SOURCE: "Thou Idol Ceremony': Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the Rites of the English Monarchy," in Urban Life in the Renaissance, edited by Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman, Associated University Presses, 1989, pp. 240-66.

[In the following essay, McCoy explores the theatrics of royal ceremony and antends that Shakespeare's later history plays undercut the majesty of ceremony and expose its " 'made-up quality' and the void behind its illusions."]

Something happened at the coronation of Elizabeth I, something potentially scandalous that subverted the rite's sacrosanctity and symbolic hierarchy. For centuries, the coronation had been a virtual sacrament as well as a "clerical monopoly" administered by bishops.¹ Traditionally, the highest-ranking primate presided over the solemn oath, the anointment, and the investiture, and the monarch's inaugural subordination to a higher power was symbolized by his literal prostration at various points in the service. The coronation ordo of Richard III and Henry VII prescribes that the king shall lie "groveling afore the high aulter" before the administration of the oath and the unction, and that the king and his queen "w^t a great devocion receive the sacrament" at the subsequent Mass.²

From the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth displayed little reverence toward the clergy or their solemnities. She excluded the most staunchly Catholic primates such as Heath and Bonner from the coronation service; the timely death of Cardinal Pole, archbishop of Canterbury, relieved her of the need to eliminate him as well. She retained the lower-ranking bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe, to crown and anoint her, but she insisted on making Protestant changes in the ensuing Mass. The bishop balked at such changes several weeks before the coronation. According to II Schifanoya, an Italian resident in London, "on Christmas day, the Bishop of Carlisle sang high mass, and her Majesty sent to tell him that he was not to elevate the host; to which the good Bishop replied that thus he had learnt the mass, and that she must pardon him as he could not do otherwise."³ Offended by his intransigence, Elizabeth walked out after the reading of the gospel, replacing Oglethorpe at the next day's service with a more pliant royal chaplain.

How then did Elizabeth conduct herself at her coronation? There are hints in the records of scandalous irregularities, but these accounts are so elliptical and inconsistent that certainty is impossible.⁴ The only official version is an unusually brief and fragmentary paragraph in the archives of the College of Arms that is much less detailed than the herald's earlier accounts of coronation proceedings. Its cryptic summary may reflect an effort to play down if not cover up a troublesome inaugural occasion. There are also two unofficial versions of the event: a letter from a Mantuan resident, 11 Schifanoya, and a report by an anonymous English eyewitness. The herald's account and the letter from II Schifanoya agree on one significant alteration. Each indicates that, while Bishop Oglethorpe crowned and anointed the queen, the Mass was celebrated by the Dean of the Chapel Royal, George Carew, a man who could be trusted to refrain from elevating the host. Faced with the prospect of such a sacrilegious alteration, several Catholic dignitaries boycotted the service, including, apparently, II Schifanoya; his version is filled with errors and gives the impression of being second-hand.

The anonymous eyewitness account raises an even more scandalous possibility. In this version, the bishop celebrated the Mass, presumably elevating the host as he said he would. The report says that "her Grace retorned unto her Closset hearing the Consecration of the Mass." Similarly, the herald's proclamation notes the queen's withdrawal during the Mass "to her traverse," a curtained pew or closet. Finally, a heraldic drawing used for planning the service locates a traverse behind the high altar in St. Edward's chapel, but the instructions indicate that she was to go there only "after the ceremonyes and Service [were] doon." Evidently, the queen withdrew to a traverse midway through the Mass, where she abstained from receiving communion and hid herself from sight for the duration of the service. The Spanish ambassador had refused to attend a church service that omitted the elevation; now he had a new scandal to report to Philip II:

By last post I wrote your Majesty that I had been told that the Queen took the holy sacrament 'sub utraque specie' on the day of the coronation, but was all nonsense. She did not take it at all.⁵

These tantalizing clues and enigmas have inspired considerable speculation, prompting some historians to conclude that Elizabeth impulsively walked out on her own coronation. One even accused her of committing "a striking breach of the ritual of centuries."⁶ Others doubt that such behavior would excite so little remark. H. A. Wilson proposes the less dramatic possibility of a second traverse on the altar to which she withdrew deliberately rather than impulsively.⁷ Tudor monarchs often heard Mass from the privacy of a curtained pew, a practice going back at least to Edward's coronation.⁸ Moreover, a memorandum prepared before the coronation anticipates that "her Ma^tie in her closett may use the Masse without lyfting up above the Host according to the Ancient customs."⁹ Nevertheless, even if Elizabeth's withdrawal to her traverse were decorously deliberate, her treatment of the bishop and her abstention from communion still suggest a lapse from the "great devocion" toward the "sacrament" enjoined by the coronation ordo of her predecessors. Indeed her diminished regard for the entire sacred rite is manifest in her subsequent remarks to the French Ambassador, Fénélon. Legalism rather than piety prompts her to assure him that "she had been crowned and anointed according to the ceremonies of the Catholic church, and by Catholic bishops, without, however, attending the mass."¹⁰ Less flippant than the witticism attributed to Henri IV that Paris was worth a Mass, Elizabeth's remark still reflects the same politique spirit of calculating pragmatism.

The real historical significance of Elizabeth's coronation finally has little to do with the actual events or the rumors surrounding it. Since the records are scanty and contradictory, the facts can never be determined with any certainty; Elizabeth's coronation is one of those historic occasions that recedes from view as one learns more about it. Many religious sectarians on both sides were certainly scandalized: Catholics were shocked by her liturgical alterations and her treatment of Bishop Oglethorpe, while the Geneva exiles were distressed by her employment of a Catholic bishop and the traditional Latin rite.¹¹ Nevertheless, none of these scandals or controversies stirred up much excitement. The most extraordinary features of Elizabeth's coronation were its obscurity and ultimate irrelevance. The event's real historical significance consists in the deliberate subordination of the church service to the civic progress the day before.

