The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440-1627 (Queenship and Power)

Most modern accounts of fifteenth-century English queens understandably focus on separating what really happened from what was fabricated. What has not been considered in any detail, however, is the fabrications themselves as narratives, and as reflections of questions and anxieties that haunted their writers. By focusing on the relationship between gender and genre and the way embedded literary narratives echo across texts as disparate as chronicles, parliamentary proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, ballads, poetry, and drama, this study reveals hitherto unexplored tensions within these texts, generated by embedded narratives and their implications. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Abbreviations......Page 12 Introduction: The Queen as Cipher in the Medieval Period......Page 14 1 Narrating Queens in the Fifteenth Century......Page 26 2 “By meane of a woman”: Changing the Subject in Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia and Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard the Third......Page 60 3 “The point of a very woman”: Gendering Destabilization in Edward Hall’s Union and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles......Page 88 4 Queens in the Margins: Allegorizing Anxiety in A Mirror for Magistrates......Page 118 5 Performing Queenship in Legge’s Richardus Tertius , The True Tragedy of Richard III , and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV......Page 138 6 “A qu een in jest”: Queenship and Historical Subversion in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy......Page 158 7 “The fetters of her sex”: Voicing Queens in the Historical Poetry of Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel......Page 186 Notes......Page 206 Bibliography......Page 242 Index......Page 268 "Most modern accounts of fifteenth-century queens understandably focus on separating what really happened from what was fabricated. What has not been considered in any detail, however, is the fabrications themselves as narratives, and as reflections of questions and anxieties that haunted their writers. By focusing on the relationship between gender and genre and the way embedded literary narratives echo across texts as disparate as chronicles, parliamentary proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, ballads, poetry, and drama, this study reveals hitherto unexplored tensions within these texts, generated by embedded narratives and their implications"-- Provided by publisher An examination of fifteenth-century British queens through literature and history.