Elizabeth I of England and Rosalind of Arden
Elizabeth I was the complete performance artist: a great actress, great director, great scriptwriter. The shrewdest political operator of her time, she was also Queen of England when Shakespeare wrote As You Like It. Rosalind’s speeches could have come fresh from her tongue. Or in another dimension Shakespeare could have written Elizabeth’s scripts. The court was her thrust stage. The playhouse was his court. They could have swapped roles. Born 7 Sept 1533, Elizabeth was in her 66th year and had been on the throne for forty of those years when Rosalind first stepped on stage. Immortalised as Gloriana in Edmund Spenser’s poem, The Faerie Queen, Elizabeth was a generation older than Shakespeare, but when she acceded to the crown in 1558 she had been a young woman of twenty-five, coincidentally the same age as Elizabeth II when she acceded in 1952 nearly four centuries later. Gloriana was a grand paradox. She could embody both youth and age. She could include both genders.
Although Elizabeth existed in fact and Rosalind lives in fiction, they have so much in common, as well as the common touch. Both were aristocrats: Elizabeth the daughter of King Henry VIII; Rosalind the daughter of Duke Senior. Both had been abandoned by their fathers and had no mothers. Henry VIII had beheaded Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, and bastardised his daughter. She had similarly lost successive stepmothers, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr, and her father King Henry VIII himself had died in 1547. Deposed and vanished into exile, Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior is effectively lost to her throughout the greater part of the play. Even when she comes face to face with him in the forest, he doesn’t see through her Ganymede disguise to recognise his daughter. Rosalind’s mother is never mentioned. These parental chasms in both Elizabeth and Rosalind’s lives were emotionally profound. As young women they had to fend for themselves at court against dangerous and unpredictable adversaries. Rosalind has to survive with a brave face, showing ‘more mirth’ than she is ‘mistress of,’ while inwardly raging at the court of her usurping, changeable uncle, Duke Frederick. Elizabeth was buffeted by successive regime changes, under new stepmothers, then during the reign of her younger Protestant brother, Edward VI, and subsequently in a complete volte-face under her elder Catholic sister, Mary I. During Mary’s reign, Elizabeth’s life was perilous; she was imprisoned in the Tower and only survived through her wits, enterprise and courage.
These adverse experiences coloured both their lives. By 1599, the year of As You Like It, long reigning Queen Elizabeth dominated her court, whereas Rosalind only attended Duke Frederick’s court under sufferance. However, Elizabeth never forgot what it had felt like to be marginalised at court in her youth, even to be declared illegitimate. She was proud of her resourcefulness. ‘I thank God I am indeed endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom,’1 she said, imagining a costume almost as transgressive as Rosalind fleeing her uncle’s court dressed as a man. Rosalind and Elizabeth share resilient spirits, and both were young when they were most threatened.
Elizabeth and Rosalind were powerful women who in normal sixteenth century circumstances would have been excluded from public life by their gender. But they had the brains and strength to devise a life far beyond the usual boundaries of their sex. They knew how to stage-manage events in their own worlds, whether at court or in Arden. And both were onstage. Elizabeth was in the spotlight of her court and of the state, as Rosalind is the lodestar of Arden and of her play. Sheer magnetism of personality fuelled both Elizabeth and Rosalind. Biographers have called Gloriana, ‘this amazing Queen, so keenly intelligent, so effervescing, so intimate, so imperious and regal,’2 qualities possessed in equal measure by voluble, ingenious, commanding Rosalind.
