Abstract
Giambattista Basile’s fairy tales are known for their exuberant berant language in contrast to the “chaste compactness” Walter Benjamin claimed as a defining feature of most fairy tales.1 Basile’s portrayal of a beautiful woman in “The Myrtle” is typical of his rhetorical amplifications and his figurative hyperbole: when the prince beholds the “lovely girl” who would become his bride, “he saw the flower of beauty, the marvel of all women, the mirror and painted egg of Venus, a beautiful little tidbit of Love. He saw a baby doll, a gleaming dove, a Fata Morgana, a banner, a golden spike of wheat; he saw a stealer of hearts, a falcon’s eye, a full moon, a little pigeon face, a morsel fit for a king, a jewel; he saw, in short, an eyepopping spectacle.”2
“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of us all?”
—The Brothers Grimm, “Snow White”
“But she was earnest with me to declare which of them I judged fairest. I said, ‘She was the fairest Queen in England and mine the fairest Queen in Scotland.’”
—James Melville, the Scottish ambassador reporting on his meeting with Elizabeth in 1564
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the World of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). See Elizabeth Harries on the limitations of Benjamin’s definition, Twice Upon A Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12.
Giambattista Basile, “The Myrtle,” in The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones, trans. Nancy Canepa (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 52–60.
Qtd. in Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 242.
Sir Philp Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New York: Penguin Classics, 1977), 159.
Lüthi, Max. The Fairy Tale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 20.
For useful discussions on early modern concepts of beauty, see Anna Riehl, The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010);
Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); and
Patricia Philippy, Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Sara F. Matthews Grieco, “The Body, Appearance, and Sexuality,” in A History of Women: Renaissance and Englightenment Paradoxes, eds. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 58.
Basile, “The Two Cakes,” in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, ed. Jack Zipes (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 632.
D’Aulnoy, “The White Cat,” in Wonder Tales: Six French Stories of Enchantmen, ed. Marina Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19–63.
Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, “The Hind in the Woods,” in The Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, trans. Annie Macdonell (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1892), 347–76.
On Disney’s Americanization and commercialization of the German Snow White tale, see Jack Zipes, “Breaking the Disney Spell,” From Mouse to Mermaid. The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, et. al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 21–42.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 36.
Cristina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 33–35.
Wolfgang Mieder, Tradition and Innovation in Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 22.
James McGlathery, Fairy Tale Romance: The Grimms, Basile, and Perrault (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 121.
See Christine Shojaei Kawan, “A Brief Literary History of Snow White,” Fabula 49, no. 3–4 (2008), 325–41;
Steven Swann Jones, The New Comparative Method. Structural and Symbolic Analysis of the Allomotifs of & Snow White (Helsinki: FF Communications, 1990). As Jones carefully outlines, early modern tales include some but not all of the episodes and structural motifs he has identified as characteristic of “Snow White.” There have also been various attempts to locate a historical source for the character of Snow White. In 1994, German scholar Eckhard Sander wrote a book in which he suggests that the Snow White character was based on Margarete von Waldek, a German countess with whom Philip II was said to have had a liaison. Schneewittchen: Märchen oder Wahrheit?: Ein lokaler Bezug zum Kellerwald Gudensberg-Gleichen (Snow White: Fairytale or Truth?: A local reference to the ‘Kellerwald’ region) (Wartberg: Verlag, 1994). I am grateful to Brigitte Gebert for her help with this reference.
Frederic J. Baumgartner, Louis XII (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 1996), 240.
Qtd. in Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995), 34.
On Queen Juana, see Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)
and Maria Gomez, Juana of Castile: History and Myth of the Mad Queen (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008).
Chrimes, S. B., Henry VII (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), 236–43.
Retha Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See chapter 2, “English Negotiators” for a helpful look at the process of the royal marriage market.
William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the Eighth, ed. J. A. Froude (London: Parker, Son, and Bourne, 1861), 58.
Susan James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, 127.
In addition to Riehl, ch. 2, see Karim-Cooper and Phillippy; also Frances Dolan, “Taking the Pencil Out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 108, no. 2 (March, 1993), 224–39 and
Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face Painting Conventions (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994).
See Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of A King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994)
Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
A. Labanoff, Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Marie Stuart, 1844, cited in Jane Dunn, Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens (New York: Vintage, 2005), 68.
Qtd. in John Guy, The True Life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 430.
James Melville, Memoirs of His Own Life. Reprint (London: Chapman & Dodd, 1922, 55.
John Clapham, Elizabeth of England: Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth, eds. Evelyn Plummer Read and Conyers Read (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 86.
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© 2012 Jo Eldridge Carney
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Carney, J.E. (2012). The Fairest of Them All: Queenship and Beauty. In: Fairy Tale Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269690_5
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