It was in the opening lines of a pamphlet published in the spring of 1558, only a few months before Elizabeth’s coronation, that John Knox famously proclaimed: “To promote a Woman to bear rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any Realme, Nation, or Citie, is repugnant to Nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good Order, of all equitie and justice”.1 This first blast of Knox’s prophetic trumpet was directed at three Catholic queens, but Elizabeth was involved in the anathema as well. Women were barred from the legitimate exercise of authority by divine order, and rendered incapable of wielding power by the frailty of their nature. Against such a background Elizabeth began her reign, which explains why she had to become particularly skilful in representing herself and her authority as a monarch. Against all odds, she managed to capitalize on early modern societal expectations of womanly behaviour, using them to her particular advantage. Portraits, progresses, poems and much more: Elizabeth made use of all sorts of occasions, and all forms of communication available to her, to fashion herself or, rather, to have herself fashioned.2
Surprisingly, however, despite a wealth of publications on Elizabeth and her performances, her writing was neglected for a long time. Only at the end of the 1980s did the The Norton Anthology of English Literature include Queen Elizabeth as an author, citing two poems , though one of her portraits had long decorated the book’s cover. Even The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women made a similar choice, including only one speech—her celebrated address to the troops at Tilbury—and still omitting her parliamentary orations. And yet, Elizabeth lived immersed in a “culture of writing”, as it has been aptly put:3 she had been given one of the best humanistic educations of her age, William Grindall and Roger Ascham having been her tutors; she was competent in Greek and Hebrew, fluent in Latin and Italian; she studied history, theology and philosophy. She was, to all intents and purposes, “a monarch in writing”.4
In 2000, finally, a complete modern-spelling edition of Elizabeth’s works, prayers, poems , letters and public speeches was published thanks to the work of Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, who presented for the first time a wide selection of her works in one volume, thus allowing students and scholars alike to compare texts and genres from different periods of Elizabeth’s life and production. A few years later, in 2003, Marcus and Mueller edited a crucial companion volume that provides verbatim texts of her autograph works and writings in foreign languages.5 Nevertheless, in that same year, Steven W. May’s survey of the state of criticism on Elizabeth still concluded that “despite the recent demand for expanding or rewriting the canon, Elizabeth’s writings have been thus far practically excluded from the chorus of new voices”.6
This past decade, however, has shown a renewed interest in Elizabeth as an author: in 2009, Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel devoted two volumes to Elizabeth’s translations.7 Rayne Allinson, Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, Brenda Hosington, Mel Evans, Carlo M. Bajetta, and so many others have dedicated essays, book-length studies and edited important collections that have helped to reposition Elizabeth’s writings, bringing them to the fore within the canon of early modern linguistic and cultural studies.8
The present collection newly brings together a number of the authors mentioned so far, further illuminating the multifaceted written production of Elizabeth I . The aim of the book is to take a closer, updated look at the role that textuality plays in Queen Elizabeth’s life as a powerful, ruling monarch. A range of diverse approaches are adopted here to shed light both on the queen considered as an author in her own right, and as someone whose authority is also reflected in, or produced by, the writing of others, with special regard to the important Anglo–Italian connection: linguistic and philological analyses are offered along with literary and cultural-historical explorations, in an eclectic, and, we feel, particularly fruitful perspective. Of course, the queen’s agency and the very authenticity and origin of the materials under analysis remain a permanently thorny issue in studies devoted to her intellectual work. However, the contributors to this volume choose not to focus specifically on the problems of authorship attribution, a topic addressed in many previous studies; these new essays largely build upon the acknowledged canon, and in any case do not disregard the importance of cultural constructs of authoriality, so that even some texts of dubious attribution are considered as crucial indications of Elizabeth’s status as cultural agent.
The first part of this book is concerned with bringing into relief Elizabeth’s ability as an author and a scholar: an investigation that ultimately also turns into a survey of the multi-layered strategies that the queen employed to acquire and hold power, not so much with her political speeches as with her translations, letters, poems and prayers. These are the subjects of the essays in this section, whose main aim is to make a fresh contribution by encouraging both literary and linguistically minded approaches that reflect upon the variety of text types, stylistic registers, discourse strategies, authorial concerns and linguistic attitudes at play in Elizabeth’s corpus.
In “The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin and the Power of the Written Word”, Brenda Hosington develops a rich exploration of the young Elizabeth’s relationship to Latin and her involvement with translation . The essay pays special attention to Elizabeth’s early Neo-Latin works, which have attracted little critical scrutiny so far: four familiar letters to her brother Edward, two dedicatory letters to her father and brother, the Latin translation of Katherine Parr’s Prayers or Meditacions, and a Latin translation of Bernardino Ochino ’s sermon, “Che cosa è Christo & per che venne al mondo”. In Hosington’s critical reading, these works demonstrate that at a very early age Elizabeth was acutely aware of the power of the written word, and of the possibilities it could offer her as she strove to articulate a certain conception of the monarchy, reinforce family relationships , and create for herself the persona of a learned and pious young woman, thus ensuring her personal safety and inclusion in the unstable world of the Tudor court. In other words, they testify to Elizabeth’s skill in enacting strategies of self-preservation linked to modalities of self-representation.
Alessandra Petrina’s investigation similarly considers the linguistic expertise of Elizabeth as translator of Cicero and sheds new light on the circumstances of the production of her English version of Pro Marcello , which was probably undertaken in 1592; the translation , Petrina shows, is situated at a juncture that unites the practice of her cursus studiorum and the work she undertook on Latin classics in the years of her maturity. This essay would seem to confirm Leah Marcus’s well-known suggestion that one of the queen’s reasons for translating was to let the public know that she was engaged in the activity, which she invested with a precise political significance:9 the translation of Cicero was thus “both a linguistic exercise and a meditation on politics”, allowing Elizabeth to develop a sort of meditation on a number of “keywords” that were central to her political practice.
Mel Evans and Donatella Montini go on to discuss Elizabeth’s written production from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. In a corpus-linguistic approach, Evans compiles and compares two corpora, one made up of a holograph and the other of scribal letters, drawing attention to keywords and their frequency, but especially to grammatical forms of self-reference that focus on identity construction, as well as interpersonal language. Differences between letter types emerge that have much to reveal about the representation of the royal self and the positioning of the author in relation to the recipient. The final discussion of a ‘hybrid’ letter, in which scribal and holographic elements are combined, shows how the text exploits the contrastive potential of both letter types.
Donatella Montini’s essay examines Elizabeth’s devotional writing, in particular a small corpus of four prayers in vernacular attributed to her, which provide a crucial example of the linguistic and discursive strategies used by the queen in her construction of a personal authorial voice directly addressing God. As highly interactional text-types that stage a dialogic relationship between two subjects, one mortal and one divine, prayers as a genre lend themselves to be analysed with the tools of pragmatics, which help qualify Elizabeth’s pious idiolect and reaffirm her ability to publicly manage her condition as sovereign, Supreme Governor of the Church and woman. A form of ‘devotional Petrarchism’ is here inaugurated in which even the Heavenly Father is assigned a tributary role in the queen’s self-representation.
Cristina Vallaro’s essay closes the first section and in a way introduces the second part of the collection, considering Elizabeth both as an author in her talent as a poetess, and as the subject of popular imagination. The queen’s unhappy French love affair and her marriage negotiations with the duke d’Anjou, celebrated in poetic terms as a clash of public and private identities in her famous On Monsieur’s departure , are here connected to the contemporary lute song by John Dowland , Now O now I needs must part , which describes the suffering of a heartbroken lover, elaborating on the themes of absence and desire.
Elizabeth I in Writing as a collection also considers a wider web of relations between the public and private display of language in Tudor culture. Thus, a second selection of essays moves beyond issues of production to consider Elizabeth as she is ‘authored’, in a sense that both precedes and emanates from her, and includes her dialogue and confrontation with foreign-language traditions. The queen is re-considered as reflected in the writing of her contemporaries, with a special focus on the Italian Renaissance and Anglo–Italian relations: in Carlo M. Bajetta and Guillaume Coatalen’s contribution, two comp...