Abstract
The plays of William Shakespeare are arguably some of the most written about, criticized, and reproduced pieces of literature ever written. To contribute to this ongoing and ever-expanding body of scholarship, the contributions in this book offer research focused on queens and queenship in the plays of William Shakespeare. Queenship as an area of study has exploded over the last thirty years, but it is only within the last ten years that scholarship has shifted from explorations of potential queenly power to investigations that challenge traditional concepts of royal male authority. What follows is an examination of queens and queenship in Shakespeare ranging from general studies to new interpretations of the queen’s two bodies to paradigm-shifting investigations of rhetoric and theatricality.
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Notes
- 1.
Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love, dir. John Madden (Los Angeles: Miramax, 1998).
- 2.
Ironically, Shakespeare may well have encountered Elizabeth’s successor King James I in person, as his company, renamed the King’s Men, performed several times at court, but James has always been less glamorous than his predecessor.
- 3.
These include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King John, Richard II, Henry V, Parts 2 and 3 of Henry VI, Richard III, Henry VIII, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline.
- 4.
Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); J. L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
- 5.
Earenfight, Queenship, 28. Palgrave Macmillan’s Queenship and Power series, edited by Carole Levin and Charles Beem, has 47 titles as of this writing, ranging from literary and historical studies to portraiture, iconography, and popular media.
- 6.
In addition to the collection The Birth of a Queen, edited by Sarah Duncan and Valerie Schutte (2016), other recent studies of Mary I include Duncan, Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of England’s First Queen (2012), Schutte, Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion (2015), and Thomas, The King’s Pearl: Henry VIII and His Daughter Mary (2017).
- 7.
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Swift Printers Ltd. for Royal Historical Society, 1977).
Bibliography
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Finn, K.M., Schutte, V. (2018). Introduction. In: Finn, K., Schutte, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74518-3_1
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