A more natural mother : Concepts of maternity and queenship in early modern England

Early in her reign, in response to Parliament\u27s formal requests that she marry and secure the succession, Elizabeth calls herself the mother of England. Her metaphorical maternity signals a rhetorical transaction between Elizabeth and her people that stretches across time, space, and genre; writers respond to Elizabeth by modifying the metaphor in order to shape her behavior. Conceptual blending theory, developed by cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, provides language to articulate the complexities of Elizabeth\u27s metaphor—to understand how language, culture, and cognition interact to create and modify meaning. Furthering the work of critics who analyze Elizabeth\u27s self-presentation and in light of Amy Cook\u27s work with conceptual blending theory and theater, this dissertation examines Elizabeth\u27s maternal metaphor in her speeches and considers Sidney\u27s Arcadia (c. 1581-82, 1584; published in 1590), Shakespeare\u27s Titus Andronicus (c. 1588), and Spenser\u27s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) as examples of responses to and explorations of Elizabeth\u27s mother–queen blend. By manipulating the mother–queen metaphor in various ways, these writers urge Elizabeth to fulfill her responsibilities as a figurative mother: first, through actual marriage and motherhood, and later, as Elizabeth\u27s age led to infertility, by naming an heir. Elizabeth\u27s attempts to control her image through metaphor were thwarted by the very nature of her method. This examination of her metaphor in the context of imaginative writing reveals the malleability of Elizabeth\u27s carefully crafted image