QUEENSHIP AND POWER EARLY MODERN STUDIES. Edited by Anna Riehl Bertolet

Transcription

1 QUEENSHIP AND POWER QUEENS MATTER IN EARLY MODERN STUDIES Edited by Anna Riehl Bertolet

2 Queenship and Power Series Editors Charles Beem University of North Carolina Pembroke, NC, USA Carole Levin University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, NE, USA

3 This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women s studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies that queens both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization. More information about this series at

4 Anna Riehl Bertolet Editor Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies

5 Editor Anna Riehl Bertolet Auburn University Auburn, USA Queenship and Power ISBN ISBN (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

6 To Carole Levin on her 70th birthday August 2018

7 Acknowledgements This book would be impossible without the enthusiasm and wisdom of its contributors. My thanks go out to every one of the scholars whose essays appear in this collection and also to Margaret Hannay and Debra Barrett-Graves, two generous scholars who were an important part of this project at its early stages. Special thanks to the board of the Queen Elizabeth I Society and the organizers of the South-Central Renaissance Conference (SCRC), where so many studies of early modern queens have been shared since In fact, many of the essays in this collection were presented and discussed at the SCRC, and many more papers read in this stimulating venue went on to become published articles, book chapters, and monographs. For their guidance in planning and shaping this collection, I give hearty thanks to Erika Gaffney (Ashgate) and Chris Chappell (Palgrave). At Palgrave Macmillan, I am very grateful to Charles Beem, the co-editor of the Queenship and Power series, and Megan Laddusaw, the commissioning editor, for supporting this project and keeping it as a surprise for the series co-editor, Carole Levin. Many thanks also to the editorial assistant, Christine Pardue, who helped to usher this book through production, and to the anonymous readers at Palgrave for their detailed and insightful feedback. My heartfelt gratitude and deep love go to my family, especially my amazing husband Craig, my brilliant children Alexander and Jacob, and my incomparable mother Yana, and to my dear friend Carole Levin, to whom this book is dedicated, by whom it is inspired, and for whom it is a birthday gift. vii

8 Contents 1 Introduction: Studies of Queens in Honor of Carole Levin 1 Anna Riehl Bertolet Part I Prelude: Studying Queens 2 Queenship and Power: The Heart and Stomach of a Book Series 19 Charles Beem Part II Queens and Matters of Gender 3 Did Elizabeth s Gender Really Matter? 31 Susan Doran 4 A Great Reckoning in a Little Room: Elizabeth, Essex, and Royal Interruptions 53 Catherine Loomis ix

9 x Contents 5 We Are Such Stuff : Absolute Feminine Power vs. Cinematic Myth-Making in Julie Taymor s Tempest (2010) 67 Kirilka Stavreva Part III Queens and Marriage 6 Elizabeth I and the Marriage Crisis, John Lyly s Campaspe, and the Politics of Court Drama 83 Jane Donawerth 7 Tudor Consorts: The Politics of Matchmaking, Retha M. Warnicke 8 The Queen s Deathbed Wish in Early Modern Fairy Tales: Securing the Dynasty 123 Jo Eldridge Carney Part IV Queens and Religion 9 Spenser s Dragon Fight and the English Queen: The Struggle Over the Elizabethan Settlement 141 Donald Stump 10 Anne Boleyn s Legacy to Elizabeth I: Neoclassicism and the Iconography of Protestant Queenship 157 Helen Hackett 11 A Network of Honor and Obligation : Elizabeth as Godmother 181 Elaine Kruse

10 Contents xi Part V Queens, National Identity, and Diplomacy 12 Lesbianism in Early Modern Vernacular Romance: The Question of Historicity 201 John Watkins 13 Doppelgänger Queens: Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart 223 Anna Riehl Bertolet 14 Elizabeth I and the Politics of Invoking Russia in Shakespeare s Love s Labour s Lost 247 Linda Shenk 15 Queen Elizabeth I and the Elizabethan Court in the French Ambassador s Eyes 267 Estelle Paranque Part VI Inspired by the Queen: Queens in Literature 16 Queen of Love: Elizabeth I and Mary Wroth 287 Ilona Bell 17 Dressing Queens (and Some Others): Signifying Through Clothing in Wroth s Countess of Montgomery s Urania 307 Mary Ellen Lamb 18 Conjuring Three Queens and an Empress: The Philosophy of Enchantment in Margaret Cavendish s Blazing World 323 Brandie R. Siegfried

