Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
10 - Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
Summary
The cult of Elizabeth has traditionally been seen as a propaganda triumph for Tudor despotism, flourishing paradoxically in the final decade of her reign when the queen's difficulties and decline had to be concealed beneath what Roy Strong calls ‘the mask of youth’. In his influential study of her cult and the artwork and pageantry that it inspired, Strong argues that ‘the mask of youth’ worked as long as her courtiers ‘could yet join in paeans to the Divine One who alone seemed capable of holding together the world they knew’. The fair complexion and the blush of youth were, of course, a façade sustained by make-up and make-believe, but still the tributes continued to her virtue and her beauty. Midway through her reign, in the ‘Aprill’ eclogue of The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), Edmund Spenser had blended the tropes of Petrarchan compliment with the heraldic devices of the Tudor dynasty in his portrait of Elizabeth:
Tell me, have ye seene her angelick face.
Like Phoebe fayre?
Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace
Can you well compare?
The Redde rose medled with the White yfere,
In either cheeke depeincten lively chere.
Twenty years later those roses still flourished in both the paintings and poetry of her last decade. Sir John Davies dedicates his most ambitious work, Nosce Teipsum (1599) to Elizabeth:
Faire Soule, since to the fairest bodie knit,
You give such lively life, such quickning power,
Such sweete, celestiall influence to it,
As keepes it still in youths immortall flower.
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- The Reign of Elizabeth ICourt and Culture in the Last Decade, pp. 212 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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