The Queen's Two Bodies: Elizabeth I's Poetry

While the political history of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) has been well-rehearsed, fewer listeners may be aware that she was also a devilishly accomplished poet and rhetorician.  In this episode of the Subcast, we look at her most important poems -- "When I was fair and young," "On Monsieur's Departure," and "The Doubt of Future Foes" -- as well as note her stirring 1588 speech to the troops at Tilbury.

Transcript

Hello, everybody!  Welcome to another bonus chin-wag on the Subcast, where rhyme gets even more reason.

In the last podcast episode about Sir Philip Sidney, I believe I used the adjective “Elizabethan” rather liberally, but never did pause for a moment to explain what I meant by that.  In my defense, I think probably most listeners did know that “Elizabethan” refers to the time and culture in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Gloriana herself, so maybe this whole introduction is at best redundant, at worst insulting.  Please do forgive me if that is so.

Many of you probably also know that Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, which disappointed his royal rotundity because of the whole XX chromosome debacle.  She was, however, a princess and took royal precedence over her half-sister Mary, daughter of the spurned Catherine of Aragon.  However, spurning became something of a habit for Henry, and when Mrs. Henry VIII the II lost her head, Elizabeth was declared a bastard and excluded from the royal succession.

However, she received a top-notch humanist education,  most famously under Roger Ascham, became quite the polyglot, and made many translations of contemporary and classical authors, including the now ubiquitous Petrarch, Seneca, Boethius, Horace, and Plutarch.  Thus, young Bess was well-prepared, both mentally and experientially, for ascending the throne following the brief reign of her brother Edward VI and the bloody reign of sister Mary. 

You also probably know about her vaunted virginity, her “middle-way” in the religious crises, her cracking speech at Tilbury when the Spanish threatened invasion, and her dying without an heir.

OK, but did you know that Her Majesty was also a simply super poet?  Yes, yes, yes! The Virgin Queen quite adeptly wielded the pen as well as the sceptre. It is not too much to presume that her proficiency with poetry and rhetoric were instrumental in her long and successful reign.

We have grown accustomed that sobriquet “The Virgin Queen,” and many explanations have been put forward for Elizabeth’s refusal to marry (I’m not sure anyone takes the “virgin” part literally): a queen regnant was still something of a novelty (her sister Mary being the first in England) and it is altogether reasonable that she feared subordination to a husband.  And, of course, her family hardly provided inspiring examples of matrimonial felicity.  She put it about, of course, that she had no place for a husband because she was “already bound unto a husband which is the kingdom of England.”

There’s a bit of melancholy attached to this choice, I think, and you can sense it in the way she manipulates the refrain in “When I was Fair and Young”

When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.

Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.

But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:

Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more.

How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe,

How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show,

But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore:

Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy,

Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy,

I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more:

Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast

That neither night nor day I could take any rest.

Wherefore I did repent that I had said before:

Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

But her most famous poem dwells upon unrequited love.  It’s called “On Monsieur’s Departure” and many scholars believe it to have been written upon the failure of her prospective betrothal to the Duke of Anjou.  Others think it may be about her lifelong love, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.  It’s three stanzas of rime royal – six lines rhyming ABABCC.  Again, the omnipresent Petrarch exercises his influence as Elizabeth catalogues the differences between what she feels and how she must appear.

I grieve and dare not show my discontent;
I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;
I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.
I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun --
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be suppressed.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low;
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die, and so forget what love e'er meant.

Note the Petrarchan contrasts: grieving but not showing discontent, love and hate, muteness and prating, freezing and burning. The impossibility of catching one’s own shadow.  One feels the tension between her private and public selves: what one is and one must seem to be.  Elizabeth really is the first humanist female monarch and she recognizes her own interiority, yet has only alien examples upon which to model her political self.

You may have heard of the “Doctrine of Two Bodies.”  Maybe you haven’t.  How would I know?  Anyway, it was a postulate of medieval political theology that a king – a monarch – has two bodies.  The “body natural” – right, their physical body – which is subject to disease, age, and death, and the “body politic” – the metaphorical personification of the state or the people, the idea of kingship itself – which is immortal and eternal.  It’s why we said, “the Queen is dead, long live the King” recently, because although Elizabeth II’s body natural died, the monarchy – the body politic – endures in her son, Charles III.

That little diversion merely sets me up for this observation.  In “On Monsieur’s Departure,” Elizabeth expresses the difficulty of uniting those two bodies, the impossibility of holding the extremes in balance.  The last line of stanza 1 – “from myself another self I turned.”  The topline reading simply says she had to turn a lover away, one she recognizes as an equal – he, too, is a self.  But the joint use of “myself” and “self” can also be read reflexively, in that in turning her lover away, she denies something essential about herself.

That duality pops up in probably her most famous bit of oratory, too: the speech to the troops at Tilbury who prepared to meet the Spanish Armada in 1588.  It’s a stirring speech, and most historians accept it as authentic (despite there being three versions – we accept the spirit if not the letter), and the where and when of its actual delivery are somewhat contested.  But that need not detain us here, for it's the language we are interested in.  

Elizabeth begins by addressing, not her troops as such, or soldiers, but “my loving people.”  She immediately emphasizes her identity with the body politic and the adjective “loving” does double duty: people who are loved and people who love.  She then asserts her justice under God and pledges that she is “resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.”  

Ah! Who would not die for Good Queen Bess?!  Even I, a weak and feeble academic, would shoulder my pike for Gloriana.

But that sense of Elizabeth being alien to herself appears here, too, right?  She is a weak and feeble woman (well, she plays off the stereotype anyway), but a king of England – note she doesn’t say queen.  This is war, and the gender conceptions of the day hadn’t yet grown to accomodate the idea of the warrior queen.  So her “body politic” is masculine though her body natural is female, an identity she exploits when suitable to emphasize her fidelity and purity to her people.

We can observe that duality in the “Doubt of Future Foes.”  She writes about her personal and political anxiety about the dangers posed by her cousin, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.  In 1570, Pope Pius V absolved all English Catholics of loyalty to the Protestant queen, and basically put a hit out on her.  This prompted a number of plots centered on the Scottish queen to depose the heretical Elizabeth.

The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,

And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy;

For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb,

Which should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web.

But clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds,

Which turn to rain of late repent by changed course of winds.

The top of hope supposed the root upreared shall be,

And fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly ye shall see.

The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,

Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds.

The daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow

Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know.

No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port;

Our realm brooks not seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort.

My rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ

To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy.

Yep, again Petrarchan contrasts: foes and joy, falsehood and faith, hope and guile.  We get a whole basketful of natural and horticultural imagery: rain, winds, fruitless, grafted, root, sow, reap.  All this in one way or another jibes with contemporary ideas about femininity, both positive and negative stereotypes: emotional, calculating, reflective, fertile, cunning.  But the last three lines forsake the elliptical language and she becomes deadly direct: “Our realm brooks not seditious acts.”  Um, no ambiguity there.  She’s badass.  Heart and stomach of a king.  Then she reintroduces the gardening metaphor by drawing the analogy between executing by decapitation those who challenge her rule, and polling plants to allow for future growth.  If you’ve any doubt about her confidence in returning her garden to a peaceful patch, note that she ends the poem with the same word that ends her last line: joy.

Was there joy at the end?  Who knows. As she aged and the succession crisis became more and more pressing, the vultures circled hungrily. She shuffled off her mortal coil in 1603 and the son of her erstwhile foe, James VI of Scotland replaced her on the throne as James I of England, thus setting in motion the slow wheels that would turn England and Scotland into Great Britain and eventually the United Kingdom.  But that’s a long way off.