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contract her family, nobleness and birth, to the servitude of her
husband, as if he had bought her his slave, and I’m sure her
father bought him for her, for he gave her a good portion, and
now in sense who should obey?. . . and so with a forced kind of
mirth, [he] went out of the room, and I understood he had
nothing else to say. (Larson, 136–37)
The comic account of marital conversation is as pertinent to the seventeenth century as to a twenty-first century girls’ night out, yet it also lays
claim to a discourse in which men have “nothing else to say” and which
correspondingly asserts the power of female conversation.
Marion Wynne-Davies
University of Surrey
Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign Arts’: Essays in Literature, History, and
Culture. Eds. Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin. Tempe,
Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011.
339 pp. $70.00. ISBN 978-0-86698-455-3.
This book enters a crowded marketplace: in the last few years alone,
essay collections on Elizabeth I have included Annaliese Connolly
and Lisa Hopkins, eds. Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of
Elizabeth I (Manchester University Press, 2007); Jayne Elisabeth Archer,
Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds., The Progresses, Pageants, and
Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 2007); and
Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi, eds., Representations of Elizabeth I in
Early Modern Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The frequent appearance of such volumes attests to enduring fascination with Elizabeth and to
the exciting opportunities her reign and her image offer for interdisciplinary work. In fact, the essay collection is perhaps a genre particularly fitted
to discussion of this multifaceted figure, who was simultaneously a political leader, a religious figurehead, a skilled orator and author, a goddess-like
icon in portraits and poetry, an object of vilification by her enemies, and
the last of the colorful Tudor dynasty. Looking at her from different points
of view and via different themes is arguably the most appropriate and
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productive approach: as Edmund Spenser himself asserted in The Faerie
Queene, his great epic romance inspired by Elizabeth, she must be viewed
“In mirrours more then one” (Book 3, Proem 5).
Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign Arts’ is a worthy addition to the canon
of studies of the queen, drawing together an impressive roster of established and emerging scholars, and casting new light on many aspects of
its subject. Themes include Elizabeth in the context of familial relationships, both real and symbolic; Elizabeth’s command of language in both
poetry and oratory; her management of the court; and her combination
of worldly power with ecclesiastical authority and quasi-divine symbolic
status. There is therefore much here to interest readers from a wide range
of disciplines.
Janel Mueller is one of the editors of the landmark Chicago edition
of Elizabeth’s Collected Works that has transformed work in the field. Here
she uses documents from Elizabeth’s early life to argue persuasively that
the fifteen-year-old princess’s brush with life-threatening political danger
in the form of the sexual and treasonous ambitions of Thomas Seymour
was vital in shaping the adult queen, contributing not only to her resistance
to marriage but also to her self-assertiveness, independence of mind, and
political survival skills. The young princess’s bold and articulate declarations of innocence and self-belief enabled her to escape political disaster,
and Ilona Bell’s essay on the queen’s poetry similarly shows how her writings not only offer insight into her personality and point of view but also
repay analysis as efficacious political instruments. Her writings invariably
had an audience and a political end in view; moreover, efforts to access the
“real Elizabeth” through her own words may be frustrated by the difficulty
of establishing single authoritative texts. As Steven W. May shows in an
essay that supplements his own impressive edition of selected works by
Elizabeth, her two most famous speeches, the Tilbury Speech of 1588 and
the “Golden Speech” of 1601, survive in several variant versions that render
her actual words elusive, but tell us much about how her speeches were
disseminated, how she and her ministers wanted them to be remembered,
and how her myth has been fashioned by posterity.