11 xii Contents Appendix A: Works by Carole Levin 347 Appendix B: The Queenship and Power Series 355 Bibliography 359 Index 387

12 Editor and Contributors About the Editor Anna Riehl Bertolet is an Associate Professor of English and Affiliate in Women s Studies at Auburn University, USA. She is the author of The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (2010); a co-editor, with Thomas Betteridge, of Tudor Court Culture (2010); with Carole Levin, Creating the Premodern in the Postmodern Classroom: Creativity in Early English Literature and History Courses (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming); and, with Carole Levin and Jo Eldridge Carney, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen : Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts (2016). Contributors Charles Beem is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, USA. He is the author of The Lioness Roared (2006) and the editor of The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England (2008), The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I (2011), The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwood s Itinerarium ad Windsor (2013), and The Man Behind the Queen: Male Consorts in History (2014). He is also, with Carole Levin, the editor of the book series Queenship and xiii

13 xiv Editor and Contributors Power for publisher Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently at work on the monograph Queenship in Early Modern Europe. Ilona Bell is Clarke Professor of English at Williams College, USA. She is the author of Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (1999) and Elizabeth I: the Voice of a Monarch (2010). She is the editor of Penguin s John Donne: Selected Poems (2007) and John Donne: Collected Poetry (2013) and, with Steven May for the Other Voice, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: the Manuscript and Printed Texts. She has written numerous essays on English Renaissance poetry by Wroth, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Jonson. Jo Eldridge Carney is a professor of English at The College of New Jersey, USA. She is a co-editor, with Carole Levin and Anna Riehl Bertolet, of A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen : Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts (Routledge, 2016). She has also published articles on Shakespeare, early modern queens, and Renaissance and contemporary fairy tales and edited essay collections on early modern queenship. She teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern British literature, the literary fairy tale, and contemporary literature. Her most recent book is Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (2012). Jane Donawerth is a professor of English and Affiliate in Women s Studies at the University of Maryland, USA. She is a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and author of Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (1984) and Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women s Tradition, (2011). She is co-translator for the Other Voice edition of selected works by Madeleine de Scudéry and is finishing an edition of selected works by Margaret Fell with Rebecca Lush. She helped to found the Attending to Early Modern Women symposium and was a founding co-editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She has published widely in early modern women, history of women s rhetorical theory, pedagogy, and science fiction by women. Susan Doran is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Fellow at St Benet s Hall, Oxford, UK. She has published widely on sixteenth-century English history, most recently Elizabeth I and Her Circle (2015) and Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of

14 Editor and Contributors xv Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2014), co-edited with Paulina Kewes. She is now working on the early years of James I s reign. Helen Hackett is a professor of English at University College London, UK. As well as writing on representations of Elizabeth I, she has written on women and early modern prose fiction (especially Lady Mary Wroth), Shakespeare (especially A Midsummer Night s Dream), and Catholic writers (especially the Aston-Thimelby circle). Her publications include A Short History of English Renaissance Drama (2013), Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (2009), and Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1995). Elaine Kruse is the Huge Professor of History emerita at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. She has published essays on the French court during Elizabeth s reign in collections edited by Carole Levin and others, including Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women (1995) and High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations (2003). Mary Ellen Lamb is a professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University, USA. In addition to her numerous essays on early modern women in anthologies and such journals as English Literary Renaissance and Criticism, she has published several monographs, including Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (1990), The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (2006), and an abridged version of Mary Wroth s Countess of Montgomery s Urania (2011). She is the editor of the Sidney Journal and is on the editorial board of English Literary Renaissance. She is currently collaborating on an edition of poetry by William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. Catherine Loomis is a professor of English and Women s Studies at the University of New Orleans, USA. She is the co-editor of Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage (2015) and the author of William Shakespeare: A Documentary Volume (2002), The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (2010), and essays on Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and early modern women writers. Estelle Paranque is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at New College of the Humanities and Honorary Research Fellow within the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. She completed her Ph.D. at University College London in Her research

