Andrew Smyth
Department of English
Saint Louis University
Susan Frye focuses her recent book, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation, on three distinct moments in the monarch's career as she sets out to examine and complicate our perspective on Queen Elizabeth's iconography and the inevitable struggle for political meaning engendered by these images. The first two events the 1559 coronation entry into London and the Kenilworth entertainments of 1575 are perfect choices since they are easily demarcated and clearly demonstrate the conflict for power through representation. The first event portrays the negotiations of the London merchants and their new Queen, and the second highlights the Earl of Leicester's quest for favor through pageantry. Both of these events demonstrate the problematic nature of representation for a female monarch who relied upon images to define her control of a male kingdom.
As students of cultural poetics have long pointed out, iconography, as well as all sign systems, inevitably involves a struggle to impose and naturalize one reading of an image against numerous conflicting images. In her study, Frye highlights the constant competition between and among Elizabeth and her courtiers and other interested parties. Her third window through which she views this conflict Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and the aging queen of the 1590s is less clearly defined as a historical moment, but serves well to emphasize Frye's point that the competition for representation is an ever-shifting process that resists the convenient, static historical perception of Elizabeth upon which most twentieth-century biographers have based their work.
Agency provides the biggest obstacle for the historian seeking to read Elizabeth's iconography in terms of power and conflict. Was Elizabeth totally responsible for her images, Frye asks? The premise of the book suggests not at all, since courtiers, merchants, poets, and anyone with an interest that could be furthered by the queen attempted to manipulate images of her. Yet, Frye asserts, Elizabeth I did have agency, not in the sense of a self-determined subject, but through "her conscious and unconscious participation in the practice of signification" (7). Following the work of Louis Montrose and other cultural literary critics in claiming that Elizabeth had the power to shape but also to be shaped by the prevailing modes of discourse in the period, Frye analyzes the coronation entry and the pageantry at Kenilworth to prove that Elizabeth was actively involved in the struggle for her own image, a struggle that had clear political significance at every turn. At Kenilworth, as Frye reconstructs the chronology of events, we see Robert Dudley attempting to gain stature by staging entertainments centering on Elizabeth's role as a woman in need of a man. Elizabeth promptly cancelled two of the entertainments a masque in which Diana and Iris argued for marriage, and a military skirmish in which a male captain, presumably Leicester, does battle with the rapist Sir Bruse sans Pitie in defense of the Lady of the Lake, signifying the Queen. Elizabeth then substituted her own version of her glorious rescue of the Lady of the Lake, reasserting her divine authority which she closely linked with her virginity, thus displacing any need for male protection. Ironically, though, the competition continues after the event, for in George Gascoigne's written version of the Kenilworth events, The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth, the two suppressed Dudley-centered entertainments reemerge, demonstrating Elizabeth's inability to keep total control over her images. Ultimately, although the queen was strongest in the 1570s and early '80s, and despite Dudley's later failures in his military and political career, his entertainments prove not only a lasting force for our picture of the queen at this time but also an accurate vision of England's foreign policy in the 1580s, when militant protestantism led England into troublesome overseas interventions.
Frye's third setting differs from the first two because she examines the ongoing representational conflict through a poem that did not feature the interests of a political giant like Leicester or the powerful economic interests of the London merchants. Most different, though, is that with Spenser and The Faerie Queene, we lose sight of Elizabeth's agency, largely because of the paucity of records dealing with the queen's response to this redefining poem. All we know is that Spenser, through the intervention of Raleigh, presented the first three books of his epic to the queen, and that he was rewarded with a 50.00-pound annuity, the highest sum awarded to a poet in Elizabeth's reign. Then, he went back to Ireland where more immediate worldly concerns must have occupied his mind as he expanded his own holdings in that country and completed the next three books of The Faerie Queene.