The very name ‘Rosalind’ was a coded link with Elizabeth. Rosa linda is a beautiful rose, and the rose, whether cultivated or wild, sweet-briar or eglantine, is a potent and repeated symbol in the iconography of Elizabeth. In his 1575 Pelican Portrait – so-called because of the pelican jewelled pendant she wears – Nicholas Hilliard painted Elizabeth like a religious icon emblazoned with a riot of roses. But the message was political. Tudor roses uniting the red and white of the once warring houses of York and Lancaster were embroidered on her sleeves, appliqued on her skirt, suggested in the exotic, swirling fan of ostrich feathers in her hand, and inscribed in the heraldic Tudor rose supporting the crown in the upper left-hand corner of the picture.3
In its companion piece, the Phoenix Portrait, Elizabeth wears a huge jewelled red and white Tudor rose at the centre of a massive pearl studded collar looping across her breast, which culminates in two more fabulous rose jewels on each shoulder. To point up the emblem still further, her elegant right hand holds a single, natural, red rose of England, perfectly pleated.4 In the magnificent Ditchley portrait of the early 1590s by Flemish artist, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, she’s standing on a broad map of England, situated on the great globe itself. She is the symbol of national identity who is also semi-divine; a madonna set between dark heavens and English sunlit skies. Elizabeth always projected herself as a strong unifying ruler, cosmically, dynastically, politically, and religiously, with the pragmatic 1559 Church Settlement the lynchpin of her domestic policy. However, this portrait has another, more alluring, feminine message, which is also a key element of her power. Elizabeth’s ruff and collar of exquisite stiffened lace framing her face could be the fairy wings of Gloriana or Titania.5 Prominently pinned to the left side of her airy ruff is a natural pink rose set on a spray of green leaves.6
The Tudor rose referred to the body politic but it also referred to the body private although in Elizabeth’s case the two were metaphorically entwined. In sixteenth-century poetry, the rose often denoted the chastity of a marriageable virgin. Hilliard’s luminous 1572 miniature showed Elizabeth with maiden white roses in her hair and on her dress, in the same year that she was negotiating a never-to-be fulfilled marriage contract with the Duke of Anjou.7 Elizabeth continued to dally both politically and personally with a whole procession of suitors throughout her reign. However, she told her long-term favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, ‘I will have here but one mistress but no master.’8 While all Elizabeth’s flirtations led to maintaining her impregnable single status, symbolic perhaps of England’s invincibility against foreign enemies, Rosalind’s one flirtation, after demanding a tough audition from Orlando, led to her informed choice of marriage. Elizabeth promoted an image of herself as the mother of her people, though she never had a child. Rosalind is similarly childless throughout her play, but from the first moment of falling in love, she excitedly predicts Orlando as her ‘child’s father,’ clearly envisaging their future offspring.
Both Elizabeth and Rosalind were egalitarians of a sort, adept at crossing borders, whether social or sexual. Rosalind becomes a shepherd boy, runs a smallholding, earns her own living and integrates into rural life. She can talk equally to highfalutin courtiers like Jaques, and to modest tenant farmers like Corin. This most talkative of Shakespeare’s comic heroines chiefly expresses herself in the people’s prose rather than in blank verse. Like Rosalind, Elizabeth was a princess who could identify with ordinary people, and even envy them. The chronicler Holinshed said that when interned at Woodstock, ‘fraught full of terror,’ during her sister Mary’s reign, she heard a milkmaid ‘singing pleasantlie’ outside in the garden and ‘wished hir selfe to be a milkemaid as she was, saieng that hir case was better, and life more merrier than was hirs in that state as she was.’9 She returned to the evocative milkmaid once she was Queen. Under increasing pressure to marry in 1576, she vowed: ‘If I were a milkmaid with a pail on mine arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake that single state to match myself with the greatest monarch.’10 Vacillating over the fate of her seditious cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots in 1586, Elizabeth lamented that ‘if it had pleased God to have made us both milkmaids with pails on our arms,’ she could not consent to her execution.11
Elizabeth may have longed, impractically, for escape into an idyllic pastoral life. But Rosalind really lived it, crossing the gender border as she chose to become shepherd Ganymede in her flight to Arden. Both women had bitter experience of their worlds of realpolitik. Like Elizabeth under her sister Mary Tudor, Rosalind was accused of treason by a near relative, her uncle, Duke Frederick. Yet his mistrust ‘cannot make me a traitor,’ she answers levelly. The memory of the old charge of treason against her was still vivid in Elizabeth’s mind when on 12 November 1586 she confronted a parliamentary delegation at Richmond, begging her to implement the sentence of execution on Mary, Queen of Scots, which she had signed but couldn’t bring herself to act on.
I have had good experience and trial of this world: I know what it is to be a subject, what to be a sovereign; what to have good neighbors, and sometime meet evil willers. I have found treason in trust, seen great benefits little regarded, and instead of gratefulness, courses of purpose to cross.12
If Elizabeth knew how it felt to be accused of treason, she also had abundant reason to fear treachery. Her own Tudor dynasty had been established on an arguable act of treason by her grandfather, King Henry VII. Fear of plots and uprisings tormented his granddaughter Elizabeth, as they did Rosalind’s uncle, Duke Frederick, who had deposed his elder brother, Duke Senior. Throughout her reign Elizabeth dreaded a violent coup. In March 1585 she told Parliament, ‘I know no creature that breatheth whose life standeth hourly in more peril’ than her own.13 Major conspiracies against her included the Ridolfi Plot in 1571, the Throckmorton Plot in 1582, and the Catholic inspired Babington Plot of 1586. A year later, Mary, Queen of Scots was finally executed.
