Women in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries: Women in Literature

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WOMEN IN THE 16TH, 17TH, AND 18TH CENTURIES: WOMEN IN LITERATURE

DYMPNA C. CALLAGHAN (ESSAY DATE 1994)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

LEAH MARCUS (ESSAY DATE OCTOBER 2000)

SOURCE: Marcus, Leah. "Elizabeth the Writer." History Today 50, no. 10 (October 2000): 36-38.
In the following essay, Marcus praises Queen Elizabeth's oratory strengths.

In July 1597, a dashing young Polish ambassador made his debut at the Elizabethan court. The English welcomed him with pageantry that was more splendid than usual and prepared to celebrate a 'great day.' But the young ambassador's formal Latin oration of greeting froze the cordial environment, offering the aging Queen Elizabeth a series of rebukes rather than the diplomatic platitudes that had been expected. What happened next was predictable to those who had seen the Queen in action before, but astonishing to those less acquainted with her oratorical skills. Sir Robert Cecil marvelled in a letter to the Earl of Essex, 'to this, I swear by the living God that her majesty made one of the best answers extempore in Latin that ever I heard, being much moved to be so challenged in public, especially so much against her expectation.' Her reply to the Polish ambassador expressed her astonishment at 'so great and insolent a boldness in open Presence' and tartly corrected his 'ignorant' misapprehension of 'the law of nature' and 'of nations,' and 'what is convenient between kings.' She closed with a suggestion that he 'repose himself' or 'be silent,' depending on how much indignity one wishes to infuse into the translation of Elizabeth's Latin.

The learning and rhetorical skill displayed in this public rebuke were characteristic of Elizabeth I. Typically, her public speeches were not penned in advance, but delivered more or less impromptu. She was at her best when she was most spontaneous, both as a speaker and as a writer, and she was much admired by her contemporaries for both talents. No doubt, those who admired her literary skills saw them through the usual haze of flattery that surrounds a reigning monarch's every gesture. And we moderns have been hesitant to acknowledge the power of many of Elizabeth's writings out of fear that we will be suspected of a similar uncritical adulation. Nevertheless, as we begin a new century, her work is of increasing interest to historians and literary scholars. Her reputation as a writer is arguably higher now than it has been at any time since her own era.

For all their acknowledged brilliance in delivery, Elizabeth's speeches are elusive, precisely because they did not exist in advance copies. Lacking modern recording devices, contemporaries who wanted to preserve her utterances were required either to take down the queen's words in rudimentary shorthand as she spoke them or, more likely, record them from memory as soon as possible after the end of the speech. Frequently, they record their frustration at not having captured her performance adequately. In 1601, for example, Sir Roger Wilbraham, the Queen's solicitor general for Ireland, complained as he attempted to record her speech of December 19th, besides the fact that 'I could not well hear all she spake, the grace of pronunciation and of her apt and refined words, so learnedly composed, did ravish the sense of the hearers with such admiration as every new sentence made me half forget the precedents'.

Because they were written down after the fact, different manuscript versions of Elizabeth's speeches often display strikingly different wording. In the first of her impromptu 1586 replies to a parliamentary delegation urging the queen to consent to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, one manuscript has Elizabeth complaining about 'pettifoggers of the law, who look more on the outside of their books than study them within.' The version Robert Cecil printed shortly after the speech's delivery is more polite: 'you lawyers are so nice in sifting and scanning every word and letter that many times you stand more upon form than matter, upon syllables than sense of the law.' In this case, the difference in wording may be a result of the Queen's own revision, for we possess in her own hand corrections made to the speech in preparation for its publication. But to make her corrections, she had to rely on someone else's written copy made from memory after her delivery of the speech. We can judge pretty closely what she wanted her public to read, since her written corrections correlate fairly closely with the speech as printed. But how does that version compare with the speech as she actually delivered it? We can make educated guesses, but we will never know certainly.

