Year: 2008
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis constitutes a critical investigation into the scholarship into the iconography o f Queen Elizabeth I in the light of developments in critical theory and practice over the last thirty years.It provides a survey o f the ways in which the term iconography as used to refer to the image o f Elizabeth has been deployed, reconceived and adapted in early modem scholarship.The thesis therefore takes account of older historicising approaches to the Queen's image provided by the Cult of Elizabeth, as well as more recent work influenced by poststructuralist criticism.My methodology is influenced by these two related critical traditions.It does however, situate its discussion o f the three chosen figurings of Elizabeth as King David, Queen Dido and the moon goddess Cynthia within a discourse o f Elizabethan power.Here my discussion o f the politics of representation builds on the work o f Louis Montrose and Susan Frye, as I argue that each o f these allegorised images o f the Queen provides the locus for the struggle to control the meanings assigned to the Queen's person.Since the concept o f a discourse o f Elizabethan power consists of those instances where the power relations between Elizabeth and her subjects are made manifest, the discussion o f each o f the three selected personae is not restricted to the visual or literary expression of these images in portraits, poems or plays, but investigates their deployment in the speeches and prayers of the Elizabeth herself, as well as in the sermons, polemics and literature o f her subjects.It does so in order to trace the methods by which the royal image was fashioned and then appropriated by subjects who then used it to serve their own ends.The thesis focuses upon the ways in which biblical and classical figures and their mythographies contributed to this process of re-presenting the Queen.Finally, the organisation o f the thesis into three case studies and the choice o f both biblical and classical personae emphasise its diachronic approach to Elizabeth's iconography.This methodology provides a corrective to the monological approach to the Queen's image adopted by both historicist and New Historicists alike, who have persisted in using the Queen's virginity as a lens through which to view her entire reign.The thesis argues that Elizabeth's iconography developed in response to specific events and shifts in policy and therefore offers analysis of how the Queen's image was used at specific pressure points during her reign.In this way the thesis makes an important contribution to scholarship in this field. Princes set on stages: Royal Iconography on the early modern stageWarburg's colleague Fritz Saxl acting as director.3The suggestion that art, like literature, for example, had a direct link to other cultural discourses and could be used to expand our understanding of those cultures was an important critical tenet of the institute.Such a position encouraged the Institute's students to interrogate the dominant critical modes such as Formalism, which in the case o f literature encouraged the idea that literature was a special kind of writing.Erwin Panofsky, like Warburg, was also a German emigre, who left Germany in the 1930s to take up the post of visiting
Author: Annaliese Connolly
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2796708194