Often, then, we are dealing with the image and reputation of Elizabeth,
rather than anything that we can call her reality. Carole Levin, as so often
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in her work, shows here a readiness refreshing in a historian to analyze
fantasies and rumors about Elizabeth. She offers a fascinating account of
the queen’s supposed bastard children, including claims made during her
lifetime and fictions constructed very recently. Levin is surely right to argue
that such derogatory or at least depreciating stories betray the difficulty
faced by many, in both Elizabeth’s time and our own, in accepting the figure of an independent, intelligent, and capable woman ruler. Susan Doran
also leads us to re-evaluate some of the mythology generated by Elizabeth,
such as that surrounding the idea of the “court favorite,” as exemplified by
Sir Walter Ralegh. Doran comprehensively demonstrates that there was
little substance to charges of Elizabeth’s favoritism, that these had their
roots in “the influence of Tacitean history and disaffection with the late
Elizabethan regime” (174), and that the “court favorite” was essentially a
literary construct.
A number of essays in the opening section of the volume, “Elizabeth
and Expectations of Family,” evaluate her rule in relation to other prominent women: Anne Boleyn is discussed by Mary Hill Cole, Mary I by Sarah
L. Duncan, and Mary, Queen of Scots by Retha Warnicke. Less familiar
ground is broken by Catherine Howey Stearn’s essay on the monumental
tomb of Elizabeth’s unfortunate cousin Catherine Grey, who married
another claimant to the throne without royal permission, bore him two
sons (one of them conceived in the Tower of London), then starved herself
to death while under house arrest. Considering Grey’s splendid memorial
in Salisbury Cathedral together with James I’s displacement of Elizabeth
I’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, Stearn shows how women’s funerary
monuments bespeak the importance of the female body to dynastic history and could be deployed to tell alternative and even revisionist stories
of entitlement and status.
Other essays also enable us to view Elizabeth from fresh angles. John
Watkins draws on reports by ambassadors to explore how the Queen
looked “through Venetian eyes,” demonstrating that despite Venice’s
remoteness from England there were affinities between these two maritime states, who valued their independence from the great European powers. Meanwhile, the tone of the volume is darkened by Vincent P. Carey’s
piece on “state terror” in Elizabethan Ireland. He foregrounds Elizabeth’s
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approval of and responsibility for atrocities committed in her name in
England’s nearest colony, thus providing a salutary counterpoise to her
regal glamour and proto-feminist appeal. For Carey Elizabeth is a war
criminal and perhaps even a perpetrator of genocide.
Essays by Linda Shenk and Donald Stump remind us how integral
religion was to all areas of Elizabethan culture. Shenk provides a revelatory
new reading of Lyly’s Endymion as much more than just courtly dreamvision: rather, it is full of allusions to St. Paul that assert Elizabeth’s role as
creator of religious harmony and conformity. Stump explores more comprehensively than any previous scholar why the Old Testament heroines
prominent in early Elizabethan panegyric fade from view in the later years
of the reign to be displaced by pagan classical goddesses as personae for
Elizabeth. He finds some answers in Elizabeth’s gradual detachment from
polemically minded radical Protestantism and in the fact that biblical heroines were used in the first two decades of the reign in propaganda against
Catholic France, a relationship that altered dramatically as Elizabeth
embarked on the Anjou courtship and as Spain became England’s main
enemy.
Overall, then, this is an essay collection replete with many kinds of
riches. It could perhaps have been enhanced even further by the use of
illustrations. However, its essays speak to one another productively, offering many fresh insights and opening up further avenues for enquiry. It certainly earns its place on the ever-growing shelf of studies of Elizabeth I.
Helen Hackett
University College London
Mary Sidney Wroth: The Woman Who Challenged Shakespeare
[ Japanese title: Mary Sidney Wroth: Shakespeare ni idonda josei]. Akiko
Kusunoki. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 2011. 179 pp. ¥3200E. ISBN 9784-622-07596-7.
Written in Japanese, Akiko Kusunoki’s slim and elegant volume provides
a succinct but richly textured introduction to the life and writings of Mary
Sidney Wroth (1586/7–1651/3), whose family combined aristocratic lineage with an extraordinary passion and talent for literature. Daughter to