Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, eds., The Myth of Elizabeth.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. x + 269 pp. ISBN 0333930843.
Julia M. Walker. The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004. xii + 232 pp. ISBN 1403911991
DR MATTHEW WOODCOCK
(UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA)
Julia Walker concludes the introduction to her survey of posthumous
recastings of Elizabeth I’s image and imagery by asserting that the ‘Elizabeth
icon and the place it claims in the common sphere of public memory are, it
certainly seems, rich enough to nourish any number of studies’ (p. 5). This
appears – at least initially – to be true when considering the number of
scholarly works on Elizabeth produced in the last three years to mark the
four-hundredth anniversary of her death. The anniversary in 2003 provided
the ideal occasion to look back across four centuries and reflect upon the
continued popularity of Elizabeth in the public imagination and establish a
‘long view’ of the different ways in which her image has been used and
refashioned since 1603. The titles presently under review constitute two
examples of works offering critical revaluations of Elizabethan mythography
and iconography. Other examples written conterminously with these studies
include John Watkins’s Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), Michael Dobson and Nicola Watson’s England’s
Elizabeth (Oxford University Press, 2002), and the essay collection, Elizabeth I:
Always Her Own Free Woman, edited by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney and
Debra Barrett-Graves (Ashgate, 2003).
In each of these recent studies it is clear that the focus of much modern
scholarship on Elizabeth is directed towards the textual and visual strategies
deployed to represent the queen, and their legacy in later literature, portraiture
and historical accounts. Indeed it has been observed on several occasions that
to study Elizabeth is to study a construct or text: an historical and legal fiction,
an entity woven together from records of public speeches, from the figures
used to represent her in celebratory poems and pageantry, and from the
symbolic and seemingly ageless images of the queen found in royal portraits.
Susan Frye goes as far as stating unequivocally that ‘I cannot believe that
Elizabeth can be recovered in any absolute sense, even if we finally manage to
retrieve more of her voice’.1 The increasing shift away from attempts to
recover an essentialist conception of Elizabeth is signalled in the titles of both
books reviewed here, and by the critical emphasis now placed upon multiple
constructions of the ‘myth’, ‘icon’ and ‘image’ of Elizabeth. Of course the
study of Elizabethan myth-making is by no means a new discipline. The so1
Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 9.
called ‘cult’ of Elizabeth has long attracted critical attention and provides a
record of the many different representational strategies used in the
construction, embellishment and perpetuation of the body politic as it is
figured in the queen. But what increasingly distinguishes scholarship on
Elizabethan mythography of the 1980s onwards from the earlier generations
of research by E. C. Wilson, Frances Yates, and Roy Strong, is a realisation
that the queen and her government were not the sole producers of a
monolithic, unified iconography for the queen. Images constructed to
represent Elizabeth function as sites of potential conflict between different
factions and individuals, including the queen herself. As Walker’s earlier
collection Dissing Elizabeth (Duke University Press, 1998) revealed, there were
also parties both at court and abroad committed to fashioning explicitly
negative representations of the queen. It is the continued manipulation of
Elizabeth’s myth or iconography that occurs during her own lifetime that
forms the natural basis for the successive reconstructions and remythologisations that take place in the four centuries after her death, and that
become the focus of the works reviewed here.
Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman’s essay collection begins by
acknowledging the connection between past and present constructions of
Elizabeth, and contemplating briefly the enduring popular familiarity of the
queen’s physical image and personality traits that have been shaped into a
recognisable set of characteristics for the twentieth- and twenty-first-century
public imagination, it is argued, by representations of her in film. The
cinematic queen is now a ubiquitous feature of most modern studies on
Elizabethan mythography, but here too celluloid myth-makers ‘have merely
crystallised and popularised a pre-existing myth about Elizabeth’ (p. 2). Doran
and Freeman’s volume focuses upon the Elizabethan genesis of that myth and
its Jacobean evolution into what has become its recognised form, and they
quickly locate themselves in relation to revisionist traditions of scholarship on
Elizabethan myth-making. The book’s first section posits the useful notion of
so-called ‘Trojan horses’ of contemporary royal panegyric whereby extended,
effulgent praise concealed prescription and censure. Freeman’s opening essay
challenges the pervasive assumption that John Foxe’s account of Elizabeth’s
captivity during Mary I’s reign was anything more than a straightforward,
unambiguous glorification. By carefully tracing the composition of the
captivity and accession narrative in the 1563 Acts and Monuments, Freeman
reveals how Foxe was clearly shaping his historical materials for a specific
purpose. By stressing that God alone was responsible for Elizabeth’s
accession, and that the queen’s authority over Church and State was divinely
ordained, Foxe, in successive editions of his work, sought to remind her of
the obligations God imposed upon her. (The providential nature of
Elizabeth’s accession was also a major component of seventeenth-century
popular celebrations of the queen, as a wide-ranging essay by Alexandra
Walsham later in this collection reveals.) As Foxe constructs it, Elizabeth had
an obligation to complete the reformation of the English Church and to
further purge lingering remnants of popery, including the wearing of clerical
surplices. By the 1576 edition, Foxe includes a range of materials explicitly
criticising Elizabeth for failing to enact religious reform.
