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Forms of Queenship

Female Rule and Literary Structure in the English Renaissance

IF NEARLY TWENTY YEARS of new-historicist studies of early modern England have taught us anything, it is that England’s literature from 1558 to 1603 was preoccupied with the anomalous gender of the country’s monarch, Elizabeth Tudor. In other words, Elizabethan literature must be regarded as just that, Elizabethan, in ways that earlier critics did not take into account. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) set the pattern by juxtaposing Elizabethan queenly and literary style, paralleling “Elizabeth’s conscious sense of her identity as at least in part a persona ficta and her world as a theater” with Edmund Spenser’s conscious and unconscious fashionings of his fictive faery realm.¹ Greenblatt’s point is that the queen and the poet capitalize upon, even while both help create, a pervasive culture of strategic self-representation. But Louis Montrose’s influential work on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, published in its first version in 1983, goes further than Greenblatt’s placement of Elizabeth and Elizabethan literature in the same cultural pool. In Montrose’s view—first articulated in his study of Spenser’s praise of Elizabeth in The Shepheardes Calender’s “Aprill” eclogue²—the queen has a uniquely reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the literary productions of her subjects. “[T]he pervasive cultural presence of the Queen,” writes Montrose, “was a condition of [A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s] imaginative possibility. And, in the sense that the royal presence was itself represented within the play, the play appropriated and extended the imaginative possibilities of the queen.”³ More than simply adopting similar representational strategies for similar ends, the queen and the poet-playwright meet within the fictional text, a venue in which each redesigns the representational configurations of the other.

In developing his theory of queenly and literary symbiosis Montrose takes the crucial step of focusing on the queen not only as a model of improvisatorial skill but also as a galvanizing force for a pervasive Elizabethan anxiety about female power, what John Knox in 1558 called “the monstrous regiment of women.” Montrose’s discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a tool for airing and managing this anxiety thus enables critics who follow him to find the queen everywhere, in every figure of either rampaging or squelched female authority: in Titus Andronicus’s raped Lavinia, in 1 Henry VI’s demonic Joan of Arc, and in nearly every female character in The Faerie Queene from the victimized Amoret to the Amazon Radigund (to name just a few examples).⁴ Moreover, the queen is found manifested in the work of outwardly concentric circles of literary aspirants: from courtly habitues and queenly intimates like Philip Sidney and Walter Ralegh; to writers desirous of courtly recognition and advancement like John Lyly and Edmund Spenser; to playwrights who depended only institutionally on the monarchy, either as an agency of censorship or, conversely, as a benign sponsor and bulwark against theaterphobic church or local government officials. In all these studies, the underlying critical assumption is a vastly enlarged version of Montrose’s: sooner or later, in either overt or subtextual form, writers in all literary venues must get around to taking a position vis-à-vis the woman monarch—either obsequious flattery, or misogynistic opposition, or an ambivalent stance somewhere between the two. What Greenblatt would posit, therefore, as a “circulation of social energy” between queen and author gets rechanneled, so to speak, into a different dynamic, one that consists entirely of queenly influence and either authorial resistance or authorial capitulation. This line of thinking also posits that the queen’s authority, insofar as it is a specifically feminine authority, is represented in this way because it provides an occasion for measuring male authors’ scope of influence against hers. (Female authors are generally left out of the equation.) Either by celebrating or by challenging the power of a queen—including challenging her through ironic celebration—a male writer constructs his place somewhere along the spectrum between anxious failed patriarch and unacknowledged legislator of the world.

So far, then, it is clear that critics have thoroughly taken up the first half of Montrose’s axiom, that “the pervasive cultural presence of the Queen” conditioned the horizons of “imaginative possibility” not only for the drama, but for all forms of English Renaissance literature. But despite Montrose’s emphasis in the second half of his formulation upon literature’s reciprocal capacity not only to comment upon but also to extend the horizons of queenly power, critics including Montrose himself have not yet adequately addressed the motivations behind Elizabethan literature’s ongoing reformulations of female authority. Instead, queenship’s relationship to literary production is figured as one of compulsion. In Leonard Tennenhouse’s succinct phrasing, “during the Renaissance, political imperatives were also aesthetic imperatives.”⁵ The phenomenon of a female monarch simply requires male authors to take up the topic of female authority, an issue that although diffusely worrisome throughout the whole of medieval and early modern culture, as numerous historians and literary critics have recently described, might not have acquired such urgency without the focusing impetus of some fifty years of women’s rule. I would call this the Mount Everest theory of authorial motivation. Why write about the queen? Because she’s there. Further, even the literary medium or mode in which the queen is represented is determined by Elizabeth’s own customary modes of self-presentation. The queen throughout her long reign displayed herself to her realm in a theatrical and visually striking fashion; further, she was prone either to use or to disclaim her sex as need be in order to exert her will. As a result, Elizabeth’s image has been most often examined in terms of those literary productions that are themselves theatrical, visually striking, and manipulative of sex and gender roles. I am thinking of course not only of the drama, particularly Shakespeare’s, but also of the work of Spenser, with its elaborate use of dumb shows, tableaus, processions, paintings, statuary, and other dramatic and visual motifs, and with its speculative and shifty depictions of gender and sexuality.

