Dido, Queen of England

To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O lord thou pluckest me out

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

I am no man's Elizabeth.

—Cate Blanchett in Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth (1998)

From Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Roy Strong, Queen Elizabeth I's observers have been fascinated by the topic of marriage.¹ Elizabeth managed to avoid it for decades, maintaining, when pressed, that she considered herself wedded to England. Her prevarications generated a discourse of courtship, and of courtiership, that defined the terms of Elizabethan politics as well as theatricality.² Only with hindsight do the tangle of invitations, courtships and suitors, and the hedging and equivocation that did not cease until Elizabeth was long past menopause, appear to be a coherent foreign and domestic policy. Ultimately, Elizabeth's ability to leave doors open to possible matches without shutting any of them, and to facilitate a series of propitious alliances without relinquishing her own power, resolved itself in the myth of the Virgin Queen.

Dido, Queene of Carthage, written by Christopher Marlowe in collaboration with Thomas Nashe sometime between 1585 and 1588, dramatizes the symbiotic relationship between Elizabeth's virginity and her political power. Earlier in her reign, Elizabeth had been entertained by theatrical performances that urged her to choose a mate. However, as the queen entered her fifties, the selection of a husband and production of an heir were no longer likely: Elizabeth's final engagement with the Duke of Alençon had reached its inevitable stalemate, and ended with his death in 1584. Like William Gager's Dido, performed on 12 June 1583, at Christ Church, Oxford, and the Siena Sieve portrait of Elizabeth, painted in the early 1580s, Marlowe's Dido, Queene of Carthage uses the figure of Dido, Aeneas's jilted paramour, to praise the queen's de facto decision to remain single. By depicting Dido as a negative example of enslavement by erotic love and the desire for marriage, Dido, Queene of Carthage offers a sophisticated theatrical compliment to the queen.

For centuries, Virgil's Aeneid provided a model for Britain's self-fashioning as a "second Troy," founded by Brutus.³ However, Dido, Queene of Carthage illustrates the kinds of revisions that were necessary when centuries of Virgilian exemplarity confronted the reality of female sovereignty in Elizabeth. As the play reworks its Virgilian source, it highlights both the problem and the potential of using Dido as a counterpart to Elizabeth.⁴ For Dido was a highly contested figure, her salubrious pre-Virgilian reputation compromised by her self-annihilating passion in the Aeneid.To a certain extent, Dido's potent blend of avowed chastity and charged sexuality made her a perfect choice for Elizabeth. Yet her unstable reputation—is she a canny seductress or a hapless victim? African or European? Occidental or Oriental?—reinforced as much as assuaged anxieties about having a female sovereign. Paradoxically, Elizabeth was the marker for England's national identity, while her identification with Dido constructed her as the quintessential Other: exotic and eroticized, because different, and dangerous, because female.

By showing Dido as, at once, colonizer and colonized, predator and victim, eastern and western, Dido, Queene of Carthage reveals the intensely labile roles that Queen Elizabeth I chose and was expected to perform. At a time when Elizabeth was beginning to focus her energies on expansion, supporting Sir Walter Raleigh's expeditions to Virginia, and the travels of John Newbery and Ralph Fitch to India, it celebrates a ruler known for her chastity and her empire. Yet the play also dramatizes the loss of sovereignty that Elizabeth (and England) avoided by resolving the question of marriage, characteristically, by refusing to resolve it at all. And after Marlowe and Nashe were finished with it, the Aeneid was never the same. As Dido, Queene of Carthage transforms Virgil, it undermines the stability of racial and geographical hierarchies and categories, demonstrating the flexibility of the interpenetrating discourses of gender and colonialism in the early modern period.

I.

The popularity of Elizabeth's association with Dido can be explained, in part, by her name. Dido...