The civic progress from the Tower to Westminster was a secular procession, traditionally a mere preliminary to the coronation the next day. The progress included popular entertainments and allegorical pageants sponsored by the city guilds, and, at various points along the way, the monarch and his entourage would stop for an exchange of gifts and formal tributes. The progress allowed the London populace their first glimpse of the new monarch as well as an opportunity for stylized dialogue. The citizens may have written their own speeches that promoted their own agenda, but the queen probably previewed them. Nevertheless, this carefully controlled dialogue could generate feelings of spontaneity and "intimate give-and-take."¹² The civic progress was, in Eric Hobsbawm's suggestive phrase, an "invented tradition."¹³ Its speeches and spectacles were newly and variously devised for each reign, addressing contemporary political concerns. During Elizabeth's progress, the pageant at the Little Conduit depicted the "decayed common weale" of the previous regime and the "florishing commonweale" expected from her benign rule.¹⁴

In comparing these two events, a distinction made by some anthropologists is useful. The civic progress was a ceremony, secular and popular, whose pageants were freshly improvised and performed in London's streets and civic spaces; while still formal and "ceremonious," its procedures were varied, open, and genuinely dramatic. By contrast, the coronation was a ritual, sacred and hierarchical, and its procedures were fixed and mystical; these rites were performed within the confines of Westminster Abbey and they directly invoked God's authority.¹⁵ According to Percy Schramm, the coronation was paradoxically jeopardized by its privileged status and aura of ritual mystery:

only an illustrious and select circle could get near it, and so it became a question whether it would not lose its central position and become a mere episode in a long series of festivities.

The civic progress, on the other hand, was more of a crowd-pleaser because of its greater visibility and malleable theatricality. It included

manifestations of royal power that could be abandoned, changed, or devised anew. After the Middle Ages, the danger threatening the coronation was precisely that it might be degraded into a pageant of this sort.¹⁶

The danger hardly bothered Elizabeth, who made the civic progress the main event, one that completely overshadowed the sacred ritual. She clearly appreciated the political value of secular pageantry and sought to exploit it in several ways. First, she helped to subsidize the civic progress by loaning costumes from the Revels Office, as David Bergeron discovered.¹⁷ Secondly, she deployed her considerable skills as an actress to sustain a dazzling performance in which she won the hearts of her people. A commemorative tract records a variety of inspired gestures, such as clasping the English Bible to her breast, accepting humble "nose gaies" from "poore womens hands," and earnestly attending to all the exhortations addressed to her.¹⁸ Her performance enacted a drama of reciprocity and affection in which the queen

was of the people received merveylous entierly, as appeared by thassemblie, prayers, wishes, welcomminges, cryes, tender woordes, and all other signes, which argue a wonderfull earnest love of most obedient subjects towarde theyr soveraygne. And on thother syde her grace by holding up her handes, and merie countenaunce to such as stoode farre of, and most tender and gentle language to those that stode nigh to her grace, did declare her selfe no lesse thankefullye to receive her people's good wille, than they lovelingly offred it unto her.¹⁹

The essentially theatrical nature of these ceremonies is manifest in the claim that they transformed London into "a stage wherin was shewed the wonderfull spectacle, of a noble hearted princess toward her most loving people, and the peoples excading comfort in beholding so worthy a soveraign."²⁰ Finally, and most significantly, the government capitalized on the success of this performance by authorizing the prompt publication of the tract itself. The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before her Coronacion was an unprecedented publication that made the event accessible to an even larger audience and preserved its glorious memory for all time. Thus, the published record reinforced the primacy of the civic progress by shifting the focus entirely from the sacred rite to the secular pageant.²¹

The visual records are similarly distorted. There is one drawing of the procession to the church and it is clearly intended as a planning device. There are three heraldic drawings of the civic progress.²² One of these is somewhat crudely and hastily drawn and was also probably intended for planning purposes: the queen's litter is simply indicated by a rectangle and the words, "The Queens most excellent majesty." The archbishops of Canterbury and York are included, despite the death of the first and the exclusion of the second, but there are x's and lines drawn beneath them, which probably indicate their absence and the need to replace them with those next in line, the Norroy and Clarenceux Kings of Arms. In the other two drawings, Elizabeth's problems with her bishops are blithely ignored, and the two primates are shown without marks in the proper places. The drawing of the church procession shows the "bishops in their pontificalibus" with miters and crosiers; in the civic progress, they are arrayed in respectably Protestant academic caps and gowns. The later drawings pay more attention to ornament and dress: the queen is portrayed in her litter surrounded by a throng of noble and courtly attendants and the effect is one of sumptuous display. The drawings had a practical, prescriptive purpose since they depicted the order of precedence to be observed when "Procydyng to ye parlement or coronation," but they also serve the same commemorative function as The Quenes Maiesties Passage.²³ They preserve an image of social harmony, while suppressing evidence of religious difficulties.²⁴

The drawings of the civic progress and The Quenes Maiesties Passage present the opening scenes of an enormously successful and long-running stageshow. The show lasted for most of her reign, developing into the nearly idolatrous "cult of Elizabeth."²⁵ Yet for all its devotional fervor, the cult was a self-consciously theatrical enterprise in which secular ceremony and printed propaganda affirmed royal authority more effectively than sacred ritual. The Accession Day Tilts, like the civic progress, were "invented traditions," and their adaptations of Catholic symbolism and ritual were, as Stephen Greenblatt explains, stylized improvisations, designed to exploit the residual powers of the old forms and customs. Sir Henry Lee and other courtiers staged elaborate pageants in which altars and candles, hermits at their beads, and hymns in praise of virginity became the theatrical props of temporal power. According to Greenblatt, these stylized ceremonies exemplify

two of the characteristic operations of improvisation: displacement and absorption. By displacement I mean the process whereby a prior symbolic structure is compelled to coexist with other centers of attention that do not necessarily conflict with the original structure but are not swept up in its gravitational pull; indeed, as here, the sacred may find itself serving as an adornment, a backdrop, an occasion for a quite secular phenomenon. By absorption I mean the process whereby a symbolic structure is taken into the ego so completely that it ceases to exist as an external phenomenon; in the Accession Day ceremony, instead of the secular prince humbling herself before the sacred, the sacred seems only to enhance the ruler's identity, to express her power.²⁶