15 xvi Editor and Contributors focuses on representations on Elizabeth I of England in the French royal correspondence with their ambassadors. She has published several essays on Elizabeth s warlike rhetoric and Henry III of France s father figure. She is co-editing, with Nate Probasco and Claire Jowitt, Colonization, Piracy and Trade in Early Modern Europe: The Roles of Powerful Women and Queens (forthcoming). Linda Shenk is an associate professor and Associate Director of Graduate Education in the Department of English at Iowa State University, USA, where she teaches Shakespeare and early modern drama. She has received Iowa State University s Early Achievement in Teaching Award as well as the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Jerry Shakeshaft Master Teacher Award, and her teaching has prompted students to give her the nickname Shenkspeare. Professor Shenk is the author of Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry as well as articles on Elizabeth I, early modern drama, and court entertainment. Brandie R. Siegfried is the Nan Grass Professor of English at Brigham Young University, USA. She is immediate past president of the Queen Elizabeth I Society and writes regularly on the relationship between Elizabethan literary history and the cultural influences of sixteenth-century Ireland. She also publishes on women writers of the scientific revolution, giving special attention to the work of Margaret Cavendish, a focus that has recently culminated in the volume of essays co-edited with Lisa Sarasohn, God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish (2016). Kirilka Stavreva is a professor of English and co-founder of Foxden Press, a letterpress printing venue, at Cornell College, USA. She is author of Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England (2015), co-author of the essay cluster, Operation Shakespeare in Post-Communist Bulgaria in Toronto Slavic Quarterly (2017), contributing editor of an essay cluster on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Dante s Divine Comedy (Pedagogy, 2013) and of the e-book series Major Genres, Forms, and Media in British Literature and Major Authors and Movements in British Literature (2017). She has published articles on Renaissance popular literature, theater, and gender politics, and Global Shakespeare.

16 Editor and Contributors xvii Donald Stump is a professor of English at Saint Louis University, USA. With Carole Levin, he founded the Queen Elizabeth I Society in 2001 and served as its first president. With Carole and Linda Shenk, he edited Elizabeth I and the Sovereign Arts (2011) and, with Susan Felch, Elizabeth I and Her Age: A Norton Critical Edition (2009). His publications also include articles on Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe and online reference databases on Sidney and Spenser. He is currently writing a monograph on representations of Elizabeth in Spenser s Faerie Queene. Retha M. Warnicke is a professor of history at Arizona State University, USA. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (1989), Mary Queen of Scots (2006), and Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, and Commoners (2012). John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA, where he holds affiliate appointments in History and Italian Studies. He is the author of The Spector of Dido: Spenser and the Virgilian Tradition (1995), Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (2009), and, with Carole Levin, Shakespeare s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Era (2012). He is currently finishing a book on premodern marriage diplomacy.

17 List of Figures Fig. 1.1 Carole Levin. Photo by Anna Riehl Bertolet 2 Fig Hans Holbein the Younger, Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus (1533), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, bpk/ Kupferstichkabinett. SMB / Jörg P. Anders 161 Fig Woodcut illustration for the Aprill Eclogue by Edmund Spenser, in The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), f. 11v. Timewatch Images / Alamy Stock Photo 167 Fig A lady traditionally identified as Mary Queen of Scots (w/c on vellum), by Nicholas Hilliard ( ) 239 Fig Miniature of Queen Elizabeth I by Isaac Oliver. England, late 16th century 245 Fig Elizabeth I Portbury. (Elizabeth I Hunting in Woodstock Park) 274 xix

18 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Studies of Queens in Honor of Carole Levin Anna Riehl Bertolet This collection of scholarship on early modern queens is an offering to honor Carole Levin, Willa Cather Professor of History, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, on her seventieth birthday. The scope of this book spans two centuries of queens and their afterlives, from the historical Elizabeth of York to the fantastical Empress of Cavendish s Blazing World. We study these queens from so many angles and do so by freely crossing the boundaries of our various disciplines partly because of Carole s fearless interdisciplinary scholarship, mentoring, and editing. The essays in this volume are grouped in the categories that mark some of Carole s deepest research interests and the hallmarks of her methodology. Gender, marriage, religion, national identity, and diplomacy and, above all, the interplay between the historical and the literary have been at the center of Carole s research projects as well as the studies of numerous scholars whom Carole mentored and encouraged or collaborated with. This volume brings all of these facets of Carole s interests to bear on her greatest love: queenship (Fig. 1.1). A.R. Bertolet (*) Auburn University, Auburn, USA The Author(s) 2018 A.R. Bertolet (ed.), Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies, Queenship and Power, 1

