The baffled Hamlet, holding two miniatures before his mother, demanding to know how she could have stooped to Claudius, expresses a whole generation’s resentment about the vagaries of queenly judgment. In Margaret Atwood’s “Gertrude Talks Back,” the unrepentant Queen of Denmark confronts her miniature-wielding son, summarily dismissing his claims about his father’s superiority to Claudius. Gertrude tells Hamlet that every time she wanted to “warm up” her “aging bones,” Old Hamlet would react as if she had “suggested murder.” The queen prefers Claudius, whose more generous approach to aging, female sexuality, and the pleasures of the flesh allows her to stop “tiptoeing around.”1 With characteristic insight, Atwood identifies the idea that women might have different criteria for determining masculine excellence as a significant source of Hamlet’s trouble. Gertrude had eyes and she chose Claudius.
The works discussed in this book all concern themselves with women like Gertrude, who elect unorthodox men to high places, including their beds and their thrones. When Puck finds his “mistress with a monster is in love” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.6), he gives comic expression to pervasive reservations about this scenario, shared by the common people who gossiped about Leicester’s sexual proclivities, the exiled courtiers who complained about them, and the three generations of playwrights who restaged them. And yet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra show that the dream of election by a powerful woman could also be enthralling, a “most rare vision” to which theatrical audiences succumbed time and again (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.2.204–5).
Shakespeare kept offering new and improved versions of the age-in-love figure associated with that dream, attesting to its enduring popularity and commercial viability. Only when women are in power does their perspective on masculine excellence become such a source of widespread hope, anxiety, and fascination. The possibility that feminine ideas regarding masculine merit might alter the basis of society took root in the Elizabethan imagination, I have argued, because of Elizabeth I’s alleged preference for “subtile, fine, and fox-like” men like Claudius, who defied patriarchal norms and who enjoyed a bit of theatrical sport while doing so.2 On the one hand, Elizabeth’s less favored subjects felt with Hamlet that her favorites usurped proper men, without having “merited . . . to be so highly favored of [her Majes]tie.”3 On the other hand, male subjects hoped that they, too, would have their deserts graced one day, as Shakespeare did.
After Antony and Cleopatra purged the age-in-love trope of its negative associations, the dream of election by a powerful woman continued to haunt English culture (as indeed did the ghost of the woman who had inspired that dream).4 Not all newer versions embrace the transformational possibilities glimpsed in Antony’s relation to Cleopatra, but some do. Webster’s Duchess “stains time past, lights time to come” when she chooses the steward Antonio purely for what she takes to be his merits.5 And in Cymbeline, Imogen surrounds herself with tapestries celebrating “Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, / And Cydnus swell’d above the banks” (2.4.70–71). Emulating this example, she chooses Posthumous against her father’s wishes, lighting the time to come in her own way. When a choric gentleman approves Imogen’s choice of a husband, arguing that “By her election may be truly read / What kind of man” Posthumous is (1.1.53–54), he shows himself far more tolerant of “men of this kind” than Bacon was.6 Like Imogen, women from Margaret Cavendish to Willa Cather to Janet Adelman have loved Antony and Cleopatra for keeping alive alternative ways of thinking about men and women. One “would think that [Shakespeare] had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” Cavendish wrote with wonder, “for who could Describe Cleopatra Better than he hath done?”7 It helped that Shakespeare had known a “wonderful piece of work” (1.2.154–55), who was a cause of change and inspiration to him throughout her long reign.
One measure of how little attitudes toward female rule have progressed over the last four hundred years is the account given by some biographers of Elizabeth’s elder favorites, which hews closer to Elizabethan anticourt polemics than to Shakespeare’s late plays. For example, John Guy, Elizabeth’s most recent biographer, proposes that “dashing” men were the queen’s “main weakness,” and that “these could, and sometimes did, cloud her judgment.” When Guy describes the capable Sir Christopher Hatton as “an unctuous flatterer” for declaring “himself to be Elizabeth’s ‘everlasting bondman,’ seemingly without a hint of hypocrisy,” he sounds nearly as outraged as a Vindice or a Hamlet.8 Notably, what Guy finds intolerable is not the possibility that Hatton was a hypocrite, but the possibility that he was not. Hatton loved the queen he served and believed in her superiority. This apparently is harder for Guy to accept than it was for Shakespeare, who embraced alternative ideals of masculinity in Antony and Cleopatra. To some extent, antimonarchical biases explain the contempt with which scholars often treat Hatton and Leicester, and the correspondent enthusiasm they feel for the Earl of Essex, who showed this “ageing spinster” a thing or two about masculine indomitability.9 If the Elizabethan period teaches us anything, however, it is that progressive sentiments expressed in relation to female leaders can mask deeply misogynistic impulses. Years ago, Peter Erickson warned against the elevation of Essex as a “proto-democratic” figure because his “resistance to Elizabeth has a strong masculinist and misogynist aura that should not recommend it as a model and inspiration for our own ideal of subversion.”10 And Carole Levin denounced attacks on Hatton and Leicester as attacks on Elizabeth’s judgment.11 Yet we continue to privilege Essex’s career over those of his elders when trying to understand how Elizabethan men felt about their queen.
Although the queen’s elder favorites were uniquely memorable to their contemporaries, we have all but forgotten them. This is evident in the lack of political value that historicist readings of Shakespeare assign to a Claudius or an Antony. I have focused in this book on contemporary perceptions of the elder favorites, many of which were unflattering. I would like to conclude by remembering the debt we owe to Leicester, who patronized, employed, and inspired artists like Kempe, Burbage, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. English Renaissance culture was made immensely richer by men of his kind, in ways hard either to describe or to overestimate. According to Erickson, “Instead of making more of Essex’s, or Shakespeare’s, radical potential, we must . . . look elsewhere to more contemporary literature for possible images of subversion.”12 I can understand this impulse, but I think it misguided. This book started as an investigation of dated material but it ended up feeling strangely timely. The 2016 American election showed our democracy to be stubbornly hostile to female politicians, for all too familiar reasons. I cannot be the only student of Elizabeth’s reign who found the vitriolic attacks on Secretary Clinton’s judgment uncannily reminiscent of those on Elizabeth I’s. We might do worse than turn to the Elizabethan past for ideas on how to overcome this present hostility and make our future more hospitable to female rule.