of and formed by a monolithic cult of the Queen would do well to attend …