In this tightly conceived and finely crafted collection of essays, Elizabeth Hageman and Katherine Conway have assembled engaging arguments addressing the transformation of a "historical" Elizabeth I into a "literary trope" throughout the seventeenth century (27). The focus of the work is suggested by the image reproduced on the frontispiece and book cover: a seventeenth-century painting of Elizabeth in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection based on a print by Flemish engravers that derives from a lost sixteenth-century painting of the queen. The Elizabeth resurrected in this collection is, then, a mythical one, several layers of remove from the historical personage; she is the Tudor monarch reproduced and recast by others as above all the defender of Protestantism from the intrigues of Catholicism and foreign invaders. Such a collection, which promises to offer "different 'takes;" (27) on Elizabeth, however monolithically conceived, could quite productively be incorporated into a seminar on the queen, especially in concert with other works participating in the four hundredth anniversary examination of Elizabeth.
The era's purposeful aestheticization and politicization of Elizabeth is an inherently fascinating subject, particularly as handled here, even if, occasionally, the nature of those various cultural appropriations is a bit too broadly defined. Of the fourteen essays, only the first two focus on the historical Elizabeth; the bulk address her transformation into that largely protestant trope. Given that "Protestantism" itself had a number of strands, however, much was/is at stake in erasing distinctions between Elizabeth's religious positions and those of her successors; overlooking such distinctions can be problematic. To cite but one example, Leslie C. Dunn discusses Elizabeth's defense of the institution of the chapel choir as if such as position was a generic protestant stance, disentangled from conservative episcopal positions on church ceremony versus those of a puritan opposition. Similarly, several feminist essays, by accepting the implicitly biased "view" that Protestantism inevitably empowered women, promote an uncomplicated notion that Elizabeth's learning and exceptionality were a product of her religious training even as the collection's own findings suggestive of the qualification of women's political power in the era certainly raise serious questions about such a sweeping historical narrative.
The standout essays resist the tendency to accept seventeenth-century protestant myth unquestioningly; exemplary instances include Katherine Duncan-Jones's focus on the last two years of Elizabeth's life, Susanne L. Wofford's essay demonstrating the ways in which Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth obscures its reliance on Thomas Heywood and the propagandist and martyrologist John Foxe as it invites its audience to accept passively seventeenth-century myth as true, and Jonathon Baldo's sensitive reading of the ways Shakespeare's and Fletcher's Henry VIII (1613) mirror Stuart efforts to "forget" Elizabeth. Thoughtful essays by Stephen May, Alan R. Young, Peter Hyland, and Georgianna Ziegler explore Stuart reactions to the long shadow her legend cast on the seventeenth century and her successor James I, including efforts to attach her glorious promise to later Stuarts or self-proclaimed heirs or to align the heightening fame of Elizabeth with increasing disappointment in James and his court. Essays by Hardin L. Aasand, Brandie R. Siegfield, and Elizabeth Pentland illustrate various authors' (e.g., Ben Jonson, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Bradstreet) willingness to elevate their status by containing or appropriating hers.
The essays collectively offer a quite useful summary of the current take on Elizabeth's afterlife in the century following her death. Despite the refined elegance of this shared vision, this reader longs for a more complex understanding of how Elizabeth's vexed position within the religious, political, and aesthetic cultural battles waged in her own era played out in seventeenth century. A pointer to one avenue for such future research appears when Steven May acknowledges that scholars continue to rely on "third-person accounts" rather than emerging scholarship that attempts to "restore" Elizabeth's "own voice" (63), suggesting thereby the possibility of locating an Elizabeth less at one with contemporary and subsequent propagandists, one more sensitive to a history of factionalism and competing representations. This collection reflects, therefore, what is best about the discipline even as it reveals what limits current efforts to differentiate literary narratives from constructed historical "facts."
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