At her coronation Elizabeth resisted "humbling herself before the sacred" either by replacing the celebrant of the Mass or by absenting herself completely, and she focused all attention on herself by the shows of secular pageantry. The increasingly elaborate celebrations of her Accession Day, the principal feast of the cult of Elizabeth, dates the beginning of her reign from her accession and reduces the coronation to a superfluous formality.²⁷ Later in her reign, the queen timed her return from her summer progresses partly to coincide with her Accession Day, and her formal reentry into London reenacted the stately scenes of her first civic progress:

The Queen came by night with the Master of the Horse leading her palfrey by the bridle and a great noble carrying the sword. Ambassadors were invited to be present, and the Lord Mayor and citizens were called upon to don their rich gowns and chains and give a torch light welcome²⁸

The Accession Day Tilt itself was celebrated with increasingly elaborate tilts and pageants recalling the traditional feast and tournament that followed the coronation. Thus, the Accession Day festivities reenacted only the secular ceremonies of her reign's beginning, while displacing them from their original occasion; in the meantime, the sacred rite sunk still further into oblivion.

Ceremonial pragmatism was an essential technique in the Tudors' consolidation of their power. Nevertheless, the secularization of ceremony entailed losses as well as gains. The "divinity [that] doth hedge a king" was inevitably diminished by the desacralization of the rites of majesty, and the dependence of authority on theatrical artifice created problems as well as advantages. In royal pageantry, the alienation effect of ceremonial displacement was offset by the monarch's actual presence, which invested these shows with genuine authority and the aura of sacred ritual. However, when royal pageantry was transposed from the civic or courtly stage to the stages of London's theaters, yet another displacement occurred, removing it still further from its original sacred context. In the theaters, the links to ritual became more attenuated and the effects of displacement more unsettling. In fact, dramatic representation occasionally highlighted contradictions of form and function at the heart of ceremonial improvisation.

Royal ceremony in practice served purposes that were potentially incompatible, because it made the sovereign visible to men at the same time that it distanced him. Jonathan Goldberg emphasizes the contradictions of such performances: "what the sovereign displays in public [is] his own unobservability, observed in his spectacles."²⁹ In Goldberg's view, royal pageantry retains an aura of ritual mystery and limited accessibility. On its stage, the monarch is inscrutable, standing "not as an actor but as a spectacle . . . distinguished . . . by his penetrating glance, and by his invisibility and his obscurity."³⁰ By contrast, the theater provided a place

where the audience saw kings treading the stage, where the public assembled to see itself. The theater, that tragic scaffold, was a place for self-knowledge precisely because its re-presentation duplicated public life. It is there that Renaissance man went to know himself.³¹

The risk was that, presented on the common stage, the monarch became too visible and too commonplace. A desire to prevent this overexposure and demystification of majesty was probably a factor in those commands forbidding "that princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime."³²

The dangers of overexposure became apparent even in plays that celebrated a monarch's rule. As nostalgia for the good old days of good Queen Bess flourished under James, several plays reenacted the pageantry and events of Tudor history. The implicitly critical contrast between the two regimes proved less disturbing to some than the staging of royal pageantry in a public theater. In his description of Henry VIII, Sir Henry Wotton complained that the

many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty .. . the knights of the Order with their Georges and Garter, the Guards with their embroidered coats and the like [were] sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.³³

Wotton's description focuses on the splendid costumes and insignia of the royal retinue. Many of these outfits were undoubtedly obtained through the Revels Office, which frequently gave clothing from the royal wardrobe as payment to the actors' companies. This policy of "translation" made profitable use of outfits no longer "serviceable," some of them passed on because "to moche knowen."³⁴ Wotton's misgivings suggest some of the troubling consequences of this otherwise perfectly sensible displacement. Within the court, the rites and accoutrements of royal ceremony could inspire awe and sustain distance between subject and sovereign. Translated to the common stage and repeated daily by common players, these ceremonious forms lost their singularity and became "to moche knowen."³⁵

These same risks are still more obvious in Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.

The play's first half reenacts the coronation of Mary, whose reign is dominated by murderous bishops and friars, bent on securing their hold on power and doing away with Elizabeth. Their chicanery is defeated by Elizabeth's accession. Following her civic progress, the new queen simply accepts the regalia from her temporal peers, dispensing with the bishops and their rituals. If You Know Not Me perpetuates and embellishes many of the myths of Elizabethan propaganda. Its title and title page with its stereotyped engraving of an instantly recognizable personage project an image of a monarch well known to all her subjects and to Englishmen of all ages. Yet even as Hey wood's play perpetuates the cult of Elizabeth, it also reveals some of its problems, particularly in the action of the second half, which features an encounter between Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Gresham, her finance minister, and a comical sidekick named Hobson. Hobson is the epitome of brusque, bourgeois common sense, and, when the queen fails to recognize him, he applies the titular phrase to himself, exclaiming:

Knowest thou not me Queene? then thou knowest no body.
Bones a me Queen. I am Hobson . . . I am sure you know me

When she still does not know him, Gresham interjects that "He is a rich substantiall Citizen" and Hobson blurts out:

Bones a me woman send to borrow money
Of one you do not know, there's a new trick:
Your Grace sent to me by a Pursuevant
And by a Priuie Seale to lend your Highnesse
An hundred pound: I hearing that my Queene
Had need of money, and thinking you had known me,
Would needes vpon the bearer force two hundred. ³⁶

The queen graciously thanks him and then proceeds to knight Gresham and dedicate the royal exchange.