Because so little is known about Elizabeth's response to Spenser, speculation has abounded. Literary critics such as Louis Montrose, Stephen Greenblatt, Arthur Marotti, Jonathan Goldberg, and many others have sifted through the latter books of The Faerie Queene, as well as The Amoretti, Colin Clouts Come Home Again, and even Spenser's initial major publication, The Shepheardes Calender, from all of which ample evidence of the poet's political ambitions and later frustrations spring. The usual explanation is that Spenser, not having been adequately rewarded, in his opinion, with a court post for his work, became much more open in his criticism of the court and its functions in his latter work. Frye builds upon this theory, claiming that Spenser and other poets of the 1590s engaged in the competition for representing Elizabeth. They did so more successfully, according to Frye, because unlike the attempts of earlier courtiers such as Leicester, these representations were highly aestheticized and mixed their subversive materials with encomiastic intentions, thus avoiding censure and angry responses from the aging Queen.
Here, one must question how adequately Frye herself represents Elizabeth. Apparently, the Queen does not have much of a chance to compete for her representation, since Spenser's text is slippery enough to limit her response to keeping him in Ireland. Frye casts Spenser as a poet- magician who represents himself in the characters of Merlin, Archimago, and Busirane. Directing most of her attention to the House of Busirane episode at the end of Book 3, Frye asserts that Spenser redefines Chastity and, in the process, Elizabeth within the discourse of marriage in terms of purity from unlawful intercourse. Ultimately, this redefinition in the poem leads to "a figure of Elizabeth that is simultaneously imprisoned, entertained with a spectacle and poetry, and raped" (116).
That figure is Amoret, one of many mirrors of Elizabeth in the poem, and Frye presents a reading of Amoret and her female liberator, Britomart, as examples of Spenser's redefinition of Elizabeth through such figures of Chastity, an image to which Elizabeth turned in her later years as a source of power. Frye argues convincingly that Spenser has a lot in common with the evil poet-magician Busirane, both of whom use words to create the rape of Amoret, and both of whom disappear through the narrative. Spenser's narrator repeats the story of Amoret's rape three times, each time apparently effacing the violence while actually accentuating it. Ultimately, both Britomart and Amoret, by viewing and participating in the spectacle of this rape, are made vulnerable to the violence directed against Chastity in a patriarchal world.
Frye's analysis here is perceptive and enlightening, but one still wonders why Spenser and others would have chosen the rhetoric of violence in marriage to critique a queen in her sixties. Frye would have done better to look at a more violent manifestation of male dominance in book 4 of the poem, where Belphoebe and Amoret are disturbingly confronted by Lust itself and, perhaps more importantly, are implicated by the presence of a filthy hag who casts a shadow on these shadows of Elizabeth. After slaying Lust, who rapes and devours women in the wilderness, Belphoebe cannot help gazing at this fallen creature, admiring "his monstrous shape" (4.7.32.6). Belphoebe is the mirror of Elizabeth who represents militant, autonomous chastity and thus, according to Frye's analysis, is closest to the link of chastity and power that Elizabeth herself desired. The encomiastic tribute to Chastity conquering Lust and disorder in the wild is compromised by this voyeuristic trance that overcomes Belphoebe, and the subversive shadow cast upon Queen Elizabeth becomes even more explicit two stanzas later when a hag, trapped in the cave of Lust with Aemylia and Amoret, steps forth, eliciting a response of disgust from Belphoebe. The prostitute-hag by her very proximity to Amoret and Belphoebe presents a serious challenge to the signification of power in chastity, especially since the narrator has just given us a glimpse of Belpheobe entranced by Lust. With an aging Queen on the throne still courted by her political suitors in terms of courtly, Petarchan, and Neo- Platonic love, the "quean" who appears only for a moment in this scene offers an example of Spenser taking much greater liberties than he did in the earlier books.
Such stunning allegorical portrayals such as the Masque in the House of Busirane and Belphoebe's encounter with Lust do indeed affirm that a poet such as Spenser could challenge and redefine the very images which Elizabeth used to define her own power. Nonetheless, the fact that the Queen's use of iconography did force her subjects even in the 1590s to participate in such a discourse testifies to her political acumen and overwhelming personal character throughout her reign. Susan Frye's book gives us the opportunity to view Elizabeth from a variety of perspectives so that we can appreciate all the players in this competition for representation and realize that no single reading of her image can possibly account for Queen Elizabeth I at any one time.
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