Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation.

Susan Frye's perceptive examination of the various representations of Elizabeth I clearly benefits from Louis Adrian Montrose's and Leah S. Marcus's earlier examinations of the ways in which the Queen managed her self-representation to augment her political power. This book considers "three-representational crises spaced at fifteen-year intervals during a forty-five year reign" as examples of the sustained way in which Elizabeth "used her culture's assumptions about gender to create herself" (4). Yet Frye successfully argues that the various images created, while they solidly positioned the Queen within Christian and Roman myth and English history, also proved "so slippery that they also increased her political vulnerability" (4). In her analysis of Elizabeth's self-representation, Frye also shows how the impulse of others to represent the queen in such a way as to support their own interests resulted in "competition" between the various images of the monarch created.

Chapter 1 explains how Elizabeth I's coronation entry (1559) begins the task of creating a workable mode of representation. Frye shows how Elizabeth's gender and unmarried state necessitated a representation that differed from her predecessor and her successor. Mary I presented herself through the familiar and subordinate metaphor of female domestication (wife and mother to her country), while James I, predictably, entered London as the bridegroom entering the bride. While Elizabeth accepted representation as a dutiful daughter - and heir - to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and used the distinctly female genre of prayer to frame her first public speech, the coronation entry began Elizabeth's public representation as a virgin, an anomalous gender position outside the male-dominated sexual economy. This image of the virgin was, of course, the one the Queen was most concerned with replicating.

But Frye's book goes beyond a simple explication of how Elizabeth used an iconic virginity to achieve political power. The importance of her work lies in her ability to analyze how this virginal representation was challenged by others for economic and political purposes. Throughout her reign, Mary I had favored the economic interests of the Hanse merchants over those of the London Merchant Adventurers. As a result, London merchants often refused her requests for loans or credit. That the Merchant Adventurers sponsored The Queen's Majesty's Pageant (1559) indicated not only the company's desire to win the new queen's favor, but represented the necessity of economic cooperation between the Crown and London's mercantile interests. The Adventurers' attempts to influence the Queen through controlling her representation demonstrate how Elizabeth was not in sole control of that representation.

This situation is further developed in chapter 2 where Frye examines how Robert Dudley used the elaborate, eighteen-days entertainments at Kenilworth to increase his sphere of influence at home and abroad. Dudley's attempt to recreate, through masques, the Queen's virginal body as a "marriageable" one would not only indicate the earl's ability to control the Queen as a potential husband, but would also validate his status as leader of a Protestant faction that urged military intervention in the Netherlands. Frye suggests that Dudley might have used the 1575 entertainments to persuade Elizabeth to accept William of Orange's offer of sovereignty in the Netherlands in exchange for financial and military support. The Queen's acceptance of this offer would have increased Dudley's power tremendously. But Elizabeth was not a passive viewer of the entertainments, or of Dudley's attempts at re-representation; she censored Gascoigne's masque of Diana and Iris because it raised the question of her marriage. Thus the final image of the Virgin Queen that resulted was contested and negotiated between the Queen and Dudley.

By the 1590s, the vulnerability occasioned by the Queen's aging rendered representations of her somewhat remote. Chapter 3 argues that Elizabeth's response was to claim to be as "ageless" and as virginal as she is pictured in the "Coronation" (c. 1600) and the "Rainbow" portraits (c. 1600-1603). But contestatory representations of the Queen also occurred. Like Dudley, Spenser attempted to redefine Elizabeth's chastity (in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene) by reconstructing her within the discourse of early modern Protestant marriage as virgin daughter and chaste wife. These chaste exemplars of a male-protected virtue contrasted sharply with the militant and sovereign virginity the Queen had always represented herself as possessing. In a stunning reading of the rape and chastity in Book 3, Frye shows how Spenser rewrote "Chastity, the allegory created to represent the political power of Elizabeth's sexuality, into an allegory of possession and powerlessness" (133).

Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation uses a feminist historicist methodology to produce a densely argued, thoroughly scholarly work. Frye demonstrates total familiarity with earlier works on Elizabeth's representation and image-making and uses them as the basis for her own expansion of the topic. Her analysis of the ways competing political, economic, and social interests strove to re-represent the Queen is an important corrective to monolithic, gender-free analyses of monarchical power.

Theodora A. Jankowski MONTCLAIR STATE COLLEGE