Susan Doran, Thomas S. Freeman, eds. The Myth of Elizabeth. Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ix + 269 pp. $33.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-333-93084-7.
Janel Mueller, Leah S. Marcus, eds. Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xxv + 174 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-50470-4.
Reviewed by Mary Hill Cole (Department of History, Mary Baldwin College)
Published on H-Albion (March, 2004)
Elizabeth I: Then and Now
Elizabeth I: Then and Now
Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus have completed Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals, their companion volume to Elizabeth I: Collected Works, and Elizabethan scholars are again in their debt for making available the writings and speeches of the queen in a clear, useful edition. While the Collected Works targeted both scholarly and general audiences, Autograph Compositions will appeal to historians and literary scholars. This second volume, in essence, presents first Elizabeth's autograph compositions in English that took the form of letters, prayers, poems, and speeches. These transcriptions comprise about 60 percent of the text, while the remaining 40 percent offers her nonautograph compositions in languages other than English. These foreign language texts are manuscript copies or printed versions of prayers, speeches, letters, and poems that Elizabeth composed in one of the five non-English languages with which she was at ease--Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek.
As The Collected Works promised and Autograph Compositions makes apparent, the two books are interdependent, and readers of one will want to have the other at hand. While the books share the same chronological arrangement and numbering of documents, the historical notes, however, appear only in Collected Works, and the Autograph Compositions index includes names of people, not places, for which the reader needs the Collected Works index. Because the Autograph Compositions collection is a subset of the Collected Works items, the identifying numbers in Autograph Compositions by necessity have gaps in their order. Once the reader gets oriented to the system and works out the cross-referencing between the two books, based not on page number but on document number, the challenge of producing such integrated works becomes even more evident. Mueller and Marcus have done a beautiful job of making transparent their editorial decisions and structural organization, the result of which is to offer scholars the most full and nuanced access in print to these manuscripts.
The transcriptions preserve Elizabeth's spelling and capitalization, as well as indicating her additions and deletions. By printing passages with lines drawn through them to mark words that she replaced, the editors allow us to follow the linguistic decisions of Elizabeth as she shaped her ideas for an audience. Six well-chosen images of letters and documents provide photographic contact with her handwriting and her physical arrangement of words. The editors preserve the original line breaks in her poems (not in her letters or speeches), and it is especially powerful to see, for example, the original layout of her poem, "No Crooked Leg," in comparison to the modernized version in the Collected Works.
The introduction by Janel Mueller is in itself a significant, energizing reflection on the uses and potential of textual analysis of Elizabeth's compositions. After describing the editorial principles that she and Marcus employed, Mueller highlights some of the richness inherent in studying these compositions. Areas to investigate include the changes in Elizabeth's handwriting over her lifetime, from the bold Italic hand of her youth to the loose "running" hand of her maturity; her development as a writer in different genres; the way she thought and then revised her thinking, as evidenced in her editorial markings; the relationship between her spelling and her speaking, particularly in regard to matters of accent and inflection; and the significance of Elizabeth's multilingual prayers. On this last topic, Mueller offers the fascinating insight that "all of her boldest addresses to God are couched in languages other than English" (pp. xxx-xxxi). This intriguing observation forms part of the editors' hope that, most of all, their works will encourage the further study of Elizabeth, not just as a queen, woman, and scholar, but in the widest sense of the word, as an author. In providing us with these intertwined editions, Mueller and Marcus have gone a long way toward facilitating and inspiring this journey.
If Mueller and Marcus have offered Elizabeth as creator, Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman focus on Elizabeth as creation. In The Myth of Elizabeth they present ten essays devoted to exploring the ways that sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century writers and artists evoked their own Elizabeth that, by definition, was at odds with the regal reality. The readable and engaging introduction, jointly authored, locates the creation of the myth at the intersection of English ideas of gender, religion, and nationalism. As the unmarried queen defended her established church against foreign Catholic enemies, her legendary status developed. The positive elements of the myth included Elizabeth as a warrior queen, astute politician, and singular virgin. The negative possibilities--persecutor of Catholics, lascivious wanton--stemmed from the conflict between the limitations of her sex and the male power she wielded, but they ultimately failed to tarnish her image. The power and resiliency of the myth, Freeman and Doran assert, lay in its origin in the Elizabethan court under the manipulation of the queen herself. She embraced praise and excised criticism, selecting what she liked and ignoring the bitter parts. The myth lasted through the centuries because it embodied a truth, fostered by the queen and adopted by later scholars (J. E. Neale, Frances Yates, Roy Strong, Stephen Greenblatt) against other competing, contradictory truths.