Amidst the stylized artifice of an actual civic progress, the dialogue between subject and sovereign was carefully controlled. Here, on the public stage, these authoritarian controls and the ceremonial distance between subject and sovereign were partially diminished, despite the efforts of the censors. The inherent vulgarity and levelling tendencies of the public theater were recognized and deplored by an aristocrat like Sir Philip Sidney, who condemned its "mongrel tragicomedy" for "mingling kings and clowns" and then thrusting in these "clowns by head and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion."³⁷If You Know Not Me confirms Sidney's worst fears: Hobson's presumptuous bluster insists with insulting accuracy on the queen's debts and her dependence on her common subjects. The playwright's treatment of Elizabeth, however positive, is no less impertinent, and one can see why this play would not have been tolerated during her lifetime. As Stephen Orgel says of Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humor, the play "overstepped its bounds, making the monarch subject to the whim of the playwright."³⁸

There is still another, graver risk attached to the displacement of royal ceremony on to the public stage. This is the "ultimate danger" inherent in all ceremonies, according to the anthropologists Sally Moore and Barbara Meyerhoff:

the possibility that we will encounter ourselves making up our conception of the world, society, our very selves. We may slip in that fatal perspective of recognizing culture as our construct, arbitrary, conventional, invented by mortals. Ceremonies are paradoxical in this way. Being the most obviously contrived forms of social contact, they epitomize the made-up quality of culture and almost invite notice as such. Yet their very form and purpose is to discourage untrammeled inquiry into such questions.³⁹

Shakespeare's later histories, written near the end of Elizabeth's reign, enforce this heightened awareness. Ceremony is a central preoccupation in these plays. Nearly every scene in Shakespeare's Henriad undercuts the majesty of royal ceremony in subtle but unsettling ways, exposing its "made-up quality" and the void behind its illusions.⁴⁰

Upon his return to his kingdom, Richard II proclaims his belief in his own sacramental invulnerability with majestic assurance:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord;
For every man that Bullingbrook hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel; then if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.⁴¹

Richard's belief in the sufficiency of sacred unction, the "golden crown," and the divine right of English kingship is swiftly shattered by his abrupt and ignominious defeat. His disillusion is painful and absolute because what had been everything becomes nothing: the regalia, a "hollow crown," and royal ceremony, a macabre farce in death's court (Richard II. 3.2.160-70). He bitterly enjoins his rebellious subjects to "throw away respect / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty" (Richard II. 3.2.172-73), but they refuse to obey even this command for their own ulterior motives. First, the rebels require his formal self-deposition, and Richard obliges them, unable to resist the chance for a ceremonial grand finale. Secondly, "tradition, form and ceremonious duty," though insufficient in themselves, are still necessary to the usurper's own accession and rule.

The actual Henry IV "had himself anointed with the sacred oil which Thomas Becket was supposed to have received from the Virgin" in order to enhance his shaky legitimacy, and its "propaganda value" may have been as important to him as the oil's miraculous origins.⁴² Shakespeare's Henry IV is more explicitly pragmatic in his manipulation of the rites of royalty. As James Calderwood explains, Henry does not jettison "the panoply of ritual, ceremony, and verbal display with which Richard girded kingship;" instead, he exploits it "with a clear awareness that it is a means and not an end. . . . Bolingbroke's plays of state are directed exclusively to an audience of men, not God."⁴³ He also uses ceremony to ingratiate himself with the groundlings, while still dazzling them from a distance. Noting how Bullingbrook doffs "his bonnet to an oyster-wench" in "his courtship to the common people," Richard enviously concedes the effectiveness of these theatrics even as he sneers at their falseness (Richard II. 1.4.31 and 24):

How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy,
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles.

(Richard IL 1.4.25-28)

At the same time that he courts popularity, Bullingbrook tries to preserve royalty's ceremonial mystique. As he later tells Hal:

Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wond'red at, and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, show'd like a feast,
And wan by rareness such solemnity.

(1 Henry IV 3.2.55-59)

Henry realizes the dangers of overexposure: the royal presence like the robes of state can become "to moche knowen."

Henry's public performances closely resemble Elizabeth's civic theatricals. With both rulers, the same illusion of warmth and spontaneity, of intimate connection with the lowliest "oyster-wench," is conveyed by their passages among the people; during her civic progress, Elizabeth "gentlie receiued presentes offered by base and low personages."⁴⁴ Yet the sense of intimate connection is projected from an immense distance, and the monarch usually has the last word in these artfully regulated dialogues. Joseph Porter describes the exchange well when he calls it a "genuine interaction controlled entirely by the king;" in the Henriad, Henry's subjects resemble, as Porter says, "those model children who speak when spoken to."⁴⁵ A similar interaction occurs at the beginning of Elizabeth's civic progress, when the noise of the crowd drowned out the speech of the official vox populi, a small boy deputed to explain the first pageant's meaning. Before she proceeded further, Elizabeth sent a resonant double message ordering "all the other pageants to require the people to be silent for her majestie was disposed to heare all that should be said unto her."⁴⁶

The problem with Henry IV's "plays of state" is that too many of his subjects see through them and through him. Indeed, once he obtains the throne, the aims and the artifice of his ceremonial pretensions become even more obvious. Yet, for all his shrewd cynicism, Henry succumbs to pathetic hypocrisy, making the same accusations against his enemies that Richard made against him. His spokesman chastens the rebels for their "stand against anointed majesty," but Hotspur coldly rebukes such flagrant sanctimony:

The King is kind, and well we know the King
Knows at what time to promise, when to pay.
My father and my uncle and myself
Did give him that same royalty he wears.