19 2 A.R. BERTOLET Fig. 1.1 Carole Levin. Photo by Anna Riehl Bertolet

20 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDIES OF QUEENS IN HONOR OF CAROLE LEVIN 3 Carole s research, teaching, mentorship, and friendship have touched and inspired countless people around the globe. An analysis of the extent, abundance, and diversity of Carole s work and influence would fill a booklength study on its own in a volume that could serve as a counterpart to Carole s groundbreaking cultural biography of Elizabeth I, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. The current volume is an opportunity to show rather than tell how influential, appreciated, and loved Carole is. To include all scholars whose contributions are rooted in Carole s studies and whose research has been nourished by her enthusiastic support, this collection would have to span several volumes. It could easily accommodate a book series of its own. Queens Matter contains the work of seventeen scholars who serve as the deputies of hundreds more, equally grateful researchers, as representatives of hundreds and hundreds of audience members who have been inspired by Carole s unforgettable talks, and thousands and thousands of readers around the world who have enjoyed Carole s books inside and outside the classroom. This book is but a synecdoche, a glimpse of the vast scholarly expanse of Carole s impact in the fields of late medieval and early modern history and culture. Carole Levin has written five monographs to date: Shakespeare s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (co-authored with John Watkins, 2009), Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture (2008), The Reign of Elizabeth I (2002), The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (1994), and Propaganda in the English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of King John (1988). Carole has co-edited thirteen essay collections and encyclopedias; she has also edited and co-edited two special issues of Explorations in Renaissance Culture (2004 and 2011) and either authored or co-authored over five dozen book chapters, introductions, and journal articles. Her most frequently referenced work is the pioneering study of Queen Elizabeth I: The Heart and Stomach of a King, which, now in its second edition, was named one of the top ten academic books of the 1990s by the readers of Lingua Franca in September On the creative end of scholarship, Carole authored some dramatic works, most recently a mesmerizing onehour show where Elizabeth I narrates her own story: Elizabeth I In Her Own Words. 1 1 See Appendix A for a full list of Carole Levin s published works to date.

21 4 A.R. BERTOLET Carole has received numerous awards for her scholarship and teaching, published poems and short plays, given numerous interviews, appeared on radio and television, and held a number of prestigious fellowships, most recently Fulbright Scholar at the University of York (2015). She is currently involved in two book series: the Early Modern Cultural Studies series at the University of Nebraska Press, successor of the Susquehanna University Press series, and the Queenship and Power series at Palgrave Macmillan. Carole excels equally at working in the archives and giving a public talk, lecturing to non-majors, and mentoring undergraduate majors, graduate students, and scholars in their early career and beyond. In the essays offered here, Carole s significance as a scholar is eminent, but also, now and then, one may glimpse her personal warmth and contagious dedication to the subject. Indeed, Carole s influence in the scholarly field is but one part of the story. Perhaps even more prominent are the imprints Carole leaves on the minds and hearts of the non-academic audiences as a public intellectual. Carole has been instrumental in fostering the study of queens, hence the title of this collection, Queens Matter. Carole co-founded, with Donald Stump, the Queen Elizabeth I Society, and she initiated and is co-editing, with Charles Beem, the Queenship and Power series at Palgrave Macmillan. The book series and Society quickly turned into complementary venues for the study of queens. The rich and lively annual meetings of the Queen Elizabeth I Society constitute, in effect, mini-conferences in their own right within the larger South- Central Renaissance Conference. These meetings continue to offer an opportunity to share the cutting-edge scholarship on Elizabeth I and other queens, envision new collaborations, and enjoy the festivities the Queen s Revels that sometimes featured playful dramatic entertainment written by Carole, such as The King Dreams of Marriage and The Heart and Stomach of a Queen. 2 Likewise, the Queenship and Power series ensures that the innovative studies of queens have a venue for publication. Charles Beem s insider account of the birth and development of this series is an apt prelude to this volume celebrating Carole s role in the rising scholarship of queenship. 2 Carole Levin, The King Dreams of Marriage: Henry VIII and His Wives, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.1 (2004): ; The Heart and Stomach of a Queen, in Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens, ed. Carole Levin and Christine Stewart- Nuñez (Palgrave, 2015),