Rosalind and Elizabeth were both shaped by and enmeshed in politics. But the Queen’s public persona was different from Rosalind’s. Since Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, England had suffered no foreign husband, no civil wars, and no heavy taxes – in spite of an extensive maritime defence policy – but instead had enjoyed a pragmatic religious settlement, effective government and the expansionist Age of Discovery. Elizabeth was the symbol of all this, and at its height her popularity ensured she was ‘received everywhere with great acclamations’ on state progresses through the country, as noted de Silva, the Spanish Ambassador.14 In the view of John Foxe, author of the widely disseminated and much read Acts and Monuments, popularly known as Foxes Book of Martyrs, Elizabeth was
this so princely a lady and puissant princess...who, a virgin, so mildy ruleth men, governeth her subjects, keepeth all things in order, quieteth foreign nations, recovereth towns, enlargeth her kingdom, nourisheth and concileth amity, uniteth hearts and love with foreign enemies, helpeth neighbors, reformeth religion, quencheth prosecution, redresseth the dross, (and) frameth things out of joint.15
But the success of the whole country depended on Elizabeth’s health and her life. 1599, the year of As You Like It, was a key year for England. Elizabeth was ageing but still powerful – and a power dresser. The drama of who was going to succeed her was forever being enacted in secret. In As You Like It, illegal Duke Frederick is vulnerable, unpredictable, and as Le Beau says, ‘humorous.’ By 1599, Elizabeth, too, was ‘humorous,’ volatile, unwilling to name a successor, ever conscious that not so long ago her Tudor dynasty had been built on appropriated power. There were more threats from Spain of a second Armada, uprisings in Ireland, and an aborted attempt to dethrone her by the Earl of Essex.
So the healing political denouement of As You Like It in which Duke Frederick converts to a life of good works, and the benign rule of Duke Senior is re-established under the joint direction of his daughter Rosalind with her husband Orlando, was equally to be wished by Elizabeth. She could have watched Rosalind achieve public resolution during Act 5 of a royal command performance, perhaps at the Palace of Richmond. Towards the end of As You Like It, Rosalind vows, ‘I have promised to make all this matter even.’ On English victory over the first Spanish Armada in 1588, Elizabeth told the troops at Tilbury: ‘I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your virtue in the field.’16
Elizabeth was an eloquent speechmaker, a talent probably fostered by her tutor Roger Ascham who was public orator at Cambridge. Elizabeth not only had a natural capacity for unforgettable phrasemaking in her English speeches, she also had amazing facility for learning a whole range of foreign languages, what Ascham called ‘her perfect readiness’ in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian and Flemish. Only upper-class women such as fictitious Rosalind or real-life Margaret Roper, daughter of Sir Thomas More, or Mary, Queen of Scots, or Lady Jane Grey, or poet Mary Sidney had access to an education like Elizabeth’s, taught by the finest of scholars. Ascham had two main teaching principles: kindness, and the practice of double translation which produced remarkable results, later expounded in his ground-breaking book, The Scholemaster.17 Elizabeth was so avid for learning that Ascham considered she read more Greek in a day than a priest read Latin in a whole week. Like Elizabeth, Rosalind is at ease both in her second language, courtly French in which she bids Jaques, ‘Farewell, Monsieur Traveller,’ and in the classics. When she tells Orlando that no man has ever died for love, a spate of classical allusions pours from her tongue, to Troilus, Leander, Hero of Sestos, and the straits of Hellespont. Orlando’s comparisons of Rosalind to Helen, Atalanta and Lucretia overwhelm her because she has the classics at her fingertips. Some modern productions have shown her as a bookworm. But she’s not a blue stocking, she has an inspirational mind that races ahead at full speed.
