Booking and details
Plan your visitDates Opens Fri, Feb 21, 2025
Venue Stuart and Mimi Rose Rare Book and Manuscript Exhibition Hall
Tickets Free; timed-entry pass recommended
Social climbing was a competitive sport in Tudor England, requiring a complex range of skills, strategies, and techniques. How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition invites you into a world of lace ruffs, jousting, hawks, bad handwriting, scandal, and political factions. Experience the playbooks, the people, and the spectacular fails, as courtiers tried to navigate the minefield of working for a boss who could shower you with riches or chop off your head.
The exhibition features more than 60 objects from the Folger’s collection to demonstrate the “rules” for how to be a successful courtier. They show how historical and literary figures ranging from royal advisors to household staff used cunning, cutthroat, and creative means to acquire power and curry favor with the Tudor monarchs.
Take the Tudor playbook and give it a 21st-century spin! Visit the Engagement Table in the exhibition gallery to create a playbook that highlights the risks you might take to become a power player. Draw your portrait, design a dinner menu, and come up with your own rule.
On view
Explore selected highlights from the exhibition.
Portrait miniatures
As tokens of loyalty and affection, portrait miniatures were an intimate way to further one’s agenda. Power players commissioned Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the most talented and sought-after miniaturists in England, to paint these exquisitely detailed portraits, often set in locket-like gold frames. They were to be viewed privately, rather than hung on a wall for all to see.
Knights of the Garter
Becoming a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter was one of the highest honors you could receive in Tudor England. Sir Gilbert Dethick, as Garter King of Arms, was responsible for the ceremonial aspects of the order. These velvet-bound books, gifted by him to Queen Elizabeth I, included the coats of arms of the Knights of the Garter.
Playbooks
To be a power player in Tudor England, you needed to study the playbooks. Potential senior advisors to the queen studied “courtesy books” and “mirrors for princes”, which described the qualities, skills, and behaviors necessary to succeed at court.
Books on view include a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince printed in 1584 in London, a political treatise that tells leaders how to gain and retain power.
Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier
This was the definitive 16th-century book of manners, advising society’s elite how to dress, behave, and even dance. The Book of the Courtier introduced the concept of sprezzatura, or how to make hard things look easy—a sort of effortless grace in speech, writing, dress, manners, and actions. First published in Italy in 1528, it became a bestseller.
Curator
Heather Wolfe
Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
I hope visitors see the parallels between Tudor England and today. Cancel culture, brand management, nepotism, power dressing, and the idea of “fake it ’til you make it” were all a part of life for people seeking a position in the queen’s inner circle.
Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts
Related programs
DIY at the Folger: Miniatures
DIY at the Folger: The Tudor Ruff
Additional exhibition credits
Johnna Champion, Assistant Curator of Collections
Francisco Chong, Dumbarton Oaks Fellow
Liam Dempsey, Associate Director of Education
Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development and Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints
David McKenzie, Head of Exhibitions
Rebecca Niles, Digital Developer
Rebecca Quam, Museum Education Manager
Kristen Sieck, Exhibitions Coordinator
Leah Thomas, Public Humanities Program Manager, Folger Institute
Renate Mesmer, J. Franklin Mowery Head of Conservation and Preservation
Rachel Bissonnette, Book and Paper Conservator
Kathryn Kenney, Book and Paper Conservator
Charlotte Starnes, Conservation Intern
Design: Topos Graphics
Fabrication: Capitol Museum Services
Printing: EPI Colorspace