Abstract
After the death of Elizabeth in March of 1603, panegyrics remembered her as a loving mother to her people, a virtuous and wise princess who, by God’s special care, was able to survive and thrive despite the many dangers that surrounded her. Often, writers celebrated the peace enjoyed during her reign: “Full foure and fortie yeares foure months seven dayes, / She did maintaine this realme in peece alwayes.”1 But as discussed in Chapter Five, not everyone lamented the end of Elizabeth’s peaceful reign. In Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year (1603), courtiers, lawyers, merchants, citizens, and shepherds mourned the queen’s death; only the soldier, walking on wooden legs, “brisseld up the quills of his stiffe porcupine mustachio, and swore by no beggers that now was the houre come for him to bestirre his stumps.”2 Those who hoped that James might prove less irenic than Elizabeth would soon be disappointed, of course, but some of her subjects initially welcomed a man’s accession, expecting an end to certain traditionally “feminine” qualities associated with the queen, such as an aversion to war and an excess of clemency.
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Notes
Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year (London 1603), B2r.
Madeleine Doran, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, Malone Society Reprints, Volume 65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), xvii.
Teresa Grant, “Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 121.
Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 124.
Janel Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representation of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 231–34.
McLuskie suggests that the sympathetic portrayal of Philip supports the notion of aristocratic virtue in a play that she sees as negotiating “between a popular politics and a proper sense of hierarchy.” I agree that mercy is often adduced as a sign of true nobility; I argue that this is the case in If You Know Not Me, Part II. In Part I, Mary is contrasted with Elizabeth in terms of her relative lack of mercy, but Heywood also portrays both women as lacking agency. Hence, Mary is cruel when advised to be by Winchester and merciful when advised to be by Philip. Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 45.
See Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 94.
John Aylmer, An Harborowe for faithfull and trewe subjectes (London, 1559), H3v.
John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36.
Jean E. Howard reads Gresham and Hobson as contrasting figures: Gresham is the new breed of international merchant-capitalist who takes staggering risks, deals in huge sums of money, and whose grand contribution, the Royal Exchange, benefits himself as well as London. By contrast, Hobson represents the traditional London crafts-guilds and their values. He is modest, sober, and selflessly charitable. “Thomas Heywood: Dramatist of London and Playwright of the Passions” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 127.
Thomas Heywood, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Volume 1 (New York: Russell & Russell Inc, 1874; rpt. 1964), 334.
Darryll Grantley notices “an element of opportunistic pragmatism shaping Dekker’s oeuvre for the stage” and wonders if the title Whore of Babylon was meant to be provocative, following as it does popular plays of the two preceding years, The Honest Whore and The Dutch Courtesan. Darryll Grantley, “Thomas Dekker and the Emergence of City Comedy” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 86.
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© 2014 Mary Villeponteaux
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Villeponteaux, M. (2014). “Good Queene, You Must Be Rul’d”: Feminine Mercy in the Plays of Heywood and Dekker. In: The Queen’s Mercy. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371751_6
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