From the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth’s councillors were in awe of her intelligence, that goodly wit; that goodly knowledge and that great and special grace of understanding and judgment’, as Lord William Paget commented to William Cecil, her Secretary of State, in February 1559 a bare month after her coronation.18 Although women, like Shakespeare’s Portia, were debarred from practising law, Elizabeth made the rules and was a legislator, in alliance with her parliament. Rosalind’s verbal wit and effervescing intelligence are implicit homage to Elizabeth’s subtle and powerful intellect whose ‘mind was ofttime like the gentle air that cometh from the westerly point in a summer’s morn; ‘twas sweet and refreshing to all around her. Her speech did win all affections.’19 Like Elizabeth, one of Rosalind’s main characteristics is her flamboyance with language, her verbal gymnastics. As she tells Jaques, ‘I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.’20 Juliet Stevenson who played Rosalind in 1985 for the RSC says, ‘Rosalind has the most glorious wit – her mind moves like mercury – her mind dances, dances. And when you have her language, her words passing through you physically, you have a sense of having to be on tip-top form to keep up with her, to keep up with the vivacity and the nimbleness of her utterance and her thought patterns.’21
In the post-Armada world of Tudor England, Gloriana was the framework over-arching everyone’s life. Elizabeth dominated the court as Rosalind dominates the Forest of Arden. Both were women with agency, witty, verbal and brilliantly clever. Like Rosalind in affairs of the heart, the Queen controlled affairs of state by implying she contained both genders. Both Rosalind and the monarch were gender-benders. ‘I know something of a woman in a man’s profession, yes, by God, I do know about that,’ was the update Tom Stoppard gave Gloriana played by Judi Dench in the film Shakespeare in Love.22 In her dashing doublet and hose, Rosalind’s Ganymede, re-imagined by Gwyneth Paltrow as boy actor Thomas Kent, presented a male façade, but within beat her distinctly feminine heart. With her axe on thigh and spear in hand Rosalind is determined to hide her natural fear and present a swashing and a martial outside.’23
She’s not quite so swashing and martial once she enters Arden but her Ganymede is imperious and charismatic. S/he cuts a beguiling figure, ambiguous and attractive to both sexes, outwardly male but female within. In her exaggerated farthingales encrusted with jewels and pearls, Elizabeth was Rosalind’s reverse image: all female on the exterior, but inside powered, famously, by the heart and stomach of a king. In different ways, both Elizabeth and Rosalind exploited to the full their potential for dramatic androgyny. Roger Ascham reckoned Elizabeth’s mind had no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man.’
During her spellbinding appearance before the troops at Tilbury in August 1588, in the triumph of English victory over the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth, ‘being a Virgin of manly Courage,’ paraded up and down, ‘sometimes like a woman, sometimes with the countenance and pace of a soldier,’ wrote William Camden, her first biographer.24 Shakespeare had put a charismatic female military leader, Joan of Arc, on stage in Henry VI, part 1. ‘Chaste and immaculate in very thought’, Joan la Pucelle seemed like Elizabeth to derive her mysterious strength from the status of virginity itself. Elizabeth knew exactly how to make her virgin body personal express the national body politic. In her wide skirts, bareheaded but encased in a steel corselet from neck to waist, she rode a prancing white horse, while a page carried her plumed helmet on a cushion beside her.25 She could have been invoking the mythological figure of the goddess Athene, one of Rosalind’s own ancestors, who presided over war but preferred peace, and like Elizabeth with her shining helmet, seemed to contain both genders. Elizabeth had an unerring sense of occasion. For the same reasons that American Presidents take the oath of office outside the Capitol, Elizabeth understood the importance of appearing on stage in the open air, as well as at court.
My loving people...I have so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. Wherefore I am come among you at this time but for my recreation and pleasure, being 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 for my people mine honor and my blood even in the dust.26
Without modern microphones, her stirring words would have carried only to the few soldiers standing around her, but like Rosalind in her theatre, Elizabeth was a natural and consummate actor who could maximise the power of performance. The battle at sea was effectively over but Elizabeth knew exactly how to exploit the victory delivered by Francis Drake, Lord Howard of Effingham, and her navy. Shakespeare chose to allude to Elizabeth’s great performance at Tilbury in Henry V’s rousing speech before the Battle of Agincourt, written like As You Like It in 1599.
This day is called the Feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day, and live old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.27
Shakespeare’s Henry V could identify with his troops and get his troops to identify with him, just as Elizabeth could. But she did it by embracing both genders.
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 – and take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm. To the which rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will venter my royal blood.28
Elizabeth’s people always remained conscious of her political inheritance from a King of England, her father Henry VIII. Not only her startling white skinned, red-haired appearance but also her decisive powers of governance proclaimed her paternity. ‘Although I may not be a lion, I am a lion’s cub, and inherit many of his qualities,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She gives her orders and has her own way as absolutely as her father did,’ ambassador Feria told Philip of Spain.29 As she aged, she became ever more adept at inhabiting both genders. She seamlessly metamorphosed from queen to king in her famous valedictory speech to parliament of 1601, known as the Golden Speech:
To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself, I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a king or royal authority of a queen as delighted that God had made me His instrument to maintain His truth and glory, and to defend this kingdom from dishonor, damage, tyranny, and oppression.30
She might have been speaking her own obituary in her resonant use of the vernacular, permanently consolidating English as the language of monarchs and of the people. After her death, her principal Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, son of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, who had advised her during most of her reign, said ‘she was more than a man, and in troth, sometimes less than a woman.’31 It was Elizabeth’s genius for androgyny that made her Gloriana. And it’s Rosalind’s virtuoso performance of androgyny that makes Ganymede independent and fast-talking as s/he directs affairs in Arden. Both Rosalind and Elizabeth were more than male – and more than female, too. Sure-footedly they extended gender in a time when it was highly dangerous to do so.
