Introduction

In the two years that have elapsed since I wrote the introduction to the first special issue of Parergon on the subject of ‘Representing Queens’ (37.2), queens have lost none of their appeal to fascinate. Representations of medieval and early modern queens continue to be brought to the screen. It is notable, however, that there has been a shift to innovative ways of representing these often well-trodden tales. A new series of The Great was released in late 2021, in which the newly crowned Empress Catherine must learn how to reconcile her Enlightenment idealism with the reality of life in eighteenth-century Russia. The Great brings a gleefully profane and anachronistic spirit to telling Catherine’s story; that the show is only loosely connected to the historical record is registered in the shift from the subtitle of ‘an occasionally true story’ to ‘an almost entirely untrue story’ by the last episode of the second series. The premiere in 2021 of yet another series focusing on the life and death of Anne Boleyn might have been greeted with yawns, such is the ubiquity of representations of Henry VIII’s second queen, but for its casting of Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne. The spectacle of a black queen on the throne of England took on additional political significance in the light of Meghan Markle’s revelations of racism within the royal family, which were also playing themselves out across television screens at roughly the same time. Anne’s blackness in the Channel 5 series marks her out as an outsider in a hostile court, but also allows for a black woman’s body to be visibly associated with power, sexuality, and that most white of all social institutions: the British monarchy. The musical Six, a pop musical about Henry VIII’s six wives, has also toured the world to increasing acclaim since its debut in 2017. The series employs a colour-blind casting policy; the 2022 Australian production, for instance, features actors of colour in the roles of Catherine of Aragon (Phoenix Jackson Mendoza) and Catherine Parr (Viyda Makan). Six unapologetically presents the six most infamous early modern queens as modern women, aligning each queen to a contemporary pop ‘Queen-spiration’, and reclaiming history as ‘her story’.

One of the most exciting and significant innovations in the field of queenship studies has been the growing interest in the subject of race and queenship. The purview of queenship studies has moved beyond the Western world and towards a more globalized understanding of the parameters of queenship, in line with wider movements in the fields of medieval and early modern studies. Elena Woodacre’s edited collection A Companion to Global Queenship (Arc Humanities Press, 2018), which featured chapters on European queens alongside queens from China, India, and across the Islamic world, was an important contribution to this emerging field of study. The ‘Race-ing and Queering Queens’ seminar held by the Shakespeare Association of America and convened by Mira Assaf Kafantaris was another important development. Notably, Yasmine Hachimi’s paper brought race into a discussion of Anne Boleyn, noting that the way that she was constructed (both in her own time and in ours) as ‘dark’ and ‘foreign’ invoked discourses of racism and white supremacy. The casting of a black Anne Boleyn in the 2021 Anne Boleyn is therefore oddly appropriate, even if probably unintentional on the part of the filmmakers. An upcoming edition of The Scholar and Feminist Online on the subject of race-ing queens (edited by Sonja Drimmer, Mira Assaf Kafantaris, and Treva B. Lindsey) will extend these enquiries further. While the Parergon ‘Representing Queens’ project has been dominated by the study of European queens, and particularly English queens, we hope that future work on this theme will be significantly more diverse in subject-matter and scope.

Discussions about the relationship between race and queenship have also extended into the public arena with the debut of the Shondaland and Netflix collaboration Bridgerton, based on Julia Quinn’s series of novels, in December 2020. Notably and controversially, the series represents Regency England as a post-racial utopia, with Regé-Jean Page portraying the...