“‘Which play was of a king how he should rule his realm’: Tudor Interludes Advising the Ruler”

Tudor interludes are a thematically heterogeneous corpus, but what they all share is an extremely tight link to their social, cultural and political context. Moreover, they do not just reflect their context, but endeavour to intervene materially on social reality in order to change it. A peculiarity of Tudor interludes is their deep involvement with power, which is due to their “centrality”: being performed at court and in noble households,1 they were close to the political centre, to the place where decisions were taken, both at a national and at a local level.