Showing Like a Queen - Katherine Eggert

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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

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