Did William Shakespeare ever meet Queen Elizabeth I? There is no evidence of such a meeting, yet for three centuries writers and artists have been provoked and inspired to imagine it. S hakespeare ...and Elizabeth is the first book to explore the rich history of invented encounters between the poet and the Queen, and examines how and why the mythology of these two charismatic and enduring cultural icons has been intertwined in British and American culture. Helen Hackett follows the history of meetings between Shakespeare and Elizabeth through historical novels, plays, paintings, and films, ranging from well-known works such as Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth and the film Shakespeare in Love to lesser known but equally fascinating examples. Raising intriguing questions about the boundaries separating scholarship and fiction, Hackett looks at biographers and critics who continue to delve into links between the queen and the poet. In the Shakespeare authorship controversy there have even been claims that Shakespeare was Elizabeth's secret son or lover, or that Elizabeth herself was the genius Shakespeare. Hackett uncovers the reasons behind the lasting appeal of their combined reputations, and she locates this interest in their enigmatic sexual identities, as well as in the ways they represent political tensions and national aspirations. Considering a wealth of examples, Shakespeare and Elizabeth shows how central this double myth is to both elite and popular culture in Britain and the United States, and how vibrantly it is reshaped in different eras.
Did William Shakespeare ever meet Queen Elizabeth I? There is no
evidence of such a meeting, yet for three centuries writers and
artists have been provoked and inspired to imagine it.
S hakespeare ...and Elizabeth is the first book to explore the
rich history of invented encounters between the poet and the Queen,
and examines how and why the mythology of these two charismatic and
enduring cultural icons has been intertwined in British and
American culture. Helen Hackett follows the history of meetings
between Shakespeare and Elizabeth through historical novels, plays,
paintings, and films, ranging from well-known works such as Sir
Walter Scott's Kenilworth and the film Shakespeare in
Love to lesser known but equally fascinating examples. Raising
intriguing questions about the boundaries separating scholarship
and fiction, Hackett looks at biographers and critics who continue
to delve into links between the queen and the poet. In the
Shakespeare authorship controversy there have even been claims that
Shakespeare was Elizabeth's secret son or lover, or that Elizabeth
herself was the genius Shakespeare. Hackett uncovers the reasons
behind the lasting appeal of their combined reputations, and she
locates this interest in their enigmatic sexual identities, as well
as in the ways they represent political tensions and national
aspirations. Considering a wealth of examples, Shakespeare and
Elizabeth shows how central this double myth is to both elite
and popular culture in Britain and the United States, and how
vibrantly it is reshaped in different eras.
A New Image of Elizabeth I Hackett, Helen
The Huntington Library quarterly,
09/2014, Letnik:
77, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The National Portrait Gallery, London, recently acquired a previously unknown portrait of Elizabeth I. This exquisite miniature of ca. 1590 shows the queen with Juno, Pallas, and Venus. Adapting the ...myth of the Judgment of Paris, it asserts that Elizabeth exceeds the three goddesses in majesty, wisdom, and beauty, and unites their qualities to create peace. In this essay, Helen Hackett elucidates this important new image through comparisons with analogues from literature and from Elizabethan portraiture. The enduring popularity of the Three Goddesses theme throughout Elizabeth's reign is attributable to its adaptability to changing political circumstances.
In the early 1590s Nicholas Breton wrote two extraordinary poems in the voice of his patron Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke: "The Countesse of Penbrookes Love" and "The Countesse of ...Penbrooks Passion." These present Mary Sidney as a Magdalene-like penitent, giving bodily expression to sinful guilt as tears, sighs, and sobs. Both Breton's appropriation of his patron's voice and his characterisation of her as a remorseful sinner may seem potentially offensive; yet his "Mary poems" participate in important literary trends. He is one of the first poets to respond to the influence of Robert Southwell, and to blend this with the Psalm-based Protestant poetry of the passions in which Mary Sidney herself was active. Moreover, as female complaints, Breton's "Mary poems" stand alongside other 1590s experiments in the literary representation of inner states. Placed in these contexts, they reveal Breton as an innovative poet of the mind and emotions.
Huntington Library manuscript HM904 is a verse miscellany compiled by Constance Aston Fowler, daughter of Lord Aston, in 1630s Staffordshire. Constance operated as a kind of literary agent, ...soliciting, exchanging, and circulating poems, as well as preserving them in her book. Many of these poems are by or about family and friends, but they also indicate her connections with far-reaching networks of manuscript transmission. In particular, the volume contains Catholic devotional verses in an unusual and somewhat archaic hand (Hand B) that also appears in another Catholic miscellany from 1650s Warwickshire; and secular verses that may be by the Catholic love poet William Habington, or may be hybrid compositions that imitate or adapt his work. Both these ingredients have much to say about the complex compilation processes of manuscript verse miscellanies, and about the cultural participation of women and Catholics in seventeenth-century England.
Current work on early modern women and poetry – including the present volume – is illuminating the relations between poetry and its social contexts. We are discovering that women’s poems were ...frequently produced in the family, the friendship group, the neighbourhood, or communities defined by shared political or religious affiliation, and that creative interactions within such communities took diverse and complex forms. We are also learning that early modern poetry did more than just reflect pre-existing relationships; rather, poems performed social functions, and actively forged, defined and promoted relationships. Moreover, these social functions were achieved not only by the internal rhetoric of
The manuscript poem beginning 'As the diall hand tells ore' (hereafter the Dial Hand poem) appears to be a court epilogue of 1599. It has provoked animated debate, with some scholars claiming it as a ...'new' Shakespeare work; it was included as such in the RSC Complete Works (2007). Other candidates for its authorship, because of their use elsewhere of its trochaic metre, are Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker. This investigation finds weaknesses in the case for Shakespeare, not least in the fact that there is no other occurrence of such hyperbolic panegyric of Elizabeth I in his oeuvre. Jonson's case too is flawed. Dekker emerges as the strongest contender, for reasons including his recurrent preoccupation with dials and temporal cycles, his extensive composition of royal panegyric, the strong similarities between the Dial Hand poem and the epilogue to his Old Fortunatus (also performed at court in 1599), and a verbal echo of the Dial Hand poem in his Whore of Babylon (1605). The Dial Hand poem refers to Shrovetide, making Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday (1599)—a play all about the inception of Shrovetide festivities—almost certainly the play to which the epilogue belongs.
Womenwho travel in Renaissance prosefictioncontend with contemporary assumptions that they ‘‘err’’. They usually travel for love and often cross-dress, acquiring an intense moral ambiguity. Female ...pages in particular abase themselves like medieval saints while simultaneously asserting atransgressivesexual autonomy. Meanwhile, the duplicity of thedisguised female travelleris often underlined by the introduction of an oppositely sexed double. The travelling woman is at once disruptive to the world of romance, and essential to it in her flexibility ofidentityandgender, her narrative generativity, and her moralambiguity.