The kinds of critical work I have been describing have crucially and fundamentally altered what we look for in Elizabethan literature, and I cannot overstate my own debt to and dependence on their insights. But it is time to go further. To posit female authority as solely directive, even circumscribing, in this way is in a sense uncritically to reproduce the misogynistic notion, common in the early modern era as well as beyond, that femininity is fundamentally debilitating. “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,” Queen Elizabeth is famously reported to have said to her troops at Tilbury as they prepared for the anticipated invasion of Spain’s Armada, “but the heart and stomach of a king.” In the prevailing critical mindset an early modern author might paraphrase this statement, “I know I am the subject, and therefore necessarily the depictor, of a queen, but in my writing I do my best to have the heart and stomach of a man—even if a man anxious about his being subjected to a woman.”⁶ Relying, even unconsciously, on this point of view causes critics to beg the question I posed above: why write about the queen? To look at it somewhat differently, if a queen’s male subject necessarily shapes his own intellectual productions solely in response to this misogynistic anxiety, then why are the records of other venues of Elizabethan intellectual accomplishment—law, music, geography, science, and so on—not similarly deformed by this anxiety? After all, jurists, composers, mapmakers, and alchemists were just as likely as poets and dramatists to depend either directly or indirectly on the queen’s approval or patronage for their livelihoods; and one does not have to go far to demonstrate that their work similarly was concerned with crown policies.⁷ But it is difficult to argue that the influence of the monarch’s gender upon these kinds of efforts was purely a deformative, hobbling one.

In fact, the opposite may be the case. Take, for example, Elizabethan jurisprudence’s most celebrated theory pertaining to queenship, the doctrine of “the king’s two bodies,” which can be read as a response to the debilitating and even destructive effect on the realm of its monarchy’s being lodged in an unpredictable and uncontrollable female body. The sum effect of this legal fiction is that the monarch’s body politic not only subsumes, but also cures, the weaknesses of his or her physical body, including weakness imparted by female sex. As Edmund Plowden wrote in his Reports of the actions of the crown courts under Elizabeth: “[The king’s] Body politic, which is annexed to his Body natural, takes away the Imbecility of his Body natural, and draws the Body natural, which is the lesser, and all the Effects thereof to itself, which is the greater, quia magis dignum trahit ad se minus dignum.”⁸ Both Elizabeth herself and some of the anxious males of her realm made use of this paradigm in order to deflect attention away from her unfortunate femininity and toward the essentially masculine nature of the monarchical persona—serene, wise, and everlasting. The king’s two bodies can, in other words, clear at least a temporary space for an untrammeled masculinity.⁹

But several considerations force us to revise any notion that the king’s two bodies successfully preserve a masculine monarchy. First, as Susan Frye points out, Elizabeth herself tended to blur the distinctions between feminine and masculine, body natural and body politic, with the result that she invents a new conception of monarchy, “a female body politic.”¹⁰ Hence even for Elizabeth, femininity becomes a source of a creative re-envisioning of the very nature of rule. Second, this re-envisioning might extend well past the monarchy, going so far as to clear a space for the assertion of extramonarchical will. As Marie Axton details in her book The Queen’s Two Bodies, the theory of the king’s two bodies was in fact used in the courts as a way of frustrating the queen’s decisions, not of augmenting a transhistorically masculine monarchical authority. As Axton explains, Plowden—who was the first to articulate this legal principle fully in writing, even though it had been under development since the Middle Ages—was in fact a Roman Catholic and a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots’s claim to the English throne. His intent when he argued in 1561 that “what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body” was partly to forestall any attempts Elizabeth might make to exclude the Scots queen from the English succession; such efforts he defined as purely expedient decisions of the body natural, which ought not interfere with the unbroken, sacred line of the body politic.¹¹ What Plowden undertook, then, was not only a warning to the recently crowned Elizabeth, but also a repudiation of politically motivated decisions by both Henry VIII and Edward VI to exclude certain blood relatives from the succession to the crown.¹² Plowden’s seemingly monarchophantic argument in fact clears a space for English courts, not England’s ruler, to determine the future of national government. Indeed, it can easily be argued that it was the sixteenth-century debate over the right of women to rule that enabled the suggestion that juridical or Parliamentary or religious leaders should have a say in both royal succession and the exercise of royal power. The Marian exile Christopher Goodman asserted in 1558—the year of Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne—that Deuteronomy 17:15, which instructs the Israelites to choose a ruler only from among their “brethren,” allows a country to pass over female candidates for the throne in order to find a man more suitable to the job, and hence “to avoyde that monster in nature, and disordre amongest men, whiche is the Empire and governement of a woman.”¹³ And even a supporter of women’s rule like one of the authors of the 1563 edition of A Mirror for Magistrates could, at best, only gamely propose that if God saw fit to ordain an innately inept woman as monarch, she would be likely to cede authority to auxiliary, male governmental figures who could step in and set things right: “And as for wysedome and pollicie, seing it consisteth in folowing the counsayl of many godly, learned, & long experienced heades, it were better to have a woman, who consideringe her owne weakenes and inabilitye, shoulde be ruled thereby, than a man which presuming upon his owne fond brayne, wil heare no advise save his owne.”¹⁴ Or as Elizabethan clergyman John Aylmer, even while he defends women’s rule against John Knox’s blast, puts it, “It is not she [i.e., the queen] that ruleth, but the laws.”¹⁵ In a very real sense, then, the doctrine of the king’s two bodies served not so much to shore up monarchical power by de-sexing it, as to pave the way for the ascent of Parliamentary government.

