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The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens pp 9–27Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Stagecraft and Statecraft: Queenship and Theatricality on the Shakespearean Stage

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Part of the book series: Queenship and Power ((QAP))

Abstract

Early modern anxieties about female rulers and mistrust of the theater share many commonalities. Queen Elizabeth I, when convenient, employed the doctrine of “the king’s two bodies” and other forms of political androgyny and gendered rhetoric to negotiate her rule and navigate through these fears in a patriarchal world. Similarly, anti-theatrical Puritans expressed unease at the male gender becoming effeminized through cross-dressing and role playing. The ideas behind the “theater” of Queen Elizabeth’s gender-blurring rule were actualized in the playhouse, where the boy actors also had “two bodies”: the male body of a boy actor and the female body of the queenly character. This chapter investigates criticism of queenship and theatricality guided by this pervasive idea, now commonly referred to as “the queen’s two bodies.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (Geneva: J Poullian and A. Rebul, 1558).

  2. 2.

    Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 2.

  3. 3.

    John Rainolds, Th’overthrow of stage-playes, by the way of controversie betwixt D. Gager and D. Rainoldes (Middelburg: Printed by Richard Schilders, 1599).

  4. 4.

    John R. Elliot, Oxford 1: the REED series edition of dramatic records of the university and city of Oxford, England up to and including 1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 131–133.

  5. 5.

    Elliot, Oxford 1: REED, 133.

  6. 6.

    Elliot, Oxford 1: REED, 133.

  7. 7.

    William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by John Wilders, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 5.2.226.

  8. 8.

    Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 113.

  9. 9.

    See Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65.

  10. 10.

    See especially Eggert, Showing Like A Queen; Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) whose criticism will be discussed in this chapter.

  11. 11.

    Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) and Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Swift Printers Ltd. for Royal Historical Society, 1977), x, 12.

  12. 12.

    Eggert, Showing Like a Queen, 4.

  13. 13.

    See note 10.

  14. 14.

    See especially Susan Frye, Elizabeth I the Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  15. 15.

    Frye, Elizabeth I the Competition for Representation, 12.

  16. 16.

    Levin, Heart and Stomach, 121.

  17. 17.

    Frye, Elizabeth I and the Competition for Representation, 13.

  18. 18.

    Frye, Elizabeth I and the Competition for Representation, 13.

  19. 19.

    Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 27.

  20. 20.

    Lisa Hopkins, “The Words of a Queen: Elizabeth I on stage and page,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, ed. Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), 152.

  21. 21.

    Frye, Elizabeth I and the Competition for Representation, 4.

  22. 22.

    In the period, “prince” could refer to a male or female ruler, but it still carried masculine connotations, and Elizabeth I used the label more than she used “princess.”

  23. 23.

    Rayne Allinson, “Conversations on kingship: the letters of Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI,” in The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern, ed. Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise J. Wilkinson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), 133.

  24. 24.

    Constance Jordan, “Representing Political Androgyny: More on the Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990), 157.

  25. 25.

    See Frye, Elizabeth I and the Competition for Representation, and Jordan, “Representing Political Androgyny.”

  26. 26.

    Susan Watkins, In Public and in Private: Elizabeth I and her World (Singapore: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 46.

  27. 27.

    Frye, Elizabeth I and theCompetition for Representation, 3.

  28. 28.

    Levin, Heart and Stomach, 144–45.

  29. 29.

    Levin, Heart and Stomach, 125. See also Queen Elizabeth’s reported remarks on being the “husband” to King Philip II’s widowed sister Juana, 133.

  30. 30.

    Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 14, and also Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, N. Y., 1986), 137.

  31. 31.

    Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 101.

  32. 32.

    Levin, Heart and Stomach, 128.

  33. 33.

    Levin, Heart and Stomach, 133–37.

  34. 34.

    Marcus, “Comic Heroines,” 135.

  35. 35.

    Lori Leigh, Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine: Staging Female Characters in the Late Plays and Early Adaptations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  36. 36.

    Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83.

  37. 37.

    William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 4.4.454–55.

  38. 38.

    William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 4.2.171–73.

  39. 39.

    Constantin Stanislavski, Building a Character, trans. Nick O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 149.

  40. 40.

    Michael Chekhov, To the Actor, ed. Mala Powers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 78–79.

  41. 41.

    Travis Curtright, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 3–4. Curtright’s “Introduction” summarizes this argument very well, and his book demonstrates how a rhetorical acting style could present lifelike characters.

  42. 42.

    Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, eds., The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15.

  43. 43.

    Anthony B. Dawson, “Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the actors’ body,” in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41–42. Dawson is discussing Sarah Siddons performance of Lady Macbeth in the “sleepwalking scene,” but his conclusions are applied to Elizabethan acting. The chapter in general provides an interesting framework for explaining the relationship between actor and character.

  44. 44.

    Thomas Heywood, An apology for actors Containing three briefe treatises, (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1612).

  45. 45.

    Quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 3rd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 226.

  46. 46.

    Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 43.

  47. 47.

    William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 2.2.362–64.

  48. 48.

    Dawson, “Performance and Participation,” 40. Dawson writes specifically of the boy actor on pp. 42–45.

  49. 49.

    Marcus, “Comic Heroines,” 135.

  50. 50.

    In Puzzling Shakespeare, Marcus makes a similar point using a 1566 speech of Queen Elizabeth, 55–6.

  51. 51.

    Paul Menzer, “The Actor’s Inhibition: Early Modern Acting and the Rhetoric of Restraint,” Renaissance Drama, New Series, 35 (2006): 87.

  52. 52.

    See Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (Brighton: Harvester, 1981). Shepherd makes a distinction between “warrior women” and Amazons though the terms are often used interchangeably.

  53. 53.

    Qtd. in Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women, 22.

  54. 54.

    William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 1.4.113–14.

  55. 55.

    William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 1.3.18–22 and 1.1.85.

  56. 56.

    William Shakespeare, King John, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann, Arden 2nd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1954), 1.2.150; King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 4.4.1.0.

  57. 57.

    There is some debate over the Peacham drawing as a representation of Shakespeare’s play. See June Schlueter’s “Rereading the Peacham Drawing” and for a counter-argument, Richard Levin’s “The Longleat Manuscript and Titus Andronicus.” Either way, the drawing represents a queen character.

  58. 58.

    Levin, Heart and Stomach, 148.

  59. 59.

    William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. by Suzanne Gossett, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 5.1.101–4.

  60. 60.

    Richard Mulcaster, The Queen’s Majesty’s Passages and Related Documents, ed. Germaine Warkentin (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2004), 76. Mulcaster’s comments on the voice of Queen Elizabeth are particularly salient when one considers he instructed boys in voice and rhetoric.

  61. 61.

    Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 26–7.

  62. 62.

    David Mann, Shakespeare’s Women: Performance and Conception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 110. See his reference to Sir Simonds D’Ewes.

  63. 63.

    Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

  64. 64.

    William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. by James R. Siemon, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 1.3.240.

  65. 65.

    Mann, Shakespeare’s Women, 102–4.

  66. 66.

    William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2, ed. by Ronald Knowles, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 3.2.393–96.

  67. 67.

    Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions (London: Imprinted for Thomas Gosson dwelling in Pater noster row at the signe of the Sunne, 1582).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Victoria University of Wellington, Theatre Programme, Wellington, New Zealand

    Lori Leigh

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    Kavita Mudan Finn

  2. Independent Scholar, Beaver Falls, PA, USA

    Valerie Schutte

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Leigh, L. (2018). Stagecraft and Statecraft: Queenship and Theatricality on the Shakespearean Stage. 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_2

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