The Queen's most famous speech before Parliament was undoubtedly her 'Golden Speech' of November 1601, delivered in answer to the Commons' complaint about her toleration for monopolies that restricted trade and impoverished her subjects. Here, as usual, contemporaries bemoaned the fact that their written recollections of the speech preserved it so imperfectly. One copyist recorded, 'Many things through want of memory I have omitted, without setting down many her majesty's gestures of honour and princely demeanor used by her. As when the speaker spake any effectual or moving speech from the Commons to her majesty, she rose up and bowed herself. As also in her own speech, when the Commons, apprehending any extraordinary words of favour from her, did any reverence to her majesty, she likewise rose up and bowed herself.' In the case of the Golden Speech, however, the version published immediately after the event is even less reliable than usual as a guide to the speech in delivery as we have it recorded by MPs present at the occasion. The official printed version is a disappointingly short abstract that omits most of the 'golden' language for which the speech became famous. The uncertainty of contemporary evidence is surely one reason why it has taken us so long fully to acknowledge Elizabeth's formidable skills as an orator.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

QUEEN ELIZABETH I (1533-1603)

Elizabeth I was the reigning monarch of England from 1558 to 1603. She preserved the English nation against internal as well as external threats, and during her forty-five-year reign the island kingdom emerged as a world power. It is because of her influence that the latter half of the sixteenth century in England is known as the Elizabethan Age.

Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Because Henry VIII had defied the Pope and married Boleyn in the hope of producing a male heir to the throne, he was bitterly disappointed in the birth of a second daughter. Before Elizabeth was three, the king had her mother beheaded and their marriage declared invalid. Although now considered an illegitimate child, Elizabeth was still third in line to the throne (after her half brother Edward and half sister Mary). She received tutoring from leading Renaissance scholars who noted her intellect and seriousness, and became fluent in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. On 17 November 1558 Elizabeth became queen of England, and quickly surrounded herself with experienced and loyal advisers.

The remarkable literary flowering that took place during Elizabeth's rule, when William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Christopher Marlowe were all writing, has kept alive the idea that Elizabethan England enjoyed a golden age. Elizabeth was successful at maintaining peace at home and abroad and also at establishing her own image as a loving and able ruler. Although her own writings—speeches, poetry, and devotional works—do not begin to equal the greatest of her age, they were nevertheless important in creating and sustaining that age.

Roger Wilbraham's adulatory remarks are typical of auditors' responses to speeches at the end of Elizabeth's reign, when the Cult of Elizabeth was in full swing and her oratorical powers had become the stuff of legend. Four decades earlier, she was probably just as eloquent but aroused a rather different reaction from MPs. Most of her addresses from the first years of her reign were designed to deflect parliamentary petitions urging her to marry and declare a succession. She ended her very first speech before Parliament (February 1559) by deftly parrying their demands and declaring, 'And in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.' Later speeches on the same general topic are less pacific towards those who would coerce her into procreation. In a 1562 conversation with the Scottish ambassador, she complained that to declare a succession would be like holding up her own winding sheet before her eyes. In November 1566, incensed that parliamentarians were tying their grant of funds to run her government to her promise to marry and declare a succession. Elizabeth lashed out against their presumption: 'When I call to mind how far from dutiful care, yea, rather how nigh a traitorous trick this tumbling cast did spring, I muse how men of wit can so hardly use that gift they hold. I marvel not much that bridleless colts do not know their rider's hand, whom bit of kingly rein did never snaffle yet.'

After 1567, Elizabeth spoke less frequently before Parliament. We have only one full-length speech from the 1570s, and only the speeches on the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, from the 1580s. One of her most arresting productions was her famous 'Armada Speech', delivered before the troops at Tilbury who were awaiting Spanish invasion in 1588. As we would expect, this stirring address exists in several versions which display intriguing differences. The earliest known published version of the speech dates from 1654, and is, according to the compiler of the volume in which it appears, based on the recollection of Lionel Sharp, an adherent of the Earl of Leicester who was present at the speech's delivery. This version has the Queen protesting her fearlessness to appear in public, despite threats of assassination: 'And therefore I am come amongst you, as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all.' A manuscript that can be dated closer to the time of the speech's actual delivery has Elizabeth promising, 'Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all.' In this version, death in battle becomes her highest pleasure, a blood-feast of daring and sacrifice. We cannot be certain whether the published version is a later tidying clarification of the Queen's highminded sprezzatura in the face of the Spanish threat, or whether it is closer to what she actually said than the surviving manuscript. As usual, the early evidence allows us to come close to recapturing what she uttered, but leaves us at a tantalising distance from certainty.