22 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDIES OF QUEENS IN HONOR OF CAROLE LEVIN 5 The first group of essays in Queens Matter is dedicated to the recurring issues of gender in the study of queens. To be sure, all the essays in this volume touch on gender by default, so these first essays prepare the ground for the explorations of various aspects of queenship in conjunction with gender. Susan Doran s essay, Did Elizabeth s gender really matter? delineates the gendered underpinnings of some strategies and practices of Elizabeth s queenship and brings to light the lack of such gendered specificity in others. At first glance, Doran s stance may seem like a challenge to one of Carole s most important convictions that attention to gender is key to studying Elizabeth. However, this argument about the prevalence of gender-neutral practices of queenship does not negate the studies that attend to Elizabeth s gender, but rather historicizes some practices and reminds us to broaden our perspective in order to discern the elements of Elizabeth s queenship that are truly gendered. In A Great Reckoning in a Little Room: Elizabeth, Essex, and Royal Interruptions, Catherine Loomis takes a close look at a disturbing episode: the Earl of Essex bursting into the queen s bedchamber and catching her off-guard. Loomis analyzes the discourse surrounding this event, pointing out the unsettling metamorphosis of the rhetoric of courtly love into the suggestions of rape. William Barlow s sermon preached soon thereafter refers to Elizabeth as Lady Queene, once again reminding us of the gender-determined vulnerabilities of queenship. Kirilka Stavreva s chapter, We are such stuff : Re-Mythologizing the Absolute Queen in Julie Taymor s Tempest (2010) zeroes in on the ways gender is foregrounded in Taymor s recasting of Shakespeare s Prospero as Prospera. Tracing the web of mythological archetypes in Prospera s cinematic representation, Stavreva unfolds the contradictions in film s re-imagining of Shakespeare s character and points to the fragility of female power as the ultimate takeaway. The second group of essays exemplifies a triad of approaches to the issues of marriage, each approach aligned with Carole Levin s scholarly methodology and interests. Jane Donawerth, in Elizabeth I and the Marriage Crisis, John Lyly s Campaspe, and the Politics of Court Drama, reveals how literary work is embedded in the surrounding historical discourse. Donawerth juxtaposes the contemporary debate about the possibilities of Elizabeth I s marriage, on one hand, and, on the other, the way Lyly repurposes these arguments, thus joining the debate and obliquely voicing his own position.

23 6 A.R. BERTOLET Retha Warnicke s study, Tudor Consorts: The Politics of Royal Matchmaking, , moves away from the concerns of courtship and into the territory of practical choices made by Henry VII and Henry VIII while selecting and securing their future queens. In looking into the ways the queens are made through marriage rather than born as full or potential heirs to the crown, Warnicke surveys the factors, from the male perspective, that contribute to the creation of Tudor queen-consorts. This investigation of match-making practices complements Jane Donawerth s analysis of the marriage discourse carried on in Elizabeth s reign. While Warnicke explores the beginnings of royal marital unions, Jo Eldridge Carney extends the inquiry to the other side of marriage: the point when the dying queen uses her authority for the last time to preserve the dynasty. In The Queen s Deathbed Wish in Early Modern Fairy Tales: Securing the Dynasty, it is the fairy tale queens who leave their kings with some strict rules for choosing their next spouse, and these rules oddly point to the king s own daughter. Carney s piece is a fascinating study of the confluences between fairy tale motifs and historical realities. Thus, The Queens and Marriage section of the book comes full circle from the debates about, to preparations for marriage, and finally, to making provisions for the next marriage as a means to secure the succession. The third section of the book, Queens and Religion, focuses on Queen Elizabeth I, moving from exploring the process of settling the Protestant course in the early months of her reign to delineating the ways in which religious iconography and rituals allow Elizabeth to confirm or create familial bonds and political alliances. In his essay, Spenser s Dragon Fight and the English Queen: The Struggle over the Elizabethan Settlement, Donald Stump elucidates the allegorical meaning of the dragon fight at the end of Book I of Edmund Spenser s The Faerie Queene. The three phases of setbacks, recovery, and eventual triumph of Redcrosse over the dragon correspond to the complicated tactics employed by Elizabeth and her Parliament in the campaign for the religious settlement. While making clear that Elizabeth played a crucial part in the campaign, Stump examines the question of the queen s agency in Spenser s allegory since the poet relegates Una, Elizabeth s avatar, to the sidelines of the battle. Helen Hackett continues the inquiry into the literary and artistic renditions of Elizabeth s religious policies in Anne Boleyn s legacy to Elizabeth

