Jane Shore, Edward IV, and the Politics of Publicity

n 1614, the ghost of Richard III gleefully recalled the “peece of Iustice” he had inflicted on “Mistresse Shore,” the mistress of his brother Edward IV. “Shore’s wife,” as she was also known, first appeared in Thomas More’sHistory of King Richard III. She featured as the only female exemplar in the second edition of the Mirror for Magistrates (1563), and through a spate of verse complaints, she continued to tell her story in the 1590s. All versions follow roughly the same outline: Shore’s wife rises to power as Edward’s favorite mistress and then falls precipitously once Richard seizes the throne. Richard’s ghost, in the 1614 narrative poem by Christopher Brooke, revels in his hypocrisy “when (with a fained hate / To vnchast Life) I forced her to goe / Bare-foote, on penance, with deiected State.” But this “peece of Iustice” seems to have backfired. Shifting from medieval England to early modern London, Richard’s ghost bitterly complains,