Both Rosalind and Elizabeth were advance-guard feminists although the word was unknown to Elizabeth, Rosalind, or indeed Shakespeare. It didn’t enter the language until 1895 with the Suffragettes. And yet all three intuited a subtle change in the status quo, embodied in the successful reign of Queen Elizabeth herself, which would take centuries to be enacted, even partially, for women. The great actress, Ellen Terry, who never played Rosalind, though she said in 1894 she’d longed for centuries to make the attempt,’ instead inhabited Rosalind continuously in her impassioned lectures about Shakespeare’s women which she gave round the world between 1911-1921.32 ‘Wonderful women! Have you ever thought how much we all, and women especially, owe to Shakespeare for his vindication of women in these fearless, high-spirited, resolute and intelligent heroines? Don’t believe the antifeminists if they tell you, as I was once told, that Shakespeare had to endow his women with virile qualities because in his theatre they were always impersonated by men! This may account for the frequency with which they masquerade as boys, but I am convinced that it had little influence on Shakespeare’s studies of women. They owe far more to the liberal ideas about the sex which were fermenting in Shakespeare’s age. The assumption that “the women’s movement” is of very recent date – something peculiarly modern – is not warranted by history. There is evidence of its existence in the fifteenth century. Then as now it excited opposition and ridicule, but still it moved!’33
In support of her case for early feminism, Terry cited the Renaissance humanist scholar Erasmus who thought, ‘men and women have different functions, but their education and their virtues ought to be equal.’34 Shakespeare’s earlier comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost played at court for Elizabeth at Christmas 1597.35 The linguistic agility of its heroine Rosaline, an initial draft for Rosalind – and indeed the two names are sometimes interchanged in the First Folio text of As You Like It- together with Rosaline’s refusal to marry would have resonated with the audience and its most attentive listener.
Nubile virgins like Rosalind and Rosaline who were aristocratic but not royal, but claimed the right to make their own decisions, were rare in the sixteenth century. The Virgin Queen wore the coronation ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, and told a parliamentary delegation sent to sue for her early marriage, ‘I am already bound unto an husband, which is the kingdom of England, and that may suffice you.’36 This was her position from the beginning of her reign, one that she continued to reaffirm. ‘And in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a rime, lived and died a virgin.’37 Shakespeare evoked the amorous though aloof magic of royal virginity in his Fairy King’s moonlit vision of Elizabeth in the persona of ‘the imperial votaress’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
| Oberon | That very time I saw (but thou couldst not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by the west, And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial votaress passed on, In maiden meditation, fancy-free.38 |
By dexterous sleight of hand, Elizabeth conflated two contradictory messages. She was both a vestal Virgin and a Holy Mother. ‘And so I assure you all that though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all,’ she told parliament.39 The sculpted shape of her farthingale with its narrow maiden waist and exaggerated wide hips was a visual image of her double message: virginity and fertility. Elizabeth who had hardly known her own mother was determined to prove the ideal parent to her people.