24 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDIES OF QUEENS IN HONOR OF CAROLE LEVIN 7 I: Neoclassicism and the Iconography of Protestant Queenship. Hackett reminds us that the allusions to the Muses, the Three Graces, and the Judgment of Paris in the last two decades of Elizabeth s reign are shared with the neoclassical iconography of Anne Boleyn s coronation pageants. To account for these continuities, Hackett uncovers the missing links in the intervening years and explores the humanist, cultural, and religious purposes of the neoclassical allusions in the iconography of both queens. This iconographic continuity with her mother s pageants allowed Elizabeth to affirm the familial relationship she seldom discussed. Elaine Kruse argues in A Network of Honor and Obligation : Elizabeth as Godmother that Elizabeth used the religious ceremony of christening as a means to forge and fortify relationships that resembled familial bonds. Kruse offers an enlightening survey of over one hundred cases of Elizabeth s agreeing to be godmother in an age of religious conflict. Kruse delineates the trends and examines the reasons for establishing the mutual connections between Elizabeth and her godchildren s families. Part five of this book, Queens, National Identity, and Diplomacy, gathers the essays that cross geographical and cultural boundaries. The essays in this section interrogate the transformations that occur when boundaries are crossed, paying special attention to the negotiations and interpretive strategies involved in making sense of the crossing and blurring of the borders. These explorations open with John Watkins s essay, Lesbianism in Early Modern Vernacular Romance: The Question of Historicity. Tracing and historicizing the transformation of the motif of female same-sex desire in the romance-epics from Italy to England, this study continues the work started in Shakespeare s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age, the book Carole Levin and John Watkins co-authored. While not addressing Elizabeth I overtly, this essay focuses on the literary pre-history and later transformation of the episode of a sexual encounter of Britomart, one of Elizabeth s avatars in Spenser s The Faerie Queene. As the episode is reshaped from one romance-epic to the next, the filtering out of lesbian sexuality in Spenser and Milton becomes symptomatic of their authors adherence to the national identity and the attitudes promoted by England s official religion. Along with the issues of the generic transformation in Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, Watkins raises the methodological question central to interdisciplinary scholarship: to what extent does literature respond to social historical process and where does it override the reflection of historical

25 8 A.R. BERTOLET reality in favor of a longue durée literary heritage. To put it differently, to what extent are the boundaries permeable? Anna Riehl Bertolet continues the interrogation of boundaries in her chapter, Doppelgänger Queens: Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart. While the queenly status of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots makes their names almost synonymous with the national identity of their kingdoms, this essay invites questions about the construction of their personal identities that have been perennially considered to be polar opposites. By looking at the moments when the two queens become almost interchangeable, Bertolet argues that the contrast between Elizabeth and Mary is sustained and sometimes defeated by their essential likeness. In Elizabeth I and the Politics of Invoking Russia in Shakespeare s Love s Labor s Lost, Linda Shenk uses one of Carole s favorite methodologies to illuminate the historical underpinnings of the Muscovite scene in Shakespeare s play. Shenk s survey of the Anglo-Russian discourse comprised of Elizabeth s correspondence with Tsar Theodor and Boris Godunov, travel narratives, and court-attended entertainments establishes a nuanced international context that would be legible to Shakespeare s courtly audience, most of all Elizabeth herself. Shenk demonstrates that the Muscovite scene that leads to the triumph of the Princess and her women flatters Elizabeth s accomplishments in establishing lucrative trade with Russia, creating diplomatic relations that evade commitment, and bolstering England s military powers. From the intricate conceptions about Russia by Englishmen discussed by Shenk, the section shifts the perspective from inside to outside in Estelle Paranque s discussion of the foreigner s views of Elizabeth in the chapter on Queen Elizabeth I and Elizabethan Court in the French Ambassador s Eyes. Paranque explores the diplomatic dispatches of Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, French ambassador at the English court who spent seven years at Elizabeth s court. Though the French ambassador was in office during difficult times between France and England (notably the Bartholomew Massacre), this chapter focuses only on peaceful times between the two countries. As they were not biased by a major political or religious conflict, these peaceful missives are unlike the ones written during the turbulent times and reveal, to some extent, the ambassador s true views of Elizabeth and her court. The essays in part six, Inspired by the Queen: Queens in Literature, exemplify an approach to queenship in literary analysis that Carole Levin employs with mastery, for the first time, in her chapter Elizabeth as

