Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (review)

Scratch any assumption about Queen Elizabeth I, and you will find not fact but mythology, the product of centuries of claims made for and through her. In Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths, Helen Hackett, armed with her usual meticulous research, takes on both of these towering icons. As she points out in her introduction, the very absence of documented connection between queen and playwright creates a gap that has stimulated the imaginations of entertainers and scholars alike. Hackett's focus—and this book's very real achievement—is her tracing of connections between popular culture and scholarly work as she considers the many venues where Shakespeare and Elizabeth have met and continue to meet.

Hackett's six chapters are largely organized chronologically. Chapter 1, "Lives and Legends in the Eighteenth Century," considers the rise of Shakespeare's reputation in relation to Elizabeth's. At the beginning of the century, Shakespeare gained through royal association amounting at times to collaboration, as in John Dennis's introduction to his revision of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1702) and Nicholas Rowe's life of Shakespeare (1709). By the end of the century, memorialized in Westminster Abbey and lionized by Garrick, Shakespeare was in the ascendant. Yet the ongoing desire to picture the Elizabeth and Shakespeare relationship as one of patronage, even sympathy bordering on flirtation, led in scholarship to William Henry Ireland's forgery of a letter from Elizabeth to Shakespeare, a maneuver that is part of a larger trend identified by Hackett as the blurring of history and fiction in the "new genre of historical fiction" (44).

Chapter 2, "Facts and Fictions in Nineteenth-Century Britain," considers how Shakespeare commanded the historical and literary-critical stage, becoming a figure of nationalism underwriting the British Empire. At the same time, Elizabeth remained necessary to demonstrate Shakespeare's place in the social hierarchy. Edmond Malone's 1821 biography of Shakespeare, written according to new principles of historical objectivity, repeated the story that Elizabeth had requested The Merry Wives from Shakespeare. That same year, Walter Scott published Kenilworth, his second novel of historical fiction. Hackett argues that Scott, as both novelist and archivist, creates this genre in part from the desire to unite Elizabeth and Shakespeare in his version of Merrie Olde England. Scott's work inspired a century of scholarly and popular stories connecting the two figures and spurred the genre of historical painting. Hackett's nuanced, lively reading of Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Kenilworth is one of the great pleasures of this book. Another lies in Hackett's discussion of comparisons between Elizabeth and Victoria, in which she shows that both queens lost. Elizabeth's supposed relation to Shakespeare was used to criticize Queen Victoria's more lowbrow tastes, while Elizabeth lacked the feminine qualities that Victoria epitomized. Distaste for Elizabeth's unattractive "masculine" qualities did not, however, prevent Shakespeare and Elizabeth from being pictured as a couple. As Hackett points out, imagining an eroticized relation between them deflected questions about the sexuality of either. At the end of this chapter, Hackett shows us how the power of their combined myth led to their satiric treatment, as in the 1895 Punch cartoon by E. T. Reed, "Unrecorded History V: Queen Elizabeth just runs through a little thing of her own composition to William Shakespeare" (91; Figure 2.9).

In Chapter 3, "Shakespeare and Elizabeth Arrive in America," Hackett doubles back to 1750 in order to discuss Shakespeare's mythology in America, where he became, enduringly, a figure who anticipated the American rebellion against tyranny. The tradition that identifies Shakespeare, in the words of William Cullen Bryant, as "a poet of the Americas" (98) led to the great book collections of Howard Furness (destined for the University of Pennsylvania) and Henry Clay Folger (by 1932 located in the capital at the Folger Shakespeare Library). Meanwhile, the Elizabeth of nineteenth- and twentieth-century biography and history was power hungry, even "mean" to...