Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. (Reviews).

Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ix + 289 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8122-3532-0.

Katherine Eggert's reading of genre as culturally inflected and historically contingent in relation to the issue of queenship, particularly Elizabeth I's reign, is an important expansion of considerations of the female ruler's influence over literary production in early modern England. Seeking to revise New Historicism's assumption that queenly dominion over patriarchal society necessarily produces a type of cultural anxiety that becomes manifest in literary representation, Eggert argues that feminine authority, particularly the power of queen over (male) subject, offers Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton the opportunity to indulge "in fantasies of an unmitigatedly feminized literary form" (11). Feminine authority becomes a productive literary strategy that allows each of these authors to experiment with poetic practices that create new literary forms.

Eggert traces the conjunction of female authority and poetic "ravishment" through Spenser's Faerie Queene, reading the dramatic shift in genre between fantastical romance and historical allegory in Book V as Spenser's strategy for effacing the female authority constitutive of the experimental poetic fantasy in which his poem indulges beginning in Book III. Shifting from romance to historical allegory, however, even if it destroys Radigund and removes Britomart, is unable to repeal Glorianna's female dominion over Artegall, and it takes the masculine anti-epic pastoral of Book VI, and finally the "failure to impose univocal meanings upon all complicated poems" (49) that comes with Mutabilie's downfall in the poem's final cantos, to accomplish the "'trunkation' of queens -- Radigund's beheading, Britomart's abandonment" (50). Responses to female authority -- indulgent and restrictive -- create the multiplicity of genre that characterizes Spenser's poem.

Shakespeare's history plays further investigate the ravishing power of literary production, but the creative feminized theatrical energy in his plays derives, Eggert argues, from a dramatic production of the linear progress of history. Joan la Pucelle embodies the feminine authority of seductive histrionics, but Talbot's "exercise in projection," which requires an audience to imagine effects that cannot be staged, counters Joan's creation as its own form of masculine theater, an epic mode of drama that Henry V practices most effectively. The two tetralogies, then, seek to institute a masculine dramatic agency that uses the feminized stage to create what female authority cannot contain. But feminine modes of self-dramatization cannot fully be disposed of, because the strategies of digression and delay that characterize Hamlet and distinguish it from other revenge tragedies produce the "modern sense of self" so admired in that play (101). Hamlet demonstrates the problem of a queen's participation in succession at issue in the history plays, but queenly will, or Gertrude's control over her own marital union, produces the subjectivity that prevents Hamlet from being an unreflective avenger.

The absence of queenly agency, however, does not eliminate the creative power the authority of the female ruler provides. Nostalgia for a queen in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and Antony and Cleopatra produces mourning for the loss of feminine theatricality that animates the stage's captivating power. But the desire to discard an unruly feminine presence (either a wife or monarch) that Milton expresses in his divorce and anti-monarchical pamphlets does not always insure an independent masculine authority that can define itself without reference to the feminine. Eve's will, Eggert argues, is both dangerous and productive, and the productive potential of the feminine, to which Milton nostalgically turns when he praises the virginity of a past queen, represents the virtue of self-rule and resistance to unjust authority that Milton prizes.

Eggert's wide generic and historic range demonstrates the relevance of her analysis, suggesting that what she calls "the tension between historical circumstance and literary form" (20), particularly in relation to the issue of female authority during the Renaissance, is an investigation that bears upon the literary creativity of the period more generally. To be sure, her emphasis on the productive power of female authority calls attention to an element of Elizabethan influence too often under-appreciated. Eggert's suggestion, however, that the New Historicism assumes what she calls a "Mt. Everest" attitude to literary fascination with the queen -- "because she is there" -- creates a false distinction between that and her self-declared "While Sutton" theory -- "[b]ecause that is, figuratively, where the money is." (3,6). Mt. Everest, for those who wish to climb, is certainly "where the money is," but Eggert's insightful and learned attention to the creative potential of queenship demonstrates that the view fro m the top can be enriched by an enlarged frame of analysis.