The tri-partite structure of the book is mostly chronological. The first section, "Trojan Horses: Contemporary Criticisms of Elizabeth," treats two of the major writers who contributed to the religious and cultural image of Elizabeth during her own lifetime, John Foxe and Edmund Spenser. In a compelling essay that echoes through many of the later discussions, Freeman analyzes the changing attitude of John Foxe toward the protestant queen who, in his view, stopped reforming shy of the goal. Freeman's essay, "Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,'" charts Foxe's increasing criticism of Elizabeth in the 1563, 1570, and 1576 editions of his famous paean to English protestantism: "As long as Foxe thought that Elizabeth was carrying out God's will, there was no dissonance in his hymn of praise. But if Elizabeth was perceived to be backsliding from her duty to further the progress of the gospel, then praise could evolve into censure and prescription into reprimand" (p. 36). Freeman uses the example of Edward Dering's sermon chastising the queen as evidence of popular sentiment in support of Foxe's criticism. In Freeman's crisp, pungent prose, "Foxe had forged the axe which Dering used to hack at the royal image" (p. 45). With such public accusation of her lukewarm reforms, how did this criticism not color the myth of Elizabeth as God's agent? Freeman finds the answer in the queen's embrace of Foxe's praise even as she ignored the criticisms: she created her own reality that became the foundation of the myth. As the editors state in the introduction, "By identifying herself with these works, she appropriated the praise in them and made it possible for later generations to do in ignorance what she did from policy: to ignore the criticism in these works and to read them as straightforward panegyrics of her rule" (p. 6). In her blinkered approach to commentary on herself and her policies, Elizabeth kept her reputation and myth focused on the right message. Buttressing Freeman's point from a literary perspective, Andrew Hadfield, in "Duessa's Trial and Elizabeth's Error: Judging Elizabeth in Spenser's Fairie Queene," emphasizes Spenser's criticisms of female rule, Elizabeth's religious policies, and the failures of the 1590s. Hadfield argues that yet again, as she did with Foxe, Elizabeth encouraged Spenser's positive message to trample the negative.
With the religious and literary participants of myth-making in place, the second section, "Jacobean Perspectives: Politics Princess or Protestant Heroine?" moves into the public commentary on Elizabeth in the decades after her death. The stimulating essay from Patrick Collinson, "William Camden and the Anti-Myth of Elizabeth: Setting the Mould?" argues that Camden's Annales had little impact on the Elizabethan myth until their translation into English by Robert Norton in 1630. The real purpose of Camden, Collinson persuasively asserts, was to offer King James a dual history of the reigns of his real mother, Mary Stuart, and his surrogate mother, Elizabeth, that eulogized the former while presenting a mixed assessment of the latter. Camden's contribution to the myth, therefore, was to establish the themes of Elizabeth's reign for later generations: the centrality of Mary Stuart's saga, the nefarious aspects of the Earl of Leicester, and the statesmanship of Lord Burghley. A theatrical contrast of queens, this time to Elizabeth's advantage, came from Thomas Heywood, whose myth-making Teresa Grant discusses in "Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody." Grant argues that "Heywood's real importance was that he made his staging of Elizabeth almost as popular as she was herself: to have produced the most printed play of the seventeenth century is not a feat to be underestimated in the face of competition from some of the greatest playwrights the world has ever known" (p. 137). Her thoughtful essay finds that the play's popularity in the seventeenth century stemmed from its criticism of Mary Tudor's Catholicism and its praise of Elizabeth's martial protestantism. This same protestant power Lisa Richardson discusses in "Elizabeth in Arcadia: Fulke Greville and John Hayward's Construction of Elizabeth, 1610-12." Richardson traces the impact of Philip Sidney's Arcadian values on Greville and Hayward, who were privately sharing their view of Elizabeth as an eloquent, liberal, loving prince with James's heir, Prince Henry. The implicit contrast between the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts would thus give instruction to the youth on whom protestants pinned their hopes. The section concludes with another impressive discussion of religious attitudes from Alexandra Walsham. In "'A Very Deborah?' The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch," Walsham first turns to examples of women in the Old Testament whom protestant writers urged Elizabeth to emulate. When she did not, in sufficient measure for these reformers, Walsham wonders why the myth of Elizabeth as a protestant heroine did not collapse. It remained intact, then and now in her view, because of Elizabeth's providential, repeated escapes from Catholic threats: "Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that she largely had the Roman Catholics to thank for her elevation to the status of a Protestant icon" (p. 151). That icon continued to figure in religious debates throughout the seventeenth century, as Anglicans and Catholics competed for control of the Elizabethan myth.