My point is that Plowden’s end run around the queen, though at first it seems debilitating, eventually turns out to be enabling: although legal and political institutions and their personnel must go through extraordinary contortions to accommodate the unfortunate historical fact of women monarchs, the consequence is an unforeseen avenue of liberation for precisely those institutions. In a new study of Shakespeare’s early history plays, Nina S. Levine makes a similar argument about Shakespeare and his contemporaries: “The presence of a woman on England’s throne … proved liberating, allowing them to challenge, and even to reimagine—and to rewrite—traditional dynastic and national myths.”¹⁶ These reimaginings ultimately had a very real political effect. By the time of its deposition of Charles I in 1642, Parliament took the extraordinary step of declaring itself the instrument of the king’s body politic, so that “what [Parliament does] herein hath the stamp of Royal Authority, although His Majesty … do in his own Person oppose or interrupt the same.”¹⁷ In short, the development and use of the king’s two bodies theory, both in the Elizabethan age and beyond, has an extremely complex history of gender allegiance. Plowden’s support for Mary, Queen of Scots, an alternative queen to Elizabeth, ultimately contributes to eroding the legitimacy of monarchy, no matter what its sex. To make matters more complicated, the resulting ascendancy of quasi-republican government marks, in a certain way, a turn toward feminized rule, given that in the view of some, parliamentary governance itself is marked by multiplicity, unruliness, and ever-shifting grounds of authority.

In this book I argue that the same kinds of multiple reformations that queenship induces in political theory and practice can also take shape in literature. Like Falstaff, who in 2 Henry IV turns his diseases to commodity, Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan writers seize upon the specter of female monarchy not only because it warps the circumstances of their literary moment, but also because such warping—changing accustomed patterns of thought as it does—might become an occasion for an author to restructure that literary moment. In other words, my account takes very seriously Montrose’s seminal notion of the “shaping fantasies” of queenship; but I will be taking up the reverse side of previous critical descriptions of how queenship impresses itself upon the form and content of literature concerned with female authority. These “shaping fantasies” also become, in authorial practice, fantasies of literary shape. My contention is that the topic of queenship does not provoke only authorial anxiety; rather, the writers that I consider in this book turn the political “problem” of queenship, either current or remembered, to their advantage by reconstituting it in terms of new poetic and dramatic genres. As opposed to the Mount Everest theory of literary motivation, I propose the Willie Sutton theory. Why write about the queen? Because that is, figuratively, where the money is.¹⁸

Let me give a brief, condensed example of what I mean. The title of my study is coopted from the order Shakespeare’s Cleopatra gives to her ladies-in-waiting as she prepares for death: “Show me, my women, like a queen” (5.2.226). In a clear instance of the reciprocal representational shaping Montrose discusses, the Egyptian queen commands her servants’ actions, directing them to clothe her in proper monarchical attire, while at the same time the grandeur of her self-presentation depends upon their success. Indeed, it is her attendant Charmian who has the last word on the dead Cleopatra’s carefully crafted persona: she declares to the consternated Roman guard that Cleopatra’s suicide was “well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings” (5.2.325–26). Charmian’s final address to her mistress in fact rounds off Cleopatra’s life by completing the queen’s unfinished last words:

Cleopatra.	What should I stay—[Dies.]
Charmian.	In this vile world? So fare thee well.

(5.2.313)

We may read Charmian’s filling in of Cleopatra’s truncated lines as a kind of authorial representation of the queen in either the obsequious flattery mode or the competitive mode outlined above. On the one hand, Charmian shows Cleopatra to the entering Romans as the queen would like to be remembered. On the other hand, Charmian’s gesture constitutes one-upmanship of the sort that Susan Frye has so well outlined in Elizabethan courtiers’ literary competitions with their own female monarch. But there is a third hand. For a moment, Charmian takes charge of a new form of feminized authority, one that, though inspired by the queen’s, is now her own. Its newness is signalled by the Roman guard’s confused response to what he sees but does not yet recognize: “What work is here, Charmian? Is this well done?” (5.2.324). Of course, Charmian’s appropriation and extension of Cleopatra’s scene-making does not last long. As my discussion of Antony and Cleopatra in Chapter 5 will detail, it devolves upon the far less imaginative Caesar to assign order and meaning to the deaths of Egyptian women, both queen and servants. But Charmian’s “work” adumbrates a strategy for piggybacking on the preconditions set by queenship in order to launch a new, or at least a newly revised, literary enterprise. This book is concerned with just such innovative ventures in Tudor-Stuart England: not so much innovative venues of publishing or presenting literary work, such as the public theater, but rather modes and genres of literary form new to England, and perhaps new anywhere.

This inventiveness of form is closely related to the mixed feelings about England’s literary past that marks sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. Obsessed as this period was with imitating classical models, English writers nevertheless understood themselves, with both dread and exhilaration, as venturing into uncharted territory. Hence, for example, Philip Sidney’s inquiry into “why England, the mother of excellent minds, should be grown so hard a stepmother to poets, who certainly in wit ought to pass all other, since all only proceedeth from their wit, being indeed makers of themselves, not takers of others.”¹⁹ We can discern an analogy between literary and monarchical forms in this regard: having no praiseworthy native predecessors save the hopelessly “antique” Chaucer, English writers were forced to make their own way, just as England, alone among its major European rival nations, was forced to conduct its great experiment in female rule. But “being indeed makers of themselves, not takers of others” has its advantages, in literary as well as political terms. As Richard Helgerson has described it, even while writers like Spenser, Jonson, and Milton were engaged in raising their literary vocations to the level occupied by the deific classical authors, their peculiar historical situation found no antecedent match in classical forms: “Virgil had known nothing of Renaissance courtiership or of courtly love; Horace had never written for the public theaters; Demodocus was no literary latecomer in a generation of cavalier poets.”²⁰ Relatively innocent of the postlapsarian “anxiety of influence” that Harold Bloom has attributed to writers who followed Milton, Tudor-Stuart authors could invent new literary forms or combine old ones as the moment suited, up to the point where the familiar labels no longer pertained—or, if applied, sounded as inappropriate as Polonius’s “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.”²¹ This rethinking of literary form corresponded to a rethinking of when literary history began. As Raphael Falco has detailed in a fascinating study, English writers late in Elizabeth’s reign proceeded to “forge” a genealogy that began somewhere around 1580, with Sidney himself posthumously refashioned by his elegists from courtier-soldier into paterfamilias of English literature.²² From that point dated experiments in genres and modes heretofore untried in England, and undreamt of in ancient Greek and Roman literary philosophy: the history play, the romantic tragedy, the epic-romance.

