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Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a small surge in scholarship on Bradstreet’s “The Four Monarchies” that better accounts for the context and aims of this long poem by either exploring her vision of the world or situating her poem among other political works by English women writers during the seventeenth century. Jim Egan and Samuel Fallon have developed readings of Bradstreet’s worldmaking that find in her elegies a fulfillment and refinement of ideas explored in the “Monarchies.” Egan uses Bradstreet’s comparison of Alexander the Great and Sir Phillip Sidney in her elegy on Sidney to make the case that her extensive treatment of Alexander in both works was meant to connect New England to the East. Fallon distinguishes between space and time in Bradstreet’s worldmaking, and his reading of the “Monarchies” identifies a tension between the totalizing project of the history and the present time of poetic address evident in her apologies (pp. 107–108). As he explains, “Worldmaking in such moments is not a matter of charting global space, but something more modest: the careful tending of a fragile intimacy” (Fallon, p. 103). For Egan and Fallon, the elegies fulfill what is only begun in the “Monarchies” through the comparisons and identifications that this lyric genre invites. But in stressing the subtlety of Bradstreet’s “rhetorical sleight of hand” (Egan 2011, p. 23) and her modest “tending of fragile intimacy” (Fallon 2018, p. 103), both critics redirect our attention away from the naked ambition of Bradstreet’s longest poem. Scholars who focus on Bradstreet’s poem as an instance of political writing, including Susan Wiseman (2006), Mihoko Suzuki (2009), and Gillian Wright (2013), pay more attention to Bradstreet’s literary ambitions in “The Four Monarchies” as well as her complicated representation of monarchy.

Anne Bradstreet’s treatment of Semiramis in two works, “The Four Monarchies” and the elegy “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,” provides an opportunity for thinking about politics, worldbuilding, and genre.⁵ This notorious queen was known both as an empire builder and as a licentious manipulator. She is rumored to have had her husband Ninus killed in order to gain the throne and then to have had an incestuous relationship with her son, Ninias, or to have dressed as him in order to rule in his place. In the elegy, Bradstreet uses these qualities to raise Queen Elizabeth in comparison:

But time would fail me, so my tongue would to,

To tell of half she did, or she could doe.

Semiramis to her, is but obscure,

More infamy then fame, she did procure.

She built her glory but on Babels walls,

Worlds wonder for a while, but yet it falls.

(Bradstreet 1678, p. 212)

Bradstreet’s use of the inexpressibility topos in this passage builds on Semiramis’ accomplishments as the known quantity, which serves to elevate Elizabeth’s greatness while also striking a warning note about the decline of past empires.

Bradstreet’s treatment of Semiramis in “Monarchies” illuminates the ways in which the aims of her longest poem differ fundamentally from those of her lyric elegies. Following Ralegh, in this poem Bradstreet focuses on the extent and grandeur of her building projects, not their fall, and foregrounds mythmaking and competing interpretations through repeated references to “reports,” “aspersions,” and what “poets feigned.” As a poem, it is both less nationalist and less feminist than the Queen Elizabeth elegy. While in the elegy Bradstreet seeks to underscore both Semiramis’s personal infamy and the inevitable fall of Babylon in the service of demonstrating that Elizabeth I is more virtuous and more powerful, in the “Monarchies” she is far more interested in praising what Semiramis accomplished and more conflicted in treating her rumored licentiousness. For example, while in the elegy Bradstreet sets infamy and fame in opposition in order to draw a distinction between Semiramis and Elizabeth, in the “Monarchies” she frames this kind of opposition as a contradiction that at times is attributed to Semiramis’s character (“She like a brave Virago playd the Rex/And was both shame and glory of her Sex”) and at other times is attributed to the bias of historians (“That undeserv’d, they blur’d her name and fame/By their aspersions, cast upon the same”) (1678, pp. 71–72).

Both Bradstreet and Ralegh refute the charge of Semiramis’s licentiousness, but while Ralegh’s observations about the risks taken by conquerors underscore both his own acumen in judging others and his “labour and hazard” in the service of the crown, Bradstreet dwells more on sexed dichotomies that “blurred [Semiramis’s] name and fame.” For Ralegh, Semiramis’s success stands as evidence that calumnies against her are the work of “envious and lying Grecians” (Ralegh 1652, pp. 183):

For delicacy and ease doe more often accompany licentiousnesse in men and women, than labour and hazard doe. And if the one halfe be true which is reported of this Lady, then there never lived any Prince or Princesse more worthy of fame than Semiramis was, both for the works she did at Babylon and elsewhere, and for the wars she made with glorious successe….

(Ralegh 1652, p. 183)

Bradstreet follows Ralegh in stressing Greek lies and Semiramis’s power, though with subtle differences that speak to how she is exercising judgment and claiming authority:

She flourishing with Ninus long did reign,

Till her Ambition caus’d him to be slain.