Elizabeth never gave birth to a child of her body but she contrived to seem pregnant with the symbolic potential of both virginity and maternity. For the greater part of her reign she enjoyed and encouraged a parade of suitors, her Orlandos, both domestic and foreign. Her most sustained flirtations were with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester whom she called her little dog, and during her late forties with the Duke of Alençon of the French House of Valois, whom she called her ‘frog.’ He wasn’t her usual debonair type but she savoured the dalliance and conversation. Their on-off game of courtship probably popularised the folksong we still know today as ‘A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go.’ She would never marry any of the foreign contenders. More dangerous was the procession of home-grown lovers, most conspicuously the Earl of Leicester, and later Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. She basked in flattery and the diplomatic gamesmanship of marriage proposals, as ambassador de Silva reported to his Spanish King. ‘I do not think anything is more enjoyable to this Queen than treating of marriage, though she herself assures me that nothing annoys her more. She is vain and would like all the world to be running after her, but it will probably end by her remaining as she is, unless she marries Lord Robert who is still doing his best to win her.’40
Unlike Rosalind who eagerly looks forward to sex, to putting a man in her belly, as Celia lewdly jokes, Elizabeth hungered only for declarations of love, amorous conversation, and devotion unto death but not the sexual connection itself. ‘Apter to raise flames than to quench them,’ she desired men to desire her – but not to satisfy them.41 Her rages were legendary and terrifying if any of her courtiers or ladies announced their intentions to marry. Expert at the dialogue of love, she prized tall, handsome, ardent men, fishing for men’s souls as Sir Christopher Hatton said, ‘with so sweet a bait, no man could escape her net-work.’42 Yet after his long pursuit, the Earl of Leicester, her exact contemporary, finally accepted, ‘I have known her since she was eight years old, better than any man in the world. From that time she has invariably declared she would remain unmarried.’43 Elizabeth knew what sex had led to for her seductive and beautiful mother, Anne Boleyn. Her life had ended on the scaffold when her daughter was less than three. In quick succession, Elizabeth’s stepmothers had died violently or too young. From her earliest years, insomniac and afraid of the dark, the association of sex with death was clear. In maturity she always wore a curious locket ring containing two miniature portraits, one of Anne Boleyn, and one of herself, clasped together as they barely were in life. The ring never left her hand after it was presented to her in 1575, until it was removed on her death, and taken as proof to her heir, James VI of Scotland.44 She had always retained Anne Boleyn’s motto, semper eadem, as her own.45
Elizabeth’s lifelong passion for words, scholarship, languages, speechmaking, music and the arts were part of her survival strategies, and reflected her fear of abandonment from her earliest years. The safe place for courtship for Elizabeth and Rosalind was the man’s role, as if they’d appropriated the male position in dances like the galliard, the lavolta or the gavotte. Wooing as a man was not only piquant and coquettish, it was also empowering and controlling. Rosalind usurps the conventional male role in her courtship of Orlando. She gives him a necklace after she’s met him for two minutes at the wrestling match. She accosts him in the forest and from then on she conducts the love match on her terms. Because of her royal position, and her temperament, Elizabeth also occupied the male role in all potential marriage negotiations. Though both women were addicted to the rituals of courtship, there were vastly different outcomes for each. Elizabeth’s flirtations with dozens of lovers led to her lifelong virginity. Rosalind’s flirtation with just one lover leads to a marriage we feel has every hope of happiness.
Love and how to love is the central axis of Rosalind’s play as it was of Elizabeth’s political and private life. Like Rosalind whose capacity for love is as deep as the unknown bottom of the Bay of Portugal, Elizabeth had heart on an epic scale. The Queen knew the power of governing not only by authority but through love, ‘and her subjects did try to show all love to her commands; for she would say her state did require her to command what she knew her people would willingly do from their own love to her.’46 She unerringly kept faith with what she saw as the sacrament of her marriage contract with her people, and she fostered their mutual love unto death. ‘After such sort do I keep the goodwill of all my husbands, my good people; for if they did not rest assured of some special love towards them, they would not readily yield me such good obedience.’47 When he was a child, the future Bishop Goodman called out to the Queen as she processed past, ‘God save your Majesty,’ and Elizabeth replied, ‘you may well have a greater prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.’48 Until the end of her reign she continued to reiterate her interactive love affair with her people.
I do assure you there is no prince that loveth his subjects better, or whose love can countetvail our love. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel – I mean your loves. For I do more esteem it than any treasure or riches, for that we know how to prize. But love and thanks I count [ilunvaluable, and though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.
...And though you have had and may have many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had or shall have any that will be more careful and loving.49
Elizabeth knew how to hold her audience in an age when the play was the popular art form of its day. ‘Princes, you know, stand upon stages, so that their actions are viewed and beheld of all men.’50 Her political skills were sharpened by the drama of live performance. She needed all these skills when at almost sixty-eight, she became entranced by a new, handsome young favourite, the Earl of Essex. He was also lethally dangerous. She dispatched him to the wars in Ireland but he returned unannounced to London filled with a scheme to un-queen Elizabeth, as her distant ancestor, Henry Bolingbroke, had un-kinged Richard II. Shakespeare’s play about deposing a legal monarch could not have been more subversive during the build-up to Essex’s planned rebellion in February 1601, when the Earl’s cohorts recklessly organised a private performance of Richard II. Essex saw himself trailing clouds of glory as Bolingbroke re-born. But Elizabeth’s secret service foiled the plot, the rebels were arrested and Essex beheaded. Shakespeare was far too worldly wise and emotionally intelligent in his even-handed portrayals of both Richard and Bolingbroke to invite accusations of offending. The playhouse could be a platform for contemporary events but also their safety valve.