But my argument concerns more than just analogizing the way two disesteemed necessities, political and literary—queenship and the English language—became mothers of Tudor-Stuart invention. Recent studies in genre criticism assert that new literary forms come about as ways of managing (or, conversely, repressing) historical circumstance.²³ In part, I want to reaffirm this view by similarly asserting that, at significant moments in the trajectory of literature with which I am concerned, female authority itself is the leitmotif around which issues of experimentation in literary form emerge and cluster. This contention has to do partly with the widespread Renaissance perception that writing fiction of any sort was an effeminate occupation, and that publishing one’s work either on stage or in print particularly lent itself to a destabilized gender and class identity: the writer as prostitute.²⁴ (I will return to this topic shortly.) But some kinds of fiction are more dangerous in this regard than others. Anticipating Helene Cixous’s and Luce Irigaray’s postmodern visions of a feminine language, Renaissance poets and playwrights had definite ideas of which modes of fiction writing especially promoted effeminacy, both of the text itself and, by extension, of its reader. Central to this classification is the notion that femininity was a matter not so much of inhabiting a certain variety of body, as it was an essential state of disorderly being. Even in terms of their physiques, of course, women were thought of as as more unstable than men—colder and wetter in bodily humours, and even likely to suffer their reproductive organs’ shifting position inside their bodies.²⁵ Such corporeal unruliness, however, was not exclusive to women; it could also be communicated across the sexes. It was commonly believed, in accordance with Galenic medical theory, that individual human bodies occupy positions along a continuum from super-masculine to super-feminine, so that a woman might ascend the scale to resemble or even become a man, whereas a man might equally slide downward into femaleness.²⁶ But more important, in my view—and more productive for literary analysis than attending exclusively to literature’s portrayal of human reproductive equipment—is the fact that femininity, for the Renaissance, is a state of mind: a mind that is similarly disorderly, unstable, unwilling to remain within acceptable bounds or to focus upon acceptable aims.²⁷

Modes of literature that promoted this unstable state of mind were thus entirely suspect. Lyric poetry, an unmanly “toy” viewed as at best an exercise for adolescents, threatened to distract its readers from more active, useful pursuits by enrapturing them in lyric loveliness. The romance mode as well was subject to such charges. Not only did it share with much of lyric poetry a concern with heterosexual love, and hence a concern with men in danger of being overcome by women, it also embodied in its very form a kind of triviality and inconclusiveness, qualities that do not lend themselves to masculine ambition.²⁸ Patricia Parker notes that Sir John Harington, as translator of Ariosto’s romance Orlando Furioso, worried “that, in becoming ‘a translator of Italian toys,’ he was wasting his education.”²⁹ Drama as a medium and a form of literary work was also under particular suspicion. Theater’s collapsing of genders (men in women’s clothing) and of self-identity in general struck critics as a tool for “effeminizing the mind.”³⁰ Responding to such charges, Thomas Nashe proposed the dramatic genre of the history play—an English invention—as a salutary means of reviving male heroes and hence reforming “these degenerate effeminate days of ours.” A masculine form grows up around what Nashe calls “our forefathers’ valiant acts,” pursuits that evidently preclude the influence of the women of lyric or romance—Laura, or Stella, or Angelica.³¹

Lyric, romance, and drama are seen as so dangerous only because their charms are undeniable. Far from successfully reforming feminine into masculine literary form, in fact, the authors with which this book is concerned take, at least on occasion, the opposite tack: they rework masculine forms so that those forms both accommodate feminity, and are reshaped by it as an overwhelming force. In the end, these reformations of form turn to positive or at least to startlingly inventive uses the suspicion of an effeminizing fiction. In a recent study, Catherine Gallagher has outlined how women writers of the Restoration seized upon notions of the feminine self as a commodified body—always alienated, dispossessed, indebted to others—as a way of reconceiving authorial labor itself as a process of exchange, rather than of production. Turning feminine disability into literary strategy, these writers altered prevalent notions of what a fictional self consists of, as well as of what it means to be an author.³² My sense is that such an inversion is made possible because it is explored in advance, however tentatively and covertly, by the authors I address in this book, each of whom indulges in fantasies of an unmitigatedly feminized literary form.

It may seem strange and even patronizingly sexist to suggest that male authors, and especially the three authors who epitomize the Renaissance literary canon, shape femininity for the future cadre of female writers who are the objects of Gallagher’s attention. A book on “female authority and literary experiment” might logically be expected to contain quite a different set of writers, beginning with queens who were themselves writers or literary patrons. And indeed, the literary writings of Queen Elizabeth, along with those of the French queen Marguerite de Navarre, have made their way into the canon in recent years, if inclusion in standard classroom texts like The Norton Anthology of English Literature is any indication. The literary efforts of nonroyal women, both aristocrats and others, have also finally begun receiving some richly deserved attention, though some other royal women writers—particularly, in my view, Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a very talented poet—still await serious consideration.³³ But these authors are not the object of my study; nor do I consider, except briefly at the conclusion of this book, the ways in which women writers of the Tudor-Stuart period either did or did not derive literary confidence from the example of women who held political power. My reasons for focusing on Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, to the exclusion of other authors in general and women authors in particular, are twofold. First, since my topic is literary innovation, women writers of this period would tend not to fit the bill. For reasons that are too complex to enumerate here but that would richly repay a study of their own, women of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tend to write in literary veins that have already been well worked: Queen Elizabeth, for example, composes relatively predictable Petrarchan love lyrics thirty or forty years after Wyatt and Surrey; Mary Wroth writes a prose romance modeled after her uncle Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, composed some four decades earlier; and Elizabeth Cary designs her tragedy Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry along Senecan lines, even while alluding to contemporaries such as Shakespeare who had left such well-worn models behind years before. I do not mean to belittle the literary quality of these pieces; indeed, their very belatedness is an extremely interesting feature, one that can amount to an inventiveness of a very different kind. And it is also the case that the male authors I discuss in this study are also interested in retro forms—Spenser in Chaucerian tales, Shakespeare in revenge tragedy, and Milton in all things Elizabethan. But they are also on the vanguard, creating new literary modes that in turn will be imitated by others.