Elizabeth's speeches are arguably her most glorious literary production, even though, in the forms we have, they are imperfect records of performance. But she also produced poems, prayers, and hundreds of letters. The Armada threat of 1588 inspired her to intense literary activity. Beyond the Armada Speech itself, we possess two public prayers of thanksgiving for the Armada victory, one of which shows the Queen in high, vatic mode as a priestess of her people, thanking God for creating the four elements by which, acting in concert, the Spanish fleet was destroyed:

Everlasting and omnipotent Creator, Redeemer, and Conserver, when it seemed most fit time to Thy worthy providence to bestow the workmanship of this world or globe, with Thy rare judgment Thou didst divide into four singular parts the form of all this world, which aftertime hath termed elements, they all serving to continue in orderly government the whole of all the mass: which all, when of Thy most singular bounty and never-earst-seen care Thou hast this year made serve for instruments both to daunt our foes and to confound their malice.

Elizabeth's enigmatic French verses, which record a mystical rise into otherworldly constancy and spiritual equilibrium, may have been inspired by the Armada victory, as was a little-known 'Song' that was, according to the heading of the single known copy, 'made by her majesty and sung before her at her coming from Whitehall to Paul's through Fleet Street' in public celebration of the scattering of the Spanish ships. In this highly psalmic poem, she offers herself as a sacrifice in thanksgiving for the victory:

Look and bow down Thine ear, O Lord.
From Thy bright sphere behold and see
Thy handmaid and Thy handiwork,
Amongst Thy priests, offering to Thee
Zeal for incense, reaching the skies;
Myself and sceptre, sacrifice.

Given the importance of its occasion, it is astonishing that the Queen's 'Song' has until now been so little known.

The most famous of Elizabeth's political verses is 'The doubt of future foes', written in 1570-71 in response to the Northern Rebellion and the abortive plot to place the Duke of Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne of England. Her contemporaries admired this poem greatly for its extended 'dark conceit', a threat of death, half submerged in allegory, against Mary, the 'daughter of debate,' and Elizabeth's rebellious subjects. The poem begins:

The doubt of future foes
Exiles my present joy
And with me warns to shun such snares
As threatens mine annoy

and ends with the promise to prune her 'foes' with an instrument of war:

My rusty sword through rest
Shall first his edge employ
To poll their tops who seek such change
Or gape for future joy.

Like her speeches, this poem is securely attributed to Elizabeth and exists in a number of manuscript copies, all of them different in their precise wording. But her less obviously political poems are more elusive, and many of them may be lost for good. Most of them were composed as verse conversations with courtiers like Sir Thomas Heneage and Sir Walter Ralegh, and were carefully kept from circulation. To the extent that they have survived, it is often because of the fortuitous durability of the surface on which they were composed or copied. Two of Elizabeth's lyrics survive only as marginalia in religious books, and the verse exchange between Ralegh and Elizabeth was printed decades later, shorn of its personal references and the names of its authors, as a broadside ballad entitled 'The Lover's Complaint for the Loss of His Love' and 'The Lady's Comfortable and Pleasant Answer.' Even when Elizabeth's lyrics were copied, their attribution to the Queen was frequently recorded in the manuscript, and then cancelled out—a clear marker of the ambivalence her subjects felt about daring to preserve her verses.

Luckily, with Elizabeth's numerous letters, we are on firmer ground, because they are, like the speeches, always acknowledged as hers. To read her correspondence from the first awkward girlish production addressed to her father 'the most illustrious and most mighty King Henry the Eighth' through to the instructions to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, for the submission of the Earl of Tyrone at the very end of her reign, is to survey the major events of the Elizabethan age through the perceptions of its major actor. Elizabeth's letters are fascinating for their diversity and stylistic range: pleas for her life during her 'troubles' under the reign of her sister Mary, love letters (or so, at least, she wanted them to appear) to the Duke of Alencon, advice about rule in numerous impatient harangues to James VI of Scotland and Henry IV of France, condolences, pleasantries and intimate advice to her courtiers. As usual, Elizabeth's writing is at its best when she is in her mode of high indignation, as in a characteristic opening to James, 'I rue my sight that views the evident spectacle of a seduced king, abusing Council, and wry-guided kingdom'. Elizabeth usually gets high marks for her diplomatic skills, but we have not fully acknowledged how much of her success can be traced to her brilliance with language.

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