The pastoral world of the Forest of Arden is likewise a political critique of Duke Frederick’s regime. In the forest Duke Senior rules his exiled court in ‘so quiet and so sweet a style’ as he’d previously applied to his city leadership. Mobbs Gqirana, one of Nelson Mandela’s coprisoners of conscience in South Africa during the 1970s, chose to sign his name against this speech in the Robben Island Shakespeare that circulated secretly among the detainees.51
| Duke Senior | Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.52 |
The restoration of his system of honourable governance through peaceful transfer of power to Rosalind and Orlando is a quiet accolade to Elizabeth the Peacemaker. Even her reluctance to name a successor effected a diplomatic handover to James VI of Scotland and 1st of England in 1603. In the aftermath of the abortive Essex coup, Elizabeth, always sensitive to the theatrical moment, crafted her Golden Speech of 30 November 1601 that would reverberate down the centuries.
Mr. Speaker, we have heard your declaration and perceive your care of our estate... I do assure you there is no prince that loveth his subjects better, or whose love can countervail our love.
What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again... Therefore render unto them from me, I beseech you, Mr. Speaker, such thanks as you imagine my heart yieldeth but my tongue cannot express.
Mr Speaker, I would wish you and the rest to stand up, for I shall yet trouble you with longer speech.
I know the title of a king is a glorious title, but assure yourself that the shining glory of princely authority hath not so dazzled the eyes of our understanding but that we well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great Judge...
There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself.53
Elizabeth’s androgynous power only increased with her advancing years when her choice of the bravura single life seemed definitive, finally even to court observers. Her androgyny was no longer one of the most intriguing facets of her sexual appeal but part of the ageing process itself. Defiance of time became one of the key factors in the construction of Gloriana. Later portraits of Elizabeth show her fixed like a gorgeous butterfly on a pin, sumptuous and flat against the background. In a Faustian pact to conquer time, her wrinkled face was immobilized under layers of caustic makeup, compounded with noxious lead and vinegar. Artists froze her into a changeless icon, creating an image emblematic of the state of England herself. Elizabeth showed that androgyny is not only about cool youth. She maintained its double gendered authority into old age. Sally Potter made an inspired choice when she cast the elderly Quentin Crisp to play Elizabeth across gender in her 1992 film, Orlando. Crisp looked authentically like portraits of the aged Elizabeth, while Tilda Swinton as the male Orlando, with her elegant physique, startling auburn hair and porcelain complexion, eerily reanimated the young Elizabeth. I wonder whether the boy actor who first played Rosalind also had red hair and translucent skin? Young or old, mortal Elizabeth lives on in the cultural and historical imagination. Rosalind lives on too, though she will never fade, never wither, never age.
Records suggest that the Queen was present at an early performance of As You Like It on Shrove Tuesday, 20 February 1599, at Richmond Palace. If so, a dazzling, boyish Rosalind may have embodied Shakespeare’s tacit tribute to the ageing Elizabeth.54 As principal playwright and partner in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, Shakespeare had the opportunity to observe Elizabeth close up. His actors presented plays at royal command performances, often transfers from the public playhouses, presented fashionably late at night. The age difference gave Shakespeare, a generation younger, a special perspective on the older woman who was his monarch. Towards the end of his life, long after As You Like It, he could look back on her reign in a history play called Henry VIII, probably co-written with John Fletcher. Elizabeth had been dead for a decade. But the writers spirited the audience back to 1533, to the day of her christening, performed by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Through the magic of theatre the playwrights transcended the years and renewed Elizabeth’s young promise. ‘This royal infant’ shall be ‘A pattern to all princes,’ prophesies the actor with benefit of hindsight, as he intones with clear biblical imagery, the divinity of England’s ‘maiden phoenix’.
