Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England looks at a variety of uses of representations of Elizabeth, particularly in the decades immediately following her death. Even with the rich outpouring of monographs and collections on Elizabeth with the 400^th anniversary of her death in 2003, this collection demonstrates that there are new texts and materials remaining to be explored, as well as fresh insights to be learned about more familiar texts. Beginning with a fascinating account of a lovely material object —a miniature of Elizabeth by an unknown artist —the volume puts a dual stress on change and continuity. The volume does not put forward a main thesis, but rather the fourteen essays explore the range, complexity, and variety of representations.

A number of the essays, however, do focus on the Jacobean period, when Elizabeth was used as a militant Protestant exemplar to critique her pacifist and extravagant successor. Alan Young examines early praise of James as a phoenix-like reincarnation of Elizabeth. Georgianna Ziegler shows how Princess Elizabeth is seen as a second phoenix, a procreative extension of the old queen. Peter Hyland argues that the skull of Gloriana in The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) serves both to evoke Elizabeth and to attack the tyranny and excess of the Jacobean court. Jonathan Baldo suggests that Henry VIII (1613) exposes the selective nature of historical memory. Elizabeth Pentland looks at how two late Jacobean tracts draw upon Spenser and "Elizian" paradise to question Jacobean foreign policy and censorship. Hardin Aasand adds yet another strand in his account of Ben Jonson's fetishized Elizabeth in his early Jacobean masques.

While these Jacobean essays form a central core, other essays take on other periods. Katherine Duncan-Jones offers a late Elizabeth smiling in public and able to intimidate the Venetian ambassador, but miserable, melancholic, even suicidal in her final two years after the execution of her favorite, Essex. Two essays treat matters very late in the reign of Charles II. Kim Noling considers John Banks's staging of the young child Elizabeth in Vertue Betray'd (1682) as offering an alternative, maternal origin of England's Protestantism. Erika Mae Olbricht examines uses of Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots to address fears about the succession of the Catholic James, Duke of York.

Other essays are more wide-ranging in time, organized by genre or type of material. Steven May looks at how Elizabeth's own words are overshadowed by apocryphal sayings such as her supposed deathbed endorsement of James as heir. Leslie Dunn's study of musical treatments of Elizabeth moves from early Jacobean madrigals to musical links between Elizabeth and Queen Mary in the late 1680s. Brandie Siegfried examines how Margaret Cavendish, following Francis Bacon, links her own reputation with her image of Elizabeth. Lisa Gim explores how the Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman and the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet find in Elizabeth an active female figure whose conduct matches their own Protestant values. Susan Wofford shows how Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth tells a Protestant and nationalist story, drawn in part from Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

The essays are, in general, clearly written, fresh, and informative. The virtue of this volume is in its uncovering still-new ways of remembering Elizabeth, and particularly, the political appropriations of Elizabeth in the Jacobean and late Carolean periods. However, the failure to include any essays that focus on the 1630s and '40s, the Civil War, regicide, republic, or the first two decades of the Restoration is, perhaps, a missed opportunity. Uses of Queen Elizabeth to rebuke the seemingly popish-leaning, fiscally and liturgically innovative Charles I, or, later, to support (or admonish) Cromwell, for instance, would make the volume more truly representative of the upheaval of the seventeenth century.

Nonetheless, this volume adds important new material to our knowledge of appropriations of Elizabeth and offers fresh insights on how the memory of...