Imitation and influence constitute the second reason I have chosen Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton for this study, rather than other authors (including women authors). Because their influence on other authors—including, in succession, each other—was so immediate and so profound, these writers’ experiments in form are central to any study of how authors take up and challenge their predecessors’ literary patterns. It is partly because Spenser’s extraordinarily influential poem centers national history upon queenship, for example, that Shakespeare’s histories, in their attempt to adapt and even supercede The Faerie Queene in the medium of drama, also feature authoritative women as makers and breakers of national destiny. Milton, even more ambitious, is engaged in both absorbing and rewriting the entire oeuvres of both Spenser and Shakespeare, even while he attempts topics that these titanic predecessors never dared. If the feminine authorial voice becomes important to English literary history, then, it is in part because these authors, in particular, take it up as a way of making their own way into that literary history.

Because these three writers, unlike the female authors in Gallagher’s study of the Restoration and eighteenth century, are working in an era in which the idea of the self as commodity had not yet been consolidated, they imagine the feminized authorial voice along a different axis for constructing the self: the axis of monarch-subject. Along this axis the dialectic of presence and lack that Gallagher notices in the authorial voices of Restoration writers takes shape not as a dialectic between monetary value and worthlessness, or between credit and debt, but rather between command and obedience, in this case the command of a queen over her male subjects. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton portrays the authorial self as existing only in relation to monarchy; this proposition, insofar as it was made (or taken to be made) by early new-historicist studies of Spenser and Shakespeare, has been challenged and revised in recent years, and it would be patently absurd in the case of Milton.³⁴ Nevertheless, in terms of my topic the nature of the relation between sovereign and subject remains a crucial issue. It is arguably the case that, in a post–Roman Catholic era, English Renaissance writers had little place else to look but to queens—living, historical, or fictional—if they wished to find exempla for how femininity and authority might be conjoined. But as Timothy Hampton points out, the Renaissance use of the exemplum often brings about a kind of productive crisis, given that the exemplary figure often features, along with his or her virtues, qualities that are not so worthy of praise or imitation. For Hampton, this crisis of imitability becomes productive when an author questions the wisdom of modeling present action upon past heroism.³⁵ In the case of queenship, however, the use of the exemplum becomes radical when an author wholeheartedly endorses an identification with the female model because of the very fact of her femininity. Specifically, the conjunction of femininity and authority becomes a site for reconfiguring the hierarchical monarch-subject relation itself. For the authorial voice can escape the very conditions of hierarchy if it imagines itself not solely as reversing the circumstances of queenly rule over men, so that a masculine authorial voice might master a formerly feminine literary form, but rather as inhabiting the circumstances of queenly rule, so that the authorial voice dwells within and embraces the feminized form, becoming itself a master-mistress of authorial presence.³⁶

My argument, then, is that queenship is proposed so often as a model and occasion for English Renaissance literary innovation because feminized authority proves an enabling strategy for negotiating otherwise unmanageable authorial straits—that is, for stretching literary shape in the direction of effeminized form. I am building here on Diana Henderson’s study of lyricism in Elizabethan theater, which brilliantly argues that the presence of a female monarch not only encouraged lyric encomia toward the queen herself, but also catalyzed a reformation in lyric form. Once it became associated with a queen, Petrarchan love lyric could be converted into a vehicle for working out extended permutations of the possible associations and/or contradictions between lyric poetry and female power. Concomitantly, lyric becomes a venue for discussing the most serious of political, social, and religious issues, as well as a mode in which female subjectivity may be voiced on the English stage. “Elizabeth,” says Henderson, “because of her political power, provided a unique incentive within her culture for reevaluating the feminine.”³⁷ But I am also interested in what happens when this incentive for boosting the eminence of a literary form no longer exists. Showing Like a Queen is thus partly an exercise precisely in not engaging the “local readings” of early modern authors that Leah Marcus urges.³⁸ Whereas one of the “locales” with which Marcus is concerned is the phenomenon of English queenship under Elizabeth, my attention is directed toward the golden world authors attempt to create as an alternative to the brazen world of local circumstance. To test my thesis, the scope of this book extends past the era in which English authors had to contend with the living presence of a female monarch. Spenser died while Elizabeth Tudor was still queen; Shakespeare’s career straddled the reigns of both Elizabeth and James I; and Milton—though troubled by the influence upon Charles I of his Roman Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria—saw only male rulers, both kings and Protectors. Nonetheless, the unhinging of the feminized authorial mode from the actual historical circumstance of female rule is itself, in large part, the raison d’être of my study. For the work of inhabiting feminized literary form is for the most part an exercise in fantasy—the fantasy (at times, the nightmare) of a counterpatriarchal literary world.

