The Queen’s Men and the Performance of Allegiance, Conformity, and Difference in Elizabethan Norwich

Abstract

In their book, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean suggest a number of reasons why Elizabeth I formed a new theater company in 1583. Beyond centralizing control of the burgeoning theater industry at court, the queen and Privy Council’s agenda included ‘unifying the country’ by ‘spreading a court-inspired culture,’ not only carrying ‘the name and influence of the monarch through the country’ but also giving ‘the impression of a watchful monarch, one whose “men” ranged over the land.’ A key political concern of the government ‘centred on the religious arguments of the day, issues imbued with dangers from the old faith and problems from the new’, as Alexandra Johnston also demonstrated in the previous chapter.¹ Viewed from the perspective painted by Patrick Collinson, Elizabeth I, with her insistence on moderate Protestant reform, anxiously presided as ‘a protestant paragon ... head of Christ’s Church on earth’ over ‘popish recusants’ and ‘church papists,’ on the one hand, and the godly, Calvinist-inspired ‘hot-gospellers’ or ‘Puritans,’ on the other.²