In some ways, Spenser’s magnum opus raises as a matter of literary form the same proposition advanced by the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, an incident much on England’s mind in the 1590s, and one thinly allegorized in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. The Queen of Scots’s demise, the first legally enacted trial and sentencing to death of a European monarch, came about in part because of what was seen as her particularly feminine waywardness; Mary’s political machinations to acquire the English throne, like her conduct before she was deposed in 1567 from the throne of Scotland, generally involved her plans to marry a prominent lord of her own choosing.40 Ridding England of the threat of the “Scottish whore” proved a politically tricky business, then, since its precedent might justify deposing Elizabeth, herself called a whore by her detractors.41 Furthermore, in the same way that Plowden’s doctrine of the king’s two bodies distinguished the will of the courts from the will of the queen, Mary’s trial and execution disjoined the authority of the law, as well as the authority of Elizabeth’s own advisors, from the authority of a divinely ordained monarch—a station from which Mary was never demoted in either Scotland or England, even while the English authorities were branding her an adulteress, murderess, and traitor.42 Killing the queen, even if not their own queen, thus put England in something of a quandary. The queen’s rule, as it turned out, might indeed be not only altered, but ended by force of law: that is, by a form of rule finally superior to that of the monarchy. But what would that nascent form of rule look like, once given free rein? The solution to that problem was, of course, to occupy English Parliamentary politics for much of the next century after Elizabeth’s death. Similarly, Spenser’s epic, I argue, ostentatiously repeals feminine rule in its closing books by successively dethroning the Amazon queen Radigund, the female knight Britomart, the titaness Mutabilitie, and even Queen Elizabeth herself. But what kind of poetry comes to fill this void left by departed queenship? How might poetic authority be conceived as something other than feminized? Spenser’s breathtakingly swift transformations of poetic modes in the second half of The Faerie Queene play like a number of musical variations upon this question.
In the central chapters of this book I turn to Shakespeare, who, even more attuned to historical specifics than Spenser, either invents or transforms dramatic genres to accommodate and reshape topical issues uniquely associated with a feminine monarchy. First staged in the same decade, the 1590s, in which Books I through 6 of The Faerie Queene were published, Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays—the Henry VI plays and Richard III; and Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V—were experiments in crafting and refining a new English dramatic genre. The range of these plays becomes a venue in which Shakespeare works out, even to the point of literary exhaustion, the possibilities for this genre. In particular, the fledgling playwright employs the history form to probe whether and how the stage might wish to attach its fortunes to the fortunes of the monarchy—necessarily, a feminine monarchy. National desire for heroic action in these two tetralogies repeatedly confronts the obstacle of a feminine or feminized authority: the witch, Joan of Arc, in 1 Henry VI; the effeminate French in Henry V; even the slippery, smooth-tongued Machiavel, Richard III. Shakespeare’s reiteration of this theme reflects several national dilemmas surrounding England’s queen in the 1590s, in particular, whether her feminine weakness was inhibiting potential military triumph in Ireland and on the Continent, and whether her failure to produce or name an heir had hopelessly blocked English hopes for a glorious national future. But my concern is also to investigate how these feminine obstacles enable an inquiry into the gendered nature of dramatic genre. As the history plays progress, they increasingly imagine a heroic world untrammeled by femininity. But can masculine heroism give shape to a compelling and versatile dramatic form? Should the stage adopt a solely masculine authority for its own?
The history plays eventually follow the pattern of the second half of The Faerie Queene in hinging literary innovation upon the exclusion of feminine rule. My sense, though, is that by the close of the second tetralogy in Henry V (1599), Shakespeare’s theater deems this experiment unwise, a kind of dead end of limited dramatic action and affect. For proof I turn to a play that followed hard upon Henry V: Hamlet, itself a revision of the hoary genre of the revenge tragedy. Though most obviously a rumination on how and why male authority figures, kings and fathers, meet their ends, Hamlet in my view is also a rumination on the impending death of a queen. In this case, the historic problem of the queen’s participation in royal succession—a question particularly at issue at the time of the play’s writing, just two or three years before Elizabeth’s death in 1603—is redesigned into not only a meditation on troubled psychic relations between mother and son, but also an innovative revision of conventional dramatic revenge. For it is the existence of queenly will, Gertrude’s voluntary transfer of affection from Hamlet’s father to Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, that sets the conditions for Hamlet’s peculiar form: an ostensible revenge tragedy in which a woman’s wayward actions seem to impel heroic male retaliation, but at the same time distract and enervate it. Hamlet’s most celebrated dramatic innovation, the transformation of the revenger’s mindless murderousness into Hamlet’s fraught, psychologized delay, is thus predicated upon a queen’s rule over Hamlet as subject. And, if recent critics are correct in positing Hamlet as a pivotal depiction of the formation of modern subjectivity, then that subjectivity too can come into being only under the authority of a queen.
As it does with so many other issues, therefore, Hamlet pulls two ways in regard to queenship. On the one hand, feminine authority has enabled, if not instigated, all of Hamlet’s sociopolitical dilemmas and psychic pain; but on the other hand, those dilemmas and that pain become the stuff of a bold and influential experiment in dramatic form. Though one would never identify Prince Hamlet himself as nostalgic for queenship, the dramatic piece Hamlet derives its power in part from Hamlet’s being forced to live under the conditions of female rule against which he protests. From Hamlet I thus turn to two post-Elizabethan Shakespearean experiments in dramatic form: Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1607) and The Winter’s Tale (1611), each of which stretches the equation between the rule of women and innovative play-crafting into an audacious and ultimately haunting metaphysics of the theater itself. After Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, Shakespeare reversed the history plays’ nostalgia for unimpeded masculine authority into an appropriately Jacobean nostalgia for female rule—nostalgia that corresponds to the passing of a dramatic age, as well. Antony and Cleopatra, an experiment in “feminine” tragedy, not only proposes that queenly eroticism and instability constitute theatricality itself, but also compels an audience to desire the belated queen rather than the incoming Caesar. And as if commenting upon the power of the theater of queenship that Antony and Cleopatra sustains, The Winter’s Tale elevates nostalgia for female rule to the level of magic, of raising the dead, memorialized queen from stone into life.
At the same time, however, The Winter’s Tale reveals the potential masculine bad faith behind mourning the queen. Even while this late Shakespearean play, like Antony and Cleopatra, laments the fact that feminized theatricality, in all its vast potential, must be closed off, The Winter’s Tale also reveals such circumscription to be normative in a post-gynecocratic age. Indeed, The Winter’s Tale, in Shakespeare’s variation upon the new Jacobean genre of tragicomedy and its intermingling of recovery and loss, makes the survival of masculine governance contingent upon its indulging in nostalgia for a departed queen. That masculine governance, I shall argue, turns out to be dramatic as well as monarchical and dynastic, as the very conclusion of the play deposes the remarkable feminine dramaturgy of the dead queen Hermione’s vocal female mourner, Paulina, in favor of King Leontes’s capacity to order tale-telling and narrative renewal.
This masculine capacity to narrate past and even future action in the absence of a willful woman is one of the cornerstones of Paradise Lost’s strategies for controlling, while coopting, that woman’s will. The last chapter of this book turns to Milton as a way of exploring both the historical and the literary repercussions of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s experiments with feminine authority. Elizabethan and Jacobean responses to queenship recirculate, in the 1630s through the 1670s, in the terms of Milton’s interrelated polemics over the fate of monarchy and the ideal form of poetry. As I noted above in connection with the