Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert

in Gallagher’s study of the Restoration and eighteenth century, are working in an era in which the idea of the self as commodity had not yet been consolidated, they imagine the feminized authorial voice along a different axis for constructing the self: the axis of monarch-subject. Along this axis the dialectic of presence and lack that Gallagher notices in the authorial voices of Restoration writers takes shape not as a dialectic between monetary value and worthlessness, or between credit and debt, but rather between command and obedience, in this case the command of a queen over her male subjects. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton portrays the authorial self as existing only in relation to monarchy; this proposition, insofar as it was made (or taken to be made) by early new-historicist studies of Spenser and Shakespeare, has been challenged and revised in recent years, and it would be patently absurd in the case of Milton.³⁴ Nevertheless, in terms of my topic the nature of the relation between sovereign and subject remains a crucial issue. It is arguably the case that, in a post–Roman Catholic era, English Renaissance writers had little place else to look but to queens—living, historical, or fictional—if they wished to find exempla for how femininity and authority might be conjoined. But as Timothy Hampton points out, the Renaissance use of the exemplum often brings about a kind of productive crisis, given that the exemplary figure often features, along with his or her virtues, qualities that are not so worthy of praise or imitation. For Hampton, this crisis of imitability becomes productive when an author questions the wisdom of modeling present action upon past heroism.³⁵ In the case of queenship, however, the use of the exemplum becomes radical when an author wholeheartedly endorses an identification with the female model because of the very fact of her femininity. Specifically, the conjunction of femininity and authority becomes a site for reconfiguring the hierarchical monarch-subject relation itself. For the authorial voice can escape the very conditions of hierarchy if it imagines itself not solely as reversing the circumstances of queenly rule over men, so that a masculine authorial voice might master a formerly feminine literary form, but rather as inhabiting the circumstances of queenly rule, so that the authorial voice dwells within and embraces the feminized form, becoming itself a master-mistress of authorial presence.³⁶

      My argument, then, is that queenship is proposed so often as a model and occasion for English Renaissance literary innovation because feminized authority proves an enabling strategy for negotiating otherwise unmanageable authorial straits—that is, for stretching literary shape in the direction of effeminized form. I am building here on Diana Henderson’s study of lyricism in Elizabethan theater, which brilliantly argues that the presence of a female monarch not only encouraged lyric encomia toward the queen herself, but also catalyzed a reformation in lyric form. Once it became associated with a queen, Petrarchan love lyric could be converted into a vehicle for working out extended permutations of the possible associations and/or contradictions between lyric poetry and female power. Concomitantly, lyric becomes a venue for discussing the most serious of political, social, and religious issues, as well as a mode in which female subjectivity may be voiced on the English stage. “Elizabeth,” says Henderson, “because of her political power, provided a unique incentive within her culture for reevaluating the feminine.”³⁷ But I am also interested in what happens when this incentive for boosting the eminence of a literary form no longer exists. Showing Like a Queen is thus partly an exercise precisely in not engaging the “local readings” of early modern authors that Leah Marcus urges.³⁸ Whereas one of the “locales” with which Marcus is concerned is the phenomenon of English queenship under Elizabeth, my attention is directed toward the golden world authors attempt to create as an alternative to the brazen world of local circumstance. To test my thesis, the scope of this book extends past the era in which English authors had to contend with the living presence of a female monarch. Spenser died while Elizabeth Tudor was still queen; Shakespeare’s career straddled the reigns of both Elizabeth and James I; and Milton—though troubled by the influence upon Charles I of his Roman Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria—saw only male rulers, both kings and Protectors. Nonetheless, the unhinging of the feminized authorial mode from the actual historical circumstance of female rule is itself, in large part, the raison d’être of my study. For the work of inhabiting feminized literary form is for the most part an exercise in fantasy—the fantasy (at times, the nightmare) of a counterpatriarchal literary world.

      Part of that fantasy or nightmare involves nostalgia, a ready and easy means of conceiving of alternatives to the present moment. Not coincidentally, as I address in Chapter 5, nostalgia is an ailment of early modern inception; only in the Renaissance can people begin to imagine such a radical, heartrending disjunction between their present circumstances and the Heimat they have left behind. For both Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan authors, the disjunction between female and male monarchy—one present, the other gone by—can provide an especially powerful occasion and model for reinventing literary form in the way that I have just described. Whether queenship constitutes the horrible, degraded innovation of the present moment or the sweetly remembered security of the past, it establishes through counterposition the possibility of another mode of shaping the basic conditions of existence. Depending on their specific moments of production, the literary works I address in this book engage in nostalgia either for a king or a queen; but in either case, the political “problem” of queenship, either current or remembered, is turned to literary advantage. In Chapters 2 through 5 of this book I trace a historical and literary micro-history of two decades, 1590–1613, in which Spenser and Shakespeare mull over the politics of female rule in the waning and aftermath of Elizabeth’s reign, devising literary stratagems around representing—or recollecting—those historically anomalous political arrangements. My leap forward in Chapter 6 to Milton, then, is intended to test my thesis by establishing that Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century legacy remained intertwined with the fortunes of feminine authority. Even after more than sixty years of restored male rule, Milton experiments with deriving literary form from the formulae of queenship.

      Spenser’s Faerie Queene, generally treated as the culmination of literary treatments of the cult of Elizabeth, thus becomes here a precursory and foundational text. In The Faerie Queene Spenser tests strategies for being not only troubled but also gratified by the prospect of hanging an ambitious and innovative literary project upon techniques associated with effeminized writing. As the long process of its composition and publication proceeds through the last two decades of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth, The Faerie Queene poses with increasing insistence the question of how new modes of literary design can be accomplished in response to feminine authority. It will be clear how indebted I am to Montrose’s seminal studies of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, mentioned above, and their treatment of Spenser’s anxiety-ridden fashioning of his queen into an appropriate object for poetry.³⁹ My sense, though, is that in The Faerie Queene Spenser’s gender-inflected anxiety about writing an epic to and about a queen bears fruit not only in fulsome praise and/or savage recriminations toward figures of feminine authority in the poem, but also in stunning revisions of and departures from Spenser’s primary poetic models, the classical epic and the Italian romance. Even as The Faerie Queene seeds the careers of its most prominent heroines and anti-heroines with allusions to Elizabeth Tudor and to Scotland’s Mary Stuart, the poem continuously renegotiates its alliances to “feminine” modes of poetic writing as it alternatively embraces and abandons those characters. In Book 3, for example, the poem diverges from heroic epic into a more digressive genre, the epic-romance, even as it begins to associate poetic power with the feminine power of Elizabeth’s many doubles in the poem, including Britomart and Gloriana. Spenser’s link is “ravishment,” a quality he ascribes both to seductive poetry and to powerful female characters who seize men’s senses and suspend epic action. My study of The Faerie Queene traces how the poem’s celebration of queenly and poetic ravishment in Books 3 and 4 prompts other, more reactionary generic experiments as the poem progresses—including historical allegory (Book 5), courtly pastoral (Book 6), and mythopoetics (the Mutability Cantos). All of these post-ravishment flights into new poetic