(1 Henry IV. 4.3.52-55)

Henry's subjects know him all too well, and their familiarity undermines all his efforts to preserve the mystified distance of "anointed majesty." Indeed, Hotspur explicitly recalls the "covenant" Bullingbrook made in Richard II (2.3.50) with those who welcomed him home from exile and pledged to join him in treason. Then he vouched that "All my treasury / Is yet but unfelt thanks, which more enrich'd / Shall be your love and labor's recompense" (Richard II. 2.3.60-62). Hotspur subsequently sneers at Henry's claims to sacramental supremacy and insists on his debts and dependence. His claim to "know the King" is a more hostile version of Hobson's impertinent familiarity with Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me but here the reciprocal "covenant" between sovereign and subject leads not to the jocular banter of Hobson or the autocratic stability of Hobbes—but to threats of blackmail and rebellion.

Hal surpasses his father because he places himself beyond all such covenants and all familiarity. He secretly vows to "pay the debt I never promised" and can say to his confederates "I know you all," while no one knows him (1 Henry IV. 1.2.209 and 195). Indeed, upon his accession, he uses the ceremonial forms and guises of majesty to thwart knowledge of his character and claims upon his person. Confidently assuming the "new and gorgeous garment, majesty," he assures all that he will "deeply put the fashion on / And wear it in my heart" (2 Henry IV. 5.2.44 and 51-52). On returning from his coronation, Hal says to Falstaff, "I know thee not . . . Presume not that I am the thing I was" (2 Henry IV 5.5.56).

Hal's mastery of his sovereign role also derives paradoxically from his profound skepticism toward its pretensions. That skepticism pervades the Henriad, but it achieves its sharpest expression in Henry V. In that play, the chorus simultaneously deflates and inflates the illusions of both the theater and the state, apologizing for the "flat unraised spirits that hath dar'd / On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth / So great an object" (Henry V. Prologue 9-11) while urging us to "mind true things by what their mockeries be" (Henry V. 4.Cho.53). The second part of Henry IV concludes with Hal's coronation, a solemnity we do not see, but we do witness an oddly somber mockery of that event when Hal crowns himself prematurely beside his father's sick bed. The dying king awakens and bitterly rebukes him: "For now a time is come to mock at form. Harry the Fift is crown'd! Up, vanity! / Down, royal state!" (2 Henry IV. 4.5.118-20). Here we see another way in which Hal surpasses his father, for he succumbs to none of majesty's illusions. In Henry V, he realizes the unsettling truth suggested by the chorus: mocking at form is finally redundant, because all forms, no matter how solemn, are mockeries, desacrilized representations of truth and power.

That view receives its clearest expression in Hal's only soliloquy in Henry V, his desolate address to "thou idol Ceremony" on the eve of Agincourt:

What infinite heart's ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idol Ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? What are thy comings-in?
O Ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul of [adoration]?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?

(Henry V. 4.1.236-47)

Henry's sumptuously detailed inventory of his regalia dismisses all these accoutrements as components of a "proud dream" that prevents sleep:

No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtilly with a king's repose,
I am a king that find thee; and I know
'Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on, not the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world—
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave.

(Henry V. 4.1.257-68)

Hal exposes an obvious but still disturbing secret of state. The rites of "anointed majesty" have no sacramental efficacy or "soul of adoration," nor are they divinely sanctioned. Up to a point, these sentiments echo the moderate Protestantism of Archbishop Cranmer, who preached at Edward VI's coronation that the

solemn rites of coronation have their ends and utility, yet neither direct force or necessity: they be good admonitions to put kings in mind of their duty to God, but no increasement of their dignity.⁴⁷

Earlier, Cranmer advised Henry VIII that ceremonies

ought neither to be rejected, nor yet to be observed with this opinion, that they of themselves make men holy, or that they remit sin . . . not the laws and ceremonies of the church at their first making were devised for that intent . . . but for a common commodity, and for a good order and quietness among your subjects.⁴⁸

However, Hal's speech moves beyond Cranmer's pragmatic traditionalism toward Puritan iconoclasm in its use of the provocative word "idol." Radical Puritans saw ceremony as a form of idolatry, "creating awe and fear in other men" and enslaving them through its mystifications. They deplored what Cranmer endorsed—its subtle capacity to keep subjects in thrall—and they regarded its affirmations of "place, degree, and form" not as a means to "good order and quietness," but as a fraudulent imposition. Shakespeare's startling exposition of sovereignty's mystifications may have caused its suppression. Like the deposition scene of Richard II, it was omitted from contemporary printed versions.⁴⁹

The impact of both scenes is, nevertheless, more poignant than directly subversive, illuminating the pathos of sovereignty even as it exposes the artifice of its impostures. Shrewder than Richard and less susceptible to histrionics, Henry yearns to escape for a moment from ceremonial deception. He is well positioned to see through it ("I am a king that find thee") and exempt from the "awe and fear" engendered in other men. His soliloquy allows us to share in his privileged perspective and provides, momentarily, one of those "intimations .. . of a release from the complex narrative orders in which everyone is inscribed."⁵⁰ When Hal first assumed the "gorgeous garment, majesty" he eagerly embraced the responsibilities that accompanied it: "I'll be your father and your brother too / Let me but bear your love, I'll bear your cares" (2 Henry IV. 5.2.57-58). Now he wants to put aside the mantle and the burdens of sovereignty: "I think the king is but a man as I am. . . . His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man" (Henry V. 4.1:101-05).⁵¹

