Showing Like a Queen : : Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton / / Katherine Eggert.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Pennsylvania Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Eggert, Katherine,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]; ©2000
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (304 p.)

For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority. In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Texts and Editions -- 1. Forms of Queenship: Female Rule and Literary Structure in the English Renaissance -- 2. Genre and the Repeal of Queenship in Spenser's Faerie Queene -- 3. Leading Ladies: Feminine Authority and Theatrical Effect in Shakespeare's History Plays -- 4. Exclaiming Against Their Own Succession: Queenship, Genre, and What Happens in Hamlet -- 5. The Late Queen of Famous Memory: Nostalgic Form in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale -- 6. Milton's Queenly Paradise -- Afterword: Queenship and New Feminine Genres -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index