The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (Queenship and Power)

This book surveys a large and rarely examined body of early modern poems, plays, and prose works written to commemorate Queen Elizabeth I. The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries, diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a maid of honor's eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen's corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth's final illness and death, and to show Elizabeth's subjects - peers and poets, bishops and beggars, women and men - responding to their loss by remembering and reconstructing their Queen Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction....Pages 1-6 At the Last Gasp: The Final Days of Queen Elizabeth I....Pages 7-46 “Weepe with Joy”: Elegies for Elizabeth....Pages 47-82 Some Strange Eruption to Our State: Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth....Pages 83-117 “Under Whom Is Figured Our Late Queene Elizabeth”: The Queen in Jacobean Drama....Pages 119-156 Conclusion....Pages 157-161 Back Matter....Pages 163-238 "This book provides a thorough and fascinating exploration of the posthumous representation of Elizabeth I in literary and material culture. Loomis is a thoughtful, interesting, meticulous scholar and this carefully constructed and highly readable book demonstrates a fine blending of literary and historical work."--Jo Carney, Chair, Department of English, The College of New Jersey