He is, of course, incognito when he makes this confession of his common humanity, and he finally never puts his disguise aside.⁵² Williams's subsequent reproach confirms this on several levels: "Your majesty came not like yourself (Henry V. 4.8.50). During their encounter, the king's two bodies were both hidden from sight, the physical by the night's darkness and the political by his lowly disguise. The charge also rings true at a more basic level. Henry can never appear as himself, despite his professed desire to do so, nor can any of the successful monarchs depicted in the histories: as A. P. Rossiter sardonically remarks: "By and by he will 'be more himself.' Hal says it; Father says it. None does it."⁵³ Both the role and its disguises prove inescapable and Henry grudgingly submits to majesty's "hard condition": "We must bear all" (Henry V. 4.1.223). Indeed, for the remainder of the play, Henry immediately pulls back from the unsettling depths of his soliloquy, seeking to renew his fraternal connection with others in battle by promising that "he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile" (Henry V. 4.3.60-62). Public confidence in his own sovereignty is renewed by his conquest of France and his enforced dynastic marriage. Critics of the play still argue over the success of these solutions, but, for many, Henry's triumphs are still haunted by the doubts and misgivings of his soliloquy.⁵⁴ In that speech, Henry regards his submission to the role and rites of majesty as an exercise in futility and he despairs over amending "the fault / My father made in compassing the crown" (Henry V. 4.2.293-94). His profound skepticism toward ceremony extends to the penitential prayers sung by "sad and solemn priests" in chantries that he built and will continue to support: "More will I do; / Though all that I can do is nothing worth" (Henry V. 4.1.300-03).

Shakespeare's later histories coincided with the decline of the cult of Elizabeth, and the last one came on the very eve of the event that precipitated its collapse: the return against orders of the earl of Essex, "the general of our gracious Empress . . . from Ireland coming" (Henry V. 5.cho.30-31), not, as the chorus anticipates, in triumph over rebellion. Her cult was, as I said earlier, an essentially theatrical enterprise in which secular ceremony affirmed royal authority more effectively than sacred ritual. It flourished as long as Elizabeth's authority remained firm. However, as she grew older and her authority was challenged by a faction of increasingly unruly subjects, the artifice of her cult became more brittle and transparent.⁵⁵ The earl of Cumberland, her designated champion in the Accession Day Tilts had to be "forced to joust" in 1602, and certain members of the Inns of Court refused to join in the revels traditionally staged for her pleasure.⁵⁶ She had difficulty assembling a suitable entourage for her summer progress of 1600, and, according to one contemporary, "she had just cause to be offended that at her remove to this place she was soe poorely attended, for I never saw such a dearth of nobility."⁵⁷ Most insulting of all were the theatricals staged during the Essex conspiracy. She who had once triumphed by her passage through London's streets found herself mocked by a tragedy "played forty times in open street and houses": "I am Richard II. Know ye not that?"⁵⁸

Elizabeth overcame defeat and deposition, the most humiliating aspects of Richard's fate, but the pathos of his disillusion and the play's mockery of "tradition, form, and ceremonious duty" must have been galling, as some of her own subjects let these fall into neglect and worse. There is a terrible pathos in her final efforts to sustain the cult's illusions through her wigs, garish make-up, and increasingly threadbare "love tricks." Her "golden speech" to parliament was perhaps an exception to this decline, for, after receiving a delegation at Whitehall, she deployed her familiar phrases and conceits on a somewhat less jaded audience, but, at times, even she despaired of these pretenses. When one of the ladies at a wedding masque in 1600 asked her to dance, claiming to represent Affection, Elizabeth replied "Affection is false."⁵⁹ The official portraits of her last years were perhaps more successful than were courtly performances at sustaining the old illusions, for the face they present to the world is increasingly youthful, even ageless, and the figure is heavily encrusted with the mystical trappings of majesty.⁶⁰ Yet even here a poignant irony intrudes. One of the last suggests a reversion to a sacramental idea of kingship. The coronation portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery has been shown to have been painted sometime near the end of her reign, possibly even afterward, but it depicts her reign's beginning.⁶¹ It shows her as a young woman clinging to "the sceptre, and the ball" and vested in "the crown .. . [and] intertissued robe of gold and pearl." It is an icon of that once obscure and subordinate rite, her coronation.

Notes

¹ Percy Ernest Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. L. G. W. Legg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 7-9, and Janet L. Nelson, "Inauguration Rituals," Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P. H. Sawyer and J. N. Woods (1977; rpt. Leeds: University of Leeds Press, 1979), 62. For a discussion of the somewhat ambiguous sacramental status of the coronation and the power struggle between clergy and royalty, see Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 113-14.

² The text of the ordo is reproduced by Anne F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond in The Coronation of Richard III (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983).

³Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 7 (1558-1580), ed. Rawdon Brown and G. Cavendish Bentinck (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1890), 2. To confirmed Protestants, the elevation of the host was the essence of Popish idolatry.

⁴ C. G. Bayne reproduces and discusses the three extant accounts of the event in "The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth," English Historical Review 22 (1907): 650-73. For a discussion of the confusing records of Elizabeth's coronation and the subsequent historical controversy, see my '"The Wonderfull Spectacle' and Obscure Ordo of Elizabeth's Coronation" (forthcoming).

⁵Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, I (1558-67), ed. Martin A. S. Hume (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1892-99), 25. Newly consecrated monarchs could receive communion "in both kinds" as an indication of their sacerdotal status, since this was a privilege separating the clergy from the laity. See Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch, 120.

⁶ Bayne, "The Coronation of Elizabeth I" (1907), 661.

⁷ H. A. Wilson, "The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth," English Historical Review 23 (1908): 87-91. Bayne subsequently changed his mind, partly as a result of Wilson's article, concluding that Elizabeth's chaplain probably did say Mass and that Elizabeth remained for the service. See Bayne's "The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth," English Historical Review 24 (1909): 322-23. See also William P. Haugaard, "The Coronation of Elizabeth I," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 19 (1968): 161-70.

