Abstract
Elizabeth’s refusal either to make an expeditious, politic match or to rule out marriage altogether embroiled the country in a series of prolonged marriage negotiations that dominated the first half of the reign. The rhetorical challenge facing Elizabeth was to maintain the mutual force of both choices, neither precluding marriage altogether nor conceding to a marriage she did not desire. Only thus could she enjoy the personal and political advantages of courtship while maintaining her autonomy and freedom of choice.
Then those that daylie see her grace,
Whose vertue passeth euerie wight,—
Her comelie corps, her christall ace,—
They ought to pray, both day and night,
That God may graunt most happie state
Unto that Princesse and her mate.
“A Strife betwene Appelles and Pigmalion”1
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Notes
Quoted from Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 73; cited parenthetically throughout as (CW).
J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1559–1581 (London: Alden Press 1953), 88, writes, the main “emphasis had shifted abruptly to the succession”; however, as Susan Doran points out in Monarchy and Matrimony (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), this is a misreading of the situation. As the quoted passage illustrates, parliament’s petitions placed considerably more emphasis on marriage and giving birth to an heir.
As Mary Douglas writes in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London; New York: Pantheon, 1996), 74, “Interest in [the body’s] apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions. If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries.”
See Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power,” Signs 1 (1975), 34–35. For a compelling counterargument, see
Mary Thomas Crane, “‘Video et Taceo,’” Studies in English Literature 28 (1988), 10.
Citing this remark, Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patrimony,” Feminist Review 4 (1980), 52, criticizes Elizabeth for acquiring her power at the expense of other women: “In the de facto weakness of her sex lies the evidence of her special strength. And, as if to make a demonstration of her powers… Elizabeth sets herself apart from other women.”
For a survey of anti-feminist stereotypes, see Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 47–71.
Martin A. S. Hume, ed., Calendar of State Papers Simancas (1892; Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1971), 1:263.
Doran thinks Elizabeth was serious about the proposal, although the Scottish ambassador dismissed it immediately, and other historians have been skeptical. MacCaffrey , Elizabeth I (London, New York: Arnold, 1993), 85, writes, “For the historian it is hard to regard Elizabeth’s proposal as anything but preposterous.”
At this juncture, the contention made by Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse (Cambridge, New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2005), that Elizabeth made important political decisions in consultation with a few carefully chosen advisors rather than in parliament seems apropos.
Simonds D’Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments (London, 1682), 81.
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 12.
Citing this line, Susan Doran, Queen Elizabeth I (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 77, interprets this very differently: “As Elizabeth was thinking to marry ‘as a prince’ and not for private pleasure, she decided to choose a man of royal blood from abroad as her consort.”
Printed inElizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals, ed. Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 34–35.
The term, “political unconscious,” comes from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). The gender unconscious is my own adaptation of Jameson’s term. MacCaffrey, 91, notes that Elizabeth’s speech contains “a vague reference to the proposed Dudley match with Mary,” but does not specify what the reference is.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), 68, explains that posies, or short epigrams, were extremely fashionable—“made as it were upon a table, or in a windowe, or upon the wall or manteli of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed every man might come,” but also “put in paper and in bookes, and used as ordinarie missives.”
A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs in the Reign of Elizabeth from the Tear 1571 to 1596, ed. William Murdin (William Bowyer, 1759), 2:760. Marcus, Mueller, Rose, and Doran all believe the epigram was written during the first part of Elizabeth’s reign. Steven W. May, Elizabeth I: Selected Works (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), thinks the poem was written while Elizabeth was still a princess because the signature ends with a knot similar to the one her father used in his signature. May points out that there are no extant examples of this signature after Elizabeth became queen, when she began signing her letters “Elizabeth R.” Though the point is well taken, we cannot know for certain that Elizabeth stopped using the knotted signature entirely because, as Susan Doran commented in response to my query, virtually all the extant autograph letters written while she was queen are official correspondence. Most of her more intimate letters to Leicester have disappeared; the ones printed in Collected Works are copies and thus lack a signature. As Carol Levin suggested to me at the Elizabeth I Conference where I first presented my reading of this poem, Elizabeth may have chosen the more intimate signature on this particular occasion, using a knot instead of an P. for Regina, to strike a more reassuring and less regal tone.
Janel Mueller, “Elizabeth I,” in Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, ed. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay (New York: Modern Language Association, 2000), 120, writes: “Again and again in her writings, Elizabeth is found assessing a situation, action, or emotion in terms of the Bible verse or the classical maxim or the proverbial saying that it exemplifies; if there is no such encapsulation at hand, she just as directly proceeds to fashion the new sententia that the present occasion requires.”
See Elizabeth: The Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, ed. David Starkey and Susan Doran (Greenwich, London: Chatto & Windus with National Maritime Museum, 2003), 201. The commentary suggests that Elizabeth may have written the poem “to Robert Cecil who was a hunchback”; however, the poem itself suggests the addressee had a suspicious mind not a deformed body.
Victor von Klarwill, ed., Queen Elizabeth and Some Foreigners (New York: Brentano, 1928), 238–41.
Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 224.
In “The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene,” English Literary Renaissance 17 (1987): 170, Maureen Quilligan comments, “A female head to a male body politic poses the problem of monstrosity Knox trumpeted so impoliticly months before Elizabeth ascended the throne, and she was continually forced to remind her Parliaments, in exactly those terms, of her authority.”
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 23.
Jasper Ridley, Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1988), 148.
Victor von Klarwill, ed., Queen Elizabeth and Some Foreigners (New York: Brentano’s, 1928), 241.
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© 2010 Ilona Bell
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Bell, I. (2010). Parliamentary Speeches (1563, 1566) and the Psalter Posy. In: Elizabeth I. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107861_6
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