Andrew Hadfield reveals a similar criticism of Elizabeth’s failure to act
in accordance with the interests of the more militant Protestant faction that is
voiced through the ostensible panegyric structure of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
Hadfield revisits of episodes in the poem where various characters face the
difficult challenge of interpreting the subtle distinction between positive and
negative female figures (for example, Britomart and Radigund), and in turn as
readers we are forced to question which one ‘really’ represents Elizabeth. By
the 1596 edition there is increasing difficulty in distinguishing a good queen
from bad, and the poem is overtly critical of female sovereignty itself,
suggesting that women are incapable of decisive, pragmatic action necessary
to rule effectively. Heedful of the obvious question of how Foxe and Spenser
got away with such criticism, Freeman and Hadfield demonstrate not only the
complexity of collocating censure and praise but also suggest that the queen
shrewdly chose to appropriate only the positive aspects of her portrayal in
such works and ignore the criticism, displaying Elizabeth’s skill at managing
potentially challenging accounts of her reign and policies.
The next section of essays examines the emergence of two contrasting
images of Elizabeth during James I’s reign. The first is that of the ‘politic,
pragmatic ruler, reluctant to fight and hating religious extremism’ (p. 6); the
other is that of Elizabeth as a militant Protestant champion. Patrick
Collinson’s essay shows how William Camden’s original account of
Elizabeth’s reign in his Annales, first published in Latin in 1615, is less
responsible for the ‘mythical’ version of Elizabethan history than has
previously been thought. Rather, it was the successive English translations of
the Annales from 1625 onwards which downplayed the laconic detachment of
Camden’s Latin and his sympathetic account of Mary Queen of Scots,
stressing instead Elizabeth’s ‘glorious fame’ and fashioning the popularity of
her reign as a ‘yardstick’ against which to measure perceived failings of her
Stuart successors (p. 85). Both Freeman and Collinson thus offer a muchneeded revaluation of the founding authorities for Elizabethan history and
mythography, and their work will be of great importance in guiding
subsequent scholars to examine supposed myth-makers Foxe and Camden
with a greater sensitivity to oppositional voices than is found in previous
studies.
Lisa Richardson and Teresa Grant extend the analysis of Jacobean
Elizabeth here by examining a number of literary constructions of the queen.
Richardson’s innovation is to trace how Fulke Greville and Sir John Hayward
each manipulate Sir Philip Sidney’s critique of weak, inconstant monarchs
found in Arcadia, that was originally directed towards Elizabeth, in order to
construct different models of rule for their dedicatee Prince Henry. Drawing
on a nuanced reading of Stuart historiographical methods, Richardson shows
how Greville compares Elizabeth to Sidney’s ‘good king’ Euarchus, and how
Hayward’s history of Elizabeth’s early reign again depicts the queen in
Arcadian terms though stresses the virtue of acting as a pragmatic politician
rather than a militant saviour figure. The multiple strands from which the
Elizabeth myth was woven are shown again in Grant’s essay on Thomas
Heywood’s play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. Grant demonstrates
how although the first part draws heavily upon Foxe’s glorifying account, the
second instalment increasingly aligns the queen’s insistence on her virginity
with a greater emphasis on her martial valour, as ‘masculine virtue is reflected
by a concomitant arch-feminine chastity’ (p. 135). As this essay indicates
gender was a vital factor shaping Elizabethan myth-making. The virgin queen
is surely the most well-known example of the many figures used not only to
represent the Elizabeth, but to negotiate the relative novelty of female
sovereignty, especially from the 1580s when it became clear that Elizabeth
would never marry. Doran’s own essay interrogates the virgin queen
iconography and re-examines the queen’s visual representations in images
commissioned by both Elizabeth and her courtiers. Doran’s rather
contentious conclusion is that there appears to be relatively little
appropriation of Marian iconography (as argued by Yates, Strong and others),
and that in those few portraits where Elizabeth was directly responsible for
her own image she is usually represented as a Protestant ruler rather than a
virgin queen. Careful contextualisation of a selection of well-known portraits
in relation both to their circumstances of production and to the symbolic
vocabulary deployed in European visual panegyric reveals Elizabethan
portraiture to be far more conventional and derivative than is often realised.