Part of that fantasy or nightmare involves nostalgia, a ready and easy means of conceiving of alternatives to the present moment. Not coincidentally, as I address in Chapter 5, nostalgia is an ailment of early modern inception; only in the Renaissance can people begin to imagine such a radical, heartrending disjunction between their present circumstances and the Heimat they have left behind. For both Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan authors, the disjunction between female and male monarchy—one present, the other gone by—can provide an especially powerful occasion and model for reinventing literary form in the way that I have just described. Whether queenship constitutes the horrible, degraded innovation of the present moment or the sweetly remembered security of the past, it establishes through counterposition the possibility of another mode of shaping the basic conditions of existence. Depending on their specific moments of production, the literary works I address in this book engage in nostalgia either for a king or a queen; but in either case, the political “problem” of queenship, either current or remembered, is turned to literary advantage. In Chapters 2 through 5 of this book I trace a historical and literary micro-history of two decades, 1590–1613, in which Spenser and Shakespeare mull over the politics of female rule in the waning and aftermath of Elizabeth’s reign, devising literary stratagems around representing—or recollecting—those historically anomalous political arrangements. My leap forward in Chapter 6 to Milton, then, is intended to test my thesis by establishing that Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century legacy remained intertwined with the fortunes of feminine authority. Even after more than sixty years of restored male rule, Milton experiments with deriving literary form from the formulae of queenship.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, generally treated as the culmination of literary treatments of the cult of Elizabeth, thus becomes here a precursory and foundational text. In The Faerie Queene Spenser tests strategies for being not only troubled but also gratified by the prospect of hanging an ambitious and innovative literary project upon techniques associated with effeminized writing. As the long process of its composition and publication proceeds through the last two decades of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth, The Faerie Queene poses with increasing insistence the question of how new modes of literary design can be accomplished in response to feminine authority. It will be clear how indebted I am to Montrose’s seminal studies of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, mentioned above, and their treatment of Spenser’s anxiety-ridden fashioning of his queen into an appropriate object for poetry.³⁹ My sense, though, is that in The Faerie Queene Spenser’s gender-inflected anxiety about writing an epic to and about a queen bears fruit not only in fulsome praise and/or savage recriminations toward figures of feminine authority in the poem, but also in stunning revisions of and departures from Spenser’s primary poetic models, the classical epic and the Italian romance. Even as The Faerie Queene seeds the careers of its most prominent heroines and anti-heroines with allusions to Elizabeth Tudor and to Scotland’s Mary Stuart, the poem continuously renegotiates its alliances to “feminine” modes of poetic writing as it alternatively embraces and abandons those characters. In Book 3, for example, the poem diverges from heroic epic into a more digressive genre, the epic-romance, even as it begins to associate poetic power with the feminine power of Elizabeth’s many doubles in the poem, including Britomart and Gloriana. Spenser’s link is “ravishment,” a quality he ascribes both to seductive poetry and to powerful female characters who seize men’s senses and suspend epic action. My study of The Faerie Queene traces how the poem’s celebration of queenly and poetic ravishment in Books 3 and 4 prompts other, more reactionary generic experiments as the poem progresses—including historical allegory (Book 5), courtly pastoral (Book 6), and mythopoetics (the Mutability Cantos). All of these post-ravishment flights into new poetic modes, I contend, are designed to close off the feminine poetics Spenser himself had earlier proposed.

In some ways, Spenser’s magnum opus raises as a matter of literary form the same proposition advanced by the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, an incident much on England’s mind in the 1590s, and one thinly allegorized in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. The Queen of Scots’s demise, the first legally enacted trial and sentencing to death of a European monarch, came about in part because of what was seen as her particularly feminine waywardness; Mary’s political machinations to acquire the English throne, like her conduct before she was deposed in 1567 from the throne of Scotland, generally involved her plans to marry a prominent lord of her own choosing.⁴⁰ Ridding England of the threat of the “Scottish whore” proved a politically tricky business, then, since its precedent might justify deposing Elizabeth, herself called a whore by her detractors.⁴¹ Furthermore, in the same way that Plowden’s doctrine of the king’s two bodies distinguished the will of the courts from the will of the queen, Mary’s trial and execution disjoined the authority of the law, as well as the authority of Elizabeth’s own advisors, from the authority of a divinely ordained monarch—a station from which Mary was never demoted in either Scotland or England, even while the English authorities were branding her an adulteress, murderess, and traitor.⁴² Killing the queen, even if not their own queen, thus put England in something of a quandary. The queen’s rule, as it turned out, might indeed be not only altered, but ended by force of law: that is, by a form of rule finally superior to that of the monarchy. But what would that nascent form of rule look like, once given free rein? The solution to that problem was, of course, to occupy English Parliamentary politics for much of the next century after Elizabeth’s death. Similarly, Spenser’s epic, I argue, ostentatiously repeals feminine rule in its closing books by successively dethroning the Amazon queen Radigund, the female knight Britomart, the titaness Mutabilitie, and even Queen Elizabeth herself. But what kind of poetry comes to fill this void left by departed queenship? How might poetic authority be conceived as something other than feminized? Spenser’s breathtakingly swift transformations of poetic modes in the second half of The Faerie Queene play like a number of musical variations upon this question.

