George Peele and the Judgment of Elizabeth I

Always aware of her precarious position as a performer, Elizabeth I famously observed that "we princes . . . are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed." Particularly as a female ruler, the queen's shrewd sense of her own theatricality is related to the issue of judgment: both her judging and her being judged. George Peele's The Araygnement of Paris is one of several plays that appeal to Elizabeth's self-consciousness regarding performance and judgment. In Peele's play, Elizabeth is literally "set on stages," stages upon which her judgment is both active and passive, just as she was both sovereign and subject.