Abstract
In the last three chapters of Learned Queen, St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians has repeatedly echoed in contexts that portray Elizabeth as a queen who unifies through love. In the later years of her reign, the notions of St. Paul and love continue to resonate—but now Elizabeth becomes a pacific and wise Queen of Love through an aspect of Pauline rhetoric that this book has not yet explored: the idea that divine wisdom can manifest itself as folly. St. Paul writes in I Corinthians: God has “made the wisedome of this worlde foolish,” and “God hath chosen the foolish things of the worlde, to confounde the wise” (1:20, 27).1
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Notes
For perhaps the most famous discussion of Bottom’s echo of 1 Corinthians, see Annabel Patterson, “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler, 165–78 (New York: Garland, 1998).
see Vasiliki Markidou, “‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Religious Controversies of Late Sixteenth-Century England,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 9 (2001): 55–67.
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Routledge, 1979), 4.1.203–12.
Montrose, “’shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Richard Dutton, 101–38 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598, ed. Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009)
Anna Crabbe drew my attention to St. Augustine’s use of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and she notes that Boethius had this scenario in mind when he has Lady Philosophy banish the Muses in the first scene of Consolation. Crabbe, “Literary Design in the De Consolatione Philosophiae,” in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson, 237–74 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 251–52.
Jennifer Clement discusses the presence of divinity in this secular image in her essay, “‘The Imperial Vot’ress’: Divinity, Femininity, and Elizabeth I in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34 (Winter 2008): 163–84.
Elizabeth I: Collected Works (henceforth CW), ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 348.
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© 2010 Linda Shenk
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Shenk, L. (2010). Elizabeth, Shakespeare, and the Concord of Folly. In: Learned Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101852_7
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