In the central chapters of this book I turn to Shakespeare, who, even more attuned to historical specifics than Spenser, either invents or transforms dramatic genres to accommodate and reshape topical issues uniquely associated with a feminine monarchy. First staged in the same decade, the 1590s, in which Books I through 6 of The Faerie Queene were published, Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays—the Henry VI plays and Richard III; and Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V—were experiments in crafting and refining a new English dramatic genre. The range of these plays becomes a venue in which Shakespeare works out, even to the point of literary exhaustion, the possibilities for this genre. In particular, the fledgling playwright employs the history form to probe whether and how the stage might wish to attach its fortunes to the fortunes of the monarchy—necessarily, a feminine monarchy. National desire for heroic action in these two tetralogies repeatedly confronts the obstacle of a feminine or feminized authority: the witch, Joan of Arc, in 1 Henry VI; the effeminate French in Henry V; even the slippery, smooth-tongued Machiavel, Richard III. Shakespeare’s reiteration of this theme reflects several national dilemmas surrounding England’s queen in the 1590s, in particular, whether her feminine weakness was inhibiting potential military triumph in Ireland and on the Continent, and whether her failure to produce or name an heir had hopelessly blocked English hopes for a glorious national future. But my concern is also to investigate how these feminine obstacles enable an inquiry into the gendered nature of dramatic genre. As the history plays progress, they increasingly imagine a heroic world untrammeled by femininity. But can masculine heroism give shape to a compelling and versatile dramatic form? Should the stage adopt a solely masculine authority for its own?

The history plays eventually follow the pattern of the second half of The Faerie Queene in hinging literary innovation upon the exclusion of feminine rule. My sense, though, is that by the close of the second tetralogy in Henry V (1599), Shakespeare’s theater deems this experiment unwise, a kind of dead end of limited dramatic action and affect. For proof I turn to a play that followed hard upon Henry V: Hamlet, itself a revision of the hoary genre of the revenge tragedy. Though most obviously a rumination on how and why male authority figures, kings and fathers, meet their ends, Hamlet in my view is also a rumination on the impending death of a queen. In this case, the historic problem of the queen’s participation in royal succession—a question particularly at issue at the time of the play’s writing, just two or three years before Elizabeth’s death in 1603—is redesigned into not only a meditation on troubled psychic relations between mother and son, but also an innovative revision of conventional dramatic revenge. For it is the existence of queenly will, Gertrude’s voluntary transfer of affection from Hamlet’s father to Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, that sets the conditions for Hamlet’s peculiar form: an ostensible revenge tragedy in which a woman’s wayward actions seem to impel heroic male retaliation, but at the same time distract and enervate it. Hamlet’s most celebrated dramatic innovation, the transformation of the revenger’s mindless murderousness into Hamlet’s fraught, psychologized delay, is thus predicated upon a queen’s rule over Hamlet as subject. And, if recent critics are correct in positing Hamlet as a pivotal depiction of the formation of modern subjectivity, then that subjectivity too can come into being only under the authority of a queen.

As it does with so many other issues, therefore, Hamlet pulls two ways in regard to queenship. On the one hand, feminine authority has enabled, if not instigated, all of Hamlet’s sociopolitical dilemmas and psychic pain; but on the other hand, those dilemmas and that pain become the stuff of a bold and influential experiment in dramatic form. Though one would never identify Prince Hamlet himself as nostalgic for queenship, the dramatic piece Hamlet derives its power in part from Hamlet’s being forced to live under the conditions of female rule against which he protests. From Hamlet I thus turn to two post-Elizabethan Shakespearean experiments in dramatic form: Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1607) and The Winter’s Tale (1611), each of which stretches the equation between the rule of women and innovative play-crafting into an audacious and ultimately haunting metaphysics of the theater itself. After Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, Shakespeare reversed the history plays’ nostalgia for unimpeded masculine authority into an appropriately Jacobean nostalgia for female rule—nostalgia that corresponds to the passing of a dramatic age, as well. Antony and Cleopatra, an experiment in “feminine” tragedy, not only proposes that queenly eroticism and instability constitute theatricality itself, but also compels an audience to desire the belated queen rather than the incoming Caesar. And as if commenting upon the power of the theater of queenship that Antony and Cleopatra sustains, The Winter’s Tale elevates nostalgia for female rule to the level of magic, of raising the dead, memorialized queen from stone into life.

At the same time, however, The Winter’s Tale reveals the potential masculine bad faith behind mourning the queen. Even while this late Shakespearean play, like Antony and Cleopatra, laments the fact that feminized theatricality, in all its vast potential, must be closed off, The Winter’s Tale also reveals such circumscription to be normative in a post-gynecocratic age. Indeed, The Winter’s Tale, in Shakespeare’s variation upon the new Jacobean genre of tragicomedy and its intermingling of recovery and loss, makes the survival of masculine governance contingent upon its indulging in nostalgia for a departed queen. That masculine governance, I shall argue, turns out to be dramatic as well as monarchical and dynastic, as the very conclusion of the play deposes the remarkable feminine dramaturgy of the dead queen Hermione’s vocal female mourner, Paulina, in favor of King Leontes’s capacity to order tale-telling and narrative renewal.

This masculine capacity to narrate past and even future action in the absence of a willful woman is one of the cornerstones of Paradise Lost’s strategies for controlling, while coopting, that woman’s will. The last chapter of this book turns to Milton as a way of exploring both the historical and the literary repercussions of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s experiments with feminine authority. Elizabethan and Jacobean responses to queenship recirculate, in the 1630s through the 1670s, in the terms of Milton’s interrelated polemics over the fate of monarchy and the ideal form of poetry. As I noted above in connection with the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the sixteenth-century debate over feminine rule’s legitimacy becomes, in the seventeenth century, a radical questioning of monarchy’s very existence; this questioning, in turn, resurfaces in Milton’s own depictions of feminine authority. Taken together, Milton’s divorce tracts (1643–45) and antimonarchical pamphlets (1640s and 1650s) parallel discarding an unsuitable wife with dethroning an unfit monarch—a monarch who, though a king, is described in feminized terms. As a result, while Paradise Lost’s unsavory misogyny toward Eve is in part a matter of controlling women in the domestic arena, it also has to do with the decades-old question of how to control a queen, and how to erect, in the place of a feminine monarchy, a Miltonic government of men privileged by their talent, education, and religion, rather than by their blood.

