scholarly journals Iconicizing Kingship in Elizabethan England: Strategic Acting by Queen Elizabeth I

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 147-160
Author(s):  
Urszula Kizelbach
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Role Play ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
James I ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Renaissance England ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I

Abstract Renaissance England is often discussed in the context of theatre and theatrical acting. The fact is that Renaissance monarchs, too, viewed kingship in terms of theatrical display and public performance. Such is the nature of royalty presented by King James I in Basilicon Doron. Queen Elizabeth I was playing all her life. Faced with the problem of her femininity in the world of men, as well as her ambivalent hereditary rights as a member of the Tudor dynasty, she focused on legitimizing her reign through playing different roles - she played the fearful king, the loving queen, she even played Virgin Mary. But Elizabeth emerges as the most stunning actress when she plays herself. On her summer visit to Wanstead in 1578 she took an active part in the pageant “The lady of May”, playing herself, “Good Queen Bess”, which Sir Philip Sidney depicted in his pastoral romance The lady of May. In this way, Elizabeth became her own icon. This paper provides instances of the Queen’s political role play in a historical and socio-cultural context of the time.

Music and Late Elizabethan Politics: The Identities of Oriana and Diana

2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEREMY L. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Current Assessment ◽  
William Byrd

Abstract This essay challenges the current assessment that Thomas Morley's collection, The Triumphes of Oriana, was an uncomplicated musical tribute to Queen Elizabeth I, who was represented allegorically by Oriana, heroine of the romance Amadis de Gaule. It takes into account both the political context surrounding the Essex Revolt, the Elizabethan succession question, and the Catholic issue and the ideas reflected in the poetry that was set to music, as well as some of the music itself. It can be shown that both Morley and his mentor William Byrd were strongly linked to the Sidney/Essex complex of ideals that had a special appeal to Catholics who hoped for a more tolerant regime and who looked to Essex and a Jamesian succession as possible vehicles of salvation. Demonstrating the unsuitability of the Oriana characterization for Elizabeth, I propose a different allegorical identity not only for “Oriana” (James's wife Anna) but also for the character “Diana” (Essex's sister Penelope Rich), who appears in key works by Byrd and in all the Oriana madrigals as well. Certain songs by Byrd promoted the ideas of Sidney and his circle as well as Essex's image as the “heir to Sir Philip Sidney.” Morley's project for the Triumphes began originally, evidence shows, as a musical offering pleasing to the Essex camp and supportive of James's succession. A marked shift in political circumstances between 1600 and 1601 made it incumbent upon Morley and his collaborators to pay tribute to Elizabeth instead, but not all traces of the original intent were effaced. The ambivalence in the meaning of the Oriana and Diana allegories continued into the post-Elizabethan era.

scholarly journals ‘Who Is’t can Read a Woman?’: Representation of Queen Elizabeth I in Cymbeline

MANUSYA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Thanomnual Hiranyatheb
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
James I ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
King James I ◽  
Cultural Responses ◽  
A Site

This article is an attempt to read Cymbeline (1608-1610), one of Shakespeare’s so-called ‘final plays’ or ‘romances’ as a site of cultural responses to the remaining ‘presence’ of the late Queen Elizabeth I and her cultural associations in the context of the reign of her gender-different successor, King James I. It argues that these responses can be seen in the play’s portrayal of two characters in the play, namely the Wicked Queen and to a lesser extent, Imogen, in which the figure of the late queen is played out and marginalized, and proposes that these representations are ways in which the Jacobean culture deals with and exorcises its anxieties about the late monarch’s sometimes contradictory (self-appointed) role as a militant, powerful and inscrutable ‘woman-on-top’, which disrupted ‘natural’ gender distinction in the political climate of James I’s reign, during which pacifism, transparency and patriarchalism were highly advocated, especially by the king himself and other writers. It is hoped that this article can offer a reading of the play, not by interpreting it as a complete-in-itself and truth-reflecting work of art by a literary genius according to the romantic-humanistic conception of the ‘author’ and ‘literature,’ but rather by taking into accounts political, social and cultural forces that were circulated during the time of composition and reception of the play and with which it interacted.

Church and State, 1558–1612: The Task of the Cecils

1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
Joel Hurstfield
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
James I ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Roman Catholics

A week before Christmas 1604, Robert Cecil, secretary of state to James I, and recently elevated in the peerage to a viscountcy, received from Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, a frank piece of advice. ‘Good my Lord Cranborne,’ wrote the archbishop, ‘let me put you in mynde that you wer borne and brought up in true religion. Your worthy father was a worthy instrument to banish superstition and to advaunce the Gospell. Imytate him in this service efectyally.’ There followed some unkind observations about James I’s love for the blood sports, and a further warning about the Roman Catholics, and then a concluding prayer: ‘Thus beseching God to bless your Lordship with his manyfold graces that you may as long serve his most excellent Majestie as your most wyse father did serve most worthy Queen Elizabeth, I bid you most hartely farewell.’

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
James I ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....

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