Thinking with Aristotle: Political Theory and the Early Modern English Stage

The reception of Aristotle’s Politics in Elizabethan England has not gathered as much scholarly attention as other Greek works. Because it was translated into English (from French) at the end of the sixteenth century, the crucial question is through which channels this treatise entered the Elizabethan context and how it influenced literature and culture. Aristotle’s works and ideas were studied, but how they were transmitted and through which mediations remains to be examined. This dissertation wants to trace the circulation of Aristotelian categories across the English education, political treatises, translations, and theatrical debates, and to demonstrate that the Politics participated in shaping the language of the English culture. Its concepts of mixed government, civic education, virtue, and constitution did not remain confined to schools and universities but entered gradually into elite and public discourses. This dissertation, therefore, explores how Aristotelianism became embedded within the intellectual grammar of Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The Politics was a resource whose significance emerged gradually, through mediation, reinterpretation, and adaptation to the specific pressures of the English environment and the evolving constitutional order. The present study does not aim to establish direct textual dependence on Aristotle’s Politics, it rather seeks to examine how Aristotelian political categories circulated, were transformed, and became conceptually operative within the Elizabethan culture. Instead of tracing verbal parallels in search of direct borrowing, it focuses on structural and conceptual affinities, particularly in relation to Aristotle’s analysis of constitutions, mixed government, and the nature of political authority. If Aristotelianism functioned as the intellectual grammar of the age, the Politics provided a political dictionary necessary to articulate the political tensions in sixteenth-century England. By situating the Politics in between political theory and theatrical production, the dissertation aims to illuminate a dimension of early modern intellectual history that has remained only partially explored.