26 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDIES OF QUEENS IN HONOR OF CAROLE LEVIN 9 King and Queen in The Heart and Stomach of a King. This method, shared by many other contributors to this volume, allows the scholars of Elizabeth I to read works of literature while equipped with knowledge of the queen s own writings, biography, and numerous other aspects of her queenship, including the beliefs and attitudes in the broader culture of her reign. In this section in particular, this approach illuminates how women writers respond to the court culture and the queen at its center even long after Elizabeth s death. In Queen of Love Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Wroth, Ilona Bell reads the guiding force of Venus in Mary Wroth s play Love s Victory and her sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as a direct descendant of Elizabeth s rhetoric of love. While the popularity of the traditionally male Petrarchan discourse meant that Elizabeth herself was hailed as Venus, queen of love, Bell asserts that Elizabeth s legacy to writers such as Wroth was the queen s female voice that claimed agency in the matters of the heart and created an affective discourse of reciprocal love with her subjects. Mary Ellen Lamb continues the study of Wroth through the lens of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. In her chapter, Dressing Queens (and Some Others): Signifying through Clothing in Wroth s Urania, Lamb turns to Wroth s prose romance to explore the complicated system of meanings conveyed through clothing. Lamb demonstrates that clothing in Urania registers the four categories of meaning in the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne of Denmark: familial identification, expense, staging of emotion, and fashion. Brandie R. Siegfried s essay, Conjuring Three Queens and an Empress: Elizabeth I and the Philosophy of Enchantment in Margaret Cavendish s Blazing World, brings together the political and the spectacular aspects of Elizabeth s queenship. Cavendish s imaginative incarnation of Elizabeth as the Empress in Blazing World draws on Elizabeth s Golden and Tilbury Speeches to dramatize key aspects of Cavendish s theory of nature. Siegfried demonstrates that, in Cavendish s recollection, Elizabeth emerges as an artful ruler whose bedazzlement inspires her subjects to harmony and proper order. The essays in this book speak of queens, historical, mythological, and literary. These essays also speak of the significant and subtle ways queens leave their mark on the culture they inhabit. Elizabeth I looms large in this volume, but the interrogation of queenship extends to other female monarchs Elizabeth s historical counterparts (Anne Boleyn, Catherine

27 10 A.R. BERTOLET de Medici, Mary Queen of Scots) and her fictional echoes, literary queens and queen-like figures inhabiting the pages of John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. Offered to Carole as a tribute on her birthday, these essays address, each in its own way, subject matter and topics that embrace her scholarly and personal interests. The scholars who wrote the chapters of this book share a deep admiration for Carole and her multifaceted work. While the complete picture of Carole s wide-ranging influence must remain out of grasp, the perspectives offered below come directly from the contributors, who are consummate scholars themselves. These tributes sketch the contours, shapes, and colors of Carole s inspiring image. Ilona Bell: With her an encyclopedic knowledge of medieval and early modern women, Carole moves effortlessly among literature, biography, history, and cultural critique. Her intellectual bent is original, quirky, and absolutely fascinating. She loves to tell a good story full of gossip and dreams. Her scholarship generally springs from little regarded or even bizarre historical data: rumors of Elizabeth s illegitimate children, touching to cure scrofula, legends of a bearded medieval saint, and so much more. By focusing on data that other scholars have discounted or disregarded, and by posing questions her predecessors preferred not to confront, Carole makes seemingly trivial details revelatory of an entire culture. Carole gets interested in a topic and before you know it, she has formulated an innovative research project, inspired graduate students and colleagues to run with the subject, organized a conference session, and edited a scholarly collection or book series. Carole is charismatic, she s tireless, she s inventive, she s enormously productive. She is a galvanizing figure who makes an intellectual community vibrant wherever she is, and she seems to be everywhere early modernists gather. Her path-breaking scholarship, her innumerable essay collections, and visionary Queenship series have permanently altered the field of early modern studies. Anna Riehl Bertolet: When I first heard Carole s talk at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, I was instantly smitten by her enthusiasm, wit, and ease with which she juggled historical information about Queen Katherine Parr, references to Shakespeare, and imagery from John Foxe s Actes and Monuments. That

28 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDIES OF QUEENS IN HONOR OF CAROLE LEVIN 11 was the day that I received my first taste of a joyfully unbound scholarship, the true spirit of inderdisciplinarity that I began to pursue in my own career. Elizabeth I brought us together just a few years later when we both worked on Elizabeth I: Ruler and Legend, an exhibit at the Newberry Library. By then, I had read Carole s classic, The Heart and Stomach of a King, a book that turned the Elizabeth studies towards the feminist view of the queen s image-making and inspired my own work on representations of Elizabeth s face. I was blessed to act in Carole s play, The King Dreams of Marriage, twice; indeed, playing the young and plucky future Elizabeth I during the Queen s Revels in 2003 remains the only time I got close to being a queen. The spirit of my essay on Elizabeth and her frenemy Mary Queen of Scots is my own inflection of Carole s joyful scholarship whose sources reach deep into the culture of the period. Jo Eldridge Carney: It is no exaggeration to say that I owe my professional life to Carole. I met Carole in the early 1980s when she served as the outside reader on my dissertation committee, and the thoughtful support she gave then has continued over decades. Carole s intellectual curiosity, her zest for inquiry, and her detective-like exploration of the archives have resulted in a remarkable scholarly output but her even more profound legacy is the generous nurturing of countless other careers. Every project she undertakes is with an eye towards furthering and enriching the lives of others, and we are all so very grateful. Jane Donawerth: Carole s and Jeanie Watson s collection, Ambiguous Realities, was one of the first books I found on the history of early modern women, so Carole is one of the reasons I was able to pursue this avenue in my teaching and scholarship even before I knew her! That is why it was important for me to cite this book in my first footnote for this essay. In addition, Carole s work on Elizabeth, especially The Heart and Stomach of a King and The Reign of Elizabeth I (which I had read in draft), helped me to re-imagine Elizabeth as an astute rhetorician and politician who also felt dutybound to her people to provide them with stability and an heir. Carole s Elizabeth made decisions as circumstances changed, rather than being determined to virginity from the beginning. That is the crux of the marriage crisis and also my essay on Lyly s Campaspe the tension between duty and choice.

