"As many as are English are my children and kinsfolks". Elizabeth I and the Rhetoric of the Country

Elizabeth I's strategies of power founded their success on the ability of the Queen to impersonate different roles, and to inaugurate a semiotics of family relationships. The article uses passages from the speeches to show how Elizabeth appropriates and makes use of figures of male royalty and female figures, performing the same gender-based mediation that was evident in her manipulation of the courtly entertainment. The identification of a mode of political Petrarchism in the speeches underlines their closeness with more private writings, and points towards the identification of a literary persona that has so far been overshadowed by the political one