The third section, "Elizabeth Engendered: Presentation and Practice," concludes with four essays devoted to image-making and problematic sources. In a provocative and intriguing essay, "Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I," Susan Doran argues that portraits of the queen have few references to the Virgin Mary. The familiar images of the phoenix, pelican, sieve, and ermine, for example, can evoke other meanings, such as the idea of sacrifice, of hereditary rule, of uniqueness. While Elizabeth was unusual in being unmarried as a ruler, "the symbols used in her representation were generally more varied and conventional than either modern historiography or the popular media allow" (p. 193). The mask of youth in so many of her later portraits had less to do with eternal virginity, in Doran's view, than it did with maintaining a national image of military strength and indominability against foreign threats. Brett Usher also wants to upend received wisdom, in this case about the queen's attitude toward clerical marriage, in "Queen Elizabeth and Mrs. Bishop." He argues that Elizabeth had no antipathy toward bishops who married. Harington's famous anecdote about the queen's rude remark to her ecclesiastical hosts, the Parkers--"Madam I may not call you and Mistress I am ashamed to call you ... but yet I do thank you" (p. 207)--reflected its author's ideas, not the queen's, according to Usher, and Harington meant the episode to resonate with its recipient, Prince Henry. Moreover, Usher thinks the conversation occurred during the reign of Queen Mary, when the married Parker was suffering under the Catholic censure of his union. But beyond critiquing Harington, himself an easy target, Usher most powerfully turns to the Elizabethan bishops as a group to see whether the celibates dominated and prospered at the expense of the married clergy. Of the 75 men appointed bishops by Elizabeth, "only 20 were celibates and they account for only 29 of all 102 promotions" (p. 202). Outside of the four famous celibates--Grindal, Whitgift, Bancroft, and Jewel--the unmarried bishops tended to receive the poorer livings. In essence, he concludes, the marital status of a bishop was immaterial to Elizabeth. This rich essay deserves to be widely read. "Harington's Gossip" by Jason Scott-Warren continues the book's critique of the court commentator in asserting that Harington's stories revealed more about his own views, especially of women, than they did about the queen. His complaints about Elizabeth, in Scott-Warren's cogent analysis, were part of a misguided strategy in the 1590s to win favor from the future King James. When that gossip missed its mark, Harington offered stories extolling the dead queen that finally he shaped in praise of the living king--all, however, to no effect. The final essay by Thomas Betteridge, "A Queen for All Seasons: Elizabeth I on Film," argues that films devoted to Elizabeth ignore Elizabethan history to mirror women's issues of their own era. While mentioning a healthy number of movies, Betteridge focuses on Fire over England (Flora Robson, 1937), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Bette Davis, 1939), and Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett, 1998). These three films define their Elizabeths in terms of her choice between personal fulfillment in love and public success in governing: the seductive, cajoling Robson sacrifices a personal life in order to defend England from continental aggression; Davis is the unnatural public performer who suffers privately; and Blanchett rejects love by adopting a freakish facade. By ignoring the riveting history of the era and starkly posing such a simple view of Elizabeth's character, these films indicate to Betteridge that "our culture's ways of making sense of strong women have not moved on much since the sixteenth century" (p. 258). Of Judi Dench's Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, Betteridge wonders whether her brief portrayal won an award because of "the power of the figure being portrayed? Was the Oscar really for Dench or for that greatest of Elizabethan actors--Elizabeth herself" (p. 259)? Given the political nature of the awards, it is likely that Dench received the Oscar for Elizabeth but earned it the year before in Mrs. Brown.
Two suggestions: a unified bibliography for all essays would have been helpful, as would more illustrations in the essay on portraiture. But these are minor matters. The authors--historians, literary scholars, and editors--engage across the pages with the ideas of their fellow contributors in an interdisciplinary discussion focused on the central question of royal myth-making. It is hard to imagine a more riveting or coherent group of essays than those in The Myth of Elizabeth.
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Citation:
Mary Hill Cole. Review of Doran, Susan; Freeman, Thomas S., eds., The Myth of Elizabeth and
Mueller, Janel; Marcus, Leah S., eds., Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9024
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