Abstract
Abstract
This chapter examines a range of Hercules’ appearances in sixteenth-century English plays and entertainments as a character embodied onstage and as a verbal referent in dramatic speech. It discusses Hercules’ roles and appearances in occasional performances such as royal entertainments, focusing on the entertainment presented to Elizabeth I at her entry into Kenilworth Castle in 1575 and the several accounts of the entertainment. The chapter then explores the effects of speaking about Hercules in rhetorical and dramatic contexts, and argues that the multiplicity of Hercules does not only make him a morally and mythologically complex figure, but also a rhetorically unstable speaker. The chapter concludes by exploring Hercules in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and King John. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Hercules presents a comic opportunity for exploring rhetorical issues of proportion and decorum, and for perhaps emulative engagement with Erasmian proverbs and ideas of rhetorical appropriateness. In King John both Herculean proverbs and Herculean props illuminate characters’ testings of social, gender, and generic boundaries.