Simultaneously, however, Milton derives a certain kind of virtue from remembering the era of queenship: the virtue of virginity, which in the Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle signifies the capacity to resist unjust authority by means of inviolable self-rule. Hence, Paradise Lost’s engagements with the nature of human will, I argue, also are engaged with Milton’s reminiscences of female monarchy—in this case, reminiscences of the advantages the model of female monarchy might suggest. Further, Paradise Lost is a literary experiment that derives from feminine authority in that it not only revives, in Eve, the perceived dangers of Elizabeth Tudor’s or Mary, Queen of Scots’s self-willed rule, but also revisits Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s enabling associations of feminine authority with the genres of romance, of tragedy, and of tragicomedy, genres with which Milton’s epic both disputes and colludes. In many ways, Eve’s willfulness is also the will of the poem, the engine of open-ended action that replaces both the deluded, self-defeating heroism of Satan’s reworkings of epic, and the foregone tragic conclusions of God’s oddly crabbed divine dispensation. Insofar as Adam follows rather than leads Eve, he participates simultaneously in a Spenserian willingness to be ravished by the queen and by lush poetry; in a Hamletesque capacity for suspending action in favor of self-examination; in a Cleopatran ability to spin out endless scenarios for alternative realities; and in a Leontes-like real, if brief, desire to hear his revived queen speak what she will. In this way, the literary shape of Milton’s poem runs against the grain of his prose tracts’ politics, which amalgamate a supposedly enlightened republicanism with the subjection of a queen into, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra puts it, “no more but e’en a woman.”

It is this tension between historical circumstance and literary form with which this book is, finally, most concerned. My sense is that reviving “old” questions of when and how literary genres are invented can usefully broaden, as well as challenge, recent work on the relation between English Renaissance literature and the monarchy. Whereas my predecessor critics have noticed that literary works puzzle out the ambiguities of feminine authority, I wish to explain what literary advantages might accrue from such a focus. I do so, however, not to reconstruct in retrograde fashion the oldhistoricist image of the author supremely in command of the “historical background” his or her times provide to the writing of literature. Rather, I want to extend Montrose’s insight regarding the reciprocal relation between culture and the literary work it informs, in order to articulate the reciprocal relation between culture and the very form of that literary work. The author, in this case, is neither entirely the product of his or her culture nor entirely the producer of new literary modes; rather, he or she exists as the mediator between the two, as that intelligence that employs each to test, protest, stretch, and/or revel in the accepted boundaries of the other. The disruptions of social and political hierarchy initiated by queenship become the occasion for major literary innovations, which in turn set new limits for what might be attempted in drama and poetry.

In a broad sense, then, my aim in this book is to marry a new-historicist account of literature as a cultural form to a literary-historical account of the succession of texts. More particularly, my intent is to account for the microcosmic shifts in attitudes toward feminine authority within a literary work, or within a series of works like Shakespeare’s history plays. While such shifts are explicable partly in terms of the complex array of responses toward queenship that are always available in Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan England, they also come about as spur-of-the-moment strategies for handling the shaping of any number of transitory but tricky literary moments. To the new-historicist description of the Renaissance author as engaging in as well as submitting to improvisations of power, I thus want to add my description of the Renaissance text itself as improvisatory, shape-shifting, and in flux. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse put it, the course of any narrative is an important object of study because narrative itself consists of “the traces of the labor that went into organizing various materials, representations, representations of representations, into a reproducible and consumable body of knowledge that [can] be converted into speech.”⁴³ I am interested in those narrative moments in which the labor of representing female authority manifests itself, not just in anxiety and bitter toil, but also in stunning craft. In this way, issues surrounding feminine authority are most enabling for Renaissance writers precisely when they are not fully articulated and delimited within the literary text either as predictable characterizations of queens or as pressing, extraliterary historical events. Rather, the historical circumstance undergoes, as in Ariel’s song, a kind of sea-change within the text, becoming something “rich and strange” as the text absorbs it and reconfigures itself in response. I have in mind a version of what Harry Berger describes as the dialectical relation between “page and stage” in Shakespeare’s plays. Appropriating Berger’s terms regarding Shakespeare’s treatment of theatricality, I would argue that the literary works with which this book is concerned “textualize” both the anxiety-producing and the liberating circumstances of feminine authority that surround or precede them. It is only when those circumstances are “detextualized”—that is, “[d]isplac[ed] … to the local habitation of theatrical and narrative circumstances”—that they “impos[e] a land of ideological closure on the semiotic power of the text.”⁴⁴ Displacing all the possibilities and contingencies of feminine authority merely onto the prosaic activities of female characters, as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton at times do, “detextualizes” and hence closes off the alternative strategy of these texts, which is to retain femininity, in all its frightening open-endedness, as a strategy of literary endeavor.

Female authority counts so strongly as a touchstone for such improvisations because Renaissance culture viewed women, usually with great suspicion, as inherently changeable and hence unreliable.⁴⁵ As the anonymous 1560 tract entitled The deceyte of women, to the instruction and ensample of all men, yonge and old puts it, “Now beholde, what myschyefe, what marvayles and what folyshnes that the false and subtil women can brynge to passe, yea that semeth unpossyble for to be, that can they doo and brynge to passe.”⁴⁶ That mischief, those marvels, and that foolishness—all “that semeth unpossyble for to be”—translates into Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s, and Milton’s examinations of their own capacities for marvelous, unanticipated literary innovation.