29 12 A.R. BERTOLET Susan Doran: Apart from the influence of her important writings, Carole has touched the professional and personal lives of both students and scholars. Her generosity in giving time and offering opportunities to fellow-academics is truly remarkable. Helen Hackett: I have had a special connection with Carole since the mid-1990s, when her book The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power was published and was sometimes reviewed with my first book, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. It was exciting to find someone who was thinking about many of the same issues as me, and I was delighted to meet Carole in person at a Spenser conference in 2001 and to become her friend. For me, Carole s work is distinguished by her commitment to feminism, her resourcefulness in mining the riches of the archives, and the vivacity of her writing and speaking. As a literary scholar working extensively on historical contexts, I also particularly value Carole s openness to evidence sometimes dismissed by more rigidly minded historians, such as dreams, rumours, and fictions. Carole understands the importance of representations as well as realities, and this means that she and I are often working in the same fertile borderlands. Of course, we also share a central interest in Elizabeth I, who for both of us has been at the core of our work and careers. Carole has been a leader in the development of feminist scholarship over the last few decades, and her work has been an important influence on my own research and writing on early modern queenship and on early modern women in general. Catherine Loomis: Carole does not believe in boundaries not the boundaries we draw between our fields of study, not the boundaries that prevent us from sharing and asking hard questions about our research discoveries before they are ready for publication, not the boundaries that keep us from inviting our students out for coffee to ask about their lives, dreams, and hopes. That Carole does this for so many of her colleagues and students in so many fields of study is a reflection of the depth and breadth and height of Carole s own mind. Her far-ranging interests; her ability to make connections, produce fierce analysis, and write clear prose; her wit and creativity constantly demonstrate that Shakespeare s Cleopatra isn t the only one whose infinite variety will never wither.

30 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDIES OF QUEENS IN HONOR OF CAROLE LEVIN 13 Estelle Paranque: The first time I read The Heart and Stomach of a King, I was amazed by the beautiful writing and excellent research. Since then, I have been inspired and influenced by Carole. I ed her for the first time on July 27, 2009, we met in March 2013, and since then she has been the most encouraging, supportive, and kindhearted mentor one could ever wish for. Carole is the kind of person and scholar who would help anyone who asks for it. She does not think about it twice and gives everything to support someone else s dreams. Linda Shenk: Carole s ideas and methodology are brilliant; her mentoring and heart make her legendary. She represents all we want this field to be brilliant, energetic, welcoming, vibrant, and witty. Her work has been one of the most powerful influences on my scholarship, and the joy and collaborative spirit she exudes have been transformative in scholarship on late medieval and early modern queens. I will always hold dear the dramatic entertainments she prepared for meetings of the Queen Elizabeth I Society clever (often hilarious) performances that made the conferences themselves a little more like festivals. Brandie R. Siegfried: I first encountered the work of Carole Levin as a graduate student hoping to find material analyzing Elizabeth I s oratorical artistry. Later, I had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Carole at conferences, and have come to count her as a friend and one of the most enduring influences on my thought and research. Her enthusiasm for and serious pleasure in feminist historical scholarship can only be described as dazzling. Kirilka Stavreva: My essay garners inspiration from three overlapping areas of Carole s scholarship: her multifaceted explorations of the wielding and demonizing of the absolute power of early modern queens, her astute analyses of Shakespearean representations of queenly power, and her fascination with the transformations of narratives about women in power across historical eras and media. My focus is the re-gendering of the absolute power of Shakespeare s magus-ruler Prospero as feminine in Julie Taymor s 2010