⁸Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. 2 (1547-50), ed. John Roche Dasent (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1890), 33. For a description of Elizabeth's "princely travers sumptuously sett forthe" at a later Easter service, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (1923; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 3: 27. When Richard III and his queen received communion after his coronation, two bishops "held before them a long towel of white silk to shield them from the gaze of the congregation" (Sutton and Hammond, Coronation of Richard III, 42).

⁹ Public Record Office, State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth I, 68.

¹⁰ Bayne, "The Coronation of Elizabeth I" (1909), 322-33, and A. F. Pollard, "The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth," English Historical Review 25 (1910): 125-26. Her remark was made in 1571 in the midst of marriage negotiations with Alençon's representatives. It is probably just as dubious as several other claims made during that campaign of diplomatic deception, and Haugaard's suspicions of its accuracy seem justified (166). While the remark's value as evidence is as limited as all the other conflicting claims about what happened at the coronation, it is a good indication of Elizabeth's attitude toward the rites.

¹¹ Patrick Collinson discusses the reaction of the Genevan exiles in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 31.

¹² Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 31 and 39.

¹³ See Hobsbawm's introduction to The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). David Cannadine's excellent essay on the very successful ceremonial adaptations of Victoria and her modern successors, "The Context, Performance, and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarch and the 'Invention of Tradition,' c. 1820-1977" in the same collection, 101-OS, offers intriguing parallels to Elizabeth's ceremonial exercises in public relations.

¹⁴The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before her Coronacion, ed. James M. Osborn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 46-47.

¹⁵ See Raymond Firth who contends that "Ceremony [is] . . . enforced by mystical sanctions," in Tikopia Ritual and Belief '(London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), n. 2, 33, and Max and Mary Gluckmans who assert that ritual invokes occult powers while ceremony is secular, in their essay "On Drama, and Games and Athletic Contests" in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Meyerhoff (Assen/Amersterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), 231-34. They argue that the course and outcome of a ritual is "prescribed and predetermined . . . and conformity to rule and tradition is important;" ceremonies are more improvisational and open-ended (239). Ritual fixity can be exaggerated, and the distinction can become too rigid. Rituals must be relatively flexible for both formal and functional reasons. There are simple mechanical obstacles to unvarying transmission discussed by Richard A. Jackson in a paper presented to the International Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Coronations, Toronto, 31 January-2 February, 1985. See also his Vive le Roi: A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). Since many rituals are intended to negotiate conflicts arising at society's liminal stresspoints, they must also allow for flexibility, as Victor Turner has shown; see especially his Drama, Fields and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 13-15. Richard Trexler's emphasis on the "relative fixity" and "ecologically adaptive" nature of ritual is useful as well; see his Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), xxiv.

¹⁶ Schramm, History of the English Coronation, 93 and 10.

¹⁷ David Bergeron, "Elizabeth's Coronation Entry (1559): New Manuscript Evidence," English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 3-8.

¹⁸The Quenes Maiesties Passage, 48, 62, and 36, 37 respectively.

¹⁹Passage, 27.

²⁰Passage, 28.

²¹ In his introduction to the facsimile text, J. E. Neale explains that the Tudor civic progress "became increasingly important until with Queen Elizabeth, it was finally transformed into an occasion in its own right—a popular and secular companion for the subsequent solemn sacrament worthy of commemoration, as commemorated it was, in print" Passage, 7. Yet even Neale underestimates the impact of the progress and publication, because they were more than mere companions. The civic progress became the central event, reducing the vexatious coronation to an obscure sideshow whose troublesome irregularities have faded from sight and mind.

²² These drawings are included in British Museum Egerton MS 3320 and College of Arms MS M6.

²³ College of Arms MS M6 fol. 86v. There is also a marginal note on fol. 46, "At the parlement the Trompettes take ther place." The more finished of these two sets of drawings resembles drawings of Elizabethan tournaments included in the same manuscript collection. I have discussed this small anthology of chivalric texts and drawings elsewhere, arguing that they were compiled by the herald Robert Cooke, a protégé of Robert Dudley as a gift to his patron. See my "From the Tower to the Tiltyard: Robert Dudley's Return to Glory," The Historical Journal 27 (1984): 425-35. The drawings of the civic progress in which Dudley figured prominently as master of the horse would have been a handsome tribute to both the queen and her favorite. The more traditional ecclesiastical procession was dominated by the older aristocratic families, and Dudley had no special place in it.

²⁴ As a result of these distortions, the sacred and secular processions have become confused in modern accounts of Elizabeth's coronation and our recollection of the event. James Osborn, the modern editor of The Quenes Maiesties Passage, reproduces a portion of the Egerton manuscript illustration of the civic progress on the cover and as the frontispiece of the facsimile text. The note says that "the drawing depicts the Queen in her litter on the way from Whitehall to her coronation at Westminster . . . on Sunday, 15 January, the day following her passage through the City of London." The queen actually proceeded from Westminster Hall (not Whitehall) on 15 January, and the dignitaries and their order of precedence in the second day's procession were very different from the first. See Neville Williams, "The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth," Quarterly Review 291 (1953): 397-410, especially 402-06.

²⁵ See Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) and Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).

²⁶ Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 230; see also 166-68.

²⁷ According to Sutton and Hammond, The Coronation of Richard HI, the "devaluation" of the coronation had been a trend since the twelfth century, since kings began dating their reigns not "from their coronation and unction but from the day of their accession" around that time (n. 21, 6).

²⁸ Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:17-18. The change in schedule from day to night might have been designed to enhance the theatrical impact of these later passages (as well as concealing the changes wrought by age), for as Bishop Goodman says of an equally impressive appearance by the Queen, "shows and pageants are best seen by torchlight" (quoted by Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, 167).