That having no Compeer, she might rule all,

Or else she sought revenge for Menon’s fall.

Some think the Greeks this slander on her cast,

As on her life Licentious, and unchast,

That undeservd, they blur’d her name and fame

By their aspersions, cast upon the same:

But were her virtues more or less, or none,

She for her potency must go alone.

(Bradstreet 1678, 72)

Unlike Ralegh, Bradstreet does not argue that voluptuaries are rarely as successful as Semiramis was; rather, she suggests that Semiramis’ “potency” must speak for itself. This is a subtle difference and one that can be attributed in part to the epigrammatic style of Bradstreet’s poem. But while Ralegh takes pains to demonstrate that he has the experience and judgment to evaluate the character of rulers, Bradstreet reports on and then questions several salacious rumors, never fully putting them aside but instead keeping the scholarly debates in play. We might read this as a reflection of her concern with what is said about authoritative women as well as her favorable opinion of female monarchs. However, in her elegy on Queen Elizabeth, Bradstreet takes a stronger, more feminist line: “Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,/Know tis a Slander now, but once was Treason” (1678, p. 213). In “The Four Monarchies,” she catalogs and evaluates interpretive disagreements without resolving them.

Ralegh demonstrates what he knows about the globe and military endeavors, and his praise of Semiramis leads to his positive evaluation of her military might. He devotes a full section of his work to her campaign in India, enumerating at great length the reported size of her army, including the numbers of footmen, horsemen, chariots, camels, raw hides, galleys, and soldiers. He concludes, “These incredible and impossible numbers, which no one place of the earth was able to nourish, (had every man and beast but fed upon grasse) are taken from the authority of Ctesias whom Diodorus followeth” (Ralegh 1652, p. 183). Bradstreet condenses this section significantly as the conclusion to her section on the Babylonian queen:

An expedition to the East she made

Staurobates, his Country to invade:

Her Army of four millions did consist,

Each may believe it as his fancy list.

Her Camels, Chariots, Gallyes in such number,

As puzzles best Historians to remember;

But this is wonderful, of all those men,

They say, but twenty e’re came back agen.

The river [Indus] swept them half away,

The rest Staurobates in fight did slay;

This was last progress of this mighty Queen,

Who in her Country never more was seen.

The Poets feign’d her turn’d into a Dove,

Leaving the world to Venus soar’d above:

Which made the Assyrians many a day,

A Dove within their Ensigns to display:

Forty two years she reign’d, and then she di’d

But by what means we are not certifi’d.

(Bradstreet 1678, 73–74)

While Ralegh’s prose demonstrates familiarity with the logistics of war befitting a wise counselor, Bradstreet instead amplifies that which is confusing and unknowable in referring to historical “puzzles” and insists that Semiramis died “by what means we are not certifi’d.” She also elevates the “last progress of this mighty Queen” and Semiramis’s final transformation into a dove, “Leaving the world to Venus soar’d above.” Ralegh stresses learned citations and evaluates logistics according to his experiences in the field; Bradstreet navigates the problems of fame and infamy, foregrounding interpretive puzzles before elevating Semiramis as she soars out of the picture, ending with a summation of her reign as a monarch.⁶

I would argue that this poem is not only or even primarily a Puritan reflection on the failings of monarchs. Just as Ralegh wants to demonstrate his abilities as a judicious counselor with experience of the world, Bradstreet wants to demonstrate that she can compass the world imaginatively. The fact that she includes so many lines of poetry that repeat Ralegh’s judgment of prior historians is telling (they could have easily been cut, to good effect). She’s not just taking issue with monarchs; she is signaling her own authority and scholarly interest. And in condensing them, she draws our attention to myths and arguments. When in “The Prologue” she undermines her own contention that the muses stand as evidence of women’s poetic abilities with the line “The Greeks did nought, but play the fools & lye” (Bradstreet 1678, p. 4), this is not just a retreat from classical exempla back into the orthodoxy of Puritanism. Judging “lying Greeks” is part of her project; the cultural distinctions she draws are as much about her scholarly judgment as they are about distinctions among nations and civilizations.

“The Four Monarchies” is an ambitious work recounting the successes and failures of ambitious people, and charting global space is certainly an important part of this undertaking. In mapping the globe, enumerating military forces, and weighing the merits of historical interpretations, Ralegh used his Historie to demonstrate his membership in “an early modern European community of learned counselors who deployed historical analysis to produce prophetic advice” (Popper 2012, p. 74). Though Bradstreet had no hope of serving the government, in “Monarchies” she limned the bounds of empire, recounted great architectural feats, and highlighted interpretive disagreements in order to assert her power as a poet and an interpreter of history. Bradstreet embraces both her own ambition and her judgment more fully in the “Monarchies” than she does in either “The Prologue” or her elegies.