The Patronage of Rembrandt's Passion Series: Art,Politics, and Princely Display at the Court of Orange in the Seventeenth Century

This article sets out a new reading of a neglected poem by Sir Robert Howard, The Duell of the Stags (1668). It places the poem in the political context of the fall of Clarendon and rise of Howard’s friend and ally the Duke of Buckingham, and of Howard’s concurrent falling-out with his brother-in-law John Dryden. It explores the influence of Thomas Hobbes’ political theory on Howard’s poem, especially refracted through Sir William Davenant’s Hobbesian epic Gondibert (1651). The author argues that Howard’s poem implicitly attacked Dryden’s mode of panegyric for the Restoration regime by offering a radically alternative reading of Hobbes, casting royal power as fragile and contingent.