Two further Elizabethan legends receive a critical reappraisal within
this volume. The first, the enduring idea that Elizabeth vehemently opposed
clerical marriage, and that this prejudiced patterns of appointment to the
episcopacy, is convincingly challenged in a pair of case studies by Brett Usher.
Jason Scott-Warren’s contribution on the mythical legacy of Sir John
Harington’s gossipy accounts of Elizabeth’s court urges a rational,
contextualised approach to interpreting how the aspiring courtier deploys the
queen’s image within his own strategies of self-promotion. Thomas
Betteridge’s essay on Elizabeth in films returns to the issue of Elizabethan
gender roles, discussing the emphasis repeatedly placed on the relationship
between gender and power in onscreen representations of the queen.
Concentrating on Fire Over England, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and
Elizabeth, Betteridge reaches the somewhat predictable conclusion that
Elizabeth films reflect both the shifting conceptions of gender in society and
the imprint this has upon contemporary approaches to Elizabethan mythmaking. This is not the most comprehensive survey of cinematic Elizabeths
nor does it begin to engage with discussion of what makes the representation
of Elizabeth on film (or television) specifically different from earlier textual
and visual depictions; how do cinematic myth-makers exploit their particular
medium? Doran and Freeman otherwise assemble a very strong collection of
scholarly materials here, and their specific focus upon the Elizabethan and
Jacobean stages of the myth-making process ultimately fosters a great
coherence to the different approaches to the Elizabeth ‘myth’ undertaken by
all of the contributors. The collection demonstrates a commitment to revising
the boundaries of our existing understanding of Elizabethan myth-making and
scholars of early modern literature and history will welcome the challenges
repeatedly made to accepted authorities and conventions, including the
perceived orthodoxy of Spenser, Foxe and Camden.
Walker’s The Elizabeth Icon offers a far more wide-ranging approach to
the different surfaces upon which different ages have projected their (and our)
conceptions of the queen. Although as Walker observes, Elizabeth is surely
the most recognisable of all English monarchs (barring Elizabeth II), and her
image has become an icon for the English nation itself, interpretation of
individual, historical reworkings of that icon frequently requires extensive
contextualisation and cultural localisation. This is what Walker sets out to
provide for a gloriously eclectic range of texts, monuments, images, and
objects of curio and kitsch produced from 1603-2003. Walker’s study of
multi-generic representations of Elizabeth obviously invites immediate
comparison with Dobson and Watson’s 2002 England’s Elizabeth, though the
author is keen to highlight that there is little overlap in their choice of analytic
set-pieces.
Walker’s first chapter looks at the means by which Elizabeth becomes
established within Jacobean public memory through the ‘icon’ of her tomb at
Westminster Abbey. In particular she examines at some length how James I
quickly sought to appropriate that icon through relocating Elizabeth’s body
from under the altar of the Henry VII chapel to a new tomb completed in
1606, where she was buried with Mary I. James thus uses Elizabeth to serve
his own political agenda, seeking to source his own direct descent from Henry
VII and effacing his predecessor’s genealogy. As Walker rightly notes, James’s
appropriation of the Elizabeth icon at Westminster was clearly successful, as
posterity and the public imagination have all but forgotten Elizabeth’s original
resting place. Whilst Doran and Freeman (and Dobson and Watson) examine
theatrical versions of the queen on the public stage, Walker’s sections on the
seventeenth-century Elizabeth focus on her presence upon the political stage
and her appearance within discourses on the marriage of Prince Charles to the
Spanish Infanta. Once again Elizabeth is made to embody patriotic militarism
and national integrity in the face of a Spanish ‘invasion’. In the midseventeenth century the greatest threat to the royal icon comes from within
the nation, though again Walker teases out the doubleness of the Elizabeth
image using Milton as a case study. Elizabeth becomes the subject of an
interpretative struggle, a signifier capable of representing monarchy and the
limitations of the sixteenth-century religious settlement, but also of the
constitutional settlement sought by Cromwell.
