Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (review)

In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert takes up Louis Montrose's notion of the "'shaping fantasies'" of queenship and explores how they become "fantasies of literary shape" (7) when queenship is reconstituted through Spenser's, Shakespeare's, and Milton's experiments with new literary forms. Eschewing what she calls the Mount Everest theory of authorial motivation—"Why write about the queen? Because she's there" (3)—she espouses instead the Willie Sutton approach—"Why write about the queen? Because that is, figuratively, where the money is" (7). The problem of queenship becomes an opportunity for authors to engage with their cultural experience and memory of female authority by celebrating it, dethroning it, excluding it, ruminating on it, expressing nostalgia for it, even being ravished by it, ultimately reshaping the genres they have inherited as part of this process. The book acknowledges the tensions between historical circumstance and literary form and explores them in innovative and nuanced ways. Its goal is a formalism inflected by political and social concerns.

Eggert wants to see literary shape stretched in the direction of effeminized form as Diana Henderson has done in her study of the lyric and performance.¹ Her book assumes its own shape as it explores these formal experiments, beginning with Spenser's celebration of queenly and poetic ravishment in Books 3 and 4 of The Faerie Queene. Spenser then repeals feminine rule when Radigund, Britomart, the titaness Mutabilitie and Queen Elizabeth herself are successively dethroned. After using heroic epic and epic romance, Spenser shifts to historical allegory, courtly pastoral, and finally mythopoetics in the Mutability Cantos, closing off the feminine poetics and replacing it by "breathtakingly swift transformations of poetic modes . . . [that] play like a number of musical variations" (16) on the question of how poetic authority might be conceived as other than feminized. Eggert's book ends with a chapter on Milton that reads his Mask in relation to virginity as a prelapsarian condition and traces Eve's desire for freedom and her attributes of queenship in Paradise Lost "back to the enlightened republican antimonarchist [of Milton's antimonarchical tracts], back to the enfranchised ex-husband [of the divorce tracts], back through the Mask's Lady to England's remembered Virgin Queen" (180).

The innovations she explores come to rest with Milton because she finds that later writers do not use female authority as a touchstone for new literary forms in the ways that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton do, so the book has a teleology that positions Milton as the last Elizabethan. An afterword touches lightly on Anne Bradstreet and the Tory women writers of the Restoration, but Renaissance women writers are excluded on the grounds that they were not as formally inventive as their male counterparts, and by the eighteenth-century writers had abandoned "the notion of the feminine mind as a source of powerful, fascinating, perhaps even dangerous fictions" (203). This approach, which proceeds on the assumption of the value of female authority, nonetheless enhances the stature of the most elite male authors of the period while it slights others who were less established, although Eggert does bring numerous minor texts into her discussion of these major ones. The formalist focus on innovation becomes a justification for avoiding consideration of how women were gradually writing their way into cultural authority while a queen ruled and was later remembered.

Shakespeare is at the center of the book in three chapters: a discussion of his history plays in the two tetralogies, another on Hamlet's and Hamlet's succession,and a third on nostalgic form in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale. For me the most compelling claim concerning the histories is that Henry V's refusal to connect Katherine of France to Elizabeth's lineage—Katherine was Elizabeth's great-great-grandmother...