Showing Like a Queen
Showing Like a Queen
Female Authority and Literary
Experiment in Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton
KATHERINE EGGERT
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2000 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eggert, Katherine.
Showing like a queen : female authority and literary experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton / Katherine Eggert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3532-0 (alk. paper)
1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History—16th century. 3. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Literature, Experimental—Great Britain—History and criticism. 5. English literature—Male authors—History and criticism. 6. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599—Characters—Queens. 7. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters—Queens. 8. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Characters—Queens. 9. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533–1603—Influence. 10. Authority in literature. 11. Queens in literature. 12. Women in literature. I. Title.
| PR428.F45 E44 2000820.9′00082—dc21 | 99-046815 |
In memory ofElizabeth Bredthauer Eggert
Contents
1. Forms of Queenship: Female Rule and Literary Structure in the English Renaissance
2. Genre and the Repeal of Queenship in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
3. Leading Ladies: Feminine Authority and Theatrical Effect in Shakespeare’s History Plays
4. Exclaiming Against Their Own Succession: Queenship, Genre, and What Happens in Hamlet
5. The Late Queen of Famous Memory: Nostalgic Form in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale
Afterword: Queenship and New Feminine Genres
Note on Texts and Editions
I have retained the original spelling of quotations, modernizing only i/j and u/v, with the exception of quotations from Spenser, where the original i/j and u/v spellings were retained since these sometimes call attention to particular pronunciations, etymologies, and puns.
Quotations from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are, unless otherwise indicated, to the following editions, which are cited parenthetically in the text. Full publication information on these editions is in the bibliography.
For The Faerie Queene, I use the Longman edition, edited by A. C. Hamilton. The poem is cited by book, canto, and verse numbers, and Hamilton’s editorial matter is cited by page number.
For Shakespeare, I use the New (second) Arden editions, citing the plays by act, scene, and line numbers, and editorial matter by page number.
For Milton’s prose, I use the Yale edition of The Complete Prose Works, abbreviated CPW and cited by volume and page numbers. For Milton’s poetry, I use Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. All poems are cited by line number, or by book and line numbers in the case of Paradise Lost. The Arguments to Paradise Lost, as well as Hughes’s editorial matter, are cited by page number.
1
Forms of Queenship
Female Rule and Literary Structure in the English Renaissance
IF NEARLY TWENTY YEARS of new-historicist studies of early modern England have taught us anything, it is that England’s literature from 1558 to 1603 was preoccupied with the anomalous gender of the country’s monarch, Elizabeth Tudor. In other words, Elizabethan literature must be regarded as just that, Elizabethan, in ways that earlier critics did not take into account. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) set the pattern by juxtaposing Elizabethan queenly and literary style, paralleling “Elizabeth’s conscious sense of her identity as at least in part a persona ficta and her world as a theater” with Edmund Spenser’s conscious and unconscious fashionings of his fictive faery realm.1 Greenblatt’s point is that the queen and the poet capitalize upon, even while both help create, a pervasive culture of strategic self-representation. But Louis Montrose’s influential work on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, published in its first version in 1983, goes further than Greenblatt’s placement of Elizabeth and Elizabethan literature in the same cultural pool. In Montrose’s view—first articulated in his study of Spenser’s praise of Elizabeth in The Shepheardes Calender’s “Aprill” eclogue2—the queen has a uniquely reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the literary productions of her subjects. “[T]he pervasive cultural presence of the Queen,” writes Montrose, “was a condition of [A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s] imaginative possibility. And, in the sense that the royal presence was itself represented within the play, the play appropriated and extended the imaginative possibilities of the queen.”3 More than simply adopting similar representational strategies for similar ends, the queen and the poet-playwright meet within the fictional text, a venue in which each redesigns the representational configurations of the other.
In developing his theory of queenly and literary symbiosis Montrose takes the crucial step of focusing on the queen not only as a model of improvisatorial skill but also as a galvanizing force for a pervasive Elizabethan anxiety about female power, what John Knox in 1558 called “the monstrous regiment of women.” Montrose’s discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a tool for airing and managing this anxiety thus enables critics who follow him to find the queen everywhere, in every figure of either rampaging or squelched female authority: in Titus Andronicus’s raped Lavinia, in 1 Henry VI’s demonic