Walker’s methodology in discussing where the Elizabeth icon was used
(and not used) during the seventeenth century is to offer a thorough
contextualisation and close reading of each of the key texts or sites upon
which she focuses. Once she moves towards the eighteenth century however
the need for extensive background decreases as Elizabeth’s icon ‘gradually had
less to do with specific political events and more to do with popular responses
to general social issues, both foreign and domestic’ (p. 89). Walker’s focus
here is upon popular histories of Elizabeth, and the utility of the militant
Gloriana image in representing Trafalgar and Waterloo. Treatment of the
Victorian Elizabeth icon begins by stressing the differences between the two
queens’ reigns, observing that Victoria actively rejected any comparison to her
unmarried, early modern forbear (as does Elizabeth II). Walker traces instead
the emergent mass production of Elizabeth’s image, including its appearance
on biscuit tins and tobacco tins. (A later chapter similarly sees Elizabeth
appear on tea towels, teapots, and as a rubber bath duck.) The later-nineteenth
century also saw attempts, particularly in the visual arts, to conflate the age of
Shakespeare with that of Elizabeth through repeated constructions of the
queen as the bard’s ultimate audience. Twentieth-century recastings of the
Elizabeth icon construct her as a supporter of women’s suffrage, and as a
patriotic rallying point during the Dardanelles campaign and in 1940; once
again the Tilbury dock rhetoric is marshalled in defence of this island nation.
The final chapter considers the second Elizabethan age and returns us to the
mass production of the Elizabeth icon, briefly touching upon the cinematic
queen, in particular how Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth stages the birth
of the virgin queen figure.
One of the weakest points of this book is the concluding coda that
attempts to contextualise Elizabeth’s position (at number seven) in the BBC’s
2001 Top Ten Great Britons poll, though merely reveals how little the author
knows about later British history or the current popularity in UK television
programming for the cultural ‘top tens’ genre. Walker rightly concludes that
the existence of Elizabeth ‘gives English-speaking peoples a visual fix on the
Renaissance that is unparalleled’ (p. 209), though this point could have equally
been made at the end of the preceding chapter, sparing the need for the
present conclusion. As testimony to the enduring popularity of Elizabeth
outside of academia, Walker’s book appears to be aimed as much at a general
readership through its conversational register, and liberal use of personal
anecdotes and observations. At times however the pitch was confusing and I
wonder how many general readers might be scared off by the largely
unnecessary usage of Jürgen Habermas in the section on Elizabeth’s tomb?
Walker’s mode of exposition and contextualisation is excellent though too
often on reaching the end of a section one found that Dobson and Watson
had got there first and drawn similar conclusions in their study, frequently
with greater efficiency. Walker’s book is strongest on its seventeenth-century
material but on balance Dobson and Watson offer a far more comprehensive
survey of the field.
Both books reviewed here include examples of negative representations
of Elizabeth and overtly critical refashionings of her iconography. But as
Doran and Freeman observe it is remarkable how little effect these had upon
her myth. Despite Foxe’s and Camden’s critiques of her religion and politics,
and early modern Catholic constructions of Elizabeth as a persecutor, it is the
image of the queen as a ‘successful, intelligent, calculating, triumphant, but
unnaturally masculine ruler who gloried in her unique and somewhat
unnatural virginity’ which ultimately won (or is winning?) the competition for
representation between the multiple Elizabeths produced since 1603 (p. 15).
Although modern scholarly reconstructions of the queen may reveal the
complexity of the Elizabeth image, it is the version beloved of National Trust
gift-shops and Oscar-winning movies that still wins the popular vote.