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Governmental Arts in Early Tudor England studies the representational strategies through which government and dissent were performed during the English 1530s. Polito argues that the reign of Henry VIII saw the emergence of new forms of secular government. Through innovative legislation, the dissemination of propaganda and conduct literature, the appropriation of ecclesiastical and pastoral modes of rule and new and sometimes spectacular rituals of statecraft, this monarch and his counsellors worked on the intimate territories of conscience, desire and speech, as intention, sexual practises and verbal performatives were brought into the domain of public discourse and the juridical sphere. The book suggests that the conundrum of government was its assumption that its objects of government were 'sovereign' enough to deploy the kinds of self-temperance and circumspection required for the security of the realm. The same subject, however, governors understood and feared, would be deep and complex enough to alienate intention from action and, in the interest of liberty, to 'perform' as another if necessary. Tudor governmentality's notion of the self-conscious, self-divided, free subject/actor is therefore both the condition for and the limit of a pre-liberal form of government. The case of Elizabeth Barton, the nun executed for treason in 1534, supports Polito's argument that gender was key to the humanist-inspired epistemological approach to the art and science of government. The book also provides an examination of the new drama that was the Tudor secular interlude and finds that the these plays both model and mock the governmental arts that linked self-temperance, freedom and prosperity. When the drama joins the government in worrying about the necessity and danger of dissimulation in the public sphere, actors, ironically, work to show that actors can be dangerous. Thus Polito shows Henrician theatre to be as complex, compromised and interesting as the Elizabethan public stage it helped to foster.