Examines the pivotal influence of the succession question on the politics, religion and culture of the post-Armada years of Queen Elizabeth's reign

Susan Doran is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Jesus College, Oxford
Paulina Kewes is a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford

Part I: Contexts and approaches
1. Introduction: A historiographical perspective - Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes
2. The earlier Elizabethan succession question revisited - Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes
Part II: Religion and politics
3. The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean succession - Paulina Kewes
4. Taking it to the street? The Archpriest controversy and the issue of the succession - Peter Lake and Michael Questier
5. Bishop Richard Bancroft and the succession - Patrick Collinson
Part III: The court
6. Essex and the 'popish plot' - Alexandra Gajda
7. The Scottish King and the English court: the secret correspondence of James VI, 1601-3 - Alexander Courtney
Part IV: Imaginative writings and the wider public world
8. The succession in sermons, news and rumour - Arnold Hunt
9. Hamlet and succession - Richard Dutton
10. The poetics of succession, 1587-1605: the Stuart claim - Richard A. McCabe
Part V: Britain and beyond
11. Polemic and prejudice: a Scottish king for an English throne - Susan Doran
12. Brinkmanship and bad luck: Ireland, the Nine Years' War and the succession - Rory Rapple
13. A view from abroad: continental powers and the succession - Thomas M. McCoog, SJ
14. States, monarchs and dynastic transitions: the political thought of John Hayward - R. Malcolm Smuts
Afterword - Blair Worden
Select Bibliography
Index