| Cranmer | This royal infant (heaven still move about her) Though in her cradle, yet now promises Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings... She shall be lov’d and fear’d: her own shall bless her; Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn, ...In her days every man shall eat in safety Under his own vine what he plants, and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours. God shall be truly known, and those about her From her shall read the perfect ways of honour... She shall be, to the happiness of England, An aged princess...yet a virgin; A most unspotted lily shall she pass To th’ground, and all the world shall mourn her.55 |
Religious ceremonies like christenings and funerals punctuated key moments in the monarch’s public life as they did in the private lives of Elizabeth’s subjects. Four marriages mark the end of As You Like It. Yet one betrothal at its centre, both playful and profound, is more thrilling than any of these. On the face of things, it seems to be uniting two men, Ganymede and Orlando. But the audience knows what Orlando doesn’t. Ganymede is his true love Rosalind. Their pre-wedding in the forest uses almost exactly the same words as the marriage service in the English Book of Common Prayer authorised by the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity of 1559.56 The play wedding is the real thing. In 1568 at the instigation of Elizabeth, and under the aegis of the recently established Church of England, the Bishops’ Bible was published as the state alternative to the Calvinist Genevan Bible of 1560, even though both were in English. Its title page showed the Queen enthroned, being crowned by Justice and Mercy, together with Prudence and Fortitude. These were exactly the religious and imperial virtues associated with the Queen, ‘England’s Astraea, Albion’s shining sun!’57 Astraea was the classical virgin goddess of justice and purity consistently linked with Elizabeth. She had been determined to make toleration work, if only for Christians. Then in May 1570 came her excommunication by Pope Pius V, heralding in response much stricter anti-Catholic measures in England. But Elizabeth maintained, ‘There is one faith and one Jesus Christ. The rest is a dispute about trifles.’58
One of Elizabeth’s favourite biblical images for herself as guardian of her people was as the metaphorical and actual shepherd of her flock. ‘For, what a family is without a steward, a ship without a pilot, a flock without a shepherd, a body without a head, the same, I think, is a kingdom without the health and safety of a good monarch.’59 She wouldn’t have missed the parallel when Rosalind bounds across borders to play the role of a shepherd boy. During the Protestant religious settlement, Elizabeth was not only shepherd to her people but she also became the Virgin Queen implicitly replacing the Virgin Mary of Catholicism. Religious references were part of Elizabethan everyday life as they were embedded in the spiritual landscape of As You Like It.
| Duke Senior | True is it that we have seen better days, And have with holy bell been knolled to church, And sat at good men’s feasts, and wiped our eyes Of drops that sacred pity hath engendered; And therefore sit you down in gentleness And take upon command what help we have That to your wanting may be ministered.60 |
Church bells and liturgical music accompanied religion. Music both secular and divine was an intrinsic part of Elizabeth’s life. In 1559 the Venetian Ambassador recorded, ‘the Queen’s daily amusements are musical performances and other entertainments and she takes marvellous pleasure in seeing people dance...Last evening at the Court...at the dance the Queen performed her part, the Duke of Norfolk being her partner, in superb array.’61
As You Like It is the most musical of Shakespeare’s plays with its five songs, or six to include Hymen’s chant, ‘Wedding is great Juno’s crown.’ Hymen’s deus ex machina appearance to solemnize the four weddings at the end of As You Like It is a masque-like event. Elizabeth relished dancing, music, theatre and masques. The play’s lyrical interludes could be a direct tribute to the Queen’s lifelong love of music. She played the virginals, the lute, and its recently invented cousin, the orpharion. William Byrd, who was to English music what Shakespeare was to drama, composed the haunting six-voice sacred anthem based on the words of Psalm 21, substituting Elizabeth for King David.
O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen to rejoice in thy strength: give her her heart’s desire, and deny not the request of her lips; but prevent her with thine everlasting blessing, and give her a long life, even forever and ever. Amen.62
Byrd was a Catholic who nevertheless continued to write music for the Elizabethan Protestant liturgy that retained some polyphony in church music throughout the land. Elizabeth called for music on her deathbed in March 1603, just a month after she watched the final performance of her life presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company.
Both Elizabeth and Shakespeare were outsiders who could cross social borders: Shakespeare the commoner who could put kings on stage; Elizabeth the Queen who empathised with milkmaids, and had been sidelined by her father and imprisoned by her sister. Like Rosalind, Elizabeth had virtual sisters in other plays by Shakespeare. Only two were of the blood royal, steadfast Imogen, Princess of Britain, and Cleopatra, the legendary Empress of Egypt whose Shakespearean tragedy Elizabeth did not live to see performed. Shakespeare put Cleopatra at the head of her troops as Elizabeth had put herself at Tilbury.
| Cleopatra | A charge we bear i’ the war, |
| And as the president of my kingdom will Appear there for a man.63 |
But even Cleopatra was not as resonant and perfect a tribute to Elizabeth as Rosalind, the rosa linda or beautiful Rose, both the Queen’s own Tudor emblem and the national flower of England. At the centre of a triumphal 1590s engraving sits Elizabeth enthroned, within a gorgeous profusion of heraldic roses and eglantine, clearly entitled ROSA ELECTA.64
Elizabeth I Rosa Electa
by William Rogers