Courting Elizabeth : the virgin queen and Elizabethan literature

Graduation date: 2012Sixteenth century Elizabeth I of England has long been a figure of interest to\ud Renaissance scholars, and their work largely focuses on how her gender impacted the\ud power, politics, and culture of her day. Many have perceived her to be a heroine\ud whose ingenuity and determination circumvented the limitations imposed on a female\ud ruler in patriarchal Renaissance England. In my thesis, I examine the life and work of\ud Elizabeth I, and the self-representations she constructed within the boundaries\ud imposed on highborn women. In the first half of my thesis, I suggest that she\ud embraced and utilized the female roles available to her to secure agency and a degree\ud of safety for both herself and England. In the second half, I suggest that masculine\ud subjects such as Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, in turn, sought to manipulate\ud her later self-representations to negotiate their own agency and identity which was\ud perceived to be beset with anxieties and biases stemming from the ageing Queen's\ud seizure and redefinition of the female gender role allotted to her. A chronological\ud examination of the self representations evident in her personal writing, commissioned\ud portraiture, parliamentary speeches, and sonnets, as well as the poetry of two of her\ud foremost masculine subjects, suggests a shift in gender politics and a tension roused\ud by an ageing Queen regnant in a rigidly patriarchal society