Elizabeth I in Writing: Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England ed. by Donatella Montini and Iolanda Plescia (review)

A number of lively essay collections on representations of Elizabeth I have appeared since 2000, including The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (2003); Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I, ed. Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins (2007); and Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi (2011). Elizabeth I in Writing is distinctive in foregrounding the queen's own acts of authorship, capitalizing on the four-volume University of Chicago Press edition of Elizabeth's works edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, Mary Beth Rose, and Joshua Scodel (2000–2009), and Steven W. May's 2004 edition of Selected Works. These important publications have made reliable texts of Elizabeth's major works more accessible than ever before, and many of the essays in this new volume take up the opportunity for serious critical discussion of the queen as a writer. Others bring to light, sometimes for the first time in print, less familiar texts by and about Elizabeth. Overall, a broad picture is presented of Elizabeth's prolific and complex self-representations across genres, including translations, letters, prayers, and poems.

The collection begins with two excellent essays by the distinguished scholars Brenda Hosington and Alessandra Petrina, both writing on Elizabeth's Latin skills. Hosington discusses neo-Latin writings of Elizabeth's early years as princess: four familiar letters to her brother Edward, two dedicatory letters to her father and brother, and translations of works by Katherine Parr and Bernardino Ochino. Hosington's attentive analysis of the young royal scholar's nuanced word choices and phrasing is richly revealing, and demonstrates Elizabeth's understanding from an early age that rhetorical skill, especially in Latin, was a marker of authority and an instrument of power. The essay thereby initiates two recurrent themes of the volume: how Elizabeth used writing to negotiate various relationships, throughout her life, in which the personal and the political intertwined in complex ways; and where, if anywhere, in her writings we can find insight into Elizabeth's private self.

Petrina notes that, despite a common modern preoccupation with original works as sites of "authenticity," in fact it is often in Elizabeth's translations—her selections of source-texts, her lexical choices, the casual style of her later translations—that we seem to gain most insight into her mind. Petrina writes perceptively that the sixty-year-old queen's hasty, vigorous translation of Boethius in 1593—apparently undertaken simply for her own satisfaction—suggests that "the queen was more interested in the act of translating than in the resulting version" (40); throughout Elizabeth's life, she evidently found the processes of handling language to be a source of profound pleasure. Her translation the previous year of Cicero's Pro Marcello is placed by Petrina in the contexts of both her personal writing career, and the wider sixteenth-century reception of Cicero, followed by some fascinatingly meticulous analysis of her word choices and their political implications.

Mel Evans takes an innovative corpus-linguistic approach to Elizabeth's letters, exploring the differences of vocabulary, conventions, and tone between scribal and holograph letters (that is, in the queen's own hand). Evans offers an illuminating examination of some hybrid letters which combine elements of both types, revealing the rhetorical effects achieved by conforming to or deviating from the conventions of different epistolary genres; for example, by moving strategically between the "royal we" and the singular "I." Unfortunately Evans has a distracting habit of matching plural nouns with singular verbs, and vice versa, while the next essay, by Donatella Montini, on prayers attributed to Elizabeth, contains some typographical errors in its transcription of a prayer from a 1569 print edition ("left" for "lest," "ithall" for "withall" [106...