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Dissing Elizabeth focuses on the criticism that cast a shadow on the otherwise celebrated reign of Elizabeth I. The essays in this politically and historically revealing book demonstrate the sheer pervasiveness and range of rhetoric against the queen, illuminating the provocative discourse of disrespect and dissent that existed over an eighty-year period, from her troubled days as a princess to the decades after her death in 1603.
As editor Julia M. Walker suggests, the breadth of dissent considered in this collection points to a dark side of the Cult of Elizabeth. Reevaluating neglected texts that had not previously been perceived as critical of the queen or worthy of critical appraisal, contributors consider dissent in a variety of forms, including artwork representing (and mocking) the queen, erotic and pornographic metaphors for Elizabeth in the popular press, sermons subtly critiquing her actions, and even the hostility encoded in her epitaph and in the placement of her tomb. Other chapters discuss gossip about Elizabeth, effigies of the queen, polemics against her marriage to the Duke of Alençon, common verbal slander, violence against emblems of her authority, and the criticism embedded in the riddles, satires, and literature of the period.

Published to substantial critical acclaim, Elizabeth I: Collected Works brought together for the first time in one volume the speeches, poems, prayers, and selected letters of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), all in modernized spelling and punctuation. With this new volume, Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus give specialists fuller access to key originals of the queen's texts presented in Collected Works.

The originals selected for inclusion here are compositions that survive in Elizabeth's own handwriting, in English and in foreign languages, as well as her foreign language compositions preserved by other hands or in printed editions. Presented in transcriptions that reproduce the spelling and punctuation of their sixteenth-century sources, these texts convey many of the expressive and significant features of Elizabeth's writing. Through the transcriptions of texts in her own hand, readers can track the queen's language and compositional style-her choices of vocabulary and phrasing; her habits of capitalization, spelling, and punctuation; her often heavy revisions and redraftings; and her insertions of postscripts and second thoughts. The texts in foreign languages, meanwhile, will allow readers to prepare their own English translations from these original sources.

A unique resource for scholars of English literature and the Renaissance, this companion to the Collected Works offers much fuller and more detailed access to Elizabeth and her writings than can be obtained from the modern English versions alone.

This long-awaited and masterfully edited volume contains nearly all of the writings of Queen Elizabeth I: the clumsy letters of childhood, the early speeches of a fledgling queen, and the prayers and poetry of the monarch's later years. The first collection of its kind, Elizabeth I reveals brilliance on two counts: that of the Queen, a dazzling writer and a leading intellect of the English Renaissance, and that of the editors, whose copious annotations make the book not only essential to scholars but accessible to general readers as well.

"This collection shines a light onto the character and experience of one of the most interesting of monarchs. . . . We are likely never to get a closer or clearer look at her. An intriguing and intense portrait of a woman who figures so importantly in the birth of our modern world."—Publishers Weekly

"An admirable scholarly edition of the queen's literary output. . . . This anthology will excite scholars of Elizabethan history, but there is something here for all of us who revel in the English language."—John Cooper, Washington Times

"Substantial, scholarly, but accessible. . . . An invaluable work of reference."—Patrick Collinson, London Review of Books

"In a single extraordinary volume . . . Marcus and her coeditors have collected the Virgin Queen's letters, speeches, poems and prayers. . . . An impressive, heavily footnoted volume."—Library Journal

"This excellent anthology of [Elizabeth's] speeches, poems, prayers and letters demonstrates her virtuosity and afford the reader a penetrating insight into her 'wiles and understandings.'"—Anne Somerset, New Statesman

"Here then is the only trustworthy collection of the various genres of Elizabeth's writings. . . . A fine edition which will be indispensable to all those interested in Elizabeth I and her reign."—Susan Doran, History

"In the torrent of words about her, the queen's own words have been hard to find. . . . [This] volume is a major scholarly achievement that makes Elizabeth's mind much more accessible than before. . . . A veritable feast of material in different genres."—David Norbrook, The New Republic

What have poems and maps, law books and plays, ecclesiastical polemics and narratives of overseas exploration to do with one another? By most accounts, very little. They belong to different genres and have been appropriated by scholars in different disciplines. But, as Richard Helgerson shows in this ambitious and wide-ranging study, all were part of an extraordinary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century enterprise: the project of making England.

In a 1572 visit to Warwick, Queen Elizabeth looked out the window of her lodgings and saw local people dancing in the courtyard, a seemingly spontaneous performance meant to entertain her. During her travels, she was treated to fireworks, theatrical performances, and lavish banquets. Reconstructing the formal and informal events that took place throughout Elizabeth's progress visits, events rich in pageantry and ceremony, John M. Adrian demonstrates how communities communicated their character, as well as their financial and political needs, to noble guests.

While previous scholars have studied Elizabeth I and her visits to the homes of influential courtiers, Fêting the Queen places a new emphasis on the civic communities that hosted the monarch and their efforts to secure much needed support. Case studies of the cities of Oxford, Canterbury, Sandwich, Bristol, Worcester, and Norwich focus on the concepts of hospitality and space—including the intimate details of the built environment.

Part of a larger project to examine the Elizabethan politics of representation, Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing refigures the social and cultural context within which Elizabethan drama was created.

Montrose first locates the public and professional theater within the ideological and material framework of Elizabethan culture. He considers the role of the professional theater and theatricality in the cultural transformation that was concurrent with religious and socio-political change, and then concentrates upon the formal means by which Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays called into question the absolutist assertions of the Elizabethan state. Drawing dramatic examples from the genres of tragedy and history, Montrose finally focuses his cultural-historical perspective on A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Purpose of Playing elegantly demonstrates how language and literary imagination shape cultural value, belief, and understanding; social distinction and interaction; and political control and contestation.

As a woman wielding public authority, Elizabeth I embodied a paradox at the very center of sixteenth-century patriarchal English society. Louis Montrose’s long-awaited book, The Subject of Elizabeth, illuminates the ways in which the Queen and her subjects variously exploited or obfuscated this contradiction.

Montrose offers a masterful account of the texts, pictures, and performances in which the Queen was represented to her people, to her court, to foreign powers, and to Elizabeth herself. Retrieving this “Elizabethan imaginary” in all its richness and fascination, Montrose presents a sweeping new account of Elizabethan political culture.  Along the way, he explores the representation of Elizabeth within the traditions of Tudor dynastic portraiture; explains the symbolic manipulation of Elizabeth’s body by both supporters and enemies of her regime; and considers how Elizabeth’s advancing age provided new occasions for misogynistic subversions of her royal charisma.  

This book, the remarkable product of two decades of study by one of our most respected Renaissance scholars, will be welcomed by all historians, literary scholars, and art historians of the period.