Greenwich to Stirling to Greenwich: Splendorous Impulses and Composed Ornaments

In her book, Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017), Mary Beard describes how the public voice of women has been silenced over millennia by patriarchal structures that have extinguished female voices and actions. She chooses Elizabeth I as just one example. A powerful and long-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth I ought to signify a shift in understanding women’s roles in public life. For Beard, however, Elizabeth remains significant in the public imagination because of her identification with male characteristics. Beard’s point is that, despite alluding to this male identity, Elizabeth’s history has also, until very recently, been written and spoken largely by men. The queen’s voice, body, manners, habits and language have been determined by male writers and have, subsequently, been altered, tailored to the attitudes and circumstances of male power over the centuries. In this project, which takes the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I as its starting point, students have investigated the ‘materials’ of monarchy in ways which prioritise elements of the agency of kings and queens through intimate knowledge of their clothing and jewellery; questioning accepted historical precepts of gender and power and challenging the conventions of historicised language. The exhibition of work in Splendour surveys the Renaissance and Stuart courts of Scotland and England, renowned for their exuberance, luxury and excess. Materials are gathered together in ways that parallel wider associations, while simultaneously offering a critique of display and performance of royal privilege. During this period, Britain’s wealth was acquired through its exploitation of trade in precious commodities and the expression of its supremacy was often through allusion to jewels. For example, in one controversial staged performance, Masque of Blacknesse, the performer remarks: For were the world with all his wealth a ring, Britannia, whose new name makes all tongues sing, Might be a diamond worthy to encase it…. It is these associations that are foregrounded in this project, Splendour, provoking questions and meanings surrounding power and agency; who owns it and who might speak it