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Elizabeth I: Collected Works
edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose Univ. of Chicago press, 2000 446 pp.; $40 |
For the past two decades, scholars interested in cultural studies have been actively seeking, recovering, and publishing texts written by women of the early modern period, thus putting to rest Virginia Woolf's contention that women in the 16th and 17th centuries did not write because they were not allowed to. Woolf imagined Shakespeare's sister abused and ultimately driven to suicide because she tried to follow in her brother's footsteps, a direction prohibited to women. But with the rediscovery and publication of works by Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Askew, Martha Moulsworth, Katherine Philips, and many other authors, that scenario is no longer credible.
For the most part, editors and authors have chosen to preserve original spellings and punctuation in these texts. While understandable from a scholarly standpoint, this approach has had the unfortunate result of discouraging general readers from approaching the works at all. (Consider the obstacles that would face the non-academic reader of Shakespeare if editors were interested only in preserving the original texts as they appeared in folio or quarto editions replete with errors, textual corruptions, unfamiliar spellings, and inconsistent punctuation.) Hence the recovered texts that were supposed to rattle and ultimately widen the canon end up never entering it.
Fortunately, the splendid new edition of the collected works of Elizabeth I does not have this problem. Up to now it has been difficult to find more than a handful of Elizabeth's works in any one place. In this representative collection of Elizabeth I's speeches, letters, prayers, and poems, the editors have chosen to modernize spelling and punctuation, and to provide English translations when necessary. (An ancillary volume, Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals, provides original texts for those with scholarly interests.)
The sheer magnitude of works that bear the imprint of Elizabeth's hand and thinking makes it impossible to collect all of her writing in one volume. The editors have wisely chosen to limit themselves to all 24 of her full-length speeches, all 39 prayers, and all 15 poems, together with a selection of her letters as well as relevant letters from personages such as James VI of Scotland (who would later succeed Elizabeth as James I of England), poems from courtiers and political figures to whom she wrote poems in reply, and transcriptions of some of the public exchanges she had with bishops and members of Parliament.
At a time when women were not allowed into the universities and usually received no education at all, Elizabeth fell under the tutelage of schoolmasters as well known as Roger Ascham, who said of her in his famous essay, "The Schoolmaster": "Point forth six of the best-given gentlemen of this court, and they together shew not so much good will, spend not so much time, bestow not so many hours daily, orderly, and constantly, for the increase of learning and knowledge as doth the queen's Majesty herself." She spoke and read Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, and French, translating, at the age of 11, Marguerite of Navarre's The Mirror of the Sinful Soul as a New Year's gift for her stepmother Queen Katherine, and the next year tackling the first chapter of Calvin's Institutes as a gift for the same. Elizabeth took pride in her learning, at age 16 writing in a letter to King Edward about a portrait she had given to him, "For the face, I grant, I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present." In a prayer written in Latin in 1563, five years into her reign, she thanks God for her learning, "unusual in my sex," and prays that she will always use her intellectual gifts for the glory of God. Remarkably, in later years she was able to deliver extemporaneous Latin orations (published in translation in this volume as re-created by listeners) to the faculties of Oxford and Cambridge, several centuries before women were allowed admission into the universities.
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