This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.

The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems in the voices of medieval rulers and rebels compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols between 1574 and 1610 extended the Mirror's scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the texts' later manifestations profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. Unperfect Histories is the first monograph to consider the text's early modern transmission history as a whole. In chapters on Baldwin, Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's complaint collections, it demonstrates that the Mirror is an invaluable witness to how verse history was conceptualized, written, and read across the period, and explores the ways in which it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical skepticism, as well as the macabre humour and metatextual play which have come to be known as hallmarks of Baldwin's mid-Tudor writings. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes and techniques right across the Mirror's history. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's contributions are analysed for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with Baldwin's early editions. This new reading offers a lively account of the texts' depth and variety, and provides insight into the extent of the Mirror's influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.