Helen Hackett on Elizabeth I

Tell me about your first choice, Elizabeth I: The Exhibition Catalogue, edited by David Starkey and Susan Doran.

I chose this one because it is a catalogue of an excellent exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in 2003. That was one of a whole lot of events and publications for the 400-year anniversary of Elizabeth’s death in 1603. This volume is particularly interesting because it is a really rich, full, broad catalogue where they tried to present some unusual things that people haven’t seen before, because, of course, Elizabeth I is so familiar to us. 

There were lots of really unusual things like a locket ring that belonged to Elizabeth which contains two pictures. It has a jewel on the front that opens up and you see one picture of Elizabeth in profile and another which appears to be her mother Anne Boleyn. And that’s very interesting because Elizabeth never publicly mentioned or acknowledged her mother, for obvious reasons because she had been beheaded for adultery and incest by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII. The ring suggests that in private she did like to maintain a memory of her mother. 

There were also portraits of Elizabeth in the exhibition that hadn’t been widely seen before, that might have hung in civic buildings halls and even people’s homes. And there were coins, because of course Elizabeth’s subjects would have mainly seen her portrait on coins. There were items from wrecks of Armada ships, such as a wonderful toothpick in the shape of a dolphin; so it gave us a much fuller, richer sense of Elizabethan England than people had had before. It wasn’t just about Elizabeth and her court but there was a great sense of the domestic life of Elizabethan England as well.

Your next book is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

I wanted to include an example of literature from Elizabeth’s reign because she inspired a fantastic richness and breadth of poetry, with lots of writers competing with each other to praise her in ever more elaborate ways. Probably the most powerful example of that is Spenser’s Faerie Queene which is a huge epic romance published in two parts in the 1590s. 

It shows Elizabeth in lots of different guises. So we have her as Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Una and lots of other figures. I think that suggests, in a way, a problem underlying all this effort to praise Elizabeth, because as a female Queen ruling in her own right she was a very unusual figure. She was almost unprecedented in English history, and particularly as an unmarried Queen without a husband to support her or to give her guidance. 

For Spenser and others that created a difficulty, and the only way they could deal with that was by splitting her up. So we have Gloriana who represents her majesty and her power, then we have Belphoebe who is her beauty and femininity, more like Elizabeth as a private person, and then all these other aspects of her representing her mercy or her piety or truthfulness and so on. 

As a female ruler she was a contradiction in terms, because rulers were expected to have masculine qualities, so how do you represent this anomaly? Spenser said he needed to show her in ‘mirrors more than one’. What you also get as you read on through The Faerie Queene is an increasing sense that the praise is not simple. There is criticism embedded in it as Spenser and others became quite disillusioned with Elizabeth in this late stage in her reign.

Spenser was a militant Protestant, and he and others like him would have liked the Queen to have pursued a much more aggressive foreign policy in support of Protestants abroad, and a much more assertive policy at home of making the Church of England freer of Catholic practices. So there is a sort of disappointment in her. What you get is the idea that all these ideal images are being held up as a kind of perfection for her to aspire to. They are not representing how she is but how she might be, and as the poem goes on you get the idea that this is what she has failed to be. 

There is a fragment of The Faerie Queene which wasn’t published in Spenser’s lifetime. The published book has six volumes and there is a fragment of the seventh book called ‘The Cantos of Mutability’ which is where he is most overtly critical of Elizabeth. It shows her in Ireland as the goddess Diana – the moon goddess. He shows her bathing naked, and a fawn catches sight of her and he laughs at her. This is like laughing at the whole cult of the Virgin Queen, because what makes him laugh is catching sight of her private parts.

It sounds like a good thing it wasn’t published before he died, but how were the other books received?

Well, we know she liked the first three books which were published in 1590, because she awarded Spenser a pension which was very unusual for her. She was known to be pretty abstemious when it came to handing out money to artists and writers. But there doesn’t seem to be any record of what she thought of the final three books. What interests me about Spenser’s book and many others at the time is this idea of two levels: you have the appearance of praise but there is a lot of buried criticism, and to some extent the queen and her regime recognise and allow it, because it is better to have some low-level authorised criticism than to let it bubble up into more overt criticism and dissent.

Your next book is actually by Elizabeth herself – this is some of her translations from the 1590s. 

Yes, I wanted to give an example of some of her own writing because that is where we get closest to feeling that we know her and we get an insight into her own mind and attitude and ideas.