²⁹ Goldberg, James I, 150. See also Anne Barton Righter's explanation of royal ceremony that simultaneously distances kings from their subjects while allowing an "outward expression of authority. . . .

Through form and tradition, a splendor of ritual and dress, and all those accustomed rites of obeisance and fealty, the nature of kingship is made visible to men" in Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 114.

³⁰ Goldberg, James I, n. 37, 271.

³¹ Goldberg, James I, 150.

³² Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:328.

³³ The letter is quoted by Herschel Baker in his introduction to Henry VIII in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. B. Blackmore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 976.

³⁴ Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:76.

³⁵ In his essay entitled "Making Greatness Familiar," Stephen Orgel elaborates on Wotton's apprehensions, noting that "to mime nobility on the stage was to diminish it," because, as Wotton realized, such familiarity could easily breed contempt, Genre 15 (1982): 47.

³⁶ Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, 2 vols. (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1934-35), 2: fol. H. lv.

³⁷ Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (1965; rpt. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 135.

³⁸ Orgel, "Making Greatness Familiar," 45.

³⁹ Moore and Meyerhoff, "Introduction: Secular Ritual: Forms and Meanings," Secular Ritual, 18.

⁴⁰ W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 68. Zeeveld's first chapter is devoted to a thoughtful and historically informed discussion of ceremony in the history plays. See also Alvin B. Kernan, "The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays," in Modern Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), 245-75, and Eric LaGuardia, "Ceremony and History: The Problem of Symbol from Richard II to Henry V" in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1966), 68-88.

⁴¹ Richard II, 3.2.54-62. All references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, hereafter cited in the text.

⁴² J. W. McKenna, "The Coronation Oil of the Yorkist Kings," English Historical Review 82 (1967): 102.

⁴³ James L. Calderwood, Shakespeare Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 182.

Cf. Herbert Coursen's assertion that "ritual becomes the invention of men. . . . Ritual will no longer be the transmitter of deeper spiritual mysteries as it was in the world John of Gaunt recalls" in Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976), 86-87.

⁴⁴Passages, 62.

⁴⁵ Joseph A. Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts; Shakespeare 's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 61-62.

⁴⁶Passages, 36-37.

⁴⁷ John Strype, Memorials of Archbishop Cranmer, 2 vols. (Oxford: Ecclesiastical Historical Society, 1848), 2:8.

⁴⁸ Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, ed. John Edmund Cox, Parker Society Publications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 326-27.

⁴⁹ Zeeveld, Shakespeare's Thought, 67.

⁵⁰ Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, 254. Greenblatt's subtle analysis of these equivocal intimations in Shakespeare is very persuasive, but I think he exaggerates when he concludes that "such a revelation scarcely matters" (253). If that were true in this case, the text would not have been suppressed.

⁵¹ Significantly, his effort to evade these burdens begins with a rejection of fraternity, as he dismisses Erpingham and Gloucester, "brothers both": "Go with my brothers to my lords of England / I and my bosom must debate a while / And then I would no other company" (Henry V. 4.1.30-32).

⁵² In her discussion of the disguised king motif, Anne Barton remarks that "most Elizabethan dramatists seem to have accepted the idea that disguise was an essential prerequisite for the ease and success of the meeting between private men and king. Only if the king's identity was concealed could there be a natural conversation, frankness, and a sense of rapport," in "The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History" in The Triple Bond: Plays Mainly Shakespearean in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1975), 98. Henry's disguises thwart rapport in Shakespeare's ironic treatment of this motif, and the king "falls into a series of nonencounters, meetings in which the difficulty of establishing understanding between subject and king is stressed." (99).

⁵³ A. P. Rossiter, Angels With Horns, ed. Graham Story (New York: Theatre Arts Book, 1961), 63.

⁵⁴ E.g., Una Ellis-Fermor's conclusion that "Henry V has transformed himself into a public figure. . . . It is in vain that we look for the personality behind the king; there is nothing else there" in The Frontiers of Drama (1945; rpt. London: Methuen and Co., 1964), 45, versus Gary Taylor's assertion that "the final scene of the play is a consummation of union, political and personal" reconciling Henry's "political and his private selves, the king's two bodies" in his introduction to the Oxford Henry F (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 46.

⁵⁵ For a discussion of the strains on the cult of Elizabeth in its final decade, see my "'A Dangerous Image': The Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry," The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983): 313-29.

⁵⁶ Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 136, and Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 65.

⁵⁷ Rowland White to Sir Robert Sydney, 2 August 1600, Penhurst Manuscripts, 6 vols., ed. C. L. Kings-ford (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1934), 2: 475.

⁵⁸ See the Arden Shakespeare's Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), lvii lxii. Orgel and Greenblatt each discuss this incident in their respective essays in the special issue of Genre 15 (1982): 3-6 and 41-48, respectively.

⁵⁹ J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I (1934; reprint, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), 383 and 400-01.

⁶⁰ See for example the Rainbow Portrait. Roy Strong discusses what he terms "the retreat from reality" and "the mask of youth" in the later portraits in Artists of the Tudor Court (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 126-32.

⁶¹ See John Fletcher, "The Date of the Portrait of Elizabeth I in her Coronation Robes," Burlington Magazine 120 (1978): 753. The portrait had been regarded until recently as "contemporary with the Coronation itself," but tree-ring analysis of the panel backing it established that it dates from 1600-1610. "Historical evidence suggests that the events connected with Elizabeth's elaborate funeral in April 1603 might have provided the purpose for this large painting and that it could have been intended to remind one of her 'Second Coronation' after her ascent from earth to heaven" (753). For a detailed comparison of this portrait with the earlier Hilliard miniature and other portraits, see Janet Arnold, "The 'Coronation' Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I" in the same issue of the Burlington Magazine, 727-41.