Mary Stuart's Execution and Queen Elizabeth's Divided Self

My article examines Queen Elizabeth’s representation of her own “two bodies” in her letters to James VI of Scotland dating from the period of the acute crisis occasioned by Mary Stuart’s long imprisonment, controversial trial and execution. The Elizabeth-James correspondence offers representative examples of Elizabeth’s lifelong process of self-fashioning as a woman and as a monarch. It also offers significant evidence of her mastery use of rhetorical strategies in her conscious effort to rewrite her role in the Anglo-Scottish crisis