Showing Like a Queen - Katherine Eggert

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(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,

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