“We princes are set on stages”: Performing Power in Elizabethan England

Elke Mettinger

doi:10.4312/an.53.1-2.83-100

Authors

Elke Mettinger University of Vienna, Austria

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/an.53.1-2.83-100

Keywords:

Elizabeth I, spectacle, ambiguity of power, Foucault, Shakespeare, Henry V

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore Elizabeth’s performative power as manifesting itself on the scaffold and on the stage, in royal portraits and processions. Drawing on Foucault and new historicism, it will discuss the Queen’s reliance on spectacle and ambiguity to enhance her authority and reach the population at large.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Andrewes, Lancelot. Works. Sermons. Vol. 1. Transcr. Marianne Dorman. 7/7/2020 http://anglicanhistory.org/lact/andrewes/v1/wednesday2.html

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984 (11965).

Cole, Mary Hill. The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999.

Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield. “History and Ideology: The instance of Henry V.” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John Drakakis. London and New York: Routledge, 22002. 209-230.

Fischlin, Daniel. “Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I.” Renaissance Quarterly 50.1 (1997): 175-206.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977.

Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2005 (1980).

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: OUP, 1988.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2004.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: CUP, 1996.

Hammer, Paul E.J. “Upstaging the Queen: the Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day celebrations of 1595.” The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Eds. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. 41-66.

Höfele, Andreas. “Bühne und Schafott.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 135 (1999): 46-65.

Lake, Peter and Michael Questier. “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England.” Past and Present 153 (1996): 64-107.

Laqueur, Thomas W. “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868.” The First Modern Society. Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone. Eds. A.L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim. Cambridge: CUP, 1989. 305-355.

Leahy, William. Elizabethan Triumphal Processions. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005.

Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Montrose, Louis. “Shakespeare, the Stage, and the State.” SubStance 80 (1996): 46-67.

Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Neill, Michael. “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.1 (1994): 1-32.

Orgel, Stephen. The Jonsonian Masque. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard UP, 1965.

Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1975.

Orgel, Stephen. The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

Patterson, Annabel. “Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V.” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 29-62.

Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. 1599. Ed. Andrew Gurr. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Updated Ed. Cambridge: CUP, 2005.

Sharpe, J.A. “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 107 (May 1985): 144-167.

Smith, Molly. “The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 32, 2 (1992): 217-232.

Strong, Roy. Portraits of Elizabeth I. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1963.

Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 21984 (1973).

Strong, Roy. Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. New York and London: Methuen, 1986.