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casting of Crisp in Orlando could be read as appropriate. Elizabeth I did not marry or have children, and was known as ‘the Virgin Queen’. Christopher Haigh, in his biography of Elizabeth I, reveals that a Scottish emissary said to the Queen, ‘[Y] our Majesty thinks that if you were married you would be but queen of England, and now you are both king and queen!’ 8 Crisp, despite the erotic exploits
cult for woman worship, namely that of the Virgin Queen. 5 Additionally, in the second half of the sixteenth century England had enjoyed relative peace at home. This meant that the opportunities to display military strength were fewer and social promotion had come to depend increasingly upon diplomacy, learning and trade, rather than bravery on the battlefield. 6 In 1595 John Smithe noted with regret the
. Shakespeare’s play features a young woman nicknamed ‘Madonna’ – a name associated with the Virgin Queen of Heaven – who is courted by a duke named Orsino. And Elizabeth did style herself the ‘Virgin Queen’. But had Virginio Orsini really travelled to London with flirtation in mind? Virginio was married, and a play implying a liaison with Elizabeth would have given offence to both
time’, and about the perils which would follow ‘if she married not at all’.87 VI To marry not at all? It was in the cultural context of the 1578 progress, and in Thomas Churchyard’s Norwich, that Elizabeth I was first publicly celebrated as the Virgin Queen. The allegorical symbolism was transparent in the entertainment staged by Churchyard on the fourth day of the visit, ‘Tuesday’s Device’. Churchyard claimed that this playlet was almost improvised, taking 134 Pulling the strings: religion and politics in the progress of 1578 the opportunity of the queen passing
culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped’ (p. 130). Thus, the cult of the Virgin Queen is both fostered by literature like Spenser's The Faerie Queene and a whole range of court masks and pageants, and at the same time generates such literature: life and literature stimulate and play upon each other. Elizabeth can project herself as the Queen whose virginity has mystical and magical potency because such images are given currency in court masques, in comedies, and in pastoral epic poetry. Conversely, the figure of Elizabeth stimulates
) and the History Channel’s Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen (1996). Both portray Elizabeth dressed in shining armour and mounted on a stallion while orating the famous address recorded avowedly by Leonel Sharp. The more recent Elizabeth I , first screened on Channel Four in 2005, portrayed the Tilbury address as a public relations exercise in which
quasi-religiously adored virgin Queen Bess’. 21 Elizabeth is memorialised on screen as a queen who placed the needs of her nation above her sexual and reproductive desires, sac-rificing ‘the “natural” destiny of a woman, marriage and children, trading personal happiness for public power’. 22 Her self-negation is linked to a glorious reign ‘of imperial and creative supremacy’ 23 in films such as Fire
early example of the mythology that grew up around the Virgin Queen. Beginning with Frances A. Yates's influential analysis of Elizabethan iconography, we have recognized that there was a cult of Elizabeth and understood that poems, such as Spenser's Aprill eclogue, were related to that cult. 11 Early studies of the mythology surrounding Elizabeth, however, paid little attention to chronology and so used
current use.’23 Films which depict the same historical character but which are produced in very different periods offer an insight into the expectations of different audiences. For example, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I is very different to portrayals of the Virgin Queen by Glenda Jackson, Bette Davis or Flora Robson.24 The grandiose style of Robson, the imperious theatricality of Davis and the political astuteness of Jackson indicate different aspects of the same fictional character, but also draw attention to the different periods in which these successive films were
Victoria was no Virgin Queen but hers was a Golden Age and her fecundity an encouraging sign of continuity, strength, and prosperity. But these paintings are also clearly about Sir Walter’s gallantry. The cape, so often used in the sixteenth century to signify dissembling, was to become enduringly synonymous with gallantry in representations of Ralegh.25 One of the more famous paintings of him in this period was that of John Everet Millais, a depiction of The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870). Whilst